Frequently Asked Questions
Marketing and business development for law firms, handled by someone who has done it inside law firms. That covers the work that grows a practice: winning more pitches, getting the firm ranked and recognized, building the habits and systems that turn good lawyers into people clients think to call. The specifics depend on what your firm needs, which is usually not what the firm two doors down needs.
Plenty of firms that are doing fine could be doing considerably better, and most of them have no way of knowing which is which because nobody is looking. The question worth asking is whether your growth is happening on purpose or by accident. If every new matter arrives through referral and good luck, that works right up until it doesn’t. A practice that depends entirely on one or two rainmakers, or on relationships that walk out the door when someone retires, has a problem it can’t see yet. MacGuffin exists for firms that would rather find out now.
It’s the reverse, often. Big firms have marketing departments. Solos and small firms have the lawyer, who is also the marketing department, the BD team, and the person trying to bill enough hours to make the month work. That’s exactly the situation fractional help is built for. You get the strategy and the execution a firm your size could never justify hiring full-time, scaled to what you actually need.
Usually that’s because the firm bought tactics without a strategy, or hired a generalist who had never worked in legal and treated a law firm like a dentist’s office. Legal marketing has its own rules. Directory submissions, conflict-aware pitching, the long relationship cycles that govern how legal work actually gets won. Doing the activity is not the same as doing the work. If the last attempt produced a nicer logo and a quiet phone, that’s the difference.
Most agencies sell you deliverables: a website, a content package, a set of posts. They are good at making things. They are less good at the part that comes before, which is figuring out what your firm should be doing and why, and the part after, which is making sure it actually changes how work comes in. MacGuffin works the way an in-house director would, because that’s the job it came from. The relationship is closer, the context is deeper, and the accountability is to your pipeline rather than to a content calendar.
The work spans litigation, employment, environmental, immigration, and transactional practices, among others. More to the point, the method doesn’t depend on being a subject-matter expert in your field. It depends on understanding how legal work gets won, which transfers across practice areas, and on asking you the right questions about the parts that are specific to yours. You know the law. The job is to make sure the right people know you know it.
Anyone who promises you a number before understanding your firm is guessing, and you should be wary of them. What’s reasonable to expect is a clear picture of where your business actually comes from, a plan for where it should come from next, and steady progress on the things that move a practice: a stronger pipeline, better-qualified pitches, recognition that opens doors. Some of that shows up fast. The relationship-driven parts take the time they take, and any honest answer says so.
A conversation, no charge and no obligation, about what your firm is trying to do and whether MacGuffin is the right way to get there. If it isn’t, you’ll get an honest answer to that effect, which saves everyone the trouble. If it is, the next step is figuring out the scope that fits.