I’m Just Starting to Market My Firm. What Should I Do Now?
Pick one practice area. Then do the free things: claim your Google Business Profile, get reviews, and make sure someone answers the phone every time it rings. Then start your Local Services Ads verification, because it takes three to four weeks and you can’t shortcut it. Paid search comes after that. Facebook comes later. SEO starts now and pays you back next year.
That’s the whole answer. The rest of this is why, and what to skip.
If you’ve just opened, or just gone out on your own, you’re about to get called by a lot of people selling you things. Most of them will tell you their channel is the one you need first. The order below is what I’d tell a friend, and a couple of the recommendations cost nothing.
Before anything else: pick one practice area
This is the decision that makes everything downstream cheaper, and most new firms get it wrong.
A firm that does criminal defense will outperform a firm that does personal injury, criminal defense, and family law. Not because you can’t handle all three. Because every marketing dollar you spend has to work three times as hard when you’re trying to be three things, and because the person searching for a DUI attorney doesn’t want a generalist.
The practical costs of spreading yourself:
Your website has to rank for three unrelated sets of terms instead of one. Your ads compete in three separate auctions. Your reviews say three different things about what you do. And Google’s own systems, which are increasingly trying to work out what your firm actually is, get a muddier answer.
Pick the one you want to be known for and be that for eighteen months. You can add later, from a position of strength, once the first one is producing.
What to do first: the free foundation (weeks 1 and 2)
Claim and fill out your Google Business Profile. This is the single highest-return hour you’ll spend. It’s what shows up in the map pack when somebody searches for a lawyer near them, it’s free, and a surprising number of firms leave it half-finished for years. Real photos, accurate hours, correct practice areas, a phone number that reaches a human. You’ll also need a verified profile before you can run Local Services Ads, so this isn’t optional even if you skip everything else.
Get your first five reviews. Law firms need at least five Google reviews before Google will let them into Local Services Ads, averaging 3.0 or better.
That threshold is the single thing most likely to hold up your launch, so start asking today rather than after you apply. Ask every client you’ve helped, including from your previous firm if you can do that appropriately. Check your state bar rules first, since what you’re allowed to ask for and how you’re allowed to ask varies by state.
Reviews can come from your Google Business Profile or directly from your Local Services Ads profile. Worth collecting some of each. If your Business Profile ever gets suspended, LSA reviews attached to that profile go with it, and an ad with zero reviews stops running.
Review pace matters more than total count. Five reviews over five months beats fifteen that all arrived in one week.
Fix how the phone gets answered. This one isn’t marketing and it’s the reason most new firms waste their first marketing dollar.
Every channel below produces someone trying to reach you. If that person gets voicemail, you paid for nothing. Injury victims call three or four firms and hire whoever picks up. Before you spend anything on advertising, work out who answers at 6pm, who answers on Saturday, and what happens to a call that comes in while you’re in a deposition. An answering service is fine. A cell phone that you actually answer is fine. Voicemail is not. Why response speed matters this much.
How to get on Google Local Services Ads (start in week 2)
Local Services Ads are the ads that appear at the very top of Google, above everything else, with a verification badge next to the firm’s name. You pay per lead rather than per click, which is a much better deal when you’re small.
Start the application in week two, because verification takes three to four weeks and you can’t speed it up. Firms that wait until they’re “ready” lose a month.
What you’ll need:
- An active bar license in good standing
- A background check through Google’s screening partner
- Current professional liability insurance
- Identity verification
- A verified Google Business Profile
- At least five client reviews, averaging 3.0 or better
One naming note that’s causing confusion right now: Google is merging the Google Screened badge that lawyers use and the Google Guaranteed badge from home services into a single Google Verified badge. Same program, new name. If someone quotes you an article about Google Screened, it’s not out of date, it’s just the old label.
Reported lead costs for personal injury run roughly $140 in less competitive markets to $344 in Los Angeles, with an average around $240. Those figures come from industry reporting rather than a controlled study, so treat them as a range to sanity-check quotes against, not a promise.
LSA won’t work for everyone, and you should know that before you apply
Whether Local Services Ads are worth it comes down to three things: your geography, your practice area, and your budget. Get unlucky on all three and you’ll spend money to never be seen.
The clearest example is a new personal injury firm chasing car accident cases in Los Angeles. That’s one of the most contested combinations in the country, established firms have years of reviews and response history, and Google’s placement rewards exactly those things. A new firm with five reviews and a modest budget doesn’t get shown. You aren’t outbid so much as filtered out.
If that describes you, don’t conclude LSA doesn’t work. Change what you’re going after. Less contested case types like dog bite or medical malpractice have far fewer firms competing for the same placement, and you can actually get impressions there while you build the review base and response history that eventually let you compete for the bigger categories.
Worth knowing that lower LSA competition and easier cases are different things. Medical malpractice is cheaper to get seen for and much harder to qualify and carry. What each case type actually costs to acquire and how long it takes to resolve.
