A legal-services launch cuts what each new client costs in half

Results as reported by our founder, from the firm’s own records; rounded. Anonymized. This is work our founder has led outside Probative, at other companies; the business’s own teams also contributed.

The starting problem

First campaigns, no tracking yet. A legal-services business was starting to advertise. It had no established acquisition funnel, no settled service positioning and no reliable conversion tracking, so there was nothing yet to learn from.

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 (the system that tracks every inquiry), 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 (what each new client cost the business): cut in half from the initial paid launch to scale (−50%).
• Signed engagements: more than 20 times as many a month as spending grew.
• Fee-value return on ad spend: 2× → 4×, measured as fees for each dollar spent on ads.
• Other wins: bilingual pages and intake, a median first response under 2 minutes, automated follow-up for people not yet ready to sign, and more people searching for the business by name.

We publish percentages and multiples only, as reported by our founder from the business’s own records and rounded down. We don’t publish its name, location, spend, counts 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 business’s figures and rounded down; the growth in signed engagements came with a large increase in spend, so it is not a like-for-like comparison. Probative’s own signed-case reporting counts the same way, following 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.