Every firm already pays to acquire clients. Referral fees, discounted work that generates future matters, partner hours spent on business development, or simply accepting lower-value work because better work is not arriving. Almost none of it appears on a line item, which is exactly why a marketing fee looks expensive by comparison — it is the only acquisition cost the firm actually sees.
Your cost per signed matter
Use at least a quarter of data — a single month is noise. Nothing is sent anywhere.
| Acquisition method | Cost per signed matter | What you keep afterwards |
|---|
Runs in your browser. No email, no form, nothing stored.
The comparison nobody makes
The table above compares price. The more important difference is in kind.
A referral fee buys one case. A purchased lead buys one enquiry, usually sold to several firms at once, so you are buying a race. A marketing programme builds something that keeps producing: pages that rank for years, a profile with accumulated authority, a review base, and a site that converts better than it did.
Stop paying a referral source and you have nothing. Stop buying leads and you have nothing. Stop a marketing programme after two years and the organic and profile assets keep working, degrading slowly rather than vanishing. That difference never shows up in a monthly cost comparison, which is why it is usually left out — and it is the strongest part of the case.
- Compute it over a quarter, not a month. A single month is noise, and the first two months of any programme are investment rather than return.
- Attribute honestly. Whether a call became a client happens inside your practice-management system, where no agency tool can see it. Without call tracking and a monthly signed-case list, this figure is a guess.
The fuller argument, including how to present it to partners, is on our page about justifying the cost of an agency.