Paul has spent 20 years helping law firms grow. First as head of marketing inside two fast-growing practices, then founding Toro to bring that approach to other firms.
The firms Paul works with best are boutique and growing practices, serving organisations or discerning private clients.
The partners are excellent at what they do, but their marketing usually isn’t keeping up. It’s scattered across tactics that don’t fit how the work actually arrives, leaning on an in-house team that needs more support, or relying on referrals that happen by chance rather than by design.
Paul’s view of the work is simple. The lawyers who are consistently busy aren’t doing more marketing than their competitors; they’re doing the right marketing. Every asset has to earn its place in a referral pipeline, and everything built should compound over time rather than starting from scratch every few years.
Paul didn't learn how to grow a legal practice in an agency or a classroom. He learned it inside two of Australia's fastest-growing law firms.
Paul ran the marketing and communications function through the firm's growth from 200 to 650 people, including two major mergers, learning what it takes to scale successfully through acquisition and how to keep dozens of partners aligned on positioning when everything else is changing.
Paul built the marketing strategy from scratch and helped 60+ partners shift from scattered individual efforts to a focused approach centred on building highly rewarding referral partnerships. The work fuelled years of organic growth, and taught Paul how to help excellent lawyers, who loathe self-promotion, build practices they were proud of.
Since 2014, Toro has worked with more than 100 law firms across Australia, New Zealand, and Asia.
We've delivered over 100 law firm websites, helped launch new firms, and led rebrands of established ones. Our strategy and advisory work has covered every practice area of law.
Most of these clients become ongoing engagements, with Toro supporting their growth as a fractional CMO and team.
Paul's work falls into recurring patterns. Some are kinds of engagement repeated across dozens of firms. Others are specific matters where the right intervention made the difference.
Paul has set up the marketing and BD function inside more than 20 law firms. Each one started with a strategy the partners bought into, then the systems to deliver on it. In almost all cases, those engagements are still running, with Toro supporting the firm as the practice grew.
Seven firms brought Paul in to repair a marketing function that had gone off the rails. The diagnoses varied: a marketer hired into the wrong role, a growth strategy that hadn't survived contact with the practice, disjointed effort across teams, or work that got stuck before it shipped. Each engagement ran in close consultation with the partnership or executive. Some finished by handing the function over to a new in-house lead; others continued with Toro in an ongoing role.
For partners and practice groups competing against much larger firms, Paul has found positioning that referrers could remember and clients actually valued. The work wasn't difference for its own sake. It was identifying where the practice could win, and saying it clearly enough that referrers knew when to send work its way.
Firms that grew by taking on new practices sometimes ended up without a coherent position. In each instance, Paul worked with the leadership to lay out the options, with the benefits and trade-offs of each, and made a clear recommendation.
A mid-sized commercial firm had one good contact at an industry association but no real foothold inside it. Industry associations can be one of the highest-leverage referrer channels for commercial firms, but only if you're embedded in the work, not just on the sponsor list. Paul positioned the firm as the association's trusted legal partner, attending committee meetings, helping plan the annual conference, and putting six partners forward as the go-to advisors for members. The relationship is now responsible for generating eight figures in annual work, over 20% of the firm's total revenue.
A 20-lawyer employment practice with good lawyers and a tired, scattergun approach to marketing. In employment law, Paul saw the growth opportunity coming from sustained presence in front of HR, IR, and safety consultants, not from one-off efforts. He built a referral marketing plan around that principle. The team delivered 80+ events annually, four major content pieces repurposed into 20 articles, 50 email campaigns, and 300 social posts. The team's best thinking, turned into keynote presentations and speaking engagements at industry conferences. The practice grew organically by 35% in 18 months.
A high-profile matter with a story worth telling, and a team that didn't have time to tell it. In white collar work, prospects and referrers don't want a brochure, they want to see how the team thinks under pressure. Paul prepared a 3,000-word case study on the matter, then repurposed it into training materials, social campaigns, and award submissions. It won a prestigious law society award, attracted media coverage, and continues to generate thousands of website visits annually. Referrers have told the lead partner that they continually cite it as a resource they share with colleagues.
Firms that grew by taking on new practices sometimes ended up without a coherent position. In each instance, Paul worked with the leadership to lay out the options, with the benefits and trade-offs of each, and made a clear recommendation.
A mid-sized commercial firm had one good contact at an industry association but no real foothold inside it. Industry associations can be one of the highest-leverage referrer channels for commercial firms, but only if you're embedded in the work, not just on the sponsor list. Paul positioned the firm as the association's trusted legal partner, attending committee meetings, helping plan the annual conference, and putting six partners forward as the go-to advisors for members. The relationship is now responsible for generating eight figures in annual work, over 20% of the firm's total revenue.
