Sample law firm marketing plan, filled in for one practice

This is one plan, filled in for one hypothetical firm: a three-fee-earner family practice in Columbus, Ohio. Its market is 4,000 searches a month at $21.88 a click, measured 3 August 2026, and its plan commits to 9 named pages and four quarterly gates.

Last updated: 5 August 2026

Which firm is this plan written for?

Whitlock & Reyes Family Law, Columbus, Ohio. The firm is invented. The city is not.

Three fee earners: one partner who does the courtroom work, one associate carrying the bulk of the filed matters, and one associate hired eighteen months ago who is the only person in the building who will reliably write anything. Family and divorce work, plus wills for people who have just finished a divorce. No paid advertising has ever run. The site was built by a previous supplier, has a page for each of the three people, and says nothing about what any of it costs.

The damaging admission, and it is the whole weakness of this page: the firm does not exist. Everything attached to Columbus is measured and repeatable — you can look the volumes up. Everything attached to Whitlock & Reyes is a construction: the fee earners, the pages, the gates, the sequence. Nothing here reports what happened to a real practice, because publishing a client's numbers is not something we will do and inventing a case study is worse. Read it as a worked example of the reasoning, not as evidence the reasoning produced anything.

What does this firm's own market actually look like?

Four thousand searches a month, at prices that make one of the firm's three services worth a very different amount from the others.

All four rows measured 3 August 2026 from Google Ads monthly volume and cost per click. The right-hand column is arithmetic — volume multiplied by click price — and it says what the whole month of attention would cost to buy at Google's own prices. It is not revenue, not profit, and not matters won.

Two things follow, and both shape the plan. First, this dataset treats family and divorce as a single category, so the 4,000 figure covers both and the plan must not be written as though it were divorce alone. Second, the firm's main line is cheap by American standards: a hundred Columbus divorce clicks cost $2,188, arithmetic on the measured price, and the build tier at $2,900 costs roughly what 132 of those clicks cost. In Atlanta personal injury at $149.13 a click, the comparison would not be close.

That is the argument for putting this firm's money into pages rather than a paid line, and it holds in Columbus family law specifically. Copied to a market where a click costs seven times more, it would not.

Which pages does the plan commit to building?

Nine, named, each with the quarter it goes live.

Page 1 goes first and it is the one the firm will argue about. It answers the question that 15 of the 62 buyer questions we collected are about. The United States has no rule requiring any of this to be published, so it is a choice rather than an obligation — and it is the choice that separates this firm from the ones the same reader is comparing it against.

Pages 2, 4 and 5 exist because the same person asks all three in sequence over several weeks; family clients do not decide in one sitting. Pages 6 and 7 exist because people search the name of the lawyer they just met, and what they find decides whether the second meeting happens.

Page 9 is the only speculative one. It bridges an $87,520 line into an $11,672 line, and it is last for that reason.

What does each quarter release or stop?

Four gates, each with one question, and none of them asks whether it is working before it can be.

The Q3 gate is deliberately weak, and that is the design. Months six to nine is the earliest point a search line can be read at all, and even then the honest question is presence rather than performance. A firm that asks "how many matters did the pages bring" in Q3 is asking a question the data cannot answer, and it will cut the line at the moment it is starting to move.

The Q4 gate is the one most firms fail, and it has nothing to do with marketing. If nobody recorded where each matter came from, the following year's plan is built on recollection. That step belongs to the firm and no supplier can do it from outside.

What does the plan cost this firm, line by line?

Two fixed fees and one line the firm supplies itself.

Both of our figures are fixed and published, with no minimum term. Of the 40 legal-marketing suppliers we read in full on 3 August 2026, 12 published a price at all, 5 of those showed only a "from" figure, 8 claimed a guarantee of some kind, and 1 offered work with no minimum term.

There is no paid line in this plan. At $21.88 a click the firm could afford a test, and the reason it is not here is sequencing rather than cost: sending paid traffic to a site with no fee page spends the click price on a question the site refuses to answer. We never charge 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 this plan refuse to do?

Three things, stated now so nobody discovers them at the Q2 gate.

1. It sets no target. No position, no traffic figure, no number of matters. Nobody controls Google's results, and the nine pages are the commitment because they are the part anyone can actually be held to.
2. It does not fix intake. Whoever answers the phone at Whitlock & Reyes decides whether the pages were worth building. That is operational, it sits inside the firm, and we do not do it.
3. It assumes capacity exists. Three fee earners at full utilization do not need this plan. They need a fourth, and a plan sold to a firm in that position is a plan that produces work it cannot take.

Do you want the empty version of this instead?

If you came looking for a template rather than a worked case, yes.

This page is the concrete one: one city, one practice, real figures, a named page list. The abstract sibling is law firm marketing plan example, which is the empty structure — the sections a plan must contain, what each is for, and the test that decides whether a section is finished. Neither page is a shortened version of the other, and a firm building its first plan will usually want both: the structure to fill in, and one instance of it filled.

Which suppliers would this firm shortlist, and what do they publish?

Three of the 40 sit close to this search, and none of the three published a price.

practicepanther.com, osbplf.org and mycase.com were all in the set of 40 legal-marketing suppliers we read in full on 3 August 2026, and none had a price on the page we read. Nothing else is asserted about any of them here; the benchmark recorded a presence check on the page as published and nothing more.

Where one of them suits this firm better than we do: a firm that wants a document to work through on its own, at no cost, should take that route before paying anybody, including us. We would sell Whitlock & Reyes a $2,900 build, and a firm whose site is adequate should think carefully before agreeing to that.

Before you shortlist anyone

Of the 40 legal-marketing suppliers we read in full on 3 August 2026, twelve published a price and one offered work with no minimum term. Three of them are named above.

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 your firm is in a market where the click prices are an order of magnitude higher: law firm marketing los angeles and los angeles law firm seo.

On who inside a firm holds the plan once it exists: law firm marketing positions.

On what the build and the pages actually consist of: law firm seo services and law firm seo agency.

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