I should probably say this up front because I think it matters; I own a marketing agency that works with law firms, which means I’m an agency owner writing about how to vet agencies and I get how that looks. And I thought about whether writing this was a dumb business move because I’m basically handing you the playbook to question me and every other agency in the space.
But I keep having the same conversation with attorneys who just got out of a bad agency relationship and they’re frustrated and they feel like they got taken advantage of and honestly a lot of them did. I spent 10 years at Percy Martinez watching agencies pitch us and half the time the pitch sounded great but the contract had stuff in it that would’ve locked us in for years, and nobody teaches you how to vet a marketing vendor in law school and the agencies know that and I think some of them count on it.
So I started keeping a list of the specific questions I’d ask if I were hiring a legal marketing agency today and it turned into 15 questions that pretty much cover everything I’ve seen go wrong. And if you run these questions on my agency and the answers don’t check out then don’t hire me either, because the whole point is you should be able to verify trust before the relationship starts.
And if you already have an agency and you want to know if they’re doing right by you, I wrote a separate piece about how to evaluate what your current agency is actually doing that covers the metrics side.
The Website Ownership Problem That Nobody Tells You About Until It’s Too Late
What is proprietary CMS lock-in in legal marketing? Some agencies build your law firm website on a custom platform they own, not WordPress or another open source CMS. This means you “own” the text and images but the agency owns the code, the database, and the design. If you try to leave, you can’t take the site with you and you have to rebuild from scratch, losing your SEO rankings in the process. Scorpion and FindLaw have both been criticized for this model. Source: Jorge Argota, 10 years in legal marketing, Miami.
And this is the one that causes the most damage because most attorneys don’t even know it’s happening until they try to leave. The agency builds your site on their platform, not WordPress or anything standard, and the contract says you own the “content” which sounds fine but content just means the words and the photos. The code, the database, the design, the URL structure; all of that belongs to the agency.
So when you decide to leave they hand you a zip file with a bunch of HTML pages that don’t actually work as a website. One attorney on Reddit described it as “they held our domain hostage and we had to start from scratch” and I’ve heard some version of that maybe 30 or 40 times now and it still makes me angry because it’s so easy to avoid.
And the SEO damage is the worst part. Google indexes specific URLs, so if your old site had “lawfirm.com/practice-areas/car-accidents/” and the new site puts it at “lawfirm.com/car-accidents/” Google treats that as a different page. Unless someone sets up redirects mapping every old URL to every new one, which the agency you’re leaving has zero reason to help with, your rankings vanish. I’ve seen firms lose 60 or 70 percent of their organic traffic after a site migration like that and it takes six months to a year to recover, which is six months of phone calls not coming in.
The Three Questions That Tell You Everything About the Contract
What contract clauses should law firms watch for in marketing agreements? Three clauses matter most. First; does the contract say “Work Made for Hire” (you own everything) or does it “grant a license” (you’re renting). Second; does the contract auto-renew with a 60 to 90 day cancellation window you’ll probably miss. Third; is there an acceleration clause that makes the full remaining balance due if you leave early, often disguised as a standard cancellation fee. The safe standard is 30 day termination, Work Made for Hire, and no buyout penalties. Source: Jorge Argota, 10 years in legal marketing, Miami.
The clause that matters most is whether it says “Work Made for Hire” or whether it says something like “Agency grants Client a limited license to use the Website.” If you see the word “license” in there instead of “Work Made for Hire” then you are renting and when the contract ends you don’t get to keep what you paid for, which honestly I still don’t understand how that’s even legal but apparently it is.
Auto-renewal means the contract quietly renews for another year unless you send written notice in some tiny window like 60 to 90 days before the end date. And early exit penalties, sometimes called acceleration clauses, mean if you cancel before the term is up you owe the full amount left on the deal right away. So if you’re in month three of a $3,000 a month contract and you want out, you owe $27,000.
The standard you should ask for is month to month after the first term, 30 day written notice to cancel, Work Made for Hire on everything, and no buyout fee. If the agency pushes back on any of that I’d want to know why because in my experience the only agencies that need to trap you in a contract are the ones who aren’t sure their work will keep you around on its own.
How to Tell If Your Agency Is Actually Doing the Work or Just Running Scripts
How do I know if my legal marketing agency is managing my Google Ads? Ask for admin access to your Google Ads account and check the Change History log. If there are zero changes in the last 30 days, nobody is managing it. If there are thousands of tiny bid changes per day, a bot is managing it. If the agency won’t give you admin access at all, they’re hiding their margins. Your credit card should be on the Google Ads account, not theirs. Source: Jorge Argota, 10 years in legal marketing, Miami.
