How can I tell if a legal marketing agency understands client intake? The clearest signal is unprompted — an agency that understands intake asks about your answered-call rate in the first conversation, because it knows that is where marketing budgets are lost.
Intake is where most legal marketing money dies. An agency that never mentions it is telling you something.
- Published pricing — $2,500, $3,500 and $4,500 a month, on the site.
- Month to month. No contract is holding you anywhere.
- A former attorney of 17 years who filed 5,000+ cases works your account.
- You see your rankings move for 14 days before you are billed a dollar.
- Law firms only — no other industries, ever.
| Attorney Pro Marketing | Scorpion | FindLaw | Typical legal agency | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing published on the website | Yes — $2,500 / $3,500 / $4,500 per month | Not published | Not published | Rarely published |
| Contract term | Month to month, 30 days’ notice | Not published | Not published | Commonly 12 months |
| Who works on your account | A former attorney of 17 years, in every account | Assigned account team | Assigned account team | Account manager, often across industries |
| Your website is built on | Standard, portable code | Proprietary platform | FirmSite platform | Varies — ask before signing |
| See results before you are billed | Yes — 14 days, then you decide | No | No | No |
| Ad spend billed by Google directly to you | Yes, no markup | Ask | Ask | Often passes through the agency |
“Not published” means the figure does not appear on that company’s own website as of October 2026 — check for yourself before you sign anything, with them or with us.
Why This Is the Deciding Question
Marketing delivers a ringing phone. Everything after that is intake, and intake is where most of the budget is lost.
Two firms with identical marketing, one answering 90 percent of calls within business hours and one answering 65 percent, produce entirely different results from the same spend. At many solo and small practices the unanswered rate runs 20 to 40 percent, because hearings and client meetings occupy exactly the hours when people call.
An agency that does not understand this will report rising call volume as success while the firm experiences nothing changing. Worse, a programme that works makes an uncovered phone a larger problem rather than a smaller one. So an agency's grasp of intake determines whether it can diagnose your account at all.
Five Tests
- 1. Do they raise it unprompted? The strongest test by a wide margin. An agency that asks in the first conversation who answers your phone, and what happens when you are in court, understands where the money goes. One that discusses only traffic is selling the easy half.
- 2. Do they measure answered-call rate, or just call count? Call count is the agency's metric. Answered-call rate is the one that predicts your revenue, and reporting it means they are prepared to surface a number that makes their work look less effective.
- 3. Do they recommend call recordings? Not just tracking numbers — recordings. An agency that wants to listen to calls intends to assess quality rather than count events.
- 4. Do they know response time is measured in minutes? Ask what a good response time to a form submission looks like. “Within 24 hours” indicates a general marketing background. Minutes indicates they have watched this happen.
- 5. Will they tell you more marketing is the wrong purchase? The rarest signal, because it costs them revenue. An agency willing to say “fix your phone coverage before increasing spend” is giving you advice against its own interest.
What Good Answers Sound Like
Four questions worth asking directly, with what distinguishes a real answer.
“What happens to my results if 30 percent of calls go unanswered?” A real answer engages with the arithmetic — that roughly a third of the programme's output is being discarded and no targeting change recovers it. A weak answer reassures you that their leads are high quality.
“How many times should a firm follow up with someone who submitted a form?” Anyone who has watched this says more than once and means it — a call within minutes, a text the same day, a call the next morning, an email on day three, a final attempt around day seven. “We pass the lead to you” is a different answer.
“What will you need from me each month?” An agency that understands intake asks for your signed-case outcomes, because without them it is optimising toward form fills. An agency that needs nothing from you cannot see past the lead.
“If calls rise and signings do not, what do you do?” The answer should be diagnostic: listen to recordings, check response times, check search terms, check the page. Not an explanation of why volume is the real metric.
What No Agency Can Do
Clarity here keeps expectations correct in both directions.
No agency answers your phone. Some will recommend an answering service or help you select one, which is useful. The coverage decision and its cost are yours.
No agency can make you call people back. The five-attempt cadence costs nothing and requires somebody at your firm to own it.
No agency can tell which calls signed unless you tell them. Ten minutes a month in a spreadsheet — date, first name, channel, signed or not — transforms what any agency can do, and nobody can produce it for you.
No agency can fix matter fit. If calls are about matters you decline, that is partly targeting and partly your appetite, and the two have to be separated honestly.
At Attorney Pro Marketing, intake comes up in the first conversation rather than the fifth, because the person having it is Alon Darvish — 17 years in practice, over 5,000 cases filed, who built his own firm to 40–50 new cases a month and found out the hard way where the losses were. Call tracking with recordings and lead attribution is included from the Growth tier, and we ask for your signed-case list monthly so targeting moves toward the terms that produce retainers rather than the ones that produce volume.
Published pricing at $2,500, $3,500 and $4,500 a month, month to month with 30 days' notice, with rankings recorded on day 0 and the movement reported on day 14 before you are billed for that period.
See it before you pay for it.
We snapshot your rankings on day 0, build and launch your site within three days, and show you the movement on day 14. If it has not moved enough to be worth continuing, you owe nothing for that period and you keep the Google Business Profile work.
Related Questions
The strongest signal is unprompted: an agency that asks in the first conversation who answers your phone and what happens when you are in court understands where marketing budgets are lost. One that discusses only traffic and rankings is selling the easier half of the problem.
Answered-call rate rather than just call count, since call count is the agency's metric and answered-call rate predicts your revenue. Reporting it means they are willing to surface a number that makes their own work look less effective. Call recordings matter too, because they allow quality assessment rather than event counting.
Minutes, not hours. If an agency says “within 24 hours” that indicates a general marketing background rather than experience with legal intake. Someone who filled in a form wanted to talk; answered the following afternoon they have often already retained another firm.
Four things: answer your phone, though some will help you select an answering service; make you follow up, since the five-attempt cadence needs an owner at your firm; know which calls signed unless you tell them monthly; and fix matter fit, which is partly targeting and partly your own appetite.