Consortium - more than marketing

28/10/2026

What does a supportive workplace actually look like day to day? Not the policy on the intranet, the reality of how people are treated!

In this clip from our recent more than marketing podcast, Jodie Hill, Founder and Managing Partner of Thrive Law, talks to us about creating an environment where people can say what they need and actually get it, whether that’s an adjustment to how or where they work, the right space to concentrate, or a manager who notices when something isn’t right.

Jodie has built Thrive Law with wellbeing, inclusion and belonging at its core, and her own experience of neurodiversity shapes how the firm runs. Her point is a simple one: wellbeing can’t sit on the sidelines of a business. And the things that make the biggest difference are rarely dramatic. They come down to listening, not assuming you know why someone is behaving the way they are, and making the small changes that remove obstacles rather than add to them.

If you lead a law firm or work in HR, it’s a minute well spent.

Listen to the full episode on our website here: https://bit.ly/3LX6gpH
Listen on Spotify here: https://bit.ly/4xAWXkO

Or, if you’d rather read a summary of the episode, check out our article here: https://bit.ly/4rjVHAL
Thank you again to Jodie for joining us!

26/10/2026

Securing national press coverage for a specialist story starts with the person telling it.

When Rob Hailstone, founder of the Bold Legal Group and the Conveyancing Improvement Collective, came to us, the challenge was clear. The CIC is a practitioner led group tackling the practical problems that slow down property transactions, and it needed to reach beyond the specialist conveyancing press to the estate agents and property professionals who live with those delays every day but never read the trade titles.

Instead of issuing a standard release, our team sat down with Rob for an in depth editorial interview. With more than 50 years in conveyancing, he had far more to say than any press release could hold, and the job was to draw out the story, write it up in his own voice and then pitch it individually to the editors who would care about it.

The result was coverage in The Negotiator, which reaches estate and letting agents across the UK, and in Legal Futures, which took the story to the wider legal business audience. Rob has since reported a noticeable rise in interest from conveyancers, estate agents and property professionals, and the relationship has grown into an ongoing collaboration with more media activity planned.

Here is what Rob had to say about working with Laura Hearn:

"Working with Laura was a pleasure, she was inquisitive and interested in what I had to say. Her journalistic skill helped draw out some information that I didn't think until later was relevant."

For us, this is what PR looks like when it starts with a person. Journalists and their readers want to hear from someone with real experience and a real point of view, and the coverage follows from that.

Read the full case study here: https://bit.ly/4dO9dqU

How Consortium helped RBRO Solutions maintain and grow its international marketing across time zones with flexible, experienced support.

20/10/2026

Say hello to Will Gordon, Senior Marketing Executive here at Consortium.

Will joined Consortium as a Marketing Apprentice in 2022 and now works across a broad range of professional services clients, getting involved in everything from social media and email marketing to content, graphic design, events and digital communications.

It is a varied role, and that is exactly what Will enjoys about it. No two days are quite the same, and there is always something new to get stuck into, whether that is helping a client bring an idea to life or finding a more engaging way to communicate something technical.

Will is particularly passionate about challenging the idea that professional services have to be "traditional and boring". For him, good marketing is about finding ways to make even the most technical subject interesting, accessible and, ideally, a bit more fun. As he puts it: "I enjoy making clients happy, and hearing how I have helped them is what makes me love my job!"

That is a big part of why clients tend to stay with us. The work matters, but so does having someone on the other end of the email who cares whether it lands.

Find out more about Will here: https://bit.ly/4BdgzOV

16/10/2026

Your firm's history is one of the few things a competitor cannot copy.

Plenty of law firms and professional services businesses have been around for decades, some for well over a century, and most of them mention it in a single line on the About page and leave it there. That is a missed opportunity, because a long history is really a long story about people: the founders and what they stood for, the partners who built the practice, the clients who stayed for generations and the towns and communities the firm grew up alongside.

We have refreshed our article on using your company history as a marketing tool, and it looks at how to put that story to work. That means checking your heritage supports the direction the firm is heading in today, telling the story properly through timelines, photographs and the voices of the people who were there, weaving it into your visual identity, and making the most of anniversaries and milestones for PR and events.

Heritage builds trust, and trust is what clients are really buying when they choose a firm. Done well, it also shows that the people who built the firm and the people running it today share the same values, which is a reassuring thing for any client to see.

Read the article here: https://bit.ly/4jIFyn1

14/10/2026

What makes a networking group actually useful?

The Professionals Network was built around a fairly simple idea: the people in the room matter more than the size of it.

TPN brings together senior professionals from different sectors for curated lunches, with limited membership in each city and no competing businesses sitting around the same table. That changes the tone of the conversation. Nobody is pitching, nobody is guarding their patch, and people can get to know each other properly, understand what each other does and build relationships that continue long after the coffee has been cleared away.

That is also where the work eventually comes from. In professional services, instructions and referrals tend to follow trust, and trust is built by turning up, listening and being the kind of person others enjoy dealing with. A good network gives you a reason to keep doing that.

TPN currently runs lunches in London, Manchester, Cardiff and Birmingham, and Leeds joined the network last month with its first lunch at Gaucho.

If you are a senior professional looking to build your network in one of those cities, find out more about TPN here: https://bit.ly/3Fb0m4x

09/10/2026

What does "success" look like to the person reading your LinkedIn post?

A record billing quarter, a team away day, an awards dinner or a new sponsorship are all wins your firm deserves to celebrate. Depending on who is looking at them, though, they can land rather differently.

