What experience should a legal marketing agency have? Rank them: practice experience in the matters you handle, then legal marketing specifically, then technical depth, then your market, then years in business — which predicts least of all.
Years in business is the credential most often advertised and the one that predicts the least about your account.
- 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.
Five Kinds, Ranked by What They Predict
- 1. Practice experience in the matters you handle. Determines whether your most valuable pages can be written at all.
- 2. Legal marketing experience specifically. The pattern library: which terms waste money, which channel suits which practice area, how legal buyers behave.
- 3. Technical depth in search and paid advertising. Commodity skill, entirely necessary, and not conferred by either of the above.
- 4. Experience with firms of your size and market type. A programme for a twelve-office practice is not a smaller version of one for a solo.
- 5. Years in business. The most advertised, the least predictive of your outcome.
1. Practice Experience in Your Matters
This sits first because it governs the ceiling on your best pages.
The pages that earn the most valuable enquiries are the ones addressing the complicated version of a problem — the prior filing, the contested valuation, the multi-state wrinkle, the matter with assets at risk. Those searchers have the highest-value problems and they can tell within a paragraph whether the writer has handled one.
How to verify it: read a page they wrote on a complicated matter in a practice area you know well. You are the expert in the room for this test, which makes it the most reliable check available to you. Does it address what actually goes wrong, or is it a tidy overview of the straightforward case?
2. Legal Marketing Experience Specifically
Distinct from the above — a practising lawyer knows the law and may know nothing about why a campaign leaks money.
What this experience consists of: knowing that price-led queries produce price shoppers, that legal purchases happen by phone under stress from a shortlist of three, that criminal defence and estate planning need opposite channels, and what the advertising rules restrict.
How to verify it: ask which search terms they would exclude for your practice area on day one. A specific list — cheap, free, pro bono, DIY, salary, jobs, plus the adjacent practice areas you do not handle — indicates real experience. A general answer about keyword research does not.
3. Technical Depth
Entirely necessary and completely unglamorous. No amount of legal insight compensates for a slow site, a badly structured ad account or missing tracking.
How to verify it: ask what they would check first on your existing site. A competent answer is specific and fast — whether the phone number is tappable above the fold on mobile, page speed, title tags, internal linking, whether schema is present, whether conversions are even being recorded. A vague answer about a comprehensive audit is a different kind of answer.
4 and 5: Market Type and Years in Business
Experience with firms of your size matters in two directions. An agency that only serves large multi-office practices will arrive with a programme that assumes an internal marketing contact and a budget you do not have. One that only serves solos may not have the capacity for a genuinely large account. Ask for the range of firm sizes they work with and where you would sit in it.
Years in business predicts remarkably little. It correlates with having survived, which is something, and with having accumulated clients, which is not the same as having served them well. A long-established agency can be running an operating model from a different era of search; a newer one can be sharper and hungrier. The useful question is not how long they have existed but who will personally work on your account and what have they done — which is a question about a person, not a company.
Worth noting that years in business is also the credential most easily substituted for the others in a pitch, which is why it appears so prominently.
At Attorney Pro Marketing, categories one and two come from the same person: Alon Darvish, 17 years in practice, over 5,000 cases filed, who then marketed that firm himself to 40–50 new cases a month — so the practice experience and the legal marketing experience were acquired on the same account. Law firms only, which keeps category two concentrated rather than spread across nine industries.
On category three, the test is yours to run rather than ours to assert: your rankings are recorded on day 0 against up to 30 keywords of your own choosing, and the movement is reported on day 14 before you are billed for that period. Published pricing at $2,500, $3,500 and $4,500 a month, month to month with 30 days' notice.
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
In descending order of how well each predicts your outcome: direct practice experience in the matters you handle, legal marketing experience specifically, technical depth in search and advertising, experience with firms of your size and market, and years in business — which is the most advertised and least predictive.
Read a page they wrote about a complicated matter in a practice area you know well. You are the expert for that test, which makes it the most reliable check available. Judge whether it addresses what actually goes wrong or is a tidy overview of the straightforward case.
Ask what they would check first on your existing site. A competent answer is specific and fast — whether the phone number is tappable above the fold on mobile, page speed, title tags, internal linking, whether schema is present, whether conversions are being recorded at all.
Less than almost anything else. It correlates with having survived and with having accumulated clients, neither of which means having served them well, and a long-established agency may be running an operating model from an earlier era of search. Ask who will personally work on your account and what they have done.