Questions to Ask a Legal Marketing Agency

Hiring a marketing agency shouldn’t feel like a leap of faith. Five plain questions cover experience, deliverables, measurement, ownership and the first 90 days. Ask them of any agency you talk to.

Most pitches sound the same on a call.

Every agency promises more visibility, more leads and more growth. On a sales call it is hard to tell a team that already knows law firms from one that is about to learn on your budget.

Five plain questions usually tell you. They are not trick questions. A good agency answers each one directly, puts the answer in writing and does not change the subject. If an answer turns vague, that is your answer.

Ask for proof you can check.

A page of logos proves very little. Anyone can put a law firm’s name on a slide. What you want is a case study: a named client, the practice area, what the agency actually did and what changed because of it.

“Firms like yours” matters too. Marketing a personal injury practice is not the same as marketing an estate planning practice. The searches differ, the urgency differs and so does the value of a signed case. Ask for examples in your practice area, from a firm of a similar size, in a similar kind of market.

Then check what you are shown. Ask whether you can speak to the client. Look the firm up and see whether the work described is visible. Any client result an agency shares should be shared with that client’s permission and within the bar’s advertising rules.

Deliverables and dates in writing.

“We’ll improve your online presence” is not a deliverable. A deliverable is something you can point to: an audit, a set of rewritten pages, a Google Business Profile cleanup, a monthly report. Each one should have a date.

Ask the agency to write out the first month: what arrives, on which day and in what form. The calendar here shows the shape to look for. An audit in the first days, the first page updates live within a couple of weeks, the first report at the end of the month. Your dates will differ. The point is that there are dates.

When deliverables are written down, both sides know what good looks like. When they are not, a slow month is easy to explain away and you are left judging the work by how the calls feel.

Make signed cases the number that counts.

Clicks and impressions are easy to report and easy to grow. They are also a long way from what pays the firm. A report full of rising charts can sit alongside a quiet phone.

Ask which number the agency expects to be judged by. For a law firm the honest answer is signed cases, and what each one cost. Getting there takes a chain: calls and forms, then consultations, then signed cases. Search and website data cover the start of that chain. The rest lives in your intake records, so a good agency will ask for them and explain how they will be used.

If an agency cannot say how its work connects to consultations and signed cases, it is asking you to take the results on trust. See how we report to signed cases.

Confirm you keep ownership. Always.

Some agencies build your site on their own platform, register the domain in their name or run your ads from an account they control. It works fine until you want to leave. Then the website, the review profile or years of ad history can stay behind with them.

So ask it plainly: when the contract ends, what do we keep? The answer you want is everything. The website and its content, the domain, your Google Business Profile, your ad accounts and your analytics should all sit in the firm’s name, with the agency given access rather than the other way round.

Get it in the contract, not just on the call. It costs a good agency nothing to agree.

A written plan with real checkpoints.

Good marketing takes time, and nobody honest will promise rankings or case numbers for the first quarter. That is exactly why the first 90 days need checkpoints. Without them, “give it time” can stretch on with nothing to show.

A plan with real checkpoints looks something like this. On day 1, an audit of where things stand today, delivered in writing. By day 30, the first fixes and updates are live and you get a log of what changed. At day 90, a results review: what moved, what did not and what comes next.

Each checkpoint leaves you with something you keep. If the answer to this question is “trust the process”, ask what the process is.

Ask us all five.

Bring these questions to a free strategy call with Rubiks. We will answer each one plainly, show you how we work and tell you what we would look at first for your firm.

Your website and accounts always stay yours, and the free website audit you get after the call is yours to keep, whether you hire us or not.

Key takeaways.

• Ask for case studies, not logosA named client, the practice area, the work and what changed.
• Get deliverables and dates in writingWhat arrives, on which day, in what form.
• Judge the work by signed casesClicks and impressions are the start of the chain, not the end.
• Keep ownership of everythingWebsite, domain, Google profile, ad accounts and analytics in the firm’s name.
• Insist on checkpoints for the first 90 daysDay 1, day 30 and day 90, each with something you keep.

More answers, in plain English.

SEO or ads first?

Start with your timeline and where new inquiries get stuck.

Is AI answering your clients?

What AI Overviews mean for your website, and what to write now.

A search isn’t a signed case.

The six steps between someone finding your firm and hiring you.

Five seconds.

What a visitor must see before they decide to stay or leave.

Book your free strategy call.

No pitch deck. No pressure. We look at where your inquiries come from and where they are slipping away, and you get a free website audit to keep, whether you hire us or not.

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