For a prospective client, a firm that is clearly doing well is reassuring. For an existing client who has been waiting three days for a reply, a post about another networking event can feel like confirmation that their matter is a long way down the list.

In her latest article, Lou Gilbert looks at the gap between how law firms talk about success and how that success is perceived by the people they serve, drawing on real client reviews that make the point rather bluntly. Her answer is to keep celebrating, but with a clearer idea of who is reading, what your success means to them, and whether the story you tell publicly matches the experience you deliver day to day.

There is a simple habit at the centre of it: ask who will read this before you post it. When the service behind the post is consistently good, the good news lands exactly as it was meant to.

Read the full article here: https://bit.ly/4djDk9v

https://bit.ly/4djDk9v

08/10/2026

One week to go until The Legal Conference 2026!

Next Thursday, 15 October, Managing Partners, CEOs, Practice Directors and other senior leaders from law firms across the UK will be at the Hilton Birmingham Metropole for a day built around the realities of running and growing a modern law firm.

Here is a flavour of what is on the programme:

🎤 Panel One, One Future: How Legal Work Is Evolving Today, with Simon McCrum, Abby Winkworth and Vidisha Joshi, hosted by Alex Holt of Cashroom.
🎤 A keynote from Simon McCrum on the role of partners in the perfect legal business.
🎤 Panel Two, Beyond the Buzzwords: What AI Can Really Do for SME Practices, with Mike Leeman, James Chadburn and James Leyshon, hosted by Francis Davis of Wavenet.
🎤 A closing keynote on performance and focus from Harriet Beveridge, award winning executive coach and co author of Will It Make the Boat Go Faster?
🤝 Two round table sessions, a networking lunch and a closing drinks reception, with our own Lara Squires hosting the day.

The sessions will give you plenty to take back to the firm, but the real value of a day like this is the room itself. It will be full of people running firms like yours, facing the same decisions and ready to talk openly about what is working and what needs to change. Some of the most useful conversations will happen over coffee between sessions.

There are still a small number of places available, so if you have been meaning to book, now is the time.

📅 Thursday 15 October 2026, 9am to 5pm
📍 Hilton Birmingham Metropole

Register: https://bit.ly/4hhX4fX

07/10/2026

How many events have you been invited to that you genuinely wanted to attend?

That's the question at the heart of our latest article. In-person events are rated the most impactful marketing channel by 78% of organisers in Bizzabo's 2026 research, but only when someone actually wants to be in the room...

Penelope Richards, our Head of Events, has pulled together 12 event formats that work for law firms in 2026, from breakfast briefings and client roundtables on AI to podcast recordings with a live audience and recruitment open evenings.

She's also included the part most firms skip: how to measure whether an event actually worked. A small breakfast briefing that generates one instruction can easily outperform a large drinks reception that generates goodwill and nothing else.

Read it here: https://bit.ly/4xeE8nn

12 event ideas for law firms, from seminars and client roundtables to podcast recordings and hybrid webinars, with 2026 data on ROI and a simple way to measure results.

06/10/2026

If a junior lawyer never writes a hundred imperfect first drafts, do they ever develop the eye to spot the flaws in an AI generated one?

That was the question Toby Bennett came away with from EVOLVE 26 in Brighton earlier this year, and it feels even more relevant now that we are turning our attention to the people side of legal practice this quarter.

The traditional route into law ran through the foundational work: the document reviews, the first drafts, the research tasks and the admin heavy matters that taught junior lawyers their craft. As more of that work is automated, the ladder that trained the next generation starts to lose its lower rungs.

Toby's take is that this creates an opportunity as much as a problem. If junior lawyers are freed from some of that groundwork, they can start building the skills that used to wait until partnership much earlier: business development, networking, writing and speaking, and developing a personal profile and a point of view of their own.

Those are the skills that no tool can replicate. Empathy, judgement, communication, and the ability to sit across from a client on the worst day of their life and make them feel understood. Firms that use technology to amplify their people, while doubling down on the human side of practice, are the ones that will be trusted with the work.

Worth a read if you are thinking about how your firm develops its people: https://bit.ly/4hdFWZm

https://bit.ly/4hdFWZm

05/10/2026

What does a Chambers or Legal 500 ranking actually do for a law firm? Mostly, it changes how the people who could send you work see you...

That is the starting point of Lou Gilbert's guide to legal directory rankings, and it is worth revisiting now, while there is still time to plan next year's submissions properly.

Lou's view is that directories are, at heart, a people exercise. The rankings reward firms that can show distinctive, complex or strategically important work, but they are built on the words of clients and referees who were willing to say what it was like to work with your team. A submission only ever reflects the relationships behind it, and the strongest ones read like a client describing a lawyer they trust.

The article works through the seven mistakes we see most often: submitting to the same categories every year without asking which ones matter commercially, leaving everything until the last minute, choosing referees as a box ticking exercise, recycling last year's wording, and putting forward competent but routine matters without explaining why the work mattered. There is also one that has nothing to do with the directories themselves, which is a website, a set of biographies and a LinkedIn presence that quietly contradict the submission. Researchers look you up, and so do the referrers and prospective clients who see the ranking later.

Third party endorsement is also carrying more weight as search changes. Rankings, and the recognition that comes with them, are among the signals that AI driven search treats as evidence that a firm is who it says it is.

Read Lou's full guide, including what to do instead: https://bit.ly/4wUE90u