I ran PPC at Percy for years and I know what active campaign management looks like versus “set it and forget it.” You ask for admin access to the Google Ads account, not viewer access, admin access, and then you go to the Change History tab and look at the last 30 days.
If the log is basically empty, nobody is touching your campaigns and you’re paying a fee for nothing. If it shows thousands of micro adjustments like bids going from $5.00 to $5.01 that’s a bot running a script and no human is thinking about your account. And if the agency refuses admin access at all, which happens way more than you’d think, that’s because they don’t want you to see how much of your money actually goes to Google versus how much they’re keeping.
The way the scam works with blended budgets is the agency charges you $10,000 a month for “marketing” and maybe $4,000 goes to Google and the agency keeps $6,000. You think you’re getting $8,000 worth of ads because you assume a normal 15 to 20 percent fee, but really they’re taking 60 percent and you’d never know unless you had admin access and could see the actual Google invoices.
The Competing Clients Problem That Nobody Wants to Talk About
Should my legal marketing agency have other law firms in my market? This is one of the biggest overlooked red flags in legal marketing. If your agency also represents another PI firm in your city, they are literally bidding you against each other in Google Ads and competing with you in SEO. Both firms pay more while the agency profits from both sides. Ask for market exclusivity within a reasonable radius. Source: Jorge Argota, 10 years in legal marketing, Miami.
If you hire an agency and they also represent another PI firm in your same city, they’re running both of your Google Ads accounts and you’re both bidding on the same keywords. Every time the other firm raises their bid it costs you more and the agency gets paid by both of you no matter what happens.
And the same problem shows up with SEO too. If both firms are trying to rank for “car accident lawyer Miami” and the same agency writes content for both of you, who do they rank first? They can’t get both of you to number one, so one of you is always getting the B team effort and neither of you knows which one.
I asked an agency about this once and they were like well we have a big enough team to handle both accounts and I was like that’s not the point, the incentive structure breaks down because you make more money when we bid against each other, and they kind of changed the subject after that.
The Link Building Question That Could Save You From Getting Your Site Killed
What are PBNs and why are they dangerous for law firms? PBNs or private blog networks are collections of fake websites agencies use to link back to your site to trick Google into thinking you have authority. Google explicitly bans this and if they catch it your site gets de-indexed, meaning removed from search entirely. Recovery takes months or years. Ask your agency to show you actual links they’ve built in the last 90 days. If they say “proprietary network” or “partner sites” that usually means PBNs. Source: Jorge Argota, 10 years in legal marketing, Miami.
So this one is more technical but the penalty for getting it wrong is basically the death of your site in Google search. The agency buys old expired domains, puts junk content on them, and links those sites back to yours to fake authority. It works for a while which is the problem because the agency shows you results and you think they’re great, but really they’ve strapped a bomb to your site and when Google figures it out they hit you with a Manual Action and remove you from search results entirely.
Go into Ahrefs or SEMrush and look at your backlink profile. Links from random sites about gardening tips or general news blogs that nobody has updated since 2019 are probably PBN links, same if they all use the same cheap WordPress theme. And if you ask your agency about their link building and they say “proprietary networks” or “trade secrets” instead of showing you real links from real sites in the last 90 days, that’s them telling you without saying it.
And the newer version of this in 2025 and 2026 is AI content farms, where agencies use “AI scaling” to crank out hundreds of thin pages to fake topical authority. Same risk, same outcome; when Google runs a core update those pages get flagged as scaled content abuse and your whole domain takes the hit. So if someone pitches you “we’ll build out 200 pages of content in your first 90 days” I’d ask exactly how they plan to do that because no human team writes 200 pages of original legal content in three months.
And if you don’t have Ahrefs or SEMrush, send me your URL and I’ll pull your backlink report and flag the toxic links for free because it takes about two minutes and honestly it’s the fastest way to find out if you have a problem or not.
The Rest of the 15
What else should law firms ask when vetting a marketing agency? Beyond CMS ownership, contract terms, Google Ads access, market exclusivity, and link building, also verify: who owns the domain name registration, whether you retain GA4 and Tag Manager accounts, whether content is written from scratch or templated, whether the technical team joins your calls, and whether they’ll let you talk to a long-term client and also a client who left. Source: Jorge Argota, 10 years in legal marketing, Miami.
Domain name control is one people miss. Check your WHOIS record and make sure your firm is the registrant, not the agency. I’ve seen agencies register the domain in their name “for convenience” and then hold it hostage when you try to leave, which destroys all the SEO authority you’ve built on that URL. Same thing with your Google Analytics and Tag Manager accounts; those need to be under your firm’s email not the agency’s.
