The number that changed how I think about marketing budgets is that the firms growing fastest aren’t just spending more, they’re spending roughly three times more as a percentage of revenue than the firms that aren’t growing, and they’re more profitable while doing it, which breaks the assumption most attorneys have that marketing is a…

Every attorney I talk to asks the same thing before they spend a dollar on marketing, which is ‘what should I expect back’ and the honest answer is it depends on about five variables that most agencies never walk you through.

At Percy Martinez we ran both channels for years and I spent a lot of that time treating PPC as the real marketing and SEO as the thing we did on the side because the agency said we should, and it wasn’t until I looked at the numbers over a three-year window instead of monthly…

At Percy Martinez I learned that the person approving the marketing budget doesn’t care about clicks or impressions or cost per lead. Percy wanted to know one thing: if I give you this money today, when does it come back and how much bigger. And I didn’t have a good answer for a while because…

I saw this firsthand at Percy Martinez. The agency kept showing us more clicks, Percy kept saying the leads weren’t turning into cases, and I couldn’t figure out which side was wrong until I pulled the data apart and realized both sides were measuring different things and neither one was tracking to the signed case

At Percy Martinez the marketing budget kept going up every year and for a long time I thought that meant something was wrong, but what I eventually understood is that PI economics are different from every other practice area and the firms that try to run PI marketing on a family law budget end up…

For years at Percy Martinez I calculated our cost per case using only the ad spend, and when I finally added the agency fee and the intake salaries and the software the number was about 40% higher than what I’d been reporting to the partners, which was an uncomfortable conversation but at least it was…

At Percy Martinez I thought we had bad marketing for about two years before I realized the marketing was fine and our intake was losing half the leads before anyone picked up the phone, and that’s a more common problem than most firms want to admit.

I spent years at Percy Martinez calculating ROI wrong because I was using the numbers the agencies gave me instead of the numbers that came out of our case management system, and the gap between those two versions of reality is basically what this whole post is about.

The solo attorneys I’ve worked with who do well on tight budgets aren’t doing anything complicated, they’re just not wasting money on the things that big firms can afford to waste money on, and that difference in discipline is basically the whole strategy.

The industry data on mass tort retention is kind of brutal; roughly 40% of signed retainers never make it to filing because something breaks during medical review or proof of use or duplicate checks, and most firms don’t track that number because everything upstream looks fine.

A solo attorney in Orlando told me he was saving money buying shared leads at $75 each and I asked him how many calls he got from angry people asking why he was the fourth lawyer to call them that day, and he said ‘most of them,’ which is sort of the whole problem in…

A med mal firm in Tampa was celebrating a $150 cost per lead until I asked how many of those leads had actually signed and the room got quiet, because the answer was one out of a hundred and the real cost per signed case was closer to $15,000.

Somebody told a managing partner that 13.4 leads per signed case is the industry average and now he’s using it to evaluate every channel the same way, which is sort of like saying the average temperature in the US is 55 degrees and then packing for Alaska.

Two PI firms in South Florida spending the same budget, one buying cheap leads and one buying expensive ones, and the firm paying more per lead was signing more cases for less money, which made no sense until I looked at the intake numbers.

I got tired of hearing attorneys say ‘the leads are bad’ without being able to prove it with numbers, so I built the audit framework I wish someone had given me ten years ago.

I spent ten years listening to attorneys tell me their agency delivered 200 leads and they signed three cases, and it took me a while to realize that the agency and the attorney weren’t even using the same word to mean the same thing

Every January the same agencies publish the same trends list with the same buzzwords and nobody ever goes back to check which predictions were wrong, so I figured I’d write one that names the hype out loud.”

Every article ranking for “should I hire a marketing agency or do it in-house” is written by an agency, which means the answer is always “hire an agency” and the reasoning always sounds convincing because agencies are good at marketing, that’s literally what they do. There’s no honest version of this comparison available to the…

Every “marketing on a budget” article for lawyers starts with paid ads, which is the wrong starting point when the budget is $1,500 a month. At that spend level Google Ads might produce a handful of leads if the targeting is tight, and the math on cost per lead versus what a family law case…

So I was scrolling TikTok maybe four months ago and saw a PI attorney in Orlando do a 45 second video about what happens when you sign a medical release for the insurance company, and he didn’t dance and he didn’t point at text on the screen and he didn’t do any of the stuff…

A managing partner forwarded me his agency’s monthly report last fall and it was gorgeous; green arrows everywhere, impressions up 40%, clicks up 25%, and a big bold number at the top saying they’d generated 147 leads that month. And then he forwarded me his intake log from the same month and out of those…

Immigration is the fastest-growing practice area in legal and somehow almost nobody in legal marketing has written anything useful about how to actually market an immigration firm, which tells you a lot about how little most agencies understand about the clients they’re supposed to be reaching.

Nobody at the firm ever sat me down and said here’s the number, and every time I asked an agency they gave me a range so wide it was useless, like telling someone their dinner will cost between $20 and $2,000.

“I spent 10 years watching law firms sign contracts they couldn’t leave and lose websites they thought they owned, so I wrote down 15 questions to ask first.”