How do I verify a legal marketing company's track record? Verify rather than ask — six checks you can run independently, because a track record presented to you is curated and a track record you inspect is not.
Everything an agency tells you about its record is selected. Almost everything you can check yourself is not.
- 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 Asking Does Not Work
Asking an agency about its record puts you in the weakest possible position: you are evaluating material assembled specifically to be evaluated, by people who chose which parts you see.
The presented record is curated in four ways at once — the outcomes are selected, the departed clients are absent, the arithmetic behind any percentage is invisible, and the client's own attribution may have been wrong to begin with. Our page on the weight to give case studies works through each of those.
The useful move is therefore not to evaluate it better. It is to stop and go looking at things nobody prepared for you — which, because this industry's work product is published on the open web, turns out to be most of what matters.
Six Independent Checks
- 1. Inspect a client's live site. Load it on a phone. Is the phone number visible and tappable above the fold? Does it load quickly? Read two practice-area pages for depth. This is the agency's work product, published.
- 2. Read that site's page source. A proprietary platform usually announces itself in the code, which tells you about portability before anyone discusses it. Check for a unique title and meta description, and whether schema is present.
- 3. Check whether they rank for their own terms. Search what they sell. An agency invisible for its own category is selling a service it has not demonstrated on itself. Not decisive — some good agencies grow purely by referral — but informative.
- 4. Look at archived versions of client sites. Public web archives show what a site looked like before and after. You can see whether a redesign happened, roughly when, and whether content accumulated over the engagement or stopped after month three.
- 5. Search their name with contract, cancel, refund, lawsuit. Dissatisfaction surfaces in places the agency does not control.
- 6. Ask for two clients who left, with permission to contact them. The one request on this list that needs them — and the reaction is informative whether or not you call.
Check 4 is the one most firms have never thought of and it is unusually revealing: an engagement where content stopped after the first quarter is visible in the archive, years later, to anyone who looks.
What You Still Cannot Verify
Being honest about the limits keeps you from over-trusting your own research.
Whether the results were caused by the agency. A client firm that grew may have grown for other reasons — a referral relationship, a partner joining, a market shift.
What the client paid. A strong outcome at $15,000 a month tells you nothing about what $3,000 a month buys.
Who did the work. The person responsible for a good outcome three years ago may have left.
The denominator. You cannot discover how many clients produced nothing, and this remains the single biggest gap.
What to Verify Instead
Given those limits, the most reliable approach is to verify the things a track record is a proxy for — competence, candour and accountability — directly. All three are checkable now, and none depends on history.
- Is the price published? Verifiable in a browser. A published rate removes negotiating room permanently, which is a cost the agency has already accepted.
- Are the terms stated? Notice period, termination fee, renewal mechanics. An agency confident in its terms says them out loud.
- Is asset ownership committed in writing? Domain, site files, content, ad account, Google Business Profile — named separately. This decides what a bad outcome costs you.
- Is there a named person with a stated background? Not a team page. A person can be evaluated; a team cannot.
- Is there a failure condition? A defined point at which you can stop at no cost. This is accountability without needing to trust anybody's history.
Each of those costs the agency something if it is wrong, which is the property a case study lacks — and each one is true or false today rather than three years ago.
Attorney Pro Marketing's are all five checkable before you make contact: pricing published at $2,500, $3,500 and $4,500 a month; month to month, 30 days' written notice, no cancellation fee, no setup fee; your domain, website files, content, Google Ads account and Google Business Profile in your firm's name, with advertising billed to your firm directly by Google; the work done by Alon Darvish — 17 years in practice, over 5,000 cases filed, who marketed his own firm to 40–50 new cases a month; and the failure condition built into the structure — rankings recorded on day 0, movement reported on day 14, nothing billed for that period if it has not moved enough to be worth continuing.
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
Six checks without their cooperation: inspect a client's live site on a phone for load speed and whether the phone number is tappable above the fold; read that site's page source for platform and schema; check whether the agency ranks for its own terms; look at archived versions of client sites; search their name with contract, cancel and refund; and ask for two departed clients.
A great deal. Public web archives show what a site looked like before and after an engagement, so you can see whether a redesign happened and roughly when, and whether content accumulated across the engagement or stopped after the first quarter. That pattern stays visible for years to anyone who looks.
Four things: whether the agency caused a client's growth rather than a referral relationship or market shift; what that client paid, since a strong outcome at $15,000 a month says nothing about $3,000; who actually did the work, as they may have left; and the denominator — how many clients produced nothing.
The things a track record is a proxy for, which are all checkable today: whether pricing is published, whether the contract terms are stated, whether asset ownership is committed in writing asset by asset, whether a named person with a stated background does the work, and whether there is a defined failure condition you can act on at no cost.