Law firm marketing budget: which lines can stop fastest

A marketing budget has three kinds of line: money already committed, money that can be stopped this month, and money locked until a renewal date. Sort the lines that way before arguing about the total. In Philadelphia one personal injury click costs $151.31 and one immigration click costs $8.16.

Last updated: 5 August 2026

What are the three kinds of line in a law firm marketing budget?

Committed, variable, and locked. Almost every argument about a marketing budget is really an argument about which of the three a particular line belongs to.

Committed money has already been spent or contracted, and stopping the activity does not return it. A site build is the clearest case. Once the work has started, the fee is gone whether the firm changes its mind in week two or week ten, and what a cancellation buys is an unfinished website rather than a refund.

Variable money is spent in units small enough that stopping costs nothing beyond the units already bought. Paid clicks are the pure example: the account can be paused on a Tuesday afternoon and the following Wednesday costs nothing. Freelance writing bought a page at a time behaves the same way.

Locked money is an annual invoice. Directory subscriptions, sponsorships and event tables are usually paid once and cannot be recovered part way through, so the decision about them is made on one day a year and is irreversible for the other 364.

The damaging admission, and it applies to us: both of our United States lines are one-off project fees. A Practice Sprint at $1,450 and a build tier at $2,900 are fixed, published and carry no minimum term, but once either is underway it is committed money by the definition above. A firm that needs every line stoppable inside thirty days should not be buying a build this quarter, from us or from anybody.

How quickly can each line actually be stopped?

The useful column in a budget is not the amount. It is the earliest date the line can be switched off.

Write that column before the year starts and most of the panic goes out of the third quarter. A firm that discovers in October that four of its six lines cannot be touched until January has not overspent; it has committed in a shape it did not examine.

The last row is the one that changes how the rest of the budget should be read. A page that answers a question a client actually asked keeps being found after the money stops. It is the only line in the table with that property, and it is also the line with no invoice attached, which is why it is usually the first thing to go.

What should be cut first when a quarter goes badly?

In this order, and the order matters more than the amount recovered.

1. The paid click line. It stops today, it returns the unspent money immediately, and it leaves no residue. If the firm has a paid line at all, this is the first cut in every case, because it is the only line where cutting is genuinely free.
2. Anything bought monthly that has not yet produced an artifact you can open. A monthly fee with nothing to point at after three months is not a marketing line, it is a subscription. Ask what was delivered, by name, before renewing it.
3. Sponsorships at renewal, not before. Cutting one mid-term recovers nothing. Diarize the renewal date and make the decision on that date, in cold blood, rather than in the week the numbers looked bad.
4. Nothing else. By this point the remaining lines are either committed money that cutting will not return, or the published pages, which cost nothing to keep.

The order is deliberately the reverse of what happens in practice. The line most firms cut first is the writing, because it appears in the budget as fee-earner time rather than as an invoice from a stranger, and nobody has to ring anybody to stop it. It is also the only line that keeps returning something after it stops.

What should never be cut first, even though it is easiest?

Fee-earner writing time, and the measurement.

Writing time has no cancellation call attached to it, so it disappears silently. Nobody records the decision, no invoice stops arriving, and the firm discovers eight months later that nothing has been published since March. If the plan allots a fee earner two hours a week and the firm wants that stopped, stop it in writing, with a date, so that somebody has to argue for it later.

Measurement is the second one. It costs nothing in money and a little in attention, and a firm that stops recording where each new matter came from cannot argue next year's budget from anything except recollection. That record belongs to the firm and no supplier can produce it from outside.

Why does this page not give a percentage of revenue?

Because we hold no survey of what law firms allocate, and because the price of attention differs by more than an order of magnitude inside a single city.

Take Philadelphia, measured 3 August 2026.

The right-hand column is arithmetic on the two measured numbers beside it — a hundred multiplied by the click price — and it says what a hundred clicks would cost to buy at Google's own prices. It is not revenue, not profit and not matters won.

A Philadelphia injury click costs roughly 18.5 times a Philadelphia immigration click, which is $151.31 divided by $8.16. Two firms in the same building, the same size, with the same revenue, face budgets that are not comparable in any useful way. A single national percentage applied to both would be wrong for at least one of them and possibly for both, and the dataset treats family and divorce as one category, so even the fourth row is broader than it looks.

Working backwards from the click price rather than forwards from a percentage is the approach taken on lawyer firm marketing, which sets the ceiling question properly. This page assumes the total is already set and asks what shape it has.

Which suppliers publish a price you can put in a budget line?

Three sit close to this search, and one of the three published a price.

clio.com, mycase.com and bestlawyers.com were all in the set of 40 legal-marketing suppliers we read in full on 3 August 2026. Of those three, clio.com had a price on the page we read and the other two did not. Across the whole 40, 12 published a price at all, 5 of those showed only a "from" figure rather than a number, 8 claimed a guarantee of some kind, and 1 offered work with no minimum term. Nothing further is asserted about any of the three; the benchmark recorded whether a figure appeared on the page as published on that date, never what the figure was.

That is the practical problem with building a budget from supplier websites: seven rows in ten cannot be filled in without a call, and a range is not a budget line. Our own two figures are above, fixed and published. We never charge per inquiry, per case or per matter. US lawyer advertising runs through ABA Model Rule 7.2(b), adopted differently in each state.

Where one of them suits a reader better than we do: a firm whose real problem is that it cannot see its own numbers should buy practice-management software before it buys marketing. Clio and MyCase sell that; we do not, and a firm without an intake record is not ready to judge any budget line we would sell it.

Before you shortlist anyone

Of the 40 legal-marketing suppliers we read in full on 3 August 2026, twelve published a price and one offered work with no minimum term. Three of them are named above.

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?

If the injury line is the one under discussion: personal injury law firm seo.

For two cities where the budget shape is decided by very different economics: chicago law firm marketing and law firm seo company nyc.

To see the money placed inside a document: sample law firm marketing plan is one firm's plan filled in, and law firm marketing plan example is the empty structure with a test under each section.

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