How do I calculate the ROI of hiring a legal marketing company? Collected fees from attributable clients, divided by every marketing cost, over twelve months — with the monthly curve shown separately, because the shape carries more information than the total.
Four decisions determine your answer: billed or collected, what goes in the denominator, how you attribute, and over what window. Get those right and the arithmetic is trivial.
- 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.
The Formula, and the Four Decisions Inside It
ROI = (collected fees from attributable clients − total marketing cost) ÷ total marketing cost
Stated as a multiple instead, which most people find easier to think about: collected fees ÷ total marketing cost. A multiple of 3 means three dollars collected for every dollar spent.
The arithmetic is trivial. Four decisions determine whether the answer means anything.
- Billed or collected? Collected. Billed fees overstate the result by whatever your write-off rate is, which at many small firms is 15 to 30 percent.
- What goes in the denominator? Everything: agency fee, ad spend, subscriptions, photography, one-time build. Dividing by the agency fee alone can double the apparent return.
- How do you attribute? Per-channel tracking numbers plus asking every new client. Neither alone is sufficient.
- What window? Twelve months, with a lag allowance, because a client signed in month twelve was often first reached in month nine.
Five Steps
- Build the cost side first. List every marketing cost by month for the period. Agency fee, the Google invoice, call tracking, rank tracking, review software, hosting, photography, any one-time build. One column per month.
- List every new client in the period with the fee collected, not billed, and the date of first contact rather than the date of signing.
- Assign a source to each. Marketing channel, referral, repeat client, walk-in, unknown. Keep “unknown” as its own category rather than guessing — its size tells you how much to trust the whole calculation.
- Sum the marketing-attributed collected fees and divide by total marketing cost. That is your multiple.
- Plot it monthly. One line for cost, one for attributed collections. The crossover point and the trend matter more than the twelve-month figure.
The Spreadsheet
Four tabs, and it takes about twenty minutes to set up.
Tab 1 — Costs. Rows for each cost type, columns for each month. Total row at the bottom.
Tab 2 — Clients. One row per new client: first contact date, signed date, source, fee billed, fee collected to date. The two fee columns are the point; keeping both shows you your own write-off rate.
Tab 3 — Attribution. Tracked calls by channel per month, so a source assignment can be checked rather than remembered.
Tab 4 — Summary. Monthly cost, monthly attributed collections, running multiple, cost per signed case. This is the tab you take into a renewal conversation.
The Lag Problem, and How to Handle It
Legal matters have a delay between first contact and collected fee, and ignoring it distorts the calculation in both directions.
Early months look worse than they are. Month one's spend produces contacts, some of whom sign in month three and pay across months three to six. A month-one ROI calculation attributes none of that.
Late months look better than they are. Month twelve collects fees from contacts generated in months eight through eleven.
Three ways to handle it, in order of usefulness:
Match by first contact date. Attribute each client's collected fee back to the month they first made contact. More work, far more accurate, and it is the only version that tells you which month's spend actually worked.
Use a long enough window. Over twelve months the lag mostly washes out, as long as you do not compare month one against month one.
Report a trailing three-month average rather than single months, which removes most of the noise without hiding the trend.
Our structure is designed to make each of these inputs real rather than estimated. Advertising is billed to your firm directly by Google, so the cost side is exact and auditable rather than bundled. Call tracking with recordings and lead attribution from the Growth tier populates tab 3 and shrinks your “unknown” category. Pricing is published — $2,500, $3,500 and $4,500 a month — so the fee line is known before you begin. And the day 0 baseline gives the calculation a dated starting point, with the day 14 report arriving 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
Collected fees from attributable clients divided by total marketing cost, expressed as a multiple. A multiple of 3 means three dollars collected for every dollar spent. The arithmetic is trivial; the four decisions that matter are billed versus collected, what goes in the denominator, how you attribute, and over what window.
Collected. Billed fees overstate the result by whatever your write-off rate is, which at many small firms runs 15 to 30 percent. Keeping both columns in your spreadsheet is worth the effort, because the gap between them is your own write-off rate and most firms have never measured it.
It distorts the calculation both ways: early months look worse because their contacts sign later, and late months look better because they collect on earlier contacts. Match each client's collected fee back to the month of first contact, use a twelve-month window, and report a trailing three-month average rather than single months.
Keep “unknown” as its own category rather than guessing. Its size tells you how much to trust the whole calculation — a 40 percent unknown rate means every ROI figure you quote is close to meaningless. Per-channel tracking numbers plus asking every new client how they found you shrinks it quickly.