A 20-lawyer employment practice with good lawyers and a tired, scattergun approach to marketing. In employment law, Paul saw the growth opportunity coming from sustained presence in front of HR, IR, and safety consultants, not from one-off efforts. He built a referral marketing plan around that principle. The team delivered 80+ events annually, four major content pieces repurposed into 20 articles, 50 email campaigns, and 300 social posts. The team's best thinking, turned into keynote presentations and speaking engagements at industry conferences. The practice grew organically by 35% in 18 months.
A high-profile matter with a story worth telling, and a team that didn't have time to tell it. In white collar work, prospects and referrers don't want a brochure, they want to see how the team thinks under pressure. Paul prepared a 3,000-word case study on the matter, then repurposed it into training materials, social campaigns, and award submissions. It won a prestigious law society award, attracted media coverage, and continues to generate thousands of website visits annually. Referrers have told the lead partner that they continually cite it as a resource they share with colleagues.
Two firms merging, 80 partners across three cities, and a hard deadline to launch as one. In a merger, the rebrand is the most visible signal to clients and referrers that the new firm is real and confident, and it has to land on day one. Paul led the renaming and rebranding with the executive team, two partnerships, marketing, and HR through the full rollout: website, stationery, signage, and communications to clients, referrers, staff, vendors, and media. The launch event drew 500+ attendees. The visual identity is still in use 15 years later.
A mid-market M&A practice was competing with top-tier firms but had no public record of its transactions. In M&A, deal experience is the first thing prospects check before calling, and an invisible track record costs a firm work it has already earned the right to win. Paul built a database of completed deals, organised by industry and deal size. Within two years, the practice was recognised by Chambers & Partners and invited to transactions previously reserved for top-tier firms.
A leading patents practice, newly separated from its larger parent firm, needed to stand on its own internationally. In patents, the referrer network is international IP affiliates, and independence created the opportunity to expand that network beyond the relationships inherited from the parent. Paul built targeted awareness campaigns with patent attorneys focused on high-value technology, manufacturing, and pharmaceutical companies. Inside 12 months, the firm had attracted nine new referral partnerships with well-regarded US and European intellectual property practices.
A leading commercial & IP practice with deep technical expertise and lawyers who didn't want to write. The practice didn't need more content, it needed a system that turned the lawyers' real expertise into shareable material without adding to their workload. Paul built a content marketing program with repurposing workflows that got notoriously reluctant lawyers actively contributing. Their technical expertise became genuine value for prospects and foreign associates, cutting through a crowded market.
A complete rebrand following strategic changes in the practice. Naming, positioning, and a six-month rollout that delivered brand identity, website rebuild, internal change communications, segmented client and referrer announcements, media campaign, and launch event as one coordinated programme.
A campaign for a fast-growing commercial firm that was struggling to recruit lawyers and graduates against larger, higher-paying competitors. Applications grew by over 70% year on year, with top-tier firms commenting on the cut-through achieved against a fraction of their reputation and budget.
A business development program for a firm's senior associates and their referral accountants. 70% of participants made partner within three years, 85% within five.
A content series for a litigation team that turns complex contested estate cases into accessible insights. Each piece unpacks what went wrong in the original estate planning, and how the team would handle it differently. The series builds continuous credibility with high-net-worth prospects researching these matters, and gives referring solicitors and accountants a steady supply of useful material to share.
A 14-partner, four-city property practice had completed over 500 projects, but partners were spending hours building custom pitch decks for every opportunity while competitors had their experience publicly documented. Paul catalogued the work and turned it into the foundation for publications, capability statements, tenders, and website profiles. Partners now spend minutes, not hours, responding to RFPs, and their experience is finally visible to the prospects researching them.
A private client practice was receiving 70+ monthly enquiries to identify the 1–2% with legitimate claims. The manual process consumed 40+ hours per month across the lead partner and three senior lawyers. Paul built a screening tool that streamlined enquiries so the team's law clerk now handles more than 95% of them, and the lead partner's input is down to 1–2 hours per month. Non-fit enquiries receive referral lists and access to an automated letter generator for lodging complaints with government authorities, which also eliminated the negative feedback from people the firm couldn't help.
A tech law team serving funded startups was losing referred work because their initial response was slow and generic. Paul built problem-specific intake forms, template emails, and a helpful guide that enabled fast response and made first meetings valuable for both sides. Close rate improved by over 60%, and the team's accountant referrers noticed the difference.
A firm facing unfair negative reviews because of the nature of its practice. Paul built a systematic review program the team uses post-matter. In six months, the firm's average rating went from 3.2 to 4.7, reviews grew from 28 to 107, and 17 inappropriate reviews were successfully removed.
Paul has spoken to thousands of lawyers across Australia, New Zealand, and Asia at law society sessions, CPD programs, industry conferences, and firm partner retreats. The topics are the same ones the rest of this page covers: how relationship-driven firms actually grow, what good marketing looks like for a referral-led practice, and the work behind the case studies above.
If you're programming an event for lawyers, get in touch.
View Paul's Speaker Page