Most firms assume their messaging and tone of voice will develop organically, that enough good lawyers writing enough good content will eventually add up to a consistent voice. And in an ideal world, with a small enough firm, they’re correct.
The bigger a firm gets, however, the less true that becomes. And it’s not simply a headcount problem.
First, we need to step back and consider how firms get big in the first place. Organic growth, one hire and one office at a time, tends to preserve a single culture (and message) almost by accident. Everyone knows who they’re talking to, what channels work, what to say, and how.
But when a firm is ambitious, growth through merger or acquisition creates a problem. When a firm absorbs several others in quick succession, or expands from a handful of offices to dozens, each addition arrives with its own history, its own writing habits, its own instinct for what “professional” sounds like and, ultimately, what’s trying to flog and to whom.
Cross-jurisdictional growth compounds this further. A firm operating across a dozen US states, or across UK and international offices, isn’t managing one audience. It’s managing many.
In this situation, scale doesn’t produce consistency. In fact, left alone, it works against it, getting worse and worse as the organisation grows.
Does messaging really matter when there’s so much other stuff to do?
Honestly, this matters more than firms often think. Most lawyers assume clients choose them based on expertise. That’s rarely the whole story. Clients buy on trust: whether they like how a firm communicates, whether the people behind the work feel consistent and credible, whether the tone matches what was promised at the pitch. When a firm’s voice shifts from office to office, or page to page, that inconsistency doesn’t just look untidy. It reads as a lack of coherence in the firm itself. And that’s exactly where trust starts to be eroded.
So what is messaging and tone of voice?
We’ve written before about the split between messaging and tone of voice. Messaging is the what, why and who, and tone of voice is the how.
But with a large and ambitiously growing firm, this is often only half the picture.
Where does content and marketing come into this?
Content is the output that delivers the messaging: a website page, a LinkedIn post, a directory submission.
Marketing is the tactical decision or plan about what gets made, when, and where it gets published.
All of these things join up, with messaging explaining the audience and what you need to say, content delivering the tangible ‘stuff’, and marketing deciding what happens and in what order. Tone of voice sits underneath all three, setting out how it all reads or sounds.
What happens when this isn’t thought about properly?
In a one-office firm, a couple of people naturally keep all of this on track without much to think about. Once a firm has multiple offices, practice groups, or hundreds of people writing independently, that alignment doesn’t happen by accident. It has to be planned.
Picture a global firm’s corporate practice. It spans twenty-four offices across four continents, brought together through a decade of mergers. Each office inherited its own website copy, its own partner bios, its own house style from whichever firm it used to be. When they merged it happened so fast they didn’t have time to rewrite everything so they used what content they had. They always planned to redo it but it never really happened.
Read individually, every page is competent: clear, professional, on-brand for wherever it came from. Read as one practice group, they contradict each other. One office’s pages are formal and technical. Another’s are conversational. A third is dense with local market jargon a client in a different jurisdiction won’t recognise. And none of them are the same as the proposal content that BD produced centrally. No single office is the problem. The drift between them is, and it’s invisible until someone starts to look at more than one page. Until a prospective client receives a proposal and goes to the website for more information and validation of their first impression.
There might be smaller problems too. The same prospective client moves from the homepage to a practice page and the tone shifts underfoot. The client partner’s LinkedIn post reads nothing like the firm’s official marketing. Neither moment is dramatic on its own. But all of these things add up, erode trust and may even prevent instruction.
Does a messaging strategy really save the day?
A properly thought out messaging strategy is an investment that pays for itself many times over. Built properly, it’s designed to absorb growth: a new office, an acquired practice, a merger, all get folded into the existing framework rather than triggering a fresh scramble to work out what the firm sounds like now. Without that framework, every expansion becomes its own unplanned project. Another item on someone’s to-do list. Another round of reconciling a new team’s habits with everyone else’s.
In our experience a messaging and tone of voice strategy supports consistency through leadership changes, mergers, and website overhauls. It makes onboarding faster for new partners, BD teams, and external agencies. It aligns everyone internally around shared language and purpose. It improves SEO, GEO, and UX through clarity, structure, and focus. It provides a framework for prioritising what to say and to whom, rather than trying to sell everything to everyone. It protects brand reputation by keeping communications accurate, professional, and on message. And most importantly, it ensures that any prospect or client engaging with your content and marketing comes away with a clear understanding of your firm’s values, personality and trustworthiness.
Messaging and tone of voice strategy isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a strategic asset that saves time, builds trust, and fuels the growth that sets top firms apart.
If growth has outpaced your messaging, we’d love to help.
