Has your firm experimented with any new marketing channels to attract clients? What’s working so far?

Here's three of my favourite answers.

Ava Emdadian

Client Engagement Manager at O’Loan Family Law

Webinars have been a standout channel for us recently. They’ve been working really well as a lead generation tool.

We co-host them with strategic partners, which allows us to bring more depth, education and expertise to each session while also building genuine collaborative relationships. The joint format means we can tap into each other's databases and deliver shared value to both audiences.

What we've found is that this format builds trust and warms leads in a way that traditional marketing simply doesn't. By the time attendees reach out, they already feel a connection with us, and they typically call in ready to book a consultation.

For instance, as a family law firm, we encounter financial issues constantly in our work, so we partner with financial advisors to address and help talk about topics such as managing your finances post-separation. These are often the practical, frightening questions clients are too anxious to ask: How am I going to survive this? Webinars give us a way to answer them with empathy and authority before a client ever picks up the phone.

The follow-up process matters just as much as the webinar itself. After a webinar, we send an attendee email, and if we don't hear back within a few days, our client engagement team makes a follow-up phone call and books qualified leads in with our solicitors. We use HubSpot as our CRM, which keeps all our contacts and follow-up tasks in one place, and it integrates with VXT, our phone system, so every call is recorded and kept on file. Having a dedicated team handle that pipeline rather than leaving it to the lawyers has made a significant difference.

That said, I think webinars work best for firms that have reached a certain level of maturity. Anyone can run them, but to extract real value, you generally need a team of around six or seven solicitors and the infrastructure to support consistent follow-up. Our team is 15 people overall, with seven or eight solicitors, and that scale is what makes the channel genuinely productive for us.

David Lisitsa

Founder and Director of NewLaw

A key thing firms have started doing is selecting their own Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system — HubSpot, for example.

Traditionally, they'd hand everything to an external marketing agency, and it would be a bit of a black hole. You'd get a monthly report, see some numbers, and be left asking the same questions every time:

Is the money we're spending worth it? Is it actually bringing in the leads?

Being in control of your CRM, and having your marketing agencies work within your system, gives you clear ROI:

We spent $10,000 on Google AdWords and brought in $30,000 worth of work.

You can see exactly where every lead came from, what they're worth, and how they moved through the pipeline.

It creates a lever you can pull when you have capacity, and lower when you don't.

For firms we work with, that visibility has changed how they think about marketing entirely. It's no longer a cost they hope pays off; it's a system they can actually steer.

Kristen Porter

Founder of Zenovate Marketing and O*NO Legal

For a long time, law firms relied heavily on referrals, networking events and directories to generate work. I think that model is changing quickly.

The biggest shift we’ve seen is that visibility is becoming the new referral engine, especially through AI, content and personal brands.

At O*NO Legal, one of the biggest surprises for me was TikTok and short-form video. Traditionally, legal professionals were told to network in rooms, attend events, and build relationships face-to-face. As an introvert, that never felt sustainable to me. Instead, we focused on strategic content and showing up consistently online.

What happened next changed the way I think about legal marketing entirely.

Real estate agents started finding our content organically because that’s where they were spending their time. Trainers and industry groups began reaching out for speaking engagements after seeing our videos, which eventually put us in front of more than 7,000 agents nationally in less than one year. That then fed into a broader digital ecosystem of webinars, blogs, email nurturing and educational resources.

One short campaign around privacy law changes in the real estate industry, promoted across multiple digital channels (socials, EDM and webinar), generated more than $100,000+ in work. Not because we ran expensive ads, but because we had already built trust and visibility with the right audience before the issue became urgent.

Ironically, some of our strongest referral relationships today started online, not in networking rooms.

Through Zenovate Marketing – where I now help law firms build, grow and scale their firms using digital marketing, we’re now seeing another major shift. Firms are starting to realise that AI visibility matters just as much as Google visibility. One law firm we help had 88 mentions in ChatGPT in one month compared with a competitor’s 22. That gap will increasingly influence who gets recommended by tools like ChatGPT and other AI search platforms and ultimately chosen by clients.

I believe the firms that win over the next five years won’t necessarily be the firms spending the most on advertising. They’ll be the firms consistently building authority, trust and visibility across digital channels. Marketing is no longer just a lead generation activity. It is becoming a genuine firm asset and value driver.