Marketing for law firms, where one case can pay for the year

Legal clicks are the most expensive anywhere, and still cheap if one signed case covers months of spend. The question is which practice areas.

What the search behaviour actually looks like

Legal search is the most competitive paid category in the country, and the prices reflect it. That is not a reason to avoid it — a single signed case in the right practice area can be worth more than a quarter of advertising — but it does mean guessing is expensive here in a way it is not elsewhere.

Case value varies more within a single firm than most businesses vary in total. A firm that averages its practice areas into one cost-per-lead number cannot see which area is subsidising which, and usually finds it is funding the cheap work with the profitable work.

The arithmetic, with your numbers

Say a customer is worth $6,500 over twelve months — a blended case value across the practice areas a general firm actually signs — and you close 12% of the leads you get. Then:

That last figure is the one that settles every argument about whether advertising is expensive. If leads cost you a fraction of it, the correct response is to buy more of them, not to negotiate the price down. If they cost more than it, no amount of bidding strategy fixes that — the close rate or the customer value has to move first.

Run it with your own numbers: how to work out what a lead should cost you, and what that means for a monthly budget.

Timing

Less seasonal than most trades, with two exceptions worth planning around: family law rises sharply in January, and anything tied to the tax year moves with it. Otherwise the constraint is capacity, not demand.

What we hear from law firms

"Our work comes from referrals and always has."

That is the strongest position to advertise from, not a reason not to. A name people already half-recognise converts at a different rate from one they have never seen.

"Bar rules limit what we can say."

They do, and the limits are narrower than most firms assume. Everything that actually persuades — clarity about the process, what happens first, who you would be speaking to — sits well inside them.

"The leads are people who cannot afford us."

Then the filter is doing nothing. A short set of questions before a consultation is booked costs a prospective client twenty seconds and saves a partner an hour.

What we would build

The offer, the page it lands on, the filter that stops you quoting people who will never buy, the follow-up that reaches them in minutes rather than hours, the tracking that tells you which ad produced which job — and then the campaigns. All of it in month one, and we do not charge for that month.

After that it is $1,000 a month while we run and grow it. Four months for the price of three, $3,000 at signing. We take three new clients a week and hold one business per category per market, so the honest first question is whether yours is still open.

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