Fall is one of the busiest times of year for law firm marketing and business development. Summer schedules are over, conferences and events are picking up, clients are focused on what needs to happen before year-end and law firms are starting to think about their priorities for the coming year.
That makes the next few months a good time to look at what you’ve done so far this year, where you’re seeing results and what deserves more attention before the holidays. There’s still plenty of time to strengthen client relationships, increase the visibility of your lawyers and practices, create useful content and build momentum that carries into 2027.
You also don’t need to launch a dozen new initiatives. Focus on the activities that support your firm’s business goals and the clients and relationships that matter most. Here are 10 areas I would prioritize this fall.
1. Review What’s Actually Working
Before adding more to your marketing plan, spend some time looking at what you’ve already done this year.
Review your website analytics, LinkedIn performance, email marketing results, event and webinar attendance, media placements and other information you have available. Look at which topics generated engagement, which programs brought the right people together and which activities led to conversations with clients and prospects.
Go beyond the biggest numbers. A LinkedIn post with modest reach may have been seen by an important client. A webinar with 40 attendees may be more valuable than one with 200 if the smaller group included the people your lawyers wanted to reach. An article may continue attracting search traffic months after it was published.
Talk to your lawyers as part of this review too. Ask what they’re hearing from clients, which marketing activities have helped them start conversations and what they want more help with during the rest of the year.
Use all of that information to decide where to put your time and resources this fall.
2. Build Your Fall Content Around What Clients Care About Right Now
A strong content plan starts with the issues clients are dealing with, so look at the questions lawyers are receiving, the topics coming up in client meetings and the developments affecting the industries and companies you serve.
Then build content around those themes.
One substantive topic can become an article, several LinkedIn posts, a short video, a webinar, talking points for client conversations and an email to a targeted group of contacts. This approach can help your lawyers stay visible without requiring them to constantly develop new ideas.
Fall also brings natural opportunities for year-end and forward-looking content. Lawyers can address what clients need to know before the end of the year, developments they’re watching for 2027 and issues companies may want to have on their radar as they plan for the months ahead.
The most useful content gives clients information they can actually use while reinforcing what your lawyers know and the kinds of matters on which they advise.
3. Give Your Website a Fall Checkup
Your website is still one of the first places people go when they want to learn more about a lawyer or firm, and it plays an increasingly important role in how search engines and AI tools understand your experience and capabilities.
Review your most important lawyer bios and practice pages. Make sure they reflect current experience, recent matters, speaking engagements, articles, awards and other relevant information. Look for outdated descriptions, old titles, former board positions and practice descriptions that haven’t kept pace with the work your lawyers are doing today.
Pay particular attention to lawyer bios because they’re often among the most visited pages on a law firm website. A strong bio should help a prospective client understand what the lawyer does, the types of clients they work with and the experience they bring to relevant matters.
Practice and industry pages deserve the same attention. They should reflect the way clients describe their needs and include useful information about the issues the team handles, industries it knows and experience it can substantiate.
4. Take a Closer Look at Your Most Important Client Relationships
Fall is a good time to revisit key clients before formal year-end and 2027 planning begins.
Look at what has happened with each client during the year. Which matters has the firm handled? Which lawyers and practices have been involved? Have there been leadership changes, acquisitions, financings, expansions, new products, regulatory developments or other changes in the client’s business?
Then look at the relationship itself. Who at the firm knows the client? Who at the client knows the firm? Is the relationship concentrated with one partner or one contact? Are there other lawyers whose experience may be useful based on what’s happening in the client’s business?
This work can inform client team meetings and give relationship partners better context for their conversations. It can also help identify opportunities to broaden relationships across both organizations.
5. Make More of Your Fall Conferences and Events
Conference season can consume an enormous amount of time and money, so approach events as business development opportunities before anyone gets on a plane.
Review attendee and speaker lists when they’re available. Identify clients, prospects, referral sources and other contacts your lawyers want to see. Research companies and people in advance and help lawyers arrange meetings before schedules fill up.
Marketing and business development teams can also help lawyers prepare a manageable list of people they want to meet and useful background information about them.
After the event, capture what happened. Who did the lawyers meet? What follow-up did they promise? Which issues came up repeatedly? Were there companies or people that deserve additional research?
Conference follow-up can include personal emails, LinkedIn connections, introductions, sharing relevant content and scheduling another conversation. The information lawyers bring back can also generate ideas for articles, webinars and other client-facing programs.
