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Law firm marketing agency
A lead is not a case. Only one of them pays your associates.
We are a law firm marketing agency for personal injury, family, criminal defense, immigration and business practices. Legal SEO, Google Ads, Local Services Ads and intake work, reported against one number: what it costs your firm to sign a matter.
★★★★★ 4.9 out of 5 across 500+ brands, managing $2M+ in monthly ad spend
Illustrative figures showing the shape of legal acquisition, not a specific client account. The point is the distance between the first number your agency reports and the last number your firm actually pays.
01 : Sound familiar?
The leads arrive. The retainers do not.
These are the six things partners tell us before they change agency. If more than two apply, the problem is usually happening after the click, not before it.
Your agency reports leads, you count retainers
The report says 140 leads. Your case management system shows nine new matters. Nobody can explain the gap, because the agency is measuring its own dashboard rather than your signed files.
The wrong case types keep coming in
You want commercial vehicle claims and you receive slip and fall enquiries you refer out. That is a keyword and negative keyword problem, and it is usually fixable inside a fortnight.
One page covers six practice areas
Family, criminal, immigration and estate work described in four paragraphs on a single services page. That page ranks for none of them, because each is a separate search with a separate intent.
Nobody answers after six
Legal problems do not keep office hours. A client arrested on Friday evening retains whoever picks up, and every unanswered call is a case you already paid to generate.
You are invisible two suburbs over
You appear in the map pack in the district your office sits in and nowhere else across the counties you actually serve. City pages and profile configuration are almost always the cause.
Directories outrank your own firm
Search your practice area and city and you find three national directories above you, each selling your own prospects back to you as paid leads. Depth of content is the only route past them.
Find out what a signed case is costing your firm.
Send us your site and ad accounts. We will trace spend through to retained matters, not form fills, and show you where the gap sits. Free, no retainer, one business day.
02 : Practice areas
Same channels. Completely different economics.
Marketing for law firms goes wrong when every practice area is bid and written the same way. Case value, urgency and how clients search change everything about how a campaign is built.
Personal Injury
The highest case values and the highest costs per click anywhere in search. Campaigns are split by injury type and severity, because a soft tissue claim and a catastrophic injury cannot share a bid strategy.
Family Law
Long research periods and highly emotional searches. Content that explains process and cost openly outperforms persuasion, because the client is deciding whether to act at all before choosing a firm.
Criminal Defense
The most urgent searches in legal, often made by a family member at night. Intake availability outside office hours matters more here than any bid adjustment or landing page test.
Immigration
Multilingual search and visa-specific queries dominate. Pages built per visa category and per language reach clients that English-only firms in the same city never see.
Estate Planning
Low urgency and high lifetime value. This is the one area where content and email sequences do more than paid search, because clients research for months before booking anything.
Employment Law
Claimant and employer work are opposite businesses sharing a keyword list. Splitting them at campaign level stops your defense practice paying for claimant enquiries you cannot take.
Bankruptcy
Volume driven and price sensitive, with clients comparing several firms on fees. Transparent pricing content and fast intake decide most of these matters, not brand.
Business Law
Referral led and relationship driven, so search plays a smaller role. LinkedIn and content aimed at founders and finance leads produce more here than consumer-style campaigns.
03 : What we run
Legal marketing built around the retained matter.
Every channel below reports to the same outcome. Law firm digital marketing only works when the definition of success is a signed file, not a session or a form.
01
Law firm SEO and practice area depth
Legal search is won on depth, not budget. A page per practice area, per city served, and per specific situation a client searches during a crisis. Sixty focused pages beat one services page every time, and they beat directories too. Built on technical SEO and on-page work.
02
Google Ads for lawyers
Legal clicks are the most expensive in search, which makes negative keywords worth more here than anywhere else. We separate campaigns by case type, strip the research and law student traffic, schedule bids to the hours your intake can answer, and bid against case value rather than click volume. See Google Ads management.
03
Local Services Ads and Google Screened
Local Services Ads sit above every paid result, charge per lead rather than per click, and carry a badge that requires licence and background verification. For consumer practice areas they are frequently the cheapest position on the page. We handle verification, budget pacing, lead disputes and the split against standard search.
04
Local search and reputation
Most legal searches resolve in the map pack before anyone reaches a website. We complete and structure your Google Business Profile, configure service areas across the counties you cover, and build a review process that respects confidentiality while still producing volume. Rating decides clicks that rankings already paid for.
05
Intake and conversion
This is where most firms lose the case. Click to call above the fold, forms that qualify case type before an attorney’s time is spent, clear explanation of what happens next, and after-hours coverage. Our CRO team tests the pages your ads already pay for, which lifts every channel at once.
