The Visibility Gap
Many firms lose work not because they lack capability, but because the market cannot clearly see their value. Discover how visibility influences growth, trust and buying decisions.
Most lawyers I know don’t have a capability problem. Actually, quite the contrary: they are very good at what they do! What they do suffer from though is what I like to call a Visibility Gap. So for this BD Tips Wednesday post, I thought I would run through what this actually means, and how you can fix it.
What is a Visibility Gap?
A Visibility Gap is when capable lawyers and law firms lose work not because they don’t have the expertise to deliver on the project requirements, but because the purchaser cannot clearly see their value before a buying decision is made.
My 20+ years of tendering experience will tell you: That small distinction matters more than most lawyers realise. Because if what is losing you work isn’t your capability or ability, improving your delivery won’t fix the problem.
And yet, that’s exactly where most of the improvement effort will go.
The Gap Between Capability and Client Perception
Inside most firms the story is strong. You know the depth of your experience. You know the complexity of the work you’ve delivered. You know where you outperform your competitors.
But, unfortunately, the market doesn’t always see what you see. It sees fragments and from those fragments it forms a view. And here is the crux: That view is often far less impressive than we think it is!
That, in a frame, is the Visibility Gap: the space between what you are capable of doing and what the market understands you can do.
Why Good Lawyers Still Lose Work
There is a persistent belief that work is won at the point of need. But the reality is that those moments rarely decide the outcome. They just confirm it.
Long before a formal process begins, clients have already formed a view:
Who they’ve seen before
Who appears credible
Who seems to understand their challenges
By the time your submission is being evaluated, you're not being assessed in isolation. You're being assessed in context, and that context is shaped by your visibility.
If you haven’t been seen, understood or remembered, you are already behind the 8-Ball.
The Hidden Risk of “We Do Good Work”
Most firms rely on this mantra:
If we do good work, it will lead to more work.
And at a small scale, it often does. But it rarely scales beyond your immediate network.
Good work creates retention. Visibility creates growth.
Without visibility, your reputation stays contained within existing clients. It doesn’t travel. It doesn’t compound. It doesn’t position you for opportunities you’re not already in.
Being Good vs Being Known for Being Good
This is where the Visibility Gap becomes commercial. Being good is not the same as being known for being good.
One is internal. The other drives revenue.
In competitive environments — panels, government work, institutional clients — this difference becomes even more pronounced. Familiarity influences how your capability is interpreted.
Two firms present similar experience. The one that feels more familiar, more visible, more understood often has the advantage over the other. Not because they are better, but because they are a known product.
What Real Visibility Looks Like
Effective visibility is about alignment and it looks like this:
Consistently speaking to the problems your clients are actually dealing with
Showing how you think, not just listing what you’ve done
Being present before the opportunity appears
Making it easy for someone to place you in their world
It’s not about self-promotion. It’s about reducing uncertainty for the buyer.
Takeaway
Is the market seeing us early enough?
When pursuing work, this is the question you constantly need to be asking yourself. Because lawyers very rarely lose work due to a lack of capability. After all, you won’t be asked to pitch if the client didn’t think you could do the job!
What sets rainmakers apart from the rest of the marker is an understanding that there is a gap between what they can do, and what the market thinks they do.
And until you close that gap, better work alone won’t translate into better growth.
Further Reading
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