You Hire an Agency, They Build You a “Statewide” Campaign, and Six Months Later You’re Paying Chicago Prices for Downstate Leads
So you’re a firm in Illinois and you hire a marketing agency and they build you a campaign and the first month the numbers look okay and the second month the cost per lead starts climbing and by month four you’re paying $200 a click in Cook County for cases that settle for less than the ad spend and nobody can explain why, and you call the agency and they say “it’s competitive” which is true but isn’t an answer, and then you find out they’re running the same keywords in Peoria and Springfield where clicks cost $15 and the volume is there but the landing pages are written for Chicago because the agency built one campaign for the whole state, and this happens to maybe three or four firms a month that I talk to and it’s always the same story or something close to it.
But honestly the statewide campaign isn’t the real problem. The real problem is that Illinois isn’t one legal market pretending to be two; it’s two legal economies that happen to share a bar card and an ARDC number. Cook County has 70% of the state’s attorneys and the collar counties absorb most of the rest and then there are 93 counties splitting whatever’s left, and 32 of those counties have zero new attorneys according to the ARDC’s latest data, which means actual legal deserts where someone searching for a lawyer at 2 AM finds nothing local and the first firm with content targeting that county shows up as the only option.
96,821 total registered attorneys in Illinois. Of the 8,327 admitted in the last four years, 91.6% practice in Cook County or the collar counties. 75 counties have five or fewer new attorneys. The concentration isn’t slowing down.
The Chicago Side of the Split
And the thing that connects all of this is workers’ compensation, which is maybe the one practice area that genuinely spans both markets but in completely different ways. Illinois requires virtually every employer to carry comp from the first hire and benefits pay at two thirds of average weekly wage with a 45 day reporting window that catches a lot of injured workers off guard. In Chicago the cases are warehousing, construction, and manufacturing. Downstate they’re agriculture, factories, and mining. A content strategy that says “workers compensation lawyer Illinois” misses both of them because “warehouse back injury Chicago” and “farm equipment injury Peoria” are two different people in two different situations searching for two different things, which you’d think would be obvious but apparently it’s not.
Personal injury in Cook County runs $150 to $250 a click and I’ve watched firms spend six figures monthly on paid ads and still not know which cases came from where. Illinois switched to a 51% modified comparative fault threshold in 2023 which sounds like a footnote but it actually opened up cases that would’ve been barred at 50%, and the firms I’ve seen do this well are the ones whose content explains that shift so the person calling already knows they probably have a case. Local Services Ads by neighborhood in Chicago, not by city, because Cook County is too big for one campaign the same way Illinois is too big for one strategy, which I keep saying and which keeps being true.
DuPage County is one of the toughest criminal defense jurisdictions in the state and the people searching “DuPage County DUI lawyer” already know that, which is probably why the conversion rate on that keyword is higher than most generic Chicago terms I’ve tracked. The collar counties are family law and estate planning with higher household incomes and longer case cycles, and Cook County is where immigration lives because Chicago has significant Polish, Mexican, and Central American populations and if you’re not running multilingual content there you’re basically invisible to maybe a third of the market or more.
The Downstate Side of the Split
Downstate medical malpractice is a different animal than Chicago because the hospital systems are smaller and honestly the same physicians show up across multiple claims which changes the content strategy completely. Illinois gives you two years on the statute with a discovery rule that can stretch to four and a hard cap at eight for adults, and I’ve seen firms do well by targeting specific facility names and procedure types instead of “medical malpractice lawyer Illinois” which is what everyone else is running and which nobody downstate is actually searching. Springfield is state government and administrative law.
The Quad Cities straddle two states which creates content opportunities because people don’t know which state’s rules apply and that confusion maybe sound niche but convert because the person searching doesn’t know which state’s rules apply. Rockford is manufacturing injury. Champaign is university-adjacent employment law. Mass tort goes to the East St. Louis corridor because Madison and St. Clair counties have been plaintiff-friendly for decades and national firms file there specifically for the venue. Bankruptcy fills in the rest and I probably should’ve mentioned it earlier but there’s no clean place to put it so here we are.
The Rules and the Gaps
And here’s the part about legal deserts; they’re not just underserved, they’re uncontested. A firm in Springfield or Peoria or Champaign that builds content targeting the surrounding counties with zero attorneys shows up as the only option in those searches, and the ad costs are almost nothing because nobody else is bidding. The same budget that buys 10 clicks in the Loop buys real coverage across five downstate counties, and the leads convert at a higher rate because there’s no competition to comparison-shop against, which I’ve tried explaining to Chicago-only firms but most of them haven’t made the jump yet.
The Illinois Supreme Court doesn’t recognize specialty certifications. You can’t call yourself a “specialist” in your marketing. Awards must include a disclaimer that the Supreme Court does not recognize certifications of specialties. Every website and every ad we build has this baked in.
And then there are the new lead gen rules from July 2025 which changed things for basically every firm in the state that uses any kind of matching platform. The Illinois Supreme Court updated Rules 1.6 and 7.2 so now if you’re on any platform that connects you with potential clients you need a certification letter from the platform, you need to confirm the platform isn’t owned by an attorney who’s also listed on it, and you need to tell every client upfront that the connection came through a paid service. The ARDC also put out an AI guide in October 2025 and I’d recommend reading it because it’s probably the most practical thing the ARDC has published in years. Everything we build for content and AI search follows both, or at least it should and if it doesn’t I want to know. Ethics rules → Review ethics →
How I Build Illinois Campaigns
So the way I build campaigns in Illinois starts with which economy the firm operates in, or whether they straddle both, which a lot of collar county firms do. Chicago firms get neighborhood-level targeting on paid ads and Local Services Ads, GEO-structured content so AI tools cite the firm for Illinois statute questions, and tracking from first click to signed retainer by practice area and geography. Downstate firms get the legal desert play; long-tail content targeting the industries and courts specific to their region, ads on keywords nobody else is bidding on, and review management that builds the firm’s name in a market where reputation still travels by word of mouth as much as by Google, which honestly might be more true downstate than anywhere else I’ve worked.
Full data ownership. Website, hosting, analytics, ad accounts. Everything is yours. Reports → ROI →
Illinois Markets We Serve
Chicago, the collar counties, Springfield, Peoria, Rockford, Champaign Urbana, the Quad Cities, Bloomington Normal, Decatur, East St. Louis, and throughout central and southern Illinois. We work with firms nationwide too. Tell us about your market →
Are you running one campaign for two markets or two campaigns for one state?
Send me your setup and I’ll tell you whether your spend matches your geography, whether your content targets the industries actually generating cases in your area, and whether your site clears the lead gen and specialty disclaimer rules. If it’s already working I’ll tell you that too and we can both move on with our day, or don’t call, honestly either way.
Talk to Jorge → Phone or text: 941 626 9198