06
Attribution to signed cases
Call tracking per channel, form source tagging, and reporting that ties spend to retained matters rather than to conversions counted in an ad platform. Where your case management system exports data, we reconcile against it. Where it does not, we build tracking so the number is still real.
04 : Where cases are lost
Most firms do not lose on advertising. They lose on the phone.
Someone searching for an attorney is in the worst week of their year. They contact three or four firms and retain whoever gives them a real conversation first. Not the best firm. The first one that answers.
This is why we look at intake before we look at spend. Doubling the ad budget on a firm that returns calls the next morning simply generates more cases for the firm across the street.
The pattern below is illustrative of what we see in audits rather than a specific client account, but the shape holds across almost every consumer practice area.
05 : How we work
Intake first. Then traffic.
Nothing gets scaled until we can trace a dollar to a retained matter. Most firms we take on have been optimising for months against a figure that was never real.
Week 1 to 2
Audit and instrument
Call tracking per channel, form source tagging, conversion actions rebuilt, and a baseline cost per signed case established before any campaign is touched.
Week 3 to 6
Fix intake and stop waste
After-hours routing, qualification on the form, negative keywords, and profile completion across every location and county you serve.
Month 2 to 6
Build practice area depth
Practice area, city and situation pages published steadily. Paid search carries case volume while the organic base indexes, so nothing dips during the build.
Month 6 onward
Scale to capacity
Budget moves to whichever channel holds the lowest cost per signed case, capped at the caseload your attorneys can genuinely take on.
Not sure whether the problem is your ads or your intake?
The audit answers that before recommending a single change in spend. We look at both sides and tell you which is costing more.
06 : Questions firms ask
Before changing marketing agency.
Cost per signed case is total marketing spend divided by the number of matters your firm actually signed from that spend. It matters more than cost per lead because legal leads convert at wildly different rates depending on practice area, case type and how fast intake responds. A campaign delivering leads at $90 that sign at 4 percent costs $2,250 per case. A campaign delivering leads at $180 that sign at 15 percent costs $1,200 per case. The second looks twice as expensive on any lead report and is nearly half the cost where it counts.
It is worth it, but not on the terms most firms chase. Broad head terms in legal are among the most expensive and contested on the web, and a small firm will not outrank national directories on them. What works is depth: a page for each practice area, each city served, and each specific situation a client searches during a crisis. Those long tail queries carry lower competition and higher intent. A firm with sixty specific pages will consistently outperform a firm with one services page, regardless of budget.
They work well for consumer-facing practice areas where clients search in an urgent moment, which covers most personal injury, family, criminal defense and immigration work. Local Services Ads appear above regular search ads, charge per lead rather than per click, and carry a Google Screened badge that requires background and licence verification. They give you very little control over targeting or messaging, so they complement Google Ads rather than replace it. They are less useful for business law and other practice areas where clients arrive through referral rather than search.
Legal marketing budgets commonly run between 5 and 15 percent of revenue, with contingency-fee practices at the higher end because a single signed case can repay months of spend. The more reliable way to set the number is backwards from case economics. Take your average case value, decide what you are willing to pay to sign one, and multiply by the number of new matters your attorneys can actually handle. Spending past your firm’s capacity produces signed cases you serve badly, which is worse for the practice than spending nothing.
In most firms we audit the cause is intake speed rather than lead quality. Someone searching for an attorney during a crisis will usually contact several firms and retain whoever responds first with a real conversation. Calls that go to voicemail after hours, forms that receive a reply the next business day, and no follow-up sequence account for most of the gap. The other two common causes are campaigns attracting the wrong case type entirely, and pages that fail to explain what happens after the client calls.
Map pack and Google Business Profile improvements often move within 60 to 90 days because profile completeness, practice area tagging and review volume are fast levers. Organic rankings for practice area and city pages generally take six to nine months in legal, which is longer than most verticals because the competition is heavier. This is why we run paid search alongside from the start. Paid delivers signed cases while the organic work builds, and both are reported against one blended cost per signed case.
We write and structure campaigns to avoid the language that commonly creates problems, including outcome guarantees, superlative claims and testimonials that imply predictable results. We are a marketing agency and not your ethics counsel, so final review of any advertising against your state bar or law society rules stays with your firm. In practice this works well: we flag anything that looks risky before it goes live, and your compliance contact signs off. Rules vary meaningfully between jurisdictions, which is why we ask which ones you practise in during the audit.
Your turn
Tell us your practice areas. We will tell you the number.
Send us your website and, if you have them, Google Ads and Google Business Profile access. We will work out what a signed case currently costs you, which practice area and city searches you are missing, and where matters are being lost between the click and the retainer. Free, no retainer, no sales pitch, back within one business day.