I am writing this on the flight back home. For the past month, we have met with lawyers, general counsel and in-house teams across several Asian countries. The cities changed. So did the accents. The confession didn’t: “We don’t know how to talk about ourselves.”
Across South and East Asia, many lawyers share a certain reserve. Some are shy, others are simply private. Praise can make us look down at our shoes.
Then we looked west, borrowed the business-development playbook and tried to follow it. The result, too often, has been a choice between saying almost nothing and saying far too much. It split us into two camps. Camp one is too awkward to say anything at all. Camp two swings the other way, decides no publicity is bad publicity, and self-promotes unhinged. Humbled, delighted, grateful, and mostly desperate for the world to know we know our law.
Specific bar council rules matter. In jurisdictions including India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and the Philippines, professional and ethical restrictions significantly limit lawyers’ advertising and solicitation. In Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan and Thailand, some forms of legal marketing are permitted, but they remain subject to rules about how lawyers describe their services and expertise. Any approach must be shaped by the requirements of the jurisdiction in which it is used.
Everywhere we went, lawyers asked some version of the same question: How can I market myself better? The answers often came as a familiar list: directory submissions, LinkedIn thought leadership, search-engine optimisation, podcasts and conferences. Each can have a place. But tactics alone don’t answer a more important question: how will this message feel to the people it is meant to reach? Nor do they account for the difference between marketing a product and earning trust in a professional service.
Conservative Cultural Nuances
Here is a view that may be unpopular: conservative marketing for a professional service is not a weakness. It may be an advantage.
Good marketing begins before anyone writes a slogan. It begins by listening. Product marketers ask what customers are trying to accomplish, what is getting in their way and what information would help. They observe, ask questions and pay attention.
Those are skills many lawyers already practise. The lawyer who prefers a thoughtful conversation to working a room may be particularly good at hearing what a general counsel is worried about – and what has not yet been said.
Loud marketing begins with, “Look at me.” Client-led marketing begins with, “Tell me more.” The first may feel unnatural to a legal professional service provider especially in the Asian belt. The second may come quite naturally.
What Does the Client Need?
Product marketers know that attention is scarce and patience is limited. Lawyers can sometimes assume that, because their advice is important, clients will read every word.
Theodore Levitt’s famous example offers a useful reminder – a customer does not want a quarter-inch drill, the customer wants a quarter-inch hole. In the same way, a client does not want a fourteen-page advice note for its own sake. The client wants to know what to do on Monday.
Dove’s Real Beauty campaign began not with a product claim about moisturiser, but with a question about how women see themselves. It spoke to an existing concern, then connected that concern to the product. The legal equivalent is straightforward: don’t begin with “We are a full-service firm with forty years of experience.” Begin with the problem that is occupying your client’s attention.
Identify the outcome the client needs. Understand what stands in the way. Then explain how your work can help. That is the core of benefit-led communication: connect what you offer to what your audience needs.
Picture this. We met a General Counsel in Taipei who generously opened up a drawer in her office to us. It was full of law firm brochures – what she called, with a rueful smile, the evidence.
“Forty years of excellence. Full-service. Client-centric,” she said, turning the pages. “They all say they put the client first. Not one has asked what my week looks like.”
Then she described the lawyer she actually calls. He had sent her no brochure. What she remembered was a two-line note after a transaction closed: a warning about the questions her board might raise the following quarter, together with a concise answer to each.
She had never seen him on a conference stage. She had his number saved under “call first.”
Quiet Marketing, Lasting Results
You do not need to become a content creator to be remembered. A few deliberate habits can do more than a steady stream of announcements.
Listen before you publish. Keep track of the questions clients ask most often. Those questions can shape useful articles, client updates or short conversations – without requiring anyone to adopt an influencer persona.
Offer answers rather than announcements. “Delighted to announce” may earn a courteous glance. Practical guidance – what to do when a regulator calls on a Friday, for instance is more likely to be saved and shared.
Make the follow-through visible. After a matter concludes, send a brief note on what went well, what the client should watch for next and what you would do differently. It serves the client first. It also gives the relationship a reason to continue.
And follow up without an agenda. A thoughtful check-in can build more trust than another list of awards or credentials.
A Familiar Way to Build Trust
Many Asian cultures place great value on family, loyalty, close relationships and trust earned over time. There is no need to out-shout the West, or to imitate a style that feels at odds with your own.
Client-led marketing and relationship-first cultures share the same principle: be useful, be present and earn the right to be remembered.
In Indonesia, we met a soft-spoken managing partner in his mid-fifties, a man who paused before answering even the ordinary question, “How are you?”
For a year, he told us, he had felt like the last guest at a party where everyone else had been handed a microphone. His competitors were posting rankings, awards, conference photographs and regular “thrilled to share” updates.
“I asked myself whether I needed to do that too,” he said. “Then I wondered whether any of my clients had ever hired someone because of a post.”
He decided to look at his ten best client relationships and trace how each had begun. Not one client mentioned LinkedIn. Each pointed to a person: a referral, a former colleague or a general counsel who had seen him handle a crisis calmly.
His own approach is simple. After each matter, he sends the client a one-page note: what went well, what to watch for and one thing he might do differently next time. Twice a year, he calls his key clients without an agenda and asks what is keeping them up at night. When a recurring concern emerges, he turns it into a short, simply worded note and sends it to the people who might find it useful.
No hashtags. No performance.
“I don’t shout off a rooftop,” he said. “I just make sure the people already in the building never wonder whether I’m paying attention.”
And that may be the better lesson for the flight home.
To shape our law firm’s marketing strategy around the nuances of our culture and character, rather than conforming to one-size-fits-all approaches that reward volume over substance.
Authored by Tanisha Deshpande