Criminal defense cost per lead is what you spend in marketing to produce one inquiry from a person (or family member) who needs a defense lawyer, and it commonly lands somewhere between under $100 and several hundred dollars depending on the city, the charge and the channel. That number alone tells you very little. What matters is cost per retained case compared with your fee for that charge, because a cheap petty-theft lead and an expensive felony DUI lead are not the same purchase.
Criminal defense cost per lead vs. cost per retained case
Cost per lead counts inquiries. Cost per retained case counts clients who signed and paid. The gap between them is your intake and qualification rate, and in criminal defense that gap is large because so many inquiries are out of area, already represented, unable to pay, or asking about something you don't handle.
A firm can cut its cost per lead in half by loosening keywords and still pay more per case, because the extra leads are traffic tickets, records searches and people who wanted a public defender. Judge every channel by cost per retained case. Our guide to cost per signed case walks through the general math; this page applies it to criminal work.
A worked example (hypothetical numbers)
The figures below are illustrative, not benchmarks. Plug in your own.
| Step | Firm A: own Google Ads (DUI) | Firm B: exclusive pay-per-lead |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly spend | $5,000 ad spend | $3,000 (20 leads at $150) |
| Leads (calls/forms) | 20 calls over 60 seconds | 20 leads |
| Cost per lead | $250 | $150 |
| Qualified (right charge, county, can pay) | 12 | 11 |
| Retained | 4 | 4 |
| Cost per retained case | $1,250 | $750 |
| Hypothetical average DUI fee | $4,000 | $4,000 |
In this made-up scenario both firms are profitable on marketing, and Firm B's cost per case is lower. But Firm A owns its account, its data and its keyword history, which tend to get cheaper over time as the campaigns are tuned. Neither answer is always right. It depends on how much management time you have and whether you want to build an asset or buy volume.
Also count what the example leaves out: attorney time on consults that don't sign, intake staff cost, and call tracking. Firms that include those numbers make better decisions than firms that only look at the ad invoice.
What pushes criminal defense lead costs up
- The charge. DUI keywords are usually the most contested in a local market. Simple possession or petty theft is often cheaper per lead but also cheaper per case.
- The metro. Large cities with many defense firms bidding cost more per click than small counties, sometimes several times more.
- Hours. If you only take calls 9 to 5, you miss many of the late-night searches, and your daytime leads cost more because everyone competes for them.
- Answer rate. Every unanswered call is a lead you paid for and gave away. Improving intake is often the cheapest way to lower cost per case. See our criminal defense intake guide.
- Landing pages. Sending a DUI click to a generic homepage lowers conversion and raises cost per lead. A charge-specific page with a visible phone number does better.
Leads that look cheap and aren't
Some lead types inflate your count without adding cases. Calls from people who already have a public defender and want a "second opinion" for free. Calls about a case in a county you don't cover. Calls from alleged victims in domestic cases, which you can't take as clients at all. Each one costs the same as a real lead in ad spend and more in staff time. Tag them in your call log so you can see how much of your budget goes to them, then tighten keywords, location settings and landing-page copy to reduce them.
Don't decide a channel works or fails after three weeks. Criminal defense volume is lumpy: holiday weekends, local enforcement campaigns and court calendars all swing it. Give a new channel enough time to produce a few dozen qualified leads before comparing cost per case.
Matching lead cost to your fee by charge and stage
Criminal defense fees are usually flat, set by charge and by stage of the case, and that makes the economics easier to plan than in contingency work. If your fee for a misdemeanor through pretrial is modest and the trial fee is separate, your acceptable cost per case for that charge should reflect the pretrial fee, since most cases resolve before trial.
A simple rule many firms use: decide the maximum marketing cost you'll accept as a share of the fee for each charge, then set bids and budgets by charge. Felony and federal work can tolerate much higher cost per case than misdemeanor theft. Running everything through one campaign hides that difference. Our keyword map by charge type shows how to split it.
Payment plans change the math too. If a third of your DUI clients pay over several months, factor collections into the fee you use.
Do you know your cost per retained case by charge?
We'll match your ad spend to your signed cases and show which charges and channels are actually paying for themselves. Free audit.
How to measure it without fancy software
You need four numbers each month, by channel and ideally by charge: spend, leads, consults and retained cases. A spreadsheet works. Call tracking numbers on each channel let you tie calls to sources, and a short note in your case management system ("source: Google Ads / DUI") closes the loop.
Once you have a few months of data, send retained-case conversions back into Google Ads so its bidding learns which calls became clients. That one step often changes results more than any keyword change. Our page on legal marketing ROI covers the tracking setup, and if you want to compare against buying exclusive leads, see our current pay-per-lead pricing.
- Cost per lead is a vanity number unless you know how many leads retain.
- Set an acceptable cost per case for each charge based on its flat fee.
- Answer rate and landing pages move cost per case as much as bids do.
- Track spend, leads, consults and retainers monthly, by channel.
For setting an overall number, see our law firm marketing budget guide and the cluster page on criminal defense lead generation.
Frequently Asked Questions
It varies widely. In many markets, inquiries from search advertising commonly fall somewhere between under $100 and several hundred dollars, with DUI and large metros at the higher end. Exclusive pay-per-lead programs often price criminal and DUI leads around $100 to $200. Your own number depends on your city, charges, landing pages and intake.
There's no universal figure because fees vary so much by charge. A useful approach is to set a maximum marketing cost as a share of each charge's flat fee. A felony case can justify a far higher acquisition cost than a misdemeanor. If your cost per retained case is a small fraction of the fee, the channel is working.
DUI is high-volume, usually flat-fee and familiar to marketers, so many firms bid on the same handful of searches. The searcher also has a clear deadline, which makes the click valuable. That competition pushes cost per click up. DUI can still be very profitable when intake is fast and the landing page matches the search.
Yes. In criminal defense, family members often make the hiring decision and pay the fee for someone in custody. Count them as leads and track whether they retain. Just make sure your intake treats the accused as the client and handles third-party payment under your state's version of ABA Model Rule 1.8(f).