Law Firm Marketing ROI Calculator: What Should You Expect?

Every attorney I talk to asks the same question before they commit to a marketing budget, which is “what should I expect back” and the honest answer is it depends on your practice area, your market, your average case value, your intake speed, and your conversion rate, and most agencies skip all five of those variables and just tell you how many leads they’ll send.

The calculator above uses industry benchmarks from CallRail, First Page Sage, and Consultwebs to estimate what a given monthly budget should produce in your practice area. When you select a practice area the defaults fill in with average cost per lead, lead-to-case conversion rate, and average case fee for that area, and you can adjust any of those to match your actual numbers if you have them.

The outputs show estimated monthly leads, projected signed cases, cost per signed case, and the revenue-to-cost ratio which is the metric that tells you whether the marketing is actually profitable after you account for the spend. A ratio below 3:1 means marketing is eating too much of the revenue it generates. At 5:1 the math works and there’s margin left. At 10:1 or above the marketing is creating real wealth.

The cost per signed case number is the one I think matters most because it connects the marketing spend directly to the business outcome. If the calculator shows a cost per case of $3,000 and your average fee is $15,000, you’re spending 20% of the case revenue on acquisition, which is within the range most PI firms consider healthy. If it shows $3,000 and your average fee is $5,000, that’s 60% and the economics don’t work unless the case values go up or the acquisition cost comes down.

The SEO break-even estimate at the bottom is based on First Page Sage data showing the average law firm takes about 14 months to recoup its SEO investment, with a 526% return over three years as the content compounds. That timeline varies by practice area, with med mal and mass tort taking longer and criminal defense and immigration breaking even faster because the competition for organic keywords is lower.

These are projections, not promises, and I want to be clear about that. Your actual results depend on how fast your intake team responds to leads, whether your landing pages convert, how well your campaigns are managed, and what your competitors are doing in the same market. But the calculator gives you a baseline to evaluate whether a proposed budget makes sense before you commit to it, and it gives you a framework to measure the actual results once the campaigns are running.

If the numbers look right and you want to compare these projections against your real data, or if something looks off and you want to understand why, send me your current spend and case volume and I’ll run the comparison for free.