Advertising and intake tracking for law firms

A law firm does not sell to a lead. It sells to a case, and most of the people who call are not one. They are outside the practice area, outside the state, past the deadline to file, already represented, or calling about a parking ticket. Intake sorts them, a conflict check clears the ones that remain, and a signed fee agreement or retainer is the first moment the firm has a client. Every ad platform the firm uses sees only the first step of that sequence.

That gap is expensive in legal because the clicks are expensive. Personal injury, criminal defense and family law are among the costliest keyword inventories in search, and Local Services Ads charge per lead in the same categories. A firm that optimizes either channel toward calls is paying premium prices to teach Google to find people who dial, which in practice means the unqualified callers intake spends its day filtering out.

Local Services Ads for lawyers are sold by practice area, with Google's own category names: personal injury, criminal, family, immigration, bankruptcy, estate, DUI and several more. Every advertiser now carries the same Google Verified badge. The screening for lawyers is different from the trades: identity verification for the owner, and for personal injury, a state bar license check for each lawyer in the firm, with professional liability insurance where local law requires it. Lawyer listings also need headshots. Plan for that paperwork before planning a launch date.

The record that decides whether any of this worked lives in the case management system: Clio, Filevine, Litify, MyCase or the intake software in front of them. The cases that were signed, their case type and, where the firm agrees a figure in advance, an expected value by case type. Sending that back to Google Ads is what lets bidding tell a soft-tissue claim from a trucking case, and it is the only report a managing partner should trust. Local Services Ads leads arrive without a click ID, so they are matched to cases by phone number and time instead, and we say so rather than promise an accuracy figure the data cannot support.

State bar advertising rules apply to every ad and every landing page, and they differ by state. Nothing on these pages is legal advice about them. Each niche below has the tracking guide for the practice area and, where we have written them, the Google Ads playbook and the Local Services Ads guide.