Lawyer firm marketing in the UK: hire, retain or do neither

Last updated: 5 August 2026

Do law firms have a marketing team?

Most do not, and the ones that do usually have one person rather than a team.

The realistic options, with what each actually costs the firm:

The second row is where most firms actually sit and it is the worst of the four. Marketing added to a full workload gets done in bursts, and search work in bursts produces nothing — the whole mechanism depends on continuity.

The honest case for hiring instead of retaining: an in-house person is in the building, understands the firm, and can chase fee earners for the material an agency waits weeks to receive. That last point is real. A supplier who tells you an in-house hire is never the answer is selling.

The argument against is timing rather than capability. A hire has to be found, interviewed, notice-served and settled in before anything is published, and a first marketing hire in a firm that has never had one arrives without anybody to learn the role from.

How much should a law firm spend on marketing?

Work backwards from what the relevant searches cost to buy, not forwards from a percentage of turnover.

In London, 2,900 people a month search for an immigration solicitor and Google charges around £18.75 for one of those clicks, measured 3 August 2026. In Manchester, 1,760 search for conveyancing at £18.57.

A hundred Manchester conveyancing clicks is about £1,857. That number is the ceiling for reasonableness: if a supplier's annual fee exceeds what the whole search would cost to buy outright, ask what the difference buys.

Our own: £2,400 for the build, £600 to £2,400 a month for the retainer, £890 for the Price Transparency Pack. All fixed, all published, no minimum term, and £700 comes off the build when taken with six months of retainer.

Which UK suppliers publish a price?

One of the four named below, from the 40 we read in full on 3 August 2026.

⚠ We record whether a price appeared, not what it was. The figures our tooling collected mixed genuine fees with case values and fragments, and attributing a number to a named business on that basis would publish something unverified.

Across the full 40:

15 of the 62 questions buyers ask on these searches are price questions. In the one jurisdiction that expects law firms to publish price information, 70% of the suppliers selling to them will not publish their own.

That is not a small irony and it is worth raising on a first call.

What is different about marketing a firm in England and Wales?

The transparency rules, which turn a marketing decision into a publication one.

The SRA Transparency Rules have been in force since 6 December 2018 and require price and service information to be published for specified work types. The practical consequence for marketing is unusual and good: the pages the rules ask for are the pages people search for. "How much does a conveyancing solicitor cost" is both a required disclosure and a high-intent search.

A firm that treats the rule as an obligation writes a PDF nobody reads. A firm that treats it as a page writes something that answers the question and ranks.

We build the pages the rule asks for. We do not judge whether a firm complies — that belongs to the firm and its COLP.

Where is another supplier the better choice?

Three situations, stated plainly.

When the firm needs instructions this quarter. Organic work produces nothing measurable in month one and cannot be judged before month six. We do not manage ad spend, and a paid specialist will beat us on speed.

When the firm wants a marketing person embedded in the practice. The chasing problem above is real, and no external supplier solves it as well as somebody sitting on the floor.

When capacity is the constraint rather than enquiries. Better visibility then produces declined instructions and a longer waiting list. No supplier fixes that.

What should you check before shortlisting a supplier?

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.

Which law firm marketing pages should I read next?

By channel: law firm digital marketing covers the online set, law firm internet marketing and law firm web marketing cover it from different angles, and law firm online marketing covers sequencing.

If the decision is specifically about retaining an agency, law firm digital marketing agency covers what a retainer should contain and what to hold a supplier to.

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