Legal-services brand: from launch to a $12M revenue run rate

Results as reported by our founder, from the firm’s own records; rounded. Anonymized. This is work our founder led before founding Probative; the business’s own teams also contributed.

The starting problem

Launch from scratch. A startup set out to become a national legal-services brand. It had no established acquisition funnel, no settled service positioning and no reliable conversion tracking, so there was nothing yet to learn from. Ad spend started at about $20K a month.

What we changed

1. Narrowed the initial offer to high-intent services. The launch led with the services people were already searching for and ready to buy, rather than the whole menu.

2. Continuously tested service-specific landing pages. Each service got its own page, and the pages were tested against each other on signed engagements, not just form fills.

3. Built automated follow-up tied to CRM stages. Email and SMS follow-up fired from each stage in the CRM, so no inquiry waited on someone remembering to call back.

The program ran on Google Search, Meta, SEO, email, SMS and remarketing. Remarketing ran only within each platform’s policies, and no Customer Match or look-alike audiences were built from client lists.

The results

• Cost per signed engagement: $2,500 during the initial paid launch → $1,250 at scale (−50%).
• Signed engagements: 8 → 200 a month as spending increased from about $20K to $250K a month (+2,400%).
• Fee-value return on ad spend: 2× → 4×.
• Annual revenue run rate: $0 before launch → $12M. This is the business’s total. Many factors contributed to it, and it is not revenue we claim to have caused.
• Other wins: bilingual landing pages and intake; median first response under 2 minutes; automated nurture; growing branded-search demand.
• Engagement: 30 months.

The figures are as reported by our founder from the business’s own records, rounded. We don’t publish its name, location or dates.

How it was measured

Signed engagements were counted from the business’s own records, not from platform reports. Spend came from the ad accounts the business owned. Return on ad spend is the fee value of signed engagements divided by ad spend. Percentages are computed from the figures above and rounded; the growth in signed engagements came with a large increase in spend, so it is not a like-for-like comparison. Today the same measurement runs every week in our Monday report, under The Probative Standard and our method for reporting results.

What this means for your firm

A launch doesn’t need the whole menu on day one. Lead with the services people already search for, measure signed engagements from the start, and let follow-up run itself. See how we approach law firm marketing.