Law firm marketing tips for the partner who signs

These are supervision tips, for the partner who signs the invoice and does not do the work. There are 6 of them and every one is a check rather than an activity: what to require each month, how to verify a claim in under a minute, which 4 accounts belong to the firm, and what to do when nothing arrives.

Last updated: 5 August 2026

What should a partner require every month?

Three lists, on one page, before the invoice is paid.

Most monthly reporting in this market is written to be read as reassurance. A partner cannot audit reassurance. What can be audited is a record of what was made, so the standing instruction to any supplier should be one page containing:

1. Every page published this month, as a full address. Not "content published" — the addresses, so each can be opened.
2. Every page changed this month, and what changed in one line. A rewrite and a corrected phone number are both edits and they are not the same purchase.
3. Who wrote each item, by name or by role, and who checked it inside the firm.

That is the whole requirement. It fits on one side of paper, it takes a supplier who is doing the work about ten minutes to produce, and a supplier who is not doing the work cannot produce it at all. That asymmetry is the entire value of asking.

The third line is the one people leave out and the one that matters most in this profession, because a page carrying a factual claim about a matter, a court or a filing period has to have been read by somebody qualified to catch an error in it.

How do you check a claim in under a minute?

Open the address, read the first two sentences, and look for the date.

A published page is a public artifact, which makes this the cheapest audit available to a partner. Three checks, and none of them needs an account, a tool or a login:

• Open it signed out, on a phone. If it does not load, or the text is behind a cookie banner you cannot dismiss, the page is not doing the job it was invoiced for.
• Read the first forty words. AI Overviews appear on 39 of the 54 money searches we measured on 3 August 2026, and it is roughly the first forty words that get lifted into them. A page that opens with a paragraph of preamble has published the preamble to the answer engine.
• Find the visible date. A page with no date on it cannot be told apart from a page written four years ago, by a reader or by anything reading on a reader's behalf.

If a page fails all three, the correct response is not to cancel the contract. It is to send the address back with the three observations attached, which is a two-minute email that tells you more about a supplier than a quarterly review does.

Which four accounts must be in the firm's name?

The domain, the site's administrator login, the analytics property and the business profile.

This is the tip that costs nothing and is worth the most, because it is only ever discovered at the end of a relationship. Each of the four should be registered to a firm address and a firm email, with the supplier added as a user rather than as the owner.

A supplier who declines to move any of these is telling you something useful and it is better to learn it in month two than in month twenty. A supplier who agrees and takes three weeks to do it is telling you something about capacity.

How much partner time should supervising this take?

Thirty minutes a month. Five units. Say the number and hold to it.

This audience bills in six-minute increments, so a supervision routine that cannot be described in them will not be done. The realistic split: ten minutes reading the one-page record, ten minutes opening two or three of the published addresses and applying the three checks above, and ten minutes writing back. Once a quarter, add thirty minutes to look at whether the practice areas being worked on are still the ones the firm wants more of.

Anything larger than that becomes a second job and gets abandoned in the first busy week, which is how firms end up paying invoices for two years without opening a single page that was built.

What separates a report worth reading from one that is not?

Whether each claim in it names something a person outside the firm could go and look at.

The bottom two rows are not dishonest. They are describing intentions, and intentions belong in a proposal rather than in an invoice. The tip is to reply to a report by asking, for each line, what a person outside the firm could open. A supplier doing the work answers that in a sentence.

What should you do when the evidence does not arrive?

Ask once in writing, wait a month, and then treat the silence as the answer.

There is one legitimate reason for a thin first record and it is worth knowing so it is not mistaken for evasion: month one is a build month and produces nothing measurable. A supplier saying that plainly is being accurate. A supplier saying it in month four is not.

The sequence that works: ask for the one-page record by email, with the three lists named. If the next month's record is again a narrative, send back three addresses from the site and ask which of them were touched. If that produces nothing, the engagement has become a subscription with a design attached, and the accounts in the table above are the reason it can be ended without losing anything.

Which of the suppliers on this search publish a price?

One of the four we read, and three of the four sell software rather than marketing.

Read in full on 3 August 2026. The only claim made here is whether a price appeared on the page that day; we do not publish what anybody charges. Across all 40 suppliers, 12 published a price, 5 showed a "from" range rather than a figure, 8 claimed a guarantee of some kind, and one stated that work could be taken with no minimum term.

Where these beat us outright: a software company will give a firm a supervision record automatically, because the system it sells is where the work is logged. A marketing supplier has to be asked. If the firm's real problem is that nobody can see what is happening anywhere in the practice, that is a software purchase and not this one.

What does it cost, and what is not in our own reports?

Practice Sprint $1,450, build tier $2,900. Fixed, published, no minimum term, and never per inquiry or per matter.

Our monthly note is one page and it is the same three lists set out above. It does not contain a ranking table. We cannot promise a ranking and neither can anyone else, so a table of positions would be a report on weather. It does not contain a weekly summary, because there is nothing true to say weekly. And in month one it says that month one is a build month, which is an unsatisfying thing to receive and the accurate one.

US lawyer advertising runs through ABA Model Rule 7.2(b), adopted differently in each state, which is one more reason the fee is for the work by scope and time rather than by the contact.

Before you shortlist anyone

We read 40 legal-marketing suppliers in full in August 2026 — including several ranking for this search. 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 what the firm is supervising toward: law firm marketing goals covers what a target should be expressed in.

If you are choosing between approaches rather than checking one: law firm marketing strategies.

On the people and rooms around this work: law firm marketing association and law firm marketing conference.

On the search side specifically: law firm SEO coalition.

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