Most solo and small law firm owners are marketing their services when they should be marketing themselves.
Clients can't evaluate your legal skills. They aren't lawyers. They have no way of knowing whether your contract drafting is better than the firm down the street.
So they default to the only signal they can read: familiarity. The lawyer they've seen before. The one whose thinking they've already encountered.
In the absence of expertise they can measure, trust wins every time. And trust doesn't come from a service page.
A 2026 legal marketing report analyzed 140 UK law firms (from the UK top 200) and compared branded search volume (people searching a firm’s name) with annual revenue for the 2024/25 financial year.
The relationship was extremely strong: a correlation of 0.94 (the highest being 1) between branded search and revenue.
What that number tells you is simple: people have to know you exist before they can hire you.
Branded search is the closest observable proxy for brand awareness. You can't measure "familiarity in someone's head" directly. But when someone types your name into Google, that's proof the impression already exists.
If you want more demand, you want more “name searches.”
For solo and small firms, personal brand is the fastest path to “name searches.”
More name searches means more demand. More demand means more revenue.
Big firms buy familiarity through scale. Solo and small firms build it through presence.
Your personal brand is the fastest path there.
Personal branding does not mean being loud, trendy, or over-sharing.
It means being recognizable.
Your personal brand helps potential clients answer three questions before they ever contact you:
Do I trust this person? Do they understand what I'm dealing with? Will they guide me clearly?
If your current marketing doesn't answer those three questions, it's not working hard enough.
Now apply that logic to you, personally.
Personal brand is not a photoshoot and a colour palette. It's the way you think, made visible, repeatedly, over time, in public. It's the pattern someone builds of you before they've ever spoken to you.
Clients don't hire law firms in the abstract. They hire the lawyer they trust. And trust is built before the first call, before the consultation, often before you've exchanged a single word.
It's built through repeated exposure, recognition, and the feeling that they already know how you think.
That's your personal brand. And most lawyers don't have one.
Your personal brand is the way you explain a confusing legal process in a short video that a non-lawyer can actually follow. It's the case you lost, and what you learned from it, told with enough honesty that someone watching thinks, this person gets it. It's your take on a law that just changed, spoken plainly, not buried in legalese.
It's you, documented.
And that's where most lawyers get stuck. They want to present a finished, polished, prestigious version of themselves. So they wait until they have something significant to say. They agonise over whether to post. They worry about what other lawyers will think.
Meanwhile, their potential clients are out there right now, trying to figure out if they can trust someone with one of the most stressful situations of their lives, and they're scrolling past yet another firm that looks exactly like every other firm.
Your personal brand is:
People trust patterns. Consistency builds that pattern.
The instinct is to share victories. Won a big case? Post about it. Got a favourable ruling? Share the news. And yes, that matters. But it's not what builds the kind of trust that converts a stranger into a client.
What builds that trust is showing the complexity of what you actually do.
The moment where you realise a client's situation is messier than it first appeared. The way you walk someone through what to expect when everything feels uncertain. The ethical tension you had to work through. The administrative nightmare nobody warns clients about. The thing that almost went wrong, and how it didn't.
None of this undermines your authority. It demonstrates it. It shows that you've been in difficult situations before — and that you navigate them thoughtfully.
That's what makes someone feel like they already know you before they ever reach out.
Most legal marketing shows outcomes. Very little shows the work.
Yet the work is where trust is built.
Show the complexity in a client-friendly way:
This content does two things at once:
Clients do not experience their legal problem as a checklist. They experience it as stress.
So your marketing should include proof that you can handle stress with them.
Examples that build trust:
This is also how you stop competing on price. You become the obvious “safe choice.”
This is where advice usually gets vague. "Be authentic." "Share your story." "Show up consistently."
Useful. But not enough.
Here's what it looks like in practice:
Explain the thing everyone finds confusing better than anyone else in your market.
Pick one topic your clients always misunderstand. Film a two-minute video. Write 300 words. Do it in plain language with zero jargon. Post it. Then do it again next week with a different topic. That's it. That's the whole strategy to start.
Talk about a case that went wrong.
Not in a way that exposes a client. In a way that shows how you think under pressure. What happened. What you did. What you'd do differently. This is the content lawyers are most afraid to post, and the content clients find most compelling. Fear in your marketing is usually a signal you're onto something real.
React to legal news the same day it breaks.
A law just changed. A court just ruled. A regulation just shifted. You have an opinion on what it means for real people. Being first and being clear is worth more than being comprehensive and late. This is how lawyers build a reputation for being the person to follow in their space.
Show the step nobody warns clients about.
Every area of law has a moment that blindsides clients, the delay they didn't expect, the document that creates problems, the deadline that's actually earlier than they thought. Write about it. Film it. Make it searchable. The client who finds that content will feel like you already saved them something. That's trust you didn't have to earn in a meeting.
Pick a standard and say it out loud. What will you never compromise on? What do you always insist on, even when clients push back? Say it publicly. Lawyers who articulate their standards attract clients who share them, and repel the ones who would have made their lives difficult.
The common thread across all of this: you are not waiting for something impressive to happen before you post. You are documenting the actual work. The thinking. The process. The reality of practising law for real humans with real problems.
That's what builds the kind of trust a service page never will.
When a potential client already feels like they know you (watched your videos, read your posts, encountered your thinking) they've already decided.
Price becomes secondary when trust is primary. The lawyers who have figured this out are getting better clients who push back less, pay faster, and refer more.
And personal brand is one of the most capital-efficient ways to build branded awareness, particularly for solo attorneys and smaller firms who can't compete on advertising spend.
A LinkedIn post costs nothing. A short video explanation costs your time. But published consistently over months, they compound, and they do something no ad campaign does: they make you feel real.
People hire lawyers they trust. Trust comes from familiarity. Familiarity comes from showing up, consistently, as a human being who knows what they're doing.
Stop copying other law firms. Their brand was built for them. It makes no sense for you.
Answer these three questions:
That's your content. That's your brand. That's where you start.
Be consistent. Be specific. Be a real person with opinions.
The people you're trying to reach are smart enough to recognise the difference between a lawyer who wants to help them and a firm that wants to look impressive.
One of those things builds a practice. The other builds a website nobody remembers.
Next Step: Find the one part of your marketing that’s losing clients right now
Complete the Law Firm Marketing System Audit, a simple self-check for solo + small law firm owners to identify the weakest part of your system, so you know exactly what to fix first.