A recruiter contacted me recently about a law firm marketing position and asked about my experience increasing leads for law firms.
My answer probably wasn't what they expected.
I told them I don't focus on getting more leads.
I focus on getting better leads.
Because what's the point of generating 100 leads if only 10% of them become clients?
Now your intake team has 100 people to respond to, qualify, follow up with and manage, just to sign 10 clients.
I'd rather generate 25 highly qualified prospects who are actively looking for what the firm offers (and beg you to let them hire you, which one of my immigration attorney clients actually experienced) and have 15 of them hire the firm.
That's fewer leads.
But it's more clients, less wasted staff time and potentially a lot more money.
And that conversation reminded me of something I see constantly in law firm marketing:
A lot of marketers (and law firm owners) are measuring activity instead of business results.
More leads. More traffic. More wbb content. More social media posts. More keywords. More followers. More ads.
But more isn't necessarily better.
The goal of marketing isn't to create more marketing.
The goal is to attract more of the right prospects and get more of them to choose you.
So if you're spending a lot of time and money on marketing but aren't sure it's producing enough business, here are five places I'd look.
Lead volume is easy to measure, which is probably one reason marketers talk about it so much.
But a lead isn't a client.
And all leads aren't equally valuable.
Imagine two campaigns.
Campaign A generates 100 leads and 10 become clients.
Campaign B generates 25 leads and 15 become clients.
If you only looked at lead volume, Campaign A would appear four times more successful.
But Campaign B produced 50% more clients while requiring your team to deal with 75 fewer inquiries.
That's why I care much more about lead quality and what happens after the lead comes in.
For a law firm, that means looking at qualified-lead rate, consultation set, show, and hire rate, case or matter value (in teh door and lifetime) and ultimately revenue.
Those numbers tell you far more about whether your marketing is helping grow the firm than the number of forms filled out on your website.
1. Define a qualified lead. Be specific about the characteristics that make an inquiry worth pursuing.
2. Track qualified versus unqualified leads. Don't lump every phone call and form submission into one impressive-looking number.
3. Measure your set rate. What percentage of qualified prospects actually schedule a consultation or take the next step?
4. Measure your show and hire rates. How many show up, and how many become clients?
5. Compare sources based on clients and revenue. Which sources are producing business rather than simply inquiries?
Stop asking your marketing team or agency only:
"How many leads did we get?"
Start asking:
"How many of the right leads did we get, and how many became clients?"
A smaller number of highly qualified prospects can be considerably more valuable than a large number of people your team has to sort through.
There is no shortage of things a law firm can do in the name of marketing.
SEO. PPC. Social media. Video. Email. Networking. Directories. Sponsorships. Content. PR. Webinars. AI visibility.
You could keep yourself and your team busy all day doing marketing.
But busy and productive aren't the same thing.
A marketing activity shouldn't continue indefinitely just because you've always done it, your competitor does it, someone told you that you "have to," or your monthly report contains impressive-looking numbers.
You need to understand what is actually contributing to business.
That doesn't mean every marketing activity has to produce an immediately traceable client. Marketing attribution isn't always that neat.
Someone may read one of your articles, see you on LinkedIn, Google your name, read your reviews and then call.
But you should understand the role your major marketing activities play in getting the right prospects closer to hiring you.
1. What are we currently doing? Include both the money you're spending and the time attorneys and staff spend on marketing.
2. What is each activity supposed to accomplish? "Because we need to be on social media" isn't an outcome.
3. Is it producing qualified opportunities? Look beyond traffic, clicks, impressions and engagement whenever possible.
4. Would we start doing this today? Sometimes activities survive because they've become habits rather than because they still make business sense.
5. What deserves our resources most? Decide what should be increased, improved, tested, reduced or stopped.
For every significant marketing activity, be able to finish this sentence:
"We're doing this because it helps us ______."
If nobody can explain how an activity contributes to attracting, convincing or converting the clients you want, it's worth asking why you're spending time or money on it.
Getting the right person to your website is only part of the job.
They still have to choose you.
And that's difficult when so many law firms look and sound alike.
Experienced. Compassionate. Dedicated. Aggressive. Personalized attention. Fighting for you.
None of those things are necessarily bad.
The problem is that your competitors are saying them too.
A prospective client may visit several law firm websites, read reviews, ask friends, search Google and increasingly ask an AI platform to compare their options.
If all the firms appear essentially interchangeable, you've made the prospect's decision harder.
Good marketing should help the right prospect quickly understand:
This firm handles my problem.
This firm understands people like me.
I trust them.