Get help with the verification if you need it
The application isn’t complicated so much as fiddly. Document uploads, identity checks that fail if the name on your ID doesn’t exactly match your profile, insurance certificates in the right format, background check coordination. Firms lose weeks to a rejected upload nobody explained.
If you’re not comfortable with that kind of process, paying someone a few hundred dollars to run it start to finish is money well spent. It’s a one-time task and a month of delay costs more than the help does.
Making Local Services Ads work once you are live (month 2)
Once you’re verified, three things determine how much you get shown: your reviews, how fast you respond, and how close you are to the searcher. Two of those you can act on.
Answer every call, immediately. Google measures responsiveness and it affects your placement. It also affects whether you sign the case, so you’re being paid twice for the same behavior.
Keep reviews coming in steadily. Velocity beats volume.
Dispute bad leads. You’ll get charged for wrong numbers, solicitors, and people outside your practice area. Google runs an automated credit system for these now, and firms typically recover somewhere in the range of six to seven percent of spend. Not life-changing, but it’s free money you have to ask for.
Start small. You can run LSA on a few hundred dollars a month and learn what a lead in your market actually costs before you commit real budget.
When to start Google Ads (month 3 and beyond)
Once LSA is running and you know your intake holds up, Google Search is the next layer.
Search catches people who are already looking for a lawyer right now, which is why it’s expensive and why it works. Legal is the most costly category on Google, with clicks averaging around $10 across all practice areas and considerably more for personal injury in a competitive city.
Two things that will save you money:
Send traffic to a page built for the ad, not to your homepage. A homepage asks a visitor to figure out what to do next. A landing page asks them to do one thing.
Bid on specific terms, not broad ones. “Car accident lawyer” and “lawyer” are very different purchases.
If your budget only supports one of LSA or search, run LSA. Pay-per-lead is more forgiving than pay-per-click when you’re learning.
When to start Facebook ads (month 4 to 6)
Facebook reaches people who haven’t started looking for a lawyer yet, which is genuinely valuable and also why it’s the wrong first channel.
Three conditions before you start:
You need enough budget to run for 90 days without flinching. Meta’s system needs time and volume to figure out who to show your ads to, and the first three weeks look terrible on purpose.
You need intake that answers fast, at night and on weekends. Facebook leads go cold faster than search leads because the person wasn’t looking for you when your ad found them.
And you need to be able to tell which leads became cases, or you won’t know whether it worked.
Meet those and it’s a strong channel. Miss them and you’ll spend four months proving Facebook doesn’t work for law firms, which isn’t what you’ll have proven. More on how it actually works.
How long does law firm SEO take? Start now, get paid next year
Content and search rankings are a twelve to eighteen month project. That’s not a reason to skip it, it’s a reason to start early and stop expecting it to feed you this year.
What’s worth doing in your first six months:
Write the pages that describe what you do, by practice area and by city. Not thin pages, real ones that answer what somebody would actually ask.
Answer the questions clients ask you on the phone. Those questions are what people type into Google, and you already know them better than any keyword tool does.
Put your name and face on the site. People hire lawyers, not firms, and search engines increasingly reward pages that clearly come from an identifiable person.
Don’t buy a package of thirty blog posts from a content mill. Four good pages beat thirty bad ones, and the bad ones can hurt you.
Should I hire a marketing agency?
It depends, and not in the way people usually mean when they say that. It depends on which piece of work you’re talking about, and the answer is genuinely different for each one.
Google Business Profile setup: no. Claim it, fill it out, add photos, keep it current. It’s an afternoon and nobody is going to do it more carefully than you will.
Website and SEO: yes. This is where firms most often try to save money and most often regret it. Your website is the foundation everything else runs on, and local SEO in particular is far more technical than it looks from outside. Site structure, page speed, schema markup, location signals, content that’s actually built to rank rather than just read nicely. A cheap website that doesn’t convert makes every ad dollar you spend afterward worse.
Local Services Ads: depends on your budget. Under about $1,000 a month, you can probably manage it yourself once you’re verified. The interface is simple and the main levers are responsiveness and reviews, both of which are your job regardless. Over $1,000 a month, get help. At that point the difference between decent and good management is worth more than the fee.
Paid search: almost always yes. This is the one I’d push hardest on. Running a profitable PPC campaign involves campaign structure, keyword match types, negative keyword management, bid strategy, landing pages, conversion tracking, and knowing when a metric that looks bad is actually fine. The learning curve is steep and the tuition is your ad budget. Most firms who teach themselves PPC pay for the education in wasted spend, and it usually costs more than an agency would have.
So the honest summary: mostly yes, unless your budget is very small or nonexistent. If it is, do the free foundation properly and wait.
Then the harder question: what kind of help?
“Hire an agency” isn’t one decision. The options run from a virtual assistant handling review requests and profile updates for a few hundred a month, through freelancers and small shops, up to full-service agencies charging $10,000 a month or more.