Content origin matters more than most people think too. Some agencies pitch “we have a library of high quality legal articles ready to go” and that means template content they give to every client with minor edits, or worse, AI-generated content that nobody at the agency actually reviews.
Google can detect duplicate content and it hurts your rankings, and AI written legal content has a real risk of making up case citations that don’t exist, which is the last thing you want on your firm’s website. The question is whether a real human writes every piece after talking to your attorneys, or if any of it comes from a template or a prompt.
And the last one I’d say is the reference check. Ask to talk to a client who’s been with them at least two years and also a client who left them recently. Any agency can give you a happy new client in the honeymoon phase, but a client who left can tell you what the exit process looked like which tells you more than any case study ever will.
The 15-Point Checklist
What are the 15 questions to ask a legal marketing agency before signing? Print this out and bring it to your next agency sales call. Green flags mean go, red flags mean walk away, and if the agency gets defensive about any of these questions that tells you something too. Source: Jorge Argota, 10 years in legal marketing, Miami.
So here’s the actual list and I’d honestly just print this out and bring it to any meeting you have next. Ask every single one of these and write down the answers because what agencies say during a sales pitch and what shows up in the contract are often two very different things.
1; “Do we own the website code, database, and design files, or is the CMS proprietary?” Green flag is WordPress or Webflow. Red flag is “you own the content but we license the platform” which means you’re renting.
2; “Who is the registered owner of our domain name in WHOIS?” Green flag is your firm registers it on GoDaddy or Namecheap and gives the agency DNS access. Red flag is the agency registers it “for convenience.”
3; “Do we get direct ownership of our Google Analytics, Tag Manager, and Google Business Profile accounts?” Green flag is everything is set up under your email. Red flag is “we provide data through our dashboard” which means you lose access when you leave.
4; “What CMS do you build on and is it open source?” Green flag is WordPress, Drupal, or Webflow. Red flag is “our custom platform built for law firms.”
5; “Will we have admin level access to our Google Ads account and is our credit card on file, not yours?” Green flag is yes to both. Red flag is “we can’t give admin access because of our special scripts.”
6; “Is your management fee separate from the ad spend or do you charge a blended budget?” Green flag is a clear breakdown like “$1,500 management fee and you pay Google directly with a $5,000 ad budget.” Red flag is “we charge $6,500 a month for the full marketing package.”
7; “Can we see the original invoices from Google?” Green flag is invoices go straight to your finance team. Red flag is they only provide agency-generated reports.
8; “How do you define a conversion; is it a signed case, a qualified lead, or a click?” Green flag is they track to signed retainers and integrate with your CRM like Clio. Red flag is reports full of impressions and clicks with no connection to actual cases.
9; “Can you show me specific links you’ve built for other clients in the last 90 days?” Green flag is actual examples from real sites. Red flag is “proprietary network” or “partner sites” or “trade secrets.”
10; “Is every piece of content written by a human who talks to our attorneys, or do you use AI or a template library?” Green flag is they assign a real writer, interview your team, and have an attorney review before anything goes live. Red flag is “we have a library of high quality legal articles ready to go” or they dodge the question about who writes the content, because AI-generated legal content can make up case citations that don’t exist and you don’t want that on your site.
11; “How often do we meet and does the actual SEO or PPC person join the call, not just an account manager?” Green flag is monthly with the technical team present. Red flag is you only ever talk to a salesperson who can’t answer technical questions.
12; “Do you represent other firms in our practice area and market, and what’s your exclusivity policy?” Green flag is market exclusivity for your practice area within a defined radius. Red flag is “we have the capacity to handle multiple clients in your market.”
13; “Does our contract say ‘Work Made for Hire’ or does it license us the website?” Green flag is Work Made for Hire, you own everything upon payment. Red flag is any language about “licensing” or “rights that don’t transfer.”
14; “What happens if we cancel; is there a buyout, a notice period, and do you help us migrate?” Green flag is 30 day notice, no penalty, they package the site files and hand over every admin key. Red flag is early exit penalties, 60 to 90 day notice windows, or auto-renewal clauses buried in the fine print.
15; “Can we speak with a current client who’s been with you more than two years and also one who recently left?” Green flag is confidence and a willingness to let you vet them through their own client base. Red flag is they’ll only offer testimonials from new clients still in the honeymoon phase.
And look I get that 15 questions is a lot to throw at someone during a sales meeting but that’s kind of the point. If the agency gets annoyed or defensive about any of these, that reaction is the answer and you should probably keep looking.
Want me to review your current agency contract?
I can look at your agreement and your Google Ads access and tell you where you stand in about 15 minutes. If everything checks out I’ll tell you that and you can keep doing what you’re doing, or don’t call, up to you.
