"I need a presentation. Can you do it this week?”
Ten words in an inbox. No context, no audience, no timeline, and no objective.
To anyone working in law firm marketing and business development, this request (or one like it) may sound familiar. The default response in most performance environments is immediate, frantic activity. The marketing/BD team begins building slides. And inevitably many rounds of questions/revisions/more questions begin.
We mistake rapid movement for progress.
But there is a friction here that has nothing to do with the deliverables themselves. When we look closer, we find that the frustration that ensues on both sides does not stem from a lack of goodwill. It is the quiet symptom of a translation gap.
Two Systems, One Friction
Professional services firms are built on two competing systems that naturally approach time, risk, and value differently.
Lawyers operate in a system of immediate, client-driven urgency. Their professional lives are structured around responsiveness, risk mitigation, and immediate revenue. They are rewarded for (re)acting.
Business professionals operate in a system of structured, long-term asset building. Their work is built on planning, process, consistency, and compounding brand value. They are rewarded for order.
When these two systems collide without a translation mechanism, a predictable narrative emerges: marketing thinks lawyers are disorganized, and lawyers think marketing is slow. But this is not a communication failure; it is an incentive mismatch. The firm actively rewards the lawyer for immediate action, while expecting the business professional to plan.
The Psychology of Urgent Requests
Beneath the last-minute request lies a deeper psychological reality that we rarely talk about:
Urgency is often just anxiety in disguise.
In high-stakes environments like law firms, lawyers are rarely looking for "more slides" or "another article". They are looking for immediate relief from the pressure of visibility. High-competence environments create intense anxiety around reputation and status. To react quickly is to perform competence; to be busy is to feel secure.
For marketing and business development teams, the temptation is to immediately say yes. We default to rapid execution because we confuse being needed with being strategically relevant. It feels safer to execute a vague, mediocre request than to negotiate a strategic boundary.
But this performance of competence has a quiet, compounding cost: it trades away authority. When we act as simple order-takers, we treat our expertise as a disposable service rather than a strategic asset.
Shifting the Conversation: The Four Clarity Mechanisms
If the request is rarely the work, then our primary job is translation. We must shift the relationship from transactional order-taking to strategic partnership.
This shift does not happen through organizational charts or titles; it happens through the quiet discipline of four deliberate conversations before any work begins:
- Clarifying the Objective: We must move the conversation from the tactic (the slide deck) to the outcome (the business opportunity). One of the most non-threatening, powerful questions we can ask is: What would success look like here? Often, the answer changes the work entirely—a webinar request becomes a series of direct client roundtables.
- Negotiating the Timeline: Not every deadline is real. Asking, What happens if this isn't completed tomorrow? exposes assumed urgency and allows the marketing team to allocate its resources based on genuine market opportunities rather than arbitrary dates.
- Managing Priorities: Every request is important to the lawyer making it. We must make organizational trade-offs visible by asking: We can absolutely do that; help me understand which of our existing priorities should move to make room for it? Mature organizations operate on trade-offs; immature organizations pretend they do not exist.
- Creating Accountability: Projects rarely fail at the start; they fail at the handoff points. Establishing clear ownership—who is drafting, who is reviewing, who is approving, and by when—reduces systemic friction and respects everyone’s time.
The Asset Mindset in the Age of AI
This clarity is particularly critical as we navigate the integration of Artificial Intelligence into nearly everything we’re working on - especially at the marketing level.
The current legal marketing conversation is obsessed with speed: How can AI help us write content faster? But most law firms do not have a content creation problem; they have a content utilization problem. They invest enormous energy into webinars or articles that are used once and quietly archived.
We must stop thinking about disposable content and start thinking about compounding assets.
A single sixty-minute presentation or client briefing can be disassembled into a transcript, a client alert, a LinkedIn series, and a BD follow-up sequence. AI is an extraordinary accelerator for this multiplication model—but only if the original thinking is sound.
AI does not solve unclear thinking; it exposes it. If the objective is vague and the audience is ill-defined, technology merely amplifies the noise. The ultimate competitive advantage in the age of AI is not the technology itself; it is the clarity of the strategy directing it.
Influence Starts with Clarity
Operational clarity is quietly becoming a significant competitive advantage for modern law firms.
Business professionals inside law firms often believe they lack the authority to change underlying operational dynamics. But influence does not require a title, or a legal designation. It belongs to those who can bring structure to ambiguity and make complexity easier to navigate.
The next time an unfinished, urgent request lands in your inbox, resist the impulse to react immediately.
Take a breath. Ask a better question.
Because when we improve the conversation, we improve the request. And when we improve the request, we quietly build the long-term advantage of the firm.
The request is rarely the work. What comes next is.
Kelly Margani is the CEO + Strategic Coach at Southren Group, responsible for the direction of the business and brand, and development of our strategic programs for lawyers and law firms. She is a key contributor to the firm’s service offerings, and a Brain-Based Coach, certified by the Neuroleadership Institute.
Kelly helps clients create a path to their success through group coaching, training and workshops, and she is a regular speaker on strategic planning and business development.
Kelly is a lifelong entrepreneur and loves nurturing the big ideas that take businesses, and the people in them, to new heights. She’s also a passionate and dedicated coach, working with her clients to reach for their definition of success and wellbeing.
Throughout her career, Kelly has worked in and for businesses of all sizes across many business sectors, from tech to banking to design and branding. She is a decisive communicator, design thinker, and a skilled problem-solver who strives to first understand the unique needs of her audience in order to deliver the best outcome possible.
