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It's Not Business Development Or Marketing. It's Business Development And Marketing

By Meg Pritchard
July 01, 2024

At a recent social event I attended, I met a lawyer — let's call him Mark. When Mark heard that I run a content marketing agency focusing on legal services, he chuckled and said, "I bet you run into a lot of lawyers who think they know how to do marketing better than you do." Before I could assure him that this was rarely a problem and that I very much enjoyed working with lawyers and law firms, Mark leaned in close to tell me that, in his opinion, "most law firms are doing it wrong" and "should be focusing on business development rather than marketing." After imparting this piece of wisdom, he sat back with a satisfied smile.

As ironic as the scenario might have been, Mark's suggestion started me thinking.

The idea that marketing and business development are separate, siloed functions, or that they exist in an either-or relationship with each other, is not an uncommon one, especially for lawyers who may only get an occasional peek into what their firm's marketing and business development professionals spend their days working on. Understanding how marketing and business development work together can also be challenging in part because these two functions tend not to have simple definitions or clear-cut scopes, in either general business parlance or legal services marketing.

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