Most law firms know where their work comes from. Someone was referred by a former client, or by an accountant, or by another firm that doesn’t do that kind of matter.
What fewer firms have noticed is what happens between the referral and the phone call. The name gets googled first. If what turns up is a thin website, a Google listing with four old reviews and no answer on cost, a warm referral can go cold before anyone picks up the phone.
This is how I’d rank the channels for an Australian law firm, and where I think most firms lose work they had already won.
The number that should change how you think about competition
There are 25,203 legal services businesses in Australia, and around 90,000 practising solicitors. The industry is worth about $35.8 billion.
The part worth sitting with is the growth rate. Revenue has climbed about 0.4% a year over the five years to 2025-26. Firm numbers have grown faster than that.
More firms, chasing roughly the same pool of work. That is what the competition actually looks like, and it is why being findable and being easy to choose matters more each year even if your practice hasn’t changed at all.
Why legal marketing works differently
Two things make law unlike most professional services.
The first is that referrals genuinely dominate. Research into how people choose a lawyer consistently finds personal referrals and networks doing most of the work. Nobody should be trying to replace that. The mistake is assuming the referral is the end of the process rather than the start of it.
The second is cost. A review commissioned by the Victorian Legal Services Board and Commissioner found that consumers rarely shop around and are frequently confused about what legal services cost. That confusion is not neutral. It is the moment where someone decides to put it off, and putting it off often means never.
So the firm that explains its fees plainly is not just being helpful. It is removing the single most common reason someone stalls.
Worth adding: advertising rules for legal services vary by state, and personal injury advertising in particular is restricted in several jurisdictions. Check your own state’s position before running anything, because this is not an area to guess in.
Signs your firm has gone quiet
- Enquiries are down but you can’t point to anything that changed
- Your best referrer has retired, moved, or gone quiet, and nothing replaced them
- Your Google reviews are good but the newest is more than six months old
- You can’t say what your website does when someone searches your firm by name
- Your practice areas have changed but your website hasn’t
- You’re getting enquiries for work you don’t want and none for the work you do
The last one is the most fixable and the most overlooked. It usually means your website describes everything you can do rather than what you want more of.
The five channels that matter, ranked
1. Reviews and your Google listing
This sits first because it is what the referral checks.
Someone is given your name over coffee. They search it that evening. What loads is your Google Business Profile, with your star rating, your review count, your photos and whatever someone last wrote about you. That is the first real impression, not your homepage.
Recency matters as much as the score. A firm with 30 reviews where the newest is from last year reads as one that has stopped, whatever the rating says. American survey data puts the share of people reading reviews before choosing a professional at around 84%, with about half reading six or more. I have not found an Australian study with the same rigour, so treat the numbers as directional. The behaviour is familiar enough to act on.
The awkward part for law firms is asking. Plenty of matters end in ways where a review request would be inappropriate, and some work is confidential enough that clients won’t want to be visible. That is real, and it means the ask has to be selective rather than automated. Conveyancing, commercial and family law clients at the right moment are usually fine. Build the judgement into who asks rather than skipping the practice entirely.
2. Your website, and what it says about cost
Two jobs. Be found for the work you want, and let the person who lands there work out whether to call you.
Most firm websites fail the second. They list practice areas, name the partners, and say nothing about how engagement works or what anything costs. Given what the Victorian research found about cost confusion, that silence is expensive.
You do not have to publish a price list. Fixed fees where you offer them, ranges where you can, and a plain explanation of how you charge and what a first conversation involves will do more than most redesigns. Say whether the first call is free. Say what happens next.
On being found: a page called “Our Services” listing eleven practice areas will not rank for anything. A page about one matter type, written for the person with that problem, might. If family law is what you want more of, that deserves its own page with real substance, not a paragraph.
3. Your referral network
Still the biggest source of work for most firms, and still the one most often left to look after itself.
The version that works is specific and reciprocal. Know which accountants, brokers, agents and firms actually send you work. Know what they need from you. Send work back where you can. Follow up properly on every referral so the referrer hears it went well, because that is what makes them do it again.
