How much should a law firm spend on marketing?

Work backwards from what the searches cost to buy. In Houston, 22,200 people a month search for personal injury representation at around $114.87 a click, so 100 clicks is roughly $11,487. That figure, rather than a percentage of revenue, sets the ceiling on what the work is worth.

Last updated: 5 August 2026

Why is a percentage of revenue the wrong place to start?

Because the price of being visible is set by the practice area, not by the firm's turnover.

Two firms of identical size, billing identical fees, face completely different costs for the same visibility. We measured monthly search volume and cost per click across 20 US cities and eight practice areas on 3 August 2026. A hundred clicks on the Boston real estate search cost around $390. A hundred clicks on the Houston personal injury search cost around $11,487. That is a spread of nearly thirty times between two ordinary practices, and no single percentage of revenue survives contact with it.

Percentage-of-revenue rules of thumb do circulate in this market. We have not measured one, cannot trace one to a primary source, and so this page does not repeat one. A number we cannot show the working for is worth nothing to a partner who will check it.

What is the ceiling test, step by step?

Four steps, each using a figure you can verify rather than one a supplier supplies.

1. Find your practice area and your city, and take two numbers: monthly searches, and cost per click.
2. Multiply the click price by 100. That is what a hundred visits cost at Google's own prices. It is arithmetic on a measured figure, not a forecast.
3. Multiply the click price by the monthly volume. That is what buying the entire search for one month would cost. Nobody does it, which is the point: it is the outer boundary of what the search can be worth to anyone.
4. Set a supplier's annual fee against both. If a year of fees costs more than buying a meaningful share of the same search outright, the question to ask is what the fee buys that the auction does not.

Volumes and click prices measured 3 August 2026; the last two columns are multiplication, labeled as such. The dataset treats family and divorce as one category, so the Chicago row covers both.

What does the test rule out immediately?

Three things, without a meeting.

A fee larger than the search. The Boston real estate row is the clearest case. The whole search, every click for a month, costs about $2,301. An annual retainer of several thousand dollars against that search is buying something other than those clicks, and the supplier should be able to say what.

A budget set before the practice area is chosen. A firm doing both family work and real estate is looking at two rows of the table above whose click prices differ by nearly nine times. Deciding the number first gets the order backwards.

Any spend at all, in one specific case. If the constraint is fee-earner capacity rather than instructions, more visibility produces declined work and a longer waiting list. That is worth settling before any of the arithmetic above matters, and it is the one answer no supplier is paid to give.

What does the least defensible version cost?

Practice Sprint $1,450, build tier $2,900. Fixed, published, no minimum term.

Both sit below a hundred Houston injury clicks, which is the comparison worth making rather than one against another supplier's undisclosed number. Of the 40 legal-marketing suppliers we read in full on 3 August 2026, 12 published a price at all and 5 of those showed only a range. Meanwhile 15 of the 62 questions buyers ask on these searches are price questions. A test built from public auction prices beats a benchmark built from quotes nobody publishes.

We charge for the work by scope and time, never per inquiry, per case or per matter. US lawyer advertising runs through ABA Model Rule 7.2(b), adopted differently in each state.

What does the ceiling not tell you?

Whether the money produces instructions, which is a separate question with a worse answer.

A hundred clicks is a hundred visits. Some read the page, fewer make contact, fewer again instruct. We hold no conversion figure for law firms and will not invent one, so the ceiling test bounds sensible spending rather than predicting return. It tells you what the traffic is worth at market price. It does not tell you what your site does with it.

The short answer is above. If you want the two figures for your own city and practice area, plus what is missing from your site and what 40 suppliers charge, the report is free and takes about two minutes to request: /legal/us/

Where should I read next?

If the budget is small or nonexistent: marketing ideas for small law firms.

If the question underneath is what you are buying: what law firm marketing is, and what the best marketing for law firms is.

On visibility: whether lawyers have a ranking system. On the practical version: how to find clients for your law firm.

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