First...to clarify the marketing function in the legal environment. Much of what I have read and seen about law firm marketing offers insights in bits and pieces: how to produce a newsletter; how to train the lawyers; how to survey clients. Thus, one of my major goals was to provide a framework for marketing decision-making in the law firm.

Second...to provide enough information about the tools, technique, strategies and procedures...that the law firm seeking to implement them would be adequately informed. So beyond theory and framework I have tried to present a comprehensive discussion of myriad possible activities – from networks to compensation strategies, from brochures to marketing databases – to help the reader get things done and, just as importantly, to measure whether the marketing effort is working.

In striving to accomplish the first goal, although it is a difficult one, Schmidt succeeds admirably. Over the course of 14 chapters she covers almost every conceivable topic in the realm of marketing and places each topic in its appropriate context, primarily for medium-size and large corporate firms – although she does include a subchapter (13A) titled "Marketing the Small Firm." The book serves as a primer for inexperienced law marketers, and an encyclopedic reference for veteran law marketers who need to brush up on a narrow topic. So Marketing the Law Firm does provide an elementary framework for decision-making, upon which each marketer should build and improve.

In the first chapter, Schmidt organizes the law marketing universe into five "steps":

Building a solid framework for decision-making requires that you cover a very broad range of marketing tools and techniques fairly superficially, so you have enough information about them to make wise decisions, but not so much that you get hopelessly mired in them. That's exactly what Schmidt has provided. In other words, I'm saying that covering all those tools and techniques superficially is the appropriate way to create a framework for decision-making.

If the author were to "present a comprehensive discussion" about each and every marketing tool, so that you could actually implement them, "get things done," and measure their effectiveness, her book would become bloated, impossible to publish in a single volume. So I'm afraid Schmidt's two goals are mutually exclusive, and she has necessarily fallen short in accomplishing the second.

Inadequacies
In a work of such breadth by a single author, there are bound to be some areas that are covered inadequately – after all, no individual can be an expert on every law marketing topic. Schmidt covers the following three vital topics inadequately:

• Strategic differentiation, a topic popularized recently by Ross Fishman

• Industry groups (separate from practice groups), a topic popularized recently by Larry Bodine

• Referral networking, a topic not yet covered adequately by anyone for the legal profession

It's useful to compare Schmidt's book to the other encyclopedic reference in the law marketing field, Phyllis Weiss Haserot's The Rainmaking Machine. Both are comprehensive. In my opinion, Schmidt's book is easier to use as a reference because of its compact format and unified index. Haserot's work comprises several volumes (about 1,400 pages in total for the price of $147) and two separate indexes. Also, Haserot's book, the first volume of which was published in 1989, has never been updated. Schmidt provides semi-annual updates, although it's not clear how the book purchaser might obtain future updates.

About the author
Sally J. Schmidt is president of Schmidt Marketing, Inc., in Burnsville, Minnesota. Her firm serves law firms throughout the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Mexico, and Australia. Schmidt was the first president of the Legal Marketing Association. She also has taught marketing courses at the University of Minnesota, where she earned her MBA in marketing. Website: www.schmidt-marketing.com.