When should a law firm start marketing?

The firms that call us are almost always three months later than they needed to be. Not because they were careless — because the moment marketing becomes obviously urgent is the moment it's least able to help.

Here's the honest timing, what to do first when there's no budget, and why being busy is the right time to start rather than a reason to wait.

The short answer

Start the day you know which cases you want. Not the day the pipeline empties.

Everything worth having runs on a delay. If you begin when the calendar looks thin, the only thing that can help in time is paid advertising — so you end up buying the most expensive option under the most pressure, which is exactly the wrong order.

The lag is the whole problem

Three lanes, three different speeds, and picking the right one depends entirely on how much time you have.

Ads work in days. Money in, calls out, this week. That's the point of them and also the catch — it stops the day you stop paying, and you're bidding against firms who've been refining the same campaigns for years.

Reviews work in weeks. Ask ten clients, get six, and your profile looks different within a month. This is the highest-return thing most firms aren't doing, and it costs nothing but the asking.

Search works in months. Pages take time to be found and trusted. Six months is a fair expectation, longer in a competitive city. It also compounds, and it's the only one still working the month you stop spending.

So the answer to when depends on which lane you need. If you need cases in three weeks, you need ads and there's no way around it. If you'd like not to be in that position next year, the work starts now.

The week-one list, for no money

Before any budget, four things. All free, all doable in an afternoon, and all still undone at most firms.

Claim and fill your Google Business Profile. Categories, practice areas, hours, real photos. This sends more calls to most firms than anything else they own, and it's the first thing to get right.

Answer the phone. Unglamorous and decisive. The firm that responds first signs the case, and no amount of marketing survives a phone nobody picks up. If you're in court all day, that's a real constraint with real solutions — but it needs a solution, not a resolution to try harder. It's the whole problem in one sentence.

Ask your last ten clients for a review. Not a campaign. Ten messages, sent today. Ask right after the matter closes, make it one tap, and expect roughly half to do it.

Write down which cases you actually want. Case types, counties, the client you'd like more of. Everything after this is decided by that list, and firms that skip it end up marketing to everyone and reaching nobody.

Do those four and you've done more than most firms do in their first year, for nothing.

Start when you're busy

Most people think you market when work is slow. Actually the busy stretch is when it works best, and it's the harder sell.

Three reasons, none of them clever.

You can afford it. Marketing paid for out of a good quarter is a decision. Marketing paid for out of a bad one is a gamble with the rent.

The delay costs you nothing. Six months of search work is painless when the calendar's full. It's agony when it isn't, and firms cancel in month three — right before the part that pays.

You have the raw material. Recent matters, fresh clients to ask for reviews, live questions you're being asked on the phone this week. That's what the pages get written from. It's much harder to write convincingly about work you're not currently doing.

The version of this we see most often: a firm has a strong year, does nothing, has a quiet quarter, and calls in a panic. The gap between those two moments was the cheap window, and it closed.

The order to spend in

Once there's money, the sequence matters more than the amount. Roughly this, and each step earns the next.

First, fix what's already broken. Unanswered calls, a profile missing half its fields, no reviews in two years. This costs nothing and it's the highest return available to you, because everything you spend later runs through it. Pouring traffic into a firm that doesn't answer just costs more per lost case.

Second, a small site you can defend. Enough pages to say who you are and what you handle, written like a lawyer rather than a brochure. This is also the point where the budget conversation becomes a real one, because you now know what you're buying.

Third, start the slow lane. Pages about the work you actually want, added steadily. This is the part that's still paying in three years, and the part that gets cut first when firms start late and panic early.

Fourth, add ads if you need volume now. Not because ads are bad — because ads on top of a fixed intake and a real site convert far better than ads on top of neither. Same spend, more cases, purely from the order.

Firms that run this in reverse pay for clicks that land on a thin site and ring a phone nobody answers, then conclude that marketing doesn't work for law firms.

What not to build first

Don't spend your first money on a big website.

A new firm doesn't yet know which cases it wants, which means it doesn't know what the site should say. Twenty pages written before you know that is twenty pages you'll rewrite — and it's where a first marketing budget most often goes to die.

Start small and honest: who you are, what you handle, where you practise, and an obvious way to reach you. Then add pages as the answers arrive from real matters and real calls. The firm that writes five pages it can defend beats the one that bought twenty it can't.

And don't buy leads to fill a gap you haven't measured. If the phone isn't ringing, find out whether that's a demand problem or an answering problem first — they look identical from the outside and cost very different amounts to fix.

Then keep going. Read what produced calls each month, keep it, cut what didn't, and refine it as the practice takes shape. The compounding is real, but only for the firm that started early enough to still be there when it arrives.

Questions about getting started