What questions should I ask before signing a legal marketing contract?

“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 Nine Questions

These are conversation questions rather than contract clauses — what belongs in the written document is covered separately on our page about what an agency should put in writing. The purpose here is to surface, before signature, the things a contract tends to leave unstated.

Nine questions take about forty minutes. The engagement is likely to run into five figures over a year, which makes forty minutes a reasonable investment.

Term, Notice and Exit

Questions 1 and 7 are the pair that determines how much the rest matters, because they set what happens when you are wrong about everything else.

On term: a twelve-month commitment is common and the justification offered — that organic work needs time — is real. The problem is the asymmetry. You are committing a year on the basis of a sales conversation, and you will not have meaningful evidence about this particular agency on your particular account until around month three. If a long term is unavoidable, ask for a performance-based exit at month three or four, defined against the baseline.

On exit, the question is specific rather than general. Ask what happens to four things separately: the website files, the domain, the content, and the ad account with its history. Agencies frequently answer this with a single reassurance, and the four have different answers more often than not. Ask about each.

The follow-up that matters: "Will the site keep working the day after I stop paying?" If the site is built on the agency's proprietary platform, the honest answer is no, and that is worth knowing before rather than after.

Fee, Scope and Price Changes

Question 2 is where most unpleasant surprises live. The specific things worth naming aloud, because they are the ones commonly billed separately: hosting, call tracking, landing pages, the reporting platform, stock photography, additional pages beyond the included count, and the media spend itself.

Ask for the exclusions explicitly — "what will I be invoiced for that is not in this monthly figure?" — rather than reading the inclusions. The inclusions are in the proposal. The exclusions generally are not.

Question 8 catches the slower version of the same problem. Percentage-of-spend management fees rise automatically as the programme succeeds, which is a structure worth understanding before it happens rather than discovering in month eight. Ask whether the fee is fixed, and if not, what moves it.

Ownership and Who Does the Work

Question 3 has a verification step attached, and it is the only question on this list you can check yourself rather than taking on trust. Look up the domain at a public WHOIS service. The registrant is a matter of public record, and a mismatch between what you are told and what is recorded is a serious signal.

For the ad account, the thing to understand is that ownership follows whoever created it. An agency granting your firm access to an account they created has given you a permission, not a transfer — and permissions can be withdrawn. The clean arrangement is an account created in the firm's name with the agency added as a manager.

Question 4 matters more in legal marketing than in most sectors, because legal content carries advertising-rule exposure. Ask who writes it, whether they have written for law firms before, and whether any part of the work is passed to a white-label vendor. Then ask the version of the question that actually predicts your experience: "Who will be in this account in month seven?" Onboarding attention is not representative, and month seven is when accounts quietly degrade.

Measurement

Questions 5 and 6 are the ones that make the engagement auditable, and they are the most frequently skipped.

The baseline is simple: current rankings for your target terms, current call volume, current profile position, current organic traffic — written down before any work starts. An agency that will produce one within the first fortnight is an agency whose later reports can be checked. One that treats the request as unusual has told you something.

Question 6 should produce specifics. "Growth" and "improved visibility" are not answers. What you want is roughly: which terms should have moved, by how much, what call volume change is expected, and at what point the arithmetic should start covering the fee. Written down in month one, that becomes the thing you measure against rather than a retrospective argument.

Question 9 is a character question more than an information one. Real answers exist — a firm at capacity, broken intake, a practice area without search demand, a market where the economics do not work. An agency that has had those conversations will give you one readily. An agency for which no such circumstance exists is telling you that the recommendation is always yes.

How to Read the Answers

Three patterns, independent of content:

1. Speed. Questions about term, ownership and exclusions should be answered immediately by anyone who has had the conversation before. Hesitation on basics usually means the answer is unfavourable rather than unknown.
2. Specificity under follow-up. General answers are fine initially. What matters is whether a follow-up produces detail or more generality. "We'll get you ranking" followed by "for which terms, from what position?" is where the useful information appears.
3. Willingness to put it in writing. The single most reliable test. Every answer that matters should survive the question "can you put that in the agreement?" An answer that was confident in conversation and becomes difficult in writing was not an answer.

Attorney Pro Marketing's answers to all nine are the same before and after signature, which is the point of publishing them. Month to month with 30 days' notice, so question 1 is short. Published pricing at $2,500, $3,500 and $4,500 with hosting and call tracking inside the tier and no percentage of ad spend, so questions 2 and 8 are arithmetic. Domain, hosting and ad account set up in the firm's name. The work is done by Alon Darvish — 17 years in practice, over 5,000 cases filed, in month one and in month seven.

On questions 5 and 6: there is a day 0 baseline taken before anything is built and a day 14 report against it before you are billed for that period. And on question 9 — a firm at capacity, a firm whose phone goes unanswered, or a practice area without real search demand should fix those things first, and we would rather say so at the start than take the engagement.

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