6. Strengthen Your Email Marketing
Email remains an important way for law firms to reach clients and contacts directly, particularly when the content is relevant to the recipient.
Take a look at your email lists this fall. Update contact information, remove obvious duplicates and review how your lists are segmented. Think about whether everyone needs to receive every communication or whether certain content would be more useful to smaller groups based on industry, practice area, geography or another relevant factor.
Also review what you’re sending. Subject lines, timing, formatting and the usefulness of the content all affect whether people open and engage with your emails.
This is also a good time to plan year-end communications so everything doesn’t get created during the first two weeks of December. Determine which practices have year-end updates, 2027 outlook pieces, webinars or other content planned and coordinate the calendar across the firm.
7. Find More Ways to Showcase Your Lawyers and Practices
Law firms have many opportunities to make their people and experience more visible beyond traditional client alerts.
Consider lawyer Q&As, practice spotlights, short videos, podcast appearances, event recaps, client-focused explainers and posts about speaking engagements. New partners and laterals can be introduced in ways that explain what they do and how their experience expands the firm’s capabilities.
LinkedIn can play a significant role here. Firm pages can highlight lawyers and practices while individual lawyers share their own perspectives and engage with the people in their networks.
The content doesn’t always need to be long or heavily produced. A thoughtful post from a lawyer after speaking at an industry conference can be more engaging than another formal announcement that they spoke there.
Look for ways to show the knowledge and personalities of your lawyers while keeping the content useful to the people you want to reach.
8. Look for Cross-Selling Opportunities Based on Client Needs
Cross-selling works best when it starts with what’s happening with the client.
Review major clients and compare the work the firm currently handles with changes in the client’s business. An acquisition, expansion into a new market, new executive hire, regulatory development or other event may involve issues that extend beyond the practice currently serving the client.
Marketing and business development teams can help connect those developments with relevant experience elsewhere in the firm. They can also identify existing relationships that may make an introduction more natural.
Client teams can be particularly useful for this because they bring together lawyers who see different parts of the relationship. Give those meetings structure by providing current information about the client, recent firm activity and developments that may be relevant.
The conversation can then focus on how the firm can be more useful to the client and which relationships would benefit from greater attention.
9. Help Your Lawyers Strengthen Their Individual Brands
The firm’s brand and its lawyers’ individual brands reinforce each other, and fall provides plenty of opportunities for lawyers to become more visible.
Encourage lawyers to update their LinkedIn profiles, share useful content, comment on posts from people in their networks and follow up with contacts they meet at events. Help them identify a few topics they want to be associated with and create content around those areas consistently.
Some lawyers will be comfortable writing articles. Others may prefer short LinkedIn posts, videos, podcasts, webinars or speaking engagements. Build around their strengths instead of trying to make every lawyer use the same marketing playbook.
Business development coaching can also be useful here. Help lawyers think about who they want to know, which relationships they want to strengthen and what they can do consistently over the next few months to stay connected with those people.
10. Start Your 2027 Planning Before December
Fall is the time to start gathering the information that will make next year’s marketing and business development plans more useful.
Talk to practice and industry leaders about their priorities. Review client activity and financial information. Look at which industries and practices are growing, which relationships deserve additional attention and which marketing programs have generated meaningful results.
Start building your 2027 content calendar as well. Identify major industry events, conferences, regulatory dates, awareness months, firm milestones and recurring content opportunities. You don’t need every article planned in September, but having the major dates and themes mapped out will make the year much easier to manage.
This is also a good time to review budgets. Look at where you spent money this year, which sponsorships and events were worthwhile and where resources could be used differently next year.
Starting these conversations in the fall gives you time to make thoughtful decisions before year-end deadlines take over everyone’s calendars.
Make the Next Few Months Count
There’s a lot that law firms and lawyers can accomplish between now and the holidays, but a productive fall marketing plan doesn’t need to include everything on this list.
Choose the areas that connect most directly to your firm’s priorities. For one firm, that may mean strengthening key client relationships and improving client teams. For another, it may mean increasing the visibility of an important practice or industry group. Individual lawyers may want to focus on reconnecting with contacts, developing their LinkedIn presence or becoming more consistent with thought leadership.
What matters is having a clear sense of where you want to focus and making time for it while there’s still a significant part of the year ahead. The conversations you start now, the people you reconnect with and the visibility you build can shape the opportunities that come your way in the months ahead and give you a much stronger starting point when January arrives.
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