If you’re marketing a law firm, your biggest problem is that nobody thinks about you until the day they need you. People don’t shop around for a solicitor in advance, because something has to happen first, whether it’s an accident, a house move, a bereavement or a dispute. When it does, they need somebody quickly, so very often they choose the first name that comes to mind.
Meanwhile you’re competing with national claims brands for the same searches, answering to partners who’d like to know where each enquiry came from, and working within rules on publicity that most businesses never have to think about. That goes a long way towards explaining why law firms have been some of the most consistent advertisers on regional television for years, and why it’s a sector we’ve done a lot of work in.
How people choose a solicitor
The Legal Services Consumer Panel asks people about this every year. Its 2026 tracker survey of people who had recently used a legal service found that 42% of them shopped around before choosing a provider. That leaves more than half who went with a firm without weighing it against another, and the most common reasons they gave were that they or a family member had used the firm before, or that family or friends had recommended it.
Only a small share said they’d chosen a firm because they saw an advert, and we wouldn’t expect otherwise, because people rarely give advertising the credit for a decision. What the answers do show is how much of this market runs on familiarity. A firm gets chosen because it’s the one somebody already knows, or the one a relative mentions when they’re asked, and both depend on the name being out there long before the need arises. Putting it there is what advertising is for in this sector, and television is particularly good at it.
What TV does for a law firm
Building the name before the need is the first thing TV does, since you can’t predict who’ll need you next month and the only answer is to be known by everybody who might. It also lends a firm some trust, which matters more here than in most sectors. Choosing a solicitor feels like a risk, often at a time when somebody is already under strain, and a firm that’s on television feels established and accountable, partly because of the company it’s keeping on screen and partly because every TV advert has to be approved before it goes on air.
It can be kept local as well, because most firms draw their clients from a region, or from the towns around their offices, and TV can be bought to match. For most businesses ITV is bought region by region, and services such as AdSmart from Sky can narrow things down to the postcodes you choose. Our guide to advertising by postcode explains how.
On top of that, it makes your other marketing work harder. Phrases like “personal injury solicitor” are some of the most hotly contested in search, and people are more likely to click on your result if they already know your name, or to skip the general search altogether and look for your firm directly.
It depends on the work you want more of
A law firm is really several businesses under one name, and the advert’s job changes from one department to the next. An injury or a clinical negligence claim comes out of the blue, so nobody is in the market until the day they are, and the firm that gets the call is usually the one whose name was already in their head. Work like that needs steady, long-running activity and not a single short burst, which is why this kind of advertising tends to stay on air month after month, and we’ve written separately about scheduling a campaign that way.
Other work is different, because the need is already there and people are putting it off. Making a will or arranging a lasting power of attorney is something nearly everybody means to get round to, so an advert can do something more immediate, by giving people a reason to act and an easy first step. Those are two different jobs for an advert, and for a firm with several departments the sensible course is usually to decide which kind of work the campaign is for and let one advert do that one job. Thirty seconds that tries to cover injury claims, conveyancing and family law at once tends to be remembered for none of them.
What works on screen
Whichever kind of work it’s for, the adverts that do well in this sector tend to be reassuring and human. Somebody who needs a solicitor is usually having a difficult time, and what they want to know is that they’ll be looked after, that it will be manageable and that somebody is on their side. Legal jargon and lists of departments rarely achieve that.
One way of doing it is to show what the experience is like. Our advert for Heptonstalls Solicitors, made with the agency Forward & Thinking, is for a firm that specialises in compensation for medical negligence. Instead of listing what the firm does, it follows one client’s case (played by actors) from the first contact through to getting life back to normal, which gives viewers a much better idea of what to expect than a list of legal services ever could. The commercial was well received, and it helped to bring in new business for the firm.
It helps to be distinctive, too, because a lot of legal advertising looks and sounds the same, and an idea with some character goes a long way. For Winn Solicitors, working with the agency Dickinson Media, the aim was to show how easy it is to make a claim with them. The answer was the Accident Response Force, presented in the style of an American movie trailer, which is a format everybody recognises straight away.
For Hampson Hughes, with the agency Global, we’ve gone in two quite different directions. One is a 2D animation set in a black and white world, where the colour comes back when the firm gets involved, an idea that let the firm’s own colours become part of the advert. The other is a large live-action production, filmed in a Northumberland village and on Liverpool’s Albert Dock.
The rules, and who checks what
Ideas like those have to work within more rules than most advertisers face, and it’s easy to forget how recent legal advertising is. Solicitors in England and Wales have only been allowed to advertise since 1 October 1984, as the Law Society Gazette recorded at the time, and the profession still takes publicity seriously. The starting point today is paragraph 8.8 of the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s Code of Conduct, which says that any publicity in relation to your practice has to be accurate and not misleading, including what it says about your charges. (Firms in Scotland and Northern Ireland answer to their own regulators.)
Then there’s the advert itself, which is checked by Clearcast on behalf of the broadcasters, and Clearcast looks for much the same things your regulator cares about. The SRA set out its concerns in a warning notice on marketing to the public, published in December 2024, and the points below are where the two overlap.
- Any claim, such as success rates, the amount of compensation won or being the “leading” firm, has to be backed up with evidence.
- Fee arrangements such as “no win, no fee” need their conditions explained, usually in supers on screen, and the SRA’s notice says any marketing that highlights them should clearly explain what they mean. Guidance the ASA published in January 2026 for advertising outside TV and radio, after rulings against firms advertising group compensation claims, asks for the percentage taken from any compensation to be made clear as well.
- If client stories or testimonials are used, they have to be real, and you’ll need to be able to show it.
Your compliance team will have the final say on all of this, and they’ll want to approve the script as well, because the firm answers for its publicity whoever produced it. We’re happy to work with them from the start. None of it is a barrier to making a good advert, but it does mean settling the wording early, while it’s still a script, which is what we do as part of Clearcast clearance. We’ve also written about the kinds of claim that need evidence.
Where to start
The most useful first conversation is about which kind of work you’d like more of and where your clients come from, because the idea, the airtime and the budget all follow from that. From there we’ll put together a storyboard, so that you and your partners can see what the advert could look like before anybody commits to anything. You can browse more of our legal and financial work, ask for a free storyboard, or get in touch for a chat.
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