Planning a Marketing and PR Campaign for the New Business Season in a Law Firm

Summer is the perfect time to create an action plan for your company’s development in the new business season. During vacations and holidays, work activity slows down, allowing you to step away from direct client work and calmly strategize for the future. Where should you start when planning the growth of your legal business? Below is a step-by-step guide.

Step 1. Define Your Goals

Avoid overly broad goals — strive for maximum specificity in your desired outcomes. Trying to develop all practice areas and services simultaneously often leads to significant time and financial investments with no tangible results. To set the right goals, you should:

Identify your strongest practice areas and key competitors in those fields.
Study market trends and in-demand services.
Based on this analysis, decide what exactly you will focus on in the new season.

Step 2. Document Your Development Plan

Your carefully crafted plan must be written down—either on paper or digitally. Don’t just keep it in your head. This advice may seem obvious, but too often, teams discuss business development steps without documenting them, making it impossible to track progress or draw meaningful conclusions later.

Step 3. Implement the Plan

Once you’ve defined your goals and key focus areas for the next business season, take concrete steps to achieve them. Let’s use a specific practice area as an example. Suppose your firm specializes in bankruptcy law. In that case, you’ll need a yearly plan to develop this practice, including:

Events you’ll attend
Media placements
Content strategy
Outreach to potential clients

Events: Research upcoming bankruptcy conferences (most event providers publish their schedules before the season begins) or review past events (many recur annually). Since dozens of bankruptcy events take place each year, you don’t need to attend all of them — select the most relevant based on:

Audience composition
Speakers
Session topics
Cost of participation or speaking opportunities

Media: A systematic approach is key. Time your media placements to coincide with your event participation. For example, if you’re speaking on subsidiary liability at a November bankruptcy conference, publish an article on the same topic in a legal or business journal around that time. Repeated exposure in a short period maximizes audience engagement.

Content Strategy: Repurpose your materials. If you’ve written an article and spoken at a conference on the same topic, leverage that content further by creating:

Brochures
Infographics
Analytical reports

Use these for client outreach (existing and potential) and publish them on your website and social media.

Client Outreach: The final step in promoting a specific service could be offering private consultations, preparing tailored proposals, or organizing in-house seminars for a client’s legal team.

Beyond promoting individual services, your plan should include:

Website updates
Refreshed marketing collateral (brochures, presentations)
Monthly participation in rankings
Media commentary
Networking, charity, or leisure events

Structure this plan by calendar month — either as a single master schedule or separate plans for each practice area.

Step 4. Set the Budget

Budgeting is a critical part of business development planning. As you outline each step, estimate costs based on past experience, slightly inflating projections. This helps you allocate funds systematically, avoiding haphazard spending.

Step 5. Review and Adjust

Creating a plan is only half the battle — execution and analysis are equally important. Don’t expect an immediate influx of clients; results may take months or years of consistent effort. Regularly monitor your progress, noting what works and what doesn’t, and adjust accordingly.

If you’ve followed the plan but haven’t gained new clients, ask why. Did you:

Fail to publicize your event or expertise in the media?
Neglect to repurpose content into infographics or client mailings?
Hesitate to directly pitch potential clients?

Even if your efforts don’t immediately yield new business, other outcomes — like ranking in professional lists, peer referrals, or positive brand visibility — are valuable long-term investments.

Refine next year’s plan based on these insights, dropping ineffective tactics and doubling down on what works. Over time, this systematic approach will bear fruit: new clients, projects, and, crucially, satisfaction from your hard work.

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Planning a Marketing and PR Campaign for the New Business Season.pdf