The right answer depends on your budget, which pieces you need, and how much of it you want to stay involved in. Paying agency rates for work a VA could do is as much a mistake as trying to run PPC yourself. I walk through how to figure out which one you need in a companion video, coming soon.
What new law firms should skip
Four things you’ll get pitched in your first year that I’d say no to.
A twelve-month agency contract in month one. You don’t know your numbers yet. Nobody does at month one. Sign short or month to month until you do.
A $15,000 website. A clean, fast, clear site that loads on a phone and makes it obvious how to call you will outperform an expensive one. Spend the difference on ads.
Social media brand awareness. Posting on Instagram to build a following is not how injury victims find lawyers. If you enjoy it, fine. Don’t pay someone for it while you have no cases.
Buying leads, mostly. It’s a legitimate bridge if you have capacity and no pipeline, and I’d rather you did that than sit idle. Understand you’re renting, not building, and check your state’s rules first. Colorado made paying per lead a legal problem in August 2026 and California made firms responsible for their vendors’ advertising. What changed.
How much should a new law firm spend on marketing?
Honest ranges for a new firm.
Free: Google Business Profile, reviews, answering your own phone, writing your own content.
A few hundred a month: LSA at a starter budget, call tracking so you know where inquiries come from.
$1,500 to $3,000 a month: a real paid search or LSA program in most markets, enough to produce steady volume rather than a trickle.
$3,000 and up: adding Facebook, or competing seriously in a large metro.
If you’re at the free tier right now, that’s fine. Do the free tier properly for two months and you’ll be ahead of a lot of firms spending money badly.
The one number to start tracking today
How long it takes you to call back a new inquiry.
Not your cost per lead, not your traffic, not your rankings. Time from inquiry to first contact attempt, measured in minutes. It’s the number that will determine whether any of the spending above works, and it’s the only one you can improve for free.
Write it down for every inquiry for the next month. Most firms are shocked by their own median.
Frequently asked questions
What’s the first thing a new law firm should do for marketing? Claim and complete your Google Business Profile, then get your first client reviews. Both are free, both affect whether you show up in local search, and you need both before you can run Local Services Ads. After that, make sure someone answers the phone reliably before you spend on advertising.
How much should a new law firm spend on marketing? A real program in most markets runs $1,500 to $3,000 a month. You can start meaningfully below that with Local Services Ads at a few hundred a month. Below roughly $1,500 you won’t generate enough volume to learn much, so use that period to build the free foundation instead.
Should a new firm start with Google or Facebook ads? Google, and specifically Local Services Ads. It charges per lead rather than per click, appears at the top of search results, and reaches people actively looking for a lawyer. Facebook reaches people earlier in the process and needs more budget, more patience, and faster intake to work.
How long does Google Screened verification take? Typically three to four weeks once you’ve submitted everything, including bar license verification, background check, insurance, and identity verification. Start the application early, since you can’t speed it up. Google is folding the Google Screened badge into a single Google Verified badge.
How long before SEO produces cases? Twelve to eighteen months for meaningful organic traffic in most legal markets. Start writing early so the clock is running, but plan on paid channels to produce cases in your first year.
How do I get my first clients as a new lawyer? Referral relationships and your existing network produce the first cases for most new firms, well before any advertising does. Tell every attorney, physician, chiropractor, and body shop you know what you handle now. In parallel, build the free foundation above so the people who search for you can find you.
What should a new law firm marketing plan include? A sequence rather than a list of channels. Free foundation first, meaning Google Business Profile, reviews, and reliable phone coverage. Then Local Services Ads, then paid search, then Facebook once you have volume and fast intake. SEO runs alongside all of it and pays off in year two.
Do I need an agency to start? It depends on the task. Google Business Profile setup you can do yourself. Website and SEO usually warrant help, since local SEO is more technical than it looks. Local Services Ads are manageable in-house under about $1,000 a month in spend. Paid search almost always warrants help, because the learning curve gets paid for out of your ad budget.
How many reviews do I need for Local Services Ads? Law firms need at least five Google reviews with an average of 3.0 or better. Reviews can come from your Google Business Profile or directly from your Local Services Ads profile. Start collecting before you apply, since this is the requirement most likely to delay a new firm’s launch.
Should a new law firm focus on one practice area? Yes, for at least the first eighteen months. A firm known for one thing outranks, out-converts, and out-earns a firm trying to be three things, because every marketing dollar works harder when it points at a single message. Add practice areas later from a position of strength.
The short version
Pick one thing to be known for. Do the free work properly. Start LSA verification before you think you’re ready, because it takes a month. And don’t spend money on advertising until somebody reliably answers the phone.
Most new firms get this backwards. They try to serve three practice areas, buy advertising first, discover that leads go unanswered, and conclude the marketing didn’t work.
On hiring help: do your own Google Business Profile, get help with your website and SEO, manage LSA yourself under about $1,000 a month, and don’t teach yourself paid search on your own ad budget.
If you’re not sure where to start, we’ll look at your situation and tell you honestly.