Referrals still happen at Belgian and Dutch law firms, but the referrer checks LinkedIn first. Here's why social media marketing for law firms is no longer optional.
Referrals alone don't work anymore
Most Belgian and Dutch law firms we talk to say the same thing: our best clients come from referrals, not marketing. Another partner mentions your name to a client who needs a good M&A lawyer, and the introduction happens over a phone call.
That part hasn't changed. What's changed is the step right before it, and it's the reason social media marketing for law firms stopped being optional.
The referring partner doesn't rely on memory alone anymore. Before making the call, they open LinkedIn to check whether you're still active, still visible, still saying anything about the areas you claim to practice in. A firm that's gone quiet looks like it has stopped — especially for a smaller firm, where one quiet page is the whole practice's online presence.
That silence matters more in legal work than almost anywhere else. When a lawyer refers a client to another attorney, they're vouching for that attorney's judgment with their own reputation on the line. If the referral goes badly, it reflects on the referrer, not just on you. A partner who spots an inactive profile — no commentary, no sign the practice is still active — doesn't need a reason to hesitate. The absence is the reason.
You never hear about that hesitation. It doesn't show up as a lost pitch or a client who chose someone else — the referral simply never happens. Your name gets filtered out before it's ever said out loud.
Why lawyers assume social media marketing doesn't apply to them
The objection is a fair one: legal work gets sold through trust and relationships, not through content. Nobody hires a tax lawyer because of a single post.
But that doesn't mean LinkedIn doesn't matter — it matters because of what happens before that phone call, not because of any one thing posted on it. According to LinkedIn's 2024 B2B Buyer Report, 89% of B2B decision-makers use LinkedIn during vendor research, and 83% of that research happens before they ever contact a vendor directly. Legal buyers aren't different. Before a general counsel calls the firm their peer recommended, they look the recommended lawyer up first. Content doesn't replace the relationship — it's the gate the relationship has to pass through, and that gate closes long before anyone picks up the phone.
What changes when a law firm shows up on LinkedIn (and what doesn't)
This is about what happens before anyone picks up the phone, not engagement metrics or going viral.
Quinz, a Belgian firm, liked what a credible LinkedIn presence did for them enough to turn a six-month trial into an ongoing engagement. LM&DS grew impressions 100% and engagement 124% year over year. Neither result shows up as leads closed off a single post. It shows up as fewer cold pitches needed, warmer inbound, and referrers who feel safe vouching for a name they can see is still active.
Individual lawyers get the same effect without a firm-wide programme. Jan Tuerlinckx of Tuerlinckx Tax Lawyers breaks down Belgian tax law changes as they land. Geert Van Calster of GACV Law writes recurring commentary on EU trade law. Neither is selling anything in the post itself. Both are the name that comes to mind when someone needs exactly that expertise.
What doesn't change is how the work gets sold. Nobody is arguing for testimonials, case results, or client-facing marketing copy. Showing up is what gets you invited to have the relationship, not a replacement for it. Belgian firms in particular still lean almost entirely on word-of-mouth: BluMango's analysis of the Belgian legal market found that most firms still run on a basic, static website and an inactive LinkedIn page, with nothing supporting the referrals they depend on. But showing up in public raises a real question for anyone bound by a bar's advertising rules, and it's worth answering directly.
The regulatory tightrope: bar rules and professional conduct online
This is usually where the hesitation turns into a real objection, not a vague one: isn't posting regularly a risk under bar advertising rules?
It isn't, and both frameworks have said so for longer than most partners realise. Belgium's OVB and OBFG updated their deontological codes back in 1999 specifically to permit lawyer advertising under ethical conditions. Advies 430 of the Orde van Vlaamse Balies explicitly permits informative content, LinkedIn thought leadership, educational posts, and anonymised case commentary. What's prohibited is narrower than most assume: comparative superiority claims, outcome guarantees, and unsolicited direct solicitation of a specific client.
The Dutch bar has allowed advertising even longer: a 1989 NOvA regulation formally permitted it, and the 2014 Reclamecode Social Media added one specific requirement for social platforms — transparency about the relationship between the advertiser and whoever is posting. That's a disclosure rule.
So the caution most partners carry into this is a rule decided by instinct, never actually re-checked against the code. The one line that doesn't move, regardless of platform, is client-identifying detail: commentary on a change in the law is fine, naming or describing an identifiable client's case is not — and that line predates LinkedIn entirely.
Why law firm business development can't rest on partners alone
Here's the part that has nothing to do with persuasion. Most partners we talk to are already convinced. What stops them is time: billable hours don't leave room for a weekly LinkedIn post.
The instinct to skip a week rather than rush something out turns out to be backwards. Willow's analysis of 43,738 LinkedIn posts across 488 company pages over twelve months found that moving from posting some weeks to posting most weeks more than doubled impressions per post, from 106 to 233, and nearly doubled engagement, from 2.7 to 5.9. Pages that posted steadily across 88.5% of weeks got 6 times more impressions and 9 times more engagement per post than pages that posted 34% more total content in bursts, then went quiet for weeks at a time. The pattern holds specifically for law firms, too: Willow's own analysis of Belgian legal pages found that firms that post every week generate 18 times more impressions per post than firms that post occasionally.
That's the actual argument against doing this yourself: a partner's best month of posting, done in a sprint before it slides for six weeks, performs worse than a modest, steady rhythm someone else keeps running. Consistency is the entire mechanism here, and it's exactly what a billable-hours practice is structurally bad at sustaining without help. That's what Willow Create exists for: it drafts posts from a profile of the firm so nobody's staring at a blank page on a Monday, and a coach reviews and keeps them on-brand before anything goes out. Here's what the result needs to look like to actually work.
What a credible legal marketing presence on LinkedIn looks like
Not a how-to guide. Just enough to check your own firm against it.
- Cadence beats volume. One or two posts a week from the firm page, plus occasional commentary from named partners, outperforms five posts in a good week followed by silence.
- Commentary, not marketing copy. A short breakdown of a regulatory change, a court decision, or a shift in case law relevant to your practice area does more than a generic tip ever will. It shows the thinking a client would actually be paying for.
- No live client detail. Anonymised patterns are fine, and so is naming a client on a deal that's already closed and public — firms announce M&A wins by name all the time. What's off-limits is anything live, unannounced, or otherwise identifiable, under either bar's rules or plain professional judgment.
- A named voice, not a faceless page. Tuerlinckx's tax commentary and Van Calster's trade-law analysis work because a specific person is visibly behind the expertise, not a firm logo.
If your firm doesn't have the hours to keep that rhythm going, that's exactly the gap Willow's coaches fill. If your firm's LinkedIn page hasn't posted in the last month, that's a referral gap you can't see happening. The partners who used to send you clients are still out there, and they're still checking. The only question is what they find when they look.