And there's a reason I should choose them.
1. Review five competing firms. Look at their homepages and primary marketing messages.
2. Write down the claims everyone makes. Those aren't necessarily bad claims, but they're unlikely to differentiate you.
3. Ask your best clients why they chose you. Their answers may be very different from what you assume.
4. Find the proof. Reviews, results, experience, specialization, processes, media coverage and third-party validation can support your claims.
5. Put the difference where prospects can see it. Don't make someone read five pages of your website to discover why you're the right choice.
Try the 5-Second Test
Look at the top section of your website's homepage and ask:
What do we do?
What problem do we solve?
Who do we do it for?
Why should someone choose us?
If the first three aren't immediately obvious, you have a clarity problem.
If you can't answer the third, you have a differentiation problem.
Fixing either may help you produce more business from traffic you're already getting.
Sometimes a firm thinks it has a lead-generation problem when it actually has a conversion problem.
That's an expensive distinction to miss.
If you're already attracting good prospects but losing too many between first contact and signed engagement, buying more leads simply pours more people into a process that's already leaking.
A prospect calls and gets voicemail.
Someone fills out a form and doesn't hear back quickly.
A consultation gets scheduled, but the person doesn't show.
Maybe there was no follow-up beyond a calendar confirmation.
A qualified prospect says they need to think about it and nobody follows up.
Or your marketing created the wrong expectation, so the person never should have become a lead in the first place.
Every lost qualified prospect represents both potential revenue and money you've already spent to attract them.
1. Map the entire path. Start with how prospects discover the firm and follow the process through signed engagement.
2. Measure each major conversion point. Track inquiry, qualification, appointment set, show and hire rates.
3. Find the biggest drop-off. Don't assume you already know where the problem is.
4. Experience your own intake. Test your phone, forms, mobile site, response times and follow-up.
5. Fix the biggest leak first. One meaningful conversion improvement may be worth far more than another batch of leads.
Before You Buy More Leads...
Ask:
"Are we doing everything reasonably possible with the good leads we're already getting?"
If the answer is no, I'd fix that before spending more money generating additional leads.
For years, online law firm marketing conversations revolved heavily around Google.
Google still matters.
But the way people research businesses is changing.
Prospective clients can discover and evaluate firms through Google, reviews, referrals, directories, LinkedIn, YouTube, media coverage and AI platforms such as ChatGPT.
That doesn't mean your firm suddenly needs to be everywhere.
In fact, that would contradict the entire point of this article.
The question is:
Where are the clients you actually want looking, and what do they find when they get there?
AI adds another dimension because people aren't only using it to find information.
They can ask which attorney they should consider, which firms specialize in a particular problem, how different firms compare, or what they should know before hiring someone.
Simply existing online isn't enough if the information available about your firm doesn't make you understandable, credible and recommendable.
1. Find out how your best clients discovered you. Don't assume every practice area or client follows the same path.
2. Search the questions a prospective client would actually ask. Test Google and AI platforms rather than only searching your firm's name.
3. See who appears instead of you. Pay attention to competitors that repeatedly surface or get recommended.
4. Review the evidence supporting your expertise. Look at reviews, content, attorney profiles, media mentions, directories and other third-party authority signals.
5. Prioritize the gaps that matter. Don't chase every platform. Focus on the places most likely to influence the clients you actually want.
Instead of asking only:
"Do we rank on Google?"
Ask:
"When the right potential client is deciding who to hire, are we showing up as one of the best choices?"
That's the visibility that matters.
More leads aren't automatically better.
More website traffic isn't automatically better.
More content isn't automatically better.
And doing more marketing certainly isn't automatically better.
If all that additional activity doesn't result in more of the right people finding you, choosing you and becoming clients, you've created more work, not necessarily more business.
Instead, look at the whole system.
Are you attracting the right prospects?
Do you know which marketing activities contribute to new business?
Can those prospects quickly understand why they should choose you?
Are good prospects getting lost before they hire?
Are you visible in the places where the clients you want are actually making decisions?
You may discover that you don't need to do everything.
You need to do the right things better.
Because the goal isn't the busiest marketing department or the biggest lead spreadsheet.
It's smarter marketing. Better leads. More money.
That's the question I help law firms answer.
I review your marketing, messaging, visibility, lead quality and conversion to identify where you may be wasting time and money, losing good prospects or missing opportunities.
Then we can focus on the changes most likely to bring in better clients, more revenue and higher profits.
If you'd like me to take a look at your law firm's marketing, contact me and tell me you want a Marketing ROI Audit.
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