For decades, law firm growth was driven by functional advantage: technical excellence, sector expertise, geographic reach and client service. These qualities still matter, but in a market crowded with peer firms, alternative legal service providers and technology-enabled models, they are no longer enough to stand out. Many firms now look and sound the same, and research by Flare Insight shows most struggle to achieve meaningful differentiation.
The result is perceived sameness. When firms become interchangeable in the minds of clients, the commercial outcome is commoditisation: increased price pressure, weaker loyalty and reduced pricing power. The response, however, cannot be more capability. Functional differences are easier to replicate than ever, and under uncertainty they are also harder for clients to evaluate with confidence.
In those moments, decisions hinge instead on judgement, instinct and intent, human qualities that are harder to measure, harder to copy and, as a result, more enduring sources of advantage. Choice becomes less about what a firm can do, and more about what it feels like to rely on them when the stakes are high.
That is the role of brand: shaping preference by setting expectations and reducing uncertainty, not through what a firm claims, but through what it consistently demonstrates over time.
How firms express brand in practice
In practice, this shows up in observable choices and behaviours.
Mishcon de Reya and Lewis Silkin, for example, are widely associated with independence, advocacy and cultural understanding, reflected in how they operate, the clients they attract, the causes they support and the positions they are willing to take.
Recent brand evolutions at Macfarlanes, Clifford Chance and Freshfields have been less about reinvention and more about ensuring that positioning and experience reinforce authority, relevance and confidence across key touchpoints, from visual identity to digital experience.
Brand can also be built through long-term, repeated presence. Addleshaw Goddard and Hill Dickinson use sponsorship to build familiarity and trust through sustained association rather than episodic campaigns.
In each case, brand functions as a signal of reliability when outcomes are uncertain, shaping preference not by claiming difference, but by demonstrating it over time.
Commercial impact
This is not theoretical. Analysis from Thomson Reuters shows that law firms with strong, favourable brand perceptions earn, on average, 38% more of their clients’ external legal spend, evidence that brand strength translates into deeper relationships and greater share of wallet.
The same report also shows that brand strength compounds. As top-of-mind awareness grows among legal buyers, revenue tends to rise alongside it: firms that are more readily recalled at the point of need are more likely to be considered, instructed and re-instructed.
The same mechanism appears across other highly regulated, trust-based professional services. Strong brands can support a 10–20% premium in fees, increase share of client spend and reduce price sensitivity by signalling judgement under uncertainty. Firms such as Oliver Wyman have long sustained premium pricing through clear positioning, while specialist growth consultancy CIL has used brand investment explicitly to sharpen differentiation and support international expansion.
Room to grow
Despite this evidence, brand remains a lower priority across much of the legal sector.
Typical UK law firm marketing budgets sit at around 3.1% of revenue, compared with 7.7% across UK industries and 16.5% among high-growth professional services firms, a gap that has widened as functional differentiation delivers diminishing returns.
For firms prepared to act differently, that gap creates clear room to stand out, while many competitors remain constrained by sameness.