The risk worth naming: if two or three sources produce most of your work, that is a concentration risk rather than a strategy. People retire, firms merge, relationships lapse. The time to widen it is while things are going well.
4. LinkedIn
Ranked fourth for most firms and considerably higher for commercial ones.
If your clients are businesses, the people who refer and hire you are on LinkedIn and they are reachable without paying anyone. Writing usefully about the things clients get wrong, the changes coming, what a process actually involves, builds the kind of recognition that referral work runs on. It is slow and it compounds.
If your work is mostly private clients, family, wills, conveyancing, personal injury, this drops well down the list. Your clients are not researching solicitors on LinkedIn.
5. Google Ads
Last, with a caveat that it can jump the queue in specific situations.
Legal keywords are among the most expensive in the market because the value of a matter is high and every firm knows it. Bidding broadly on “lawyer melbourne” will spend money quickly and teach you very little.
Where it does work is narrow and urgent. A specific matter type, a defined area, and a page built for that exact search. If you are opening a new office or pushing into a practice area where you have no visibility, ads buy you presence while the slower work builds.
Check your state’s advertising rules first, particularly for personal injury.
The 12 month plan
Months 1 to 2. Claim and complete the Google Business Profile. Get the practice areas and categories right. Add real photos. Start a selective, appropriate review habit and make someone responsible for it.
Months 2 to 4. Fix the cost question on your website. Add a plain explanation of how you charge and what a first conversation involves.
Months 3 to 6. Build proper pages for the two or three matter types you want more of. One page each, written for the client not the profession.
Months 4 onwards. Map your referral network. Who sends what, who has gone quiet, who you have never thanked properly.
Months 6 to 12. If you are a commercial firm, start writing on LinkedIn. If enquiries still need help in a specific area, test ads against the pages you built.
The three mistakes I see most
Listing every practice area equally. It tells Google nothing and tells the client nothing. Firms that rank and convert are specific about what they want.
Treating referrals as passive. They are a channel with people in it, and channels need maintaining.
Rebuilding the website before fixing what it says. A new design that still avoids the cost question has solved the wrong problem at considerable expense.
Where Phoenix Marketing fits
We work with firms in this order: listing and reviews first, then the website and the matter-type pages, then ads once there is something worth sending traffic to. If you would rather hand it over, our marketing for lawyers page covers how we work.
If you would rather do it yourself, start with our guides to getting more enquiries from your Google Business Profile and asking for Google reviews. If you are weighing up paid channels, we have compared Google Ads, Meta and LinkedIn. The same ranked approach for clinics is in how physio clinics get more patients.
Sources
- IBISWorld, Legal Services in Australia: market size and number of businesses, 2026
- Law Society of NSW National Profile of Solicitors, on the size of the practising profession
- Victorian Legal Services Board and Commissioner, Consumers’ Experiences of Legal Services: Rapid Review, 2021
- Martindale-Avvo, Understanding the Legal Consumer, 2023 (United States data)
Frequently asked questions
Google Business Profile work can move within weeks. Website and search changes usually take three to six months to show, and longer in contested practice areas. Ads are immediate and stop when you stop paying.
Selectively, yes. Some matters and some clients are not appropriate and you should not automate the ask. Commercial, conveyancing and property clients at the right moment are usually comfortable, and recency counts for more than total volume.
Not a full price list. But saying nothing is costing you enquiries, because cost confusion is one of the main reasons people delay contacting a firm. Fixed fees where you have them and a plain explanation of how you charge is enough.
For commercial and business-facing work, yes, and it is the cheapest thing available. For private client work it is close to irrelevant. Match the channel to who actually hires you.
They vary by state and are strictest around personal injury. Check your own jurisdiction’s rules before running paid advertising, and take advice if you are unsure.
Get a second opinion on your firm’s marketing
If you want to know which of these five is letting your firm down, we will take a look and tell you. No obligation, and we will say so if the answer is that you do not need us.