When COVID-19 struck the United States, shuttering offices and disrupting business as usual, law firms embraced an old and seemingly reliable marketing tactic: the webinar.

There’s is an obvious logic at work here: as in- person marketing became untenable and as marketing budgets fell under pressure, webinars naturally emerged as an attractive solution. They’re relatively inexpensive. They’re familiar. They’re one marketing activity that’s possible to execute in our strange new working conditions.

Producing webinars may be a reflex for law firms, but listening to marketers’ stories of well-attended sessions, it sounds like a reflex that worked in the pandemic. However, deeper analysis tells a different story. We researched the Am Law 100’s use of webinars in the three-month period from March to May. The evidence suggests that neither side of the webinar equation—the law firms that produce them, nor clients who attend them—are having a uniformly positive experience with the webinar format.

And that leaves us with a lot of questions.