Why solo and small-team legal marketers at midsize firms feel so alone, and what actually helps
If you are the only marketing professional at your law firm, or one of a select few, you already know the particular loneliness of that position.
You sit in meetings where you are the only person thinking about visibility, messaging, or business development strategy. You field requests from twelve different partners who each believe their practice group is the most urgent priority.
You are expected to produce the kind of marketing output that global firms generate with full departments, but you’re doing it alone or with a small team, often with a fraction of the budget and without a senior leader in your corner.
And when you produce something truly excellent, there’s no one at the firm who fully understands what it really took to pull it off.
This is the isolation that doesn’t get talked about enough in legal marketing. The logistical challenges of doing more with less are real. The deeper issue is how lonely it can feel to be the only person in your organization who speaks your language.
The Expectations Are Often Unreasonable
Midsize law firms often hold their marketing teams to the same expectations as firms ten times their size. The partners have come from BigLaw — or they’re competing against BigLaw — and want BigLaw-caliber marketing: thought leadership campaigns, polished pitch materials, seamless event execution, a strong LinkedIn presence, a website that doesn’t embarrass them.
What they have is you.
That pressure is legitimate. But the expectation that you should be able to meet it without adequate resources, support, or a peer community isn’t reasonable.
One thing we hear consistently from solo marketers is that the hardest part isn’t the workload. It’s making every judgment call alone, with no colleague to sanity-check an instinct with, and no senior leader to escalate a disagreement to. You are the only senior-level executive in your department, or you are the entire department. And that’s exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain to people who haven’t lived it.
“You are jumping from a web update to a social post to a sensitive image search, then to newsletter content prep and an event invitation layout, followed by a ranking submission,” said Aleksandra Pimenides, Director of Marketing and Business Development at Beck Redden LLP. “The result is a role that is both high volume and high variance, where focus time and strategic planning are the first things that get squeezed.”
That variety can be energizing. But it also means solo marketers are constantly doing specialized work outside their core expertise, while they’re held to a high bar for polish and accuracy. And partners still expect minimal impact on their own billable time.
In our collective CMO2go experience, what actually helps is community.
That’s why CMO2go founder Erika Steinberg started the Midsize Marketers Exchange a few years ago, bringing together a group of solo and small-team leaders who meet regularly for honest conversations with others who get it.
Community eases the isolation. However, it doesn’t fix the structural problems underneath it.
Law Firm Marketing Has a Structural Problem
Here’s what we want law firms to understand: if your only marketing professional is burned out, isolated, or secretly looking for another job, it’s not a personal failure. It’s a structural one.
Solo marketers at midsize firms are being asked to carry a professional burden that wasn’t designed to be carried alone. The solution isn’t just encouragement or better tools. It’s support in the form of peer community, access to senior-level strategic guidance — and when it’s needed, outside reinforcement from people who can step in and share the load.
This is a big part of why CMO2go exists. We don’t replace in-house teams, but work alongside them. When a solo marketer has access to a senior strategic partner, a sounding board, or execution support on a high-priority project, the whole marketing function gets stronger, and the person at the center of it has a little more room to breathe.
“My biggest resource as a small-team legal marketer has been other legal marketers,” said Amy Nielson, CMO at Skarzynski Marick & Black LLP. Groups like the Legal Marketing Association’s CMO network and the Midsize Marketers Exchange, she said, “have been game changers.”
The value goes far beyond camaraderie. These groups serve as a practical resource to troubleshoot a marketing technology issue, sanity-check a decision, or learn how someone else handled a difficult partner conversation. Nielson also points to relationships inside the firm, particularly with leadership, as equally critical. Staying closely connected to the CFO, managing partner, and executive committee members who champion marketing gives her a faster path to getting ideas across the finish line.
That internal collaboration is exactly where Pimenides sees the most room for improvement. “What would make the biggest difference in my day-to-day is more efficient collaboration,” said Pimenides. Early visibility into a new win, an RFP, or an event lets her plan backward from the deadline and deliver stronger work, she said. Late requests compress timelines and force tradeoffs, often burning time on follow-up and rework that could otherwise go toward higher-value work.
That collaboration cuts both ways. Even strong outside support isn’t a full substitute for internal capacity. The in-house marketer still has to provide context, project-manage, and approve the final work they remain accountable for. Outside partners can make execution stronger, but they don’t automatically lighten the load if the internal inputs needed to move work forward arrive late, or require repeated follow-up.
If you’re a solo marketer who recognizes yourself in any of this, please reach out. The Midsize Marketers Exchange started with a handful of people at a lunch table. You’d be welcome there.
Let’s connect: https://app.reclaim.ai/m/erika-cmo2go/discovery-call