Law firm marketing strategy template: four refusals

A strategy is not a plan. A plan is execution: what gets done, by whom, by when. A strategy is selection: what the firm will not do. This template asks for 4 refusals, and the evidence for the practice-area refusal is the price of a click in your own city.

Last updated: 5 August 2026

What is the difference between a marketing strategy and a marketing plan?

One chooses, the other executes, and confusing them is why most documents called strategies are actually calendars.

A plan answers questions about sequence and ownership. Which pages, in which month, written by whom, approved by whom, judged on what evidence. Everything in it can be checked by looking at whether the thing happened.

A strategy answers one question, and it is uncomfortable: given that the firm cannot contest everything, what is it giving up. If a document contains no sentence beginning with a refusal, it is a plan with an ambitious cover page, and it will produce the same result as no strategy at all — effort spread evenly across every practice area the firm happens to run.

The damaging admission: a real strategy costs us money. Every practice area a firm concedes is a set of pages we do not get to build, and the honest version of this template will usually reduce what a firm buys. We would rather sell fewer pages that get found than more that do not.

What four choices does a strategy template actually ask for?

Four refusals, each written as a sentence somebody could disagree with.

The left column is what most strategy documents contain. Every sentence in it is true, none can be wrong, and none removes any work from anyone's week. The right column is shorter and it changes what happens on a Monday.

Refusal 1 is the one with evidence available, and the rest of this page is about how to fill it in. Refusals 2 to 4 are decided inside the firm, from things we cannot see: which partner brings the work, what a matter is worth to this practice, and where the firm is willing to appear in court.

How do you decide which practice areas to concede?

Start with what other firms are paying for the same attention, in your city.

A cost per click is the clearest available signal of how hard a market is being contested, because it is a price other law firms have already agreed to pay. A high one does not mean the work is unreachable and never means it is unprofitable. It means a practice with three fee earners and no pages is entering that contest late.

The decision rule is comparative rather than absolute. Look at the firm's own practice lines side by side, in its own city, and ask which of them are being contested at a level the firm can meet. Conceding on search does not mean conceding the work. It means the work will be won through referral, reputation and the people who already know the firm, and the pages will be built for the lines where the arithmetic is friendlier.

Why is the same practice area a contest in one city and a concession in another?

Because volume and price move independently, and price is the part that reflects competition.

All eight rows measured 3 August 2026 from Google Ads monthly volume and cost per click. The multiples are arithmetic on the two prices beside them — $39.33 ÷ $8.79, $86.12 ÷ $20.16, $30.05 ÷ $3.90, $138.16 ÷ $53.66 — and none of them forecasts anything.

The first row is the cleanest illustration in the dataset. Charlotte and Nashville each show 210 business-attorney searches a month: identical demand. One click costs 4.5 times what the other does. The two firms are looking at the same amount of attention with entirely different amounts of competition for it, and a Charlotte firm conceding business law on search while a Nashville firm contests it are making the same decision correctly.

The fourth row is the one that surprises people. Personal injury is the most expensive category in the American data almost everywhere, and Phoenix has three and a half times Indianapolis's volume at roughly two-fifths of the price. The general rule about injury being unreachable is a statement about most cities, not about all of them, and a strategy written from the general rule rather than from the local figure gets that one wrong.

What does a finished concession look like written down?

One sentence, with the figure and its date attached, and a named person who agreed to it.

Something of this shape: the firm will not build search pages for real estate this year; Boston real estate runs at 590 searches a month at $3.90 a click, measured 3 August 2026, and the line is small enough that the partner's existing referral network covers it. Agreed by the managing partner, reviewed in twelve months.

That is checkable in two directions. Somebody can verify the figure, and somebody can ask in twelve months whether the referral network did in fact cover it. A concession written without the figure is an opinion, and an opinion is what gets reversed in the first quarter a partner feels ignored.

Our own lines sit on the other side of that decision: a Practice Sprint at $1,450 and a build tier at $2,900, fixed and published, no minimum term. Of the 40 legal-marketing suppliers we read in full on 3 August 2026, 12 published a price at all, 5 of those showed only a "from" figure, 8 claimed a guarantee, and 1 offered work with no minimum term. 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.

What can this template not decide for you?

Three things, all of which sit inside the firm.

What a matter in each line is actually worth to you. Click prices say what other firms will pay for attention. They say nothing about your fees, your write-offs or how long a matter takes to close. A line that looks cheap to reach can still be the wrong line to fill.

Which partner will not accept being conceded. This is a firm politics problem wearing a data costume, and no template resolves it. What the template can do is force the disagreement into January, where it costs a meeting, rather than into October, where it costs a year.

Whether the referral network really covers the conceded line. The only instrument for that is the firm's own record of where each new matter came from, asked at intake and written down. We cannot supply it and neither can any supplier.

Which suppliers publish a strategy template, and do they publish a price?

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

lexisnexis.com, practicepanther.com and seoprofy.com were all in the set of 40 legal-marketing suppliers we read in full on 3 August 2026. Of those three, seoprofy.com had a price on the page we read and the other two did not. 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.

Where one of them is the better choice: a firm whose real question is which practice lines already produce its money should get that out of its own practice-management system before reading any template, including this one. That is what PracticePanther and LexisNexis sell and we do not, and a concession made without knowing what each line earns is a guess with a table under 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?

Once the selection is made, the execution document is a different artifact: lawyer firm marketing covers what you are buying when you hire somebody to run it.

For readers earlier in the question than a strategy: What is the best marketing for law firms? and How do lawyers attract new clients?

On reputation and rankings, which is where conceded lines are usually won instead: Do lawyers have a ranking system? and How do I find clients for my law firm?

Frequently asked questions