Every lawyer can write. That’s not the problem.
The problem is that writing a brief and communicating like a human are two entirely different skills — truth be told, law firms have spent decades rewarding the first, they couldn’t give a rats about the second.
Here’s the paradox at the heart of legal communication: the training that makes someone an excellent lawyer is often the exact training that makes them a mediocre communicator. Law school teaches precision, hedging, and comprehensiveness. Clients and colleagues want clarity, warmth, and brevity.
A firm can be full of brilliant legal minds and still lose clients, frustrate staff, and confuse the public — not because the lawyers don’t know the law, but because they’ve never been taught to translate it. Why lawyers can’t do this alone: the instinct to protect against every conceivable misreading is precisely the instinct that produces dense, defensive prose.
Asking a lawyer to “just simplify it” is asking them to override years of professional training in real time, usually while billing hours on something else. No individual lawyer has the vantage point to see the firm’s communication as a whole. They only see their own inbox, their own clients, their own habits. Standardizing voice requires someone looking across the entire firm, not up from inside one practice group. The same detachment that protects a lawyer’s judgment in the matter can come across as coldness to a client in crisis.
Recognizing that gap from the inside is difficult — it requires stepping outside the professional mindset that got them the job in the first place. They’re too close to their own workflow to see where it breaks down. Ask any team to diagram their own communication gaps and they’ll describe how it’s supposed to work, not how it actually does. That distinction requires an outside observer.
Billable hours are the currency of a law firm, and content creation rarely feels justifiable against that clock, even when it’s high-value marketing work. A consultant treats that content as the deliverable, not an afterthought squeezed in after real work is done.
That’s where a communications consultant comes in.
Here are 5 ways that role earns its place inside a law firm — and why it’s genuinely hard for lawyers to do it themselves:
1. Translating “Legally Accurate” into “Actually Understood”
Lawyers are trained to eliminate ambiguity, which usually means adding qualifiers, cross-references, and defined terms until a sentence is airtight — and unreadable.
A communications consultant’s job is to take that airtight sentence and rebuild it so a client with no legal background can understand it in one read, without losing the substance that makes it accurate. Nearly 50% of Lawcover claims are caused by poor communications with clients, including written advice.
2. Building a Consistent Voice Across a Firm Full of Individual Voices
Every partner writes differently. One is terse and clipped, another is formal to the point of stiffness, another over-explains out of caution.
Clients experience this as inconsistency — the firm sounds like ten different firms depending on who they’re emailing. A consultant develops firm-wide communication standards: templates, tone guidelines, and email and client-update frameworks that let each lawyer keep their personality while sounding like they belong to the same institution.
Maintaining consistency in the brand voice is essential, whether it’s a formal legal brief, a blog post on the website, a tweet, or a client email. It reinforces brand identity and ensures clarity in messaging.
3. Managing the Emotional Layer Lawyers Are Trained to Ignore
Legal training rewards detachment — stick to the facts, avoid speculation, don’t get pulled into emotional territory.
That’s a strength in a courtroom and a liability in a client relationship. Clients in litigation, divorce, estate planning, or business disputes are often frightened, angry, or overwhelmed, and they need to feel heard before they can absorb legal advice. A consultant helps lawyers deliver hard news, set expectations, and communicate empathy without compromising professionalism or opening up liability.
In today’s climate, lawyers need to understand how to effectively communicate unfavourable news to their clients:
4. Preventing Internal Miscommunication From Becoming External Risk
A huge amount of malpractice risk and client attrition doesn’t come from bad legal work — it comes from breakdowns in communication: a partner and associate assuming the other sent the update, unclear handoffs between practice groups, status updates that go out inconsistently or not at all.
Historically 40% of the complaints against lawyers relate to communication breakdowns. Don’t be in the 40%!
5. Turning Expertise Into Content That Builds the Firm’s Reputation
Lawyers are sitting on enormous amounts of expertise that never leaves the building — insights that could become newsletters, thought-leadership articles, client alerts, or social content that builds the firm’s reputation and brings in business. But knowing the law and knowing how to write compelling content about the law are different skills, and most lawyers don’t have the bandwidth or training to do the second one well.
For example. sending a regular e-newsletter is one of the best ways for a law firm to remind their clients and referrers of the services they offer and how they can help. A professional, personalised newsletter containing helpful information and regular updates on topics of interest builds trust with your audience and is a central component of your law firm’s marketing strategy, second only to your website.
If your firm recognizes any of these patterns — inconsistent client emails, hard conversations that land wrong, expertise that never turns into content — it might be time to bring in an outside eye.
Communications consultant Leon Gettler helps law firms translate legal precision into clear, human communication, without compromising accuracy or professionalism.
Get in touch with Leon on 0411 745 193 or email leon@leongettler.com to start the conversation.
