Law firm marketing company: three people or fifty

Headcount decides three things a proposal never mentions: who actually touches your work, how fast anyone replies, and what happens when your account manager leaves. A 3-person supplier and a 50-person one fail in opposite directions, and neither failure is about competence.

Last updated: 5 August 2026

What changes between a three-person supplier and a fifty-person one?

Almost everything except the work itself, which is the part both will describe.

Take those as two ends of a line rather than as measurements. We hold no data on how legal-marketing suppliers are distributed by size, and neither, in our experience, does anybody else in this market, so the sizes above are illustrations of the two failure modes and not a claim about how many firms sit where.

Who actually touches your work at each size?

At three people, the person you met. At fifty, somebody you have not met and will not.

That is not an accusation. A larger company divides the work because dividing it is what makes the capacity real. The cost is that the knowledge of your practice sits with the person answering your email rather than with the person writing your pages, and it has to be transmitted each time.

Two questions settle it in a first meeting, and both have checkable answers:

• Who writes the words on a practice-area page, by role, and are they employed here? A supplier of any size can answer this in one sentence, and hesitation is the answer.
• How many other accounts does that person hold this quarter? Not to police it, but because the number tells you what an urgent request will actually mean.

A damaging admission. We are a small supplier. That means the answer to the first question is short and the answer to the second is honest, and it also means we cannot absorb four firms all wanting a build in the same fortnight. Ask what else is in the queue before you agree a date, and ask everyone else the same thing.

How fast should anyone reply, and what belongs in writing?

Fast enough that a partner does not chase, and written down because nobody remembers what was said in a meeting.

Three items belong in the agreement rather than in the relationship:

1. A response time for ordinary questions, stated in working hours rather than described as prompt.
2. A named contact and a named deputy, on both sides. Firms often supply neither, and then the supplier waits three weeks for approval and bills the month anyway.
3. What counts as urgent, and what happens to the rest of the queue when something is. A supplier who says everything is urgent has no queue discipline and will eventually apply that to you.

The size effect here is not what people expect. A small supplier replies faster on a good week and disappears on a bad one. A large one replies at a steadier pace that is rarely fast. Neither is better in the abstract; they are better for different firms, and a practice that needs a page changed the day a case concludes should buy the first.

What happens when your account manager leaves?

At a large company, a handover meeting. At a small one, an interruption. Both are survivable if three things were in place beforehand.

• The decisions are written down somewhere you can read. Not a project plan — the reasons. Why that page exists, why the practice areas were ordered that way, what was tried and abandoned. A new account manager who cannot read the history repeats it.
• The accounts and the files are in the firm's name. The domain registrant, the analytics property, the Search Console property, the Google Business Profile, and the drafts and source files. If any of those leaves with a person, the handover is a recovery exercise.

Ask at the first meeting what happened the last time somebody on the account left, and ask for the specifics rather than the reassurance. Every supplier that has existed for more than a year or two has an answer to that question. What varies is whether they will give it.

What can a large company do that a small one cannot?

Several things, and a firm choosing on size alone should hear them plainly.

Genuine advantages of scale: parallel work, so a build and a content programme run at once rather than in sequence. Cover, so illness does not stop the month. Specialists for a one-off need — a large migration, a complicated rebuild, an accessibility review — that a small supplier has to decline or learn on your account. And a design team on staff, which matters when the work is visual rather than structural.

Where a competitor beats us. A firm with several offices, a marketing manager already in post, and a programme running across multiple practice areas at once should buy from a larger company than us. It will get parallel capacity and a bench, and a small supplier in that position becomes the bottleneck rather than the solution. Saying so costs us the enquiry, and it is true.

What does size not change?

The technical layer, the publication requirement, the pricing rule and the timeline.

The technical layer is sector-neutral and size-neutral. Page speed, rendering, structured data and internal linking behave the same whoever does them.

The publication requirement does not move. 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 fifty-person company that has never read them will quote for a website that omits those pages exactly as a three-person one will. We build the pages the rules ask for; whether a firm meets its obligations is a judgement for the firm and its COLP.

The pricing rule does not move either. LASPO 2012 section 56 prohibits referral fees in prescribed legal business including personal injury, and it binds the paying firm as well as the party being paid. We charge by scope and time, never per enquiry, case or matter, at any size of engagement.

And the timeline is the same. Three to four months before movement, six to nine before the work can be judged fairly. Measured demand, 3 August 2026 across 20 UK cities:

100 Leicester clicks at £19.17 is £1,917 — arithmetic on a measured price, not a forecast, and the dataset treats family and divorce as one category.

Which of these suppliers publishes a price?

One 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, and nothing in our benchmark records how many people work at any of them. Company size is not something we measured, and a headcount on an about page is not a count of the people who would touch your account.

Across all 40: 12 published a price, 5 showed a range rather than a figure, 8 claimed a guarantee of some kind, and 1 stated that work carried no minimum term. 15 of the 62 questions buyers ask on these searches are price questions. Ours are published: £890 for the Price Transparency Pack over ten working days, £2,400, £4,200 and £6,900 for the builds, and £600, £1,200 or £2,400 a month for the retainer with no minimum term, £700 off a build taken with six months of retainer.

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?

On the shape of the engagement rather than the size of the supplier: law firm digital marketing agency and, for the contract itself, lawyer marketing agency.

On the work: law firm seo specialist and personal injury law firm seo. On the site: small law firm website design, law firm website design cost and law firm website design services.

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