Criminal defense law firm marketing across a bench
A defense firm with several attorneys is not a solo practice with more names on the wall. The site has to route a charge to a person and cover more than one courthouse. In Houston, criminal defense runs at 4,400 searches a month at $59.34 a click, measured 3 August 2026.
Last updated: 5 August 2026
What changes when the firm has more than one defender?
The reader's question changes, and almost no firm site answers the new one.
Somebody choosing a solo is asking whether that person is any good. Somebody looking at a firm of five is asking something harder: which of these five will I actually get, and is that one any good. The usual answer to that is a team page of headshots and a shared practice-area menu, which establishes that the firm has five attorneys and nothing whatever about which of them is theirs.
The unspoken worry is specific and worth naming. A person hiring a firm is afraid of being handed to the newest person while the name on the door handles somebody more interesting. That fear does not appear in any inquiry form and it decides a meaningful share of them. A site that answers it is doing something none of its competitors are.
The admission: the answer has to be true, and we cannot make it true. If the page names an attorney and the intake hands the matter to somebody else, the site has made a promise the firm breaks in week one, and that is worse than the headshot page it replaced.
How should charges be routed to a named attorney?
By putting one name on each charge page, and deciding in advance which name.
| What most firm sites publish | What actually routes a reader to a person |
|---|---|
| A team page of photographs | A page per charge, each carrying one named attorney |
| "Sixty years of combined experience" | Each attorney's own admissions and the charges they take |
| A single shared practice-area list | The charges this firm declines, said plainly |
| A general contact form | Who picks up a matter of this type, and who covers when they cannot |
The second column has a consequence inside the partnership that nobody puts in a marketing proposal. Naming one attorney on the firm's highest-volume charge concentrates the inbound work on that person's desk. That is a decision about how the practice is run, not about how the website reads, and it should be made deliberately before the pages are written rather than discovered in month two when the inquiries have all landed in one place.
The same logic makes the departure question worth settling early. Pages carrying an attorney's name have to be reassigned when that attorney leaves, and a firm that has built its search visibility on one person's name has lent it to them. Assigning a charge page to a role the firm intends to keep filling, and putting the individual's name inside the page rather than in the URL, costs nothing at build time and saves a rewrite later.
What does covering several courts actually require?
More than adding place names, and less than a page per suburb.
A firm appearing in four counties is competing in four local markets, not one. Proximity is part of how the map results are ranked and no supplier can move it, so coverage has to be earned with content rather than asserted with a location list. What makes a court-level page worth publishing is material that could only have been written by somebody who goes there: where the building is and how long parking takes, how the calendar tends to run, which attorney from the firm appears there, and what the first appearance in that particular building looks like.
What makes one worthless is the opposite. A page announcing that the firm serves a county it has never filed in is a claim the reader can check, and near-identical county pages on near-identical terms are the pattern search engines treat as doorways, where the cost lands on the whole site rather than the weakest page.
| City | Criminal defense searches/mo | Cost per click |
|---|---|---|
| Houston | 4,400 | $59.34 |
| Los Angeles | 4,400 | $58.18 |
| New York | 4,400 | $49.31 |
| Denver | 1,900 | $63.59 |
Measured 3 August 2026 across 17 US cities. Three markets with identical volume and three different prices, and a fourth with less than half the volume at the highest price of the four. Coverage is worth pricing court by court rather than firm-wide: a hundred Denver clicks is $6,359 and a hundred New York clicks is $4,931, which is multiplication on the measured figures rather than a forecast.
Which of these four had a price on the page?
One did, when we read the sites in August 2026.
| Supplier | Price on the page, 3 August 2026 |
|---|---|
| clio.com | Yes |
| lawue.com | No |
| mycase.com | No |
| themodernfirm.com | No |
The check is presence only. Our tooling picked up case values and half-sentences next to real fees, so no amount is attached to any named business anywhere on this site. Across the whole 40: twelve carried a price, five carried a range instead, eight carried a guarantee of some kind.
When should you buy this from somebody else?
Three situations where the honest answer points away from us.
- If the routing problem is internal rather than public. A firm whose inquiries reach the wrong attorney has a matter-assignment problem, and that is practice-management software rather than marketing. clio.com and mycase.com both publish on it, and clio.com had a price on the page.
- If the firm wants a distinct identity per office. Design-led studios do that better than we do. themodernfirm.com is one of them and did not publish a price, so expect that conversation to start without a number.
- If the firm needs matters this quarter. That is paid search, and we do not manage ad spend or bid on anybody's behalf. Saying so removes a line item we could otherwise invoice.
What do you charge for this?
$1,450 for the Practice Sprint, $2,900 for the build. Fixed, published, no minimum term.
Fees here are never tied to an inquiry, a case or a matter. Prescribed legal business restricts referral fees, and the restriction catches the payer as much as the payee. American lawyer advertising is governed through ABA Model Rule 7.2(b), adopted state by state in differing forms, and no supplier should be telling a firm which of those forms binds it.
Three to four months for movement, six to nine before the work can be judged fairly.
Before you shortlist anyone
We read 40 legal-marketing suppliers in full in August 2026, including several named 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?
If the firm is in one of the metros in the table above: law firm marketing houston, and law firm marketing south carolina for a state-level view.
On judging whether any of it is working: law firm marketing metrics.
On the internal routing question this page raises: law firm marketing software.
For another supplier comparison in the same market: attorneysync law firm seo services.
Frequently asked questions
What does a multi-attorney defense firm need that a solo does not?
An answer to which of the attorneys the reader will actually get. A team page of photographs establishes that the firm has five defenders and nothing about which one is theirs, which is the question they are really asking.
Should each charge page name one attorney?
Yes, and the name has to be true at intake. A page naming an attorney who does not take the matter has made a promise the firm breaks in week one, which is worse than the shared practice-area list it replaced.
What does naming one attorney do to the firm?
It concentrates inbound work on that person's desk. That is a decision about how the practice runs rather than how the site reads, and it belongs to the partners before the pages are written rather than in month two.
What happens to those pages when an attorney leaves?
They have to be reassigned. Assigning a charge page to a role the firm keeps filling, with the individual named inside the page rather than in the address, costs nothing at build time and saves a rewrite later.
Is a page per county worth building?
Only where somebody who goes there wrote it: the building, how the calendar runs, which attorney appears, what a first appearance there looks like. Near-identical county pages are the doorway pattern, and the cost falls on the whole site.
What does defense traffic cost across cities?
Houston, Los Angeles and New York all ran at 4,400 searches a month on 3 August 2026 at $59.34, $58.18 and $49.31, while Denver ran at 1,900 and $63.59. Coverage is worth pricing court by court rather than firm-wide.
Which of the suppliers on this page publish a price?
clio.com had a price on the page on 3 August 2026; lawue.com, mycase.com and themodernfirm.com did not. Across all 40 suppliers read that day, twelve published a price and eight claimed a guarantee of some kind.