Should a law firm marketing agency provide ongoing strategic consultation? Yes — and the test is whether anything has changed on evidence by month four. Strategy is a decision made from data, not a document delivered on a schedule.
Ask what you stopped doing and why. An agency executing an unchanged checklist is not strategising, whatever the deck says.
- 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.
What Strategy Actually Means Here
Every agency claims strategy and the word is doing almost no work. A usable definition: strategy is choosing what not to do, and changing that choice when the evidence changes.
Which makes it observable. At any point in an engagement you can ask what the agency decided against, and what it reversed. A programme that has made no such decisions in six months has been executing rather than strategising — and execution is valuable, it is simply not what is being charged for separately.
The distinction matters because strategy is the component that justifies a senior fee. Content production and campaign maintenance are skilled work available at many price points. Deciding that your estate planning content is pointed at the wrong searcher, and stopping it, is the part that requires judgement.
The Test
One question, asked at month four and again at month eight: “What did we stop doing, and why?”
A real answer names a specific thing and the evidence behind it. “We paused the three cheap-divorce terms because they produced eleven calls and no signed matters across two months, and moved that budget to the business-valuation pages.” Specific, falsifiable, and it demonstrates that someone is reading the data rather than producing it.
A non-answer describes activity. “We've continued optimising and refining the approach.” Nothing was decided; the checklist ran.
Ask it plainly and do not help. The silence, if there is one, is the finding.
The Five Decisions
Strategic input in a small-firm legal marketing programme reduces to about five recurring decisions. If none of these has been made or revisited, there is no strategy happening.
- 1. Channel allocation. Which channel gets the next dollar, based on cost per signed case by channel. Revisited quarterly, not annually.
- 2. Which terms to abandon. Paused, excluded, deprioritised — and why. The clearest evidence of strategy, because it costs visible activity.
- 3. Which practice areas to fund. Most firms should fund fewer areas properly. Recommending that costs the agency scope, which is why it is rare and informative.
- 4. Query tier and case quality. Whether to move toward complexity-led terms and accept lower volume for better matters. A decision with a visible short-term cost.
- 5. When to tell you the problem is not marketing. Intake, fees, collection, capacity. The decision an agency has the least incentive to make.
What Strategy Theatre Looks Like
Four patterns, all common, none involving a decision.
The quarterly deck. Thirty slides restating last quarter's data with a slide of next quarter's activities. Expensive to produce out of your fee and informationally equivalent to the monthly report.
The annual plan. A twelve-month roadmap written in month one and followed regardless. A plan that does not change is a schedule, and the whole point of strategy is responding to what the first quarter revealed.
Benchmark comparison. “You are above the industry average for your practice area.” Unverifiable, usually drawn from the agency's own client base, and it recommends nothing.
The standing meeting with no agenda. Covered on our page about meeting frequency — a monthly call that exists because it is in the contract fills itself with whatever data is available.
How to Get the Real Version
- Supply the data that makes decisions possible. Your monthly signed-case list. Without it, cost per signed case by channel cannot be calculated, and decision 1 cannot be made by anybody.
- Ask the test question at month four, then at eight and twelve. Write the answers down.
- Ask for a recommendation against the agency's interest, once: “What would you stop doing if this were your money?” The answer is the best single read on whether you have a strategist or a vendor.
- Make the quarterly review end in a decision. Move budget, change targeting, build these, kill that. If it ends in an update, it was reporting.
- Refuse the deck. Ask for the five decisions in half a page instead, and let the saved hours go into the work.
At Attorney Pro Marketing the strategic input comes from Alon Darvish — 17 years in practice, over 5,000 cases filed, who also marketed his own firm to 40–50 new cases a month, which is where decision 5 comes from: he has been the firm with an intake problem and a working marketing programme. There is no account layer between you and the person making the decisions, so the test question gets answered by the person who made them.
Mechanically: up to 30 keywords of your own choosing tracked from day 0, call tracking with recordings and lead attribution from Growth ($3,500) to make the data decision-grade, and a monthly strategy call with Alon at Dominate ($4,500). Published pricing, month to month with 30 days' notice — which means a strategy you disagree with is something you can act on in thirty days.
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
Decisions that change on evidence: a term paused, budget moved between channels, a page rebuilt, a practice area deprioritised. Strategy is choosing what not to do and revising that choice when evidence changes — which makes it observable rather than a matter of claim.
Ask at month four and again at month eight: what did we stop doing, and why? A real answer names a specific thing and the evidence — which terms were paused, what they produced, where the budget went. A non-answer describes continued optimisation, which means the checklist ran.
Five: channel allocation based on cost per signed case; which terms to abandon; which practice areas to fund, since most firms should fund fewer properly; whether to move toward complexity-led terms and accept lower volume; and when to tell you the problem is intake, fees or capacity rather than marketing.
Four patterns: the quarterly deck restating the monthly report across thirty slides; the annual plan written in month one and followed regardless, which is a schedule rather than a strategy; unverifiable benchmark comparisons against the agency's own client base; and a standing meeting with no agenda.