Marketing agency for a law firm: preparing the first meeting

Send five things before the first meeting: your work types, your current site, who signs off copy, what you have already tried, and what you want to be true in a year. Then judge them on what they ask you back. Of 40 suppliers read on 3 August 2026, 12 published a price.

Last updated: 5 August 2026

What should a firm send before the first meeting?

Five items, none of which takes a fee earner more than ten minutes to assemble.

The fifth item does most of the work. A firm that wants more instructions in one department is buying something quite different from a firm that wants to stop losing work to a competitor with a better site, and a supplier cannot tell which you are from a website.

Sending this in advance is not a courtesy. It converts a first meeting from a sales presentation into a conversation about your practice, and a supplier who cannot use it has told you something in the first ten minutes rather than the third month.

What does a good agency ask you that a poor one does not?

Questions about the practice. A weak first meeting is a supplier describing its process.

None of those is a hard question. What matters is that the supplier asks them before it describes anything it sells, because the order tells you whether the proposal will be written about your firm or assembled from a template.

The reverse test — the questions you ask them — is a separate exercise, and it is set out on marketing agency for legal firms.

Which of their questions show they have worked in this sector?

Three, and they are specific enough that they cannot be improvised.

The pricing-basis question. A supplier who asks whether the firm handles injury work, and then says the fee will be by scope rather than by enquiry volume, has met LASPO 2012 section 56. Section 56 prohibits referral fees in prescribed legal business, which includes personal injury, and it binds the paying firm as well as the party being paid. A supplier from another sector may propose per-enquiry pricing in complete good faith, because in most industries it is ordinary.

The publication question. The SRA Transparency Rules have been in force since 6 December 2018 and require price and service information for specified work types. Checked 3 August 2026. A supplier who asks which of your work types are covered can tell you which pages are absent. One who does not will quote for a website that omits them, and the firm pays twice.

The sign-off question. Copy for a regulated practice is approved by somebody with a court list. A supplier who asks for a named approver and a deputy, and who asks what happens when both are away, has run this before.

We are a marketing supplier and give no advice about professional obligations. Whether the firm meets its own is a judgement for the firm and its COLP. We build the pages the rules ask for and say factually which ones are missing.

What should you not send, and what should you not be asked for?

Client material, and administrative access before anything is signed.

Three lines worth holding:

1. No matter detail, no client names, no correspondence. Nothing a supplier proposes needs it, and a supplier who asks for examples of recent work should be given a practice area, not a file.
2. No administrative access before an agreement exists. Analytics and Search Console can be shared read-only. Registrar and hosting credentials belong at the point the work starts, not at the point it is being pitched.
3. No agreement to a fee expressed in enquiries, cases or clients. That is the one item on this list that reaches the firm as well as the supplier, for the reason set out above.

A damaging admission. We ask for the same read-only access at the same stage, and we will not price anything without seeing the site, so a firm that wants a figure before any conversation will find our first email unsatisfying. The figures for the products themselves are published and appear below.

What should the first conversation establish about price?

A number, and whether one exists at all.

Of the 40 legal-marketing suppliers we read in full on 3 August 2026, 12 published a price, 5 of those showed a range rather than a figure, 8 claimed a guarantee of some kind, and 1 stated that work carried no minimum term. Against that, 15 of the 62 questions buyers ask on these searches are price questions — the largest single category.

So the first conversation is usually the only place the number can come from. Ask for it before the second meeting, and treat a refusal as information rather than rudeness.

Ours are published because the argument does not work otherwise. The Price Transparency Pack is £890 over ten working days. Firm Site is £2,400, Firm Site+ £4,200 and the Authority Build £6,900. Retainers are £600, £1,200 or £2,400 a month with no minimum term, and £700 comes off a build taken with six months of retainer. We charge by scope and time, never per enquiry, case or matter.

What should arrive in writing afterwards, and how quickly?

A short document within a few working days, and it should read like notes rather than a brochure.

Four things belong in it: what the supplier understood the firm to want, the specific pages or work proposed, the figure, and what is excluded. The fourth is the one that predicts the year. A follow-up that lists everything included and nothing excluded is a document written to be agreed to rather than read.

Partners bill in six-minute units, so a first meeting should take thirty minutes and the written follow-up should be readable in five. A supplier who needs ninety minutes to explain what it does before quoting anything has told you how the reporting calls will feel.

Which of these suppliers publishes a price?

Two of the four named below, from the 40 read on 3 August 2026.

⚠ We record whether a price appeared on the page, not what it was. The figures our tooling collected mixed genuine fees with case values and sentence fragments, and attributing one to a named business would publish something unverified about a competitor.

Nothing in our benchmark records what any of them asks in a first meeting; we read published pages, not conversations. Two of the four published a figure and either may suit a firm better than we do, particularly a firm that wants somebody it can visit, which we are not.

Before you shortlist anyone

We read 40 legal-marketing suppliers in full in August 2026 — including several on this page. Twelve published a price. One offered work with no minimum term.

The free report gives you the full count, named, so you can repeat it rather than take ours. It also shows how many people search for your practice areas in your town, and what those clicks cost to buy at Google's own prices.

Get the report — five questions, about two minutes →

No call required. Our own prices are on that page.

Where should I read next?

Once the conversation has happened and a document exists: lawyer marketing agency reads the contract clause by clause, and law firm digital marketing agency compares the three ways to pay.

On the work itself: law firm seo, law firm internet marketing, law firm web marketing and law firm online marketing.

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