Lemon-law firm: built from the ground up 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 firm’s own teams also contributed.

The starting problem

Ground-up launch. A startup lemon-law practice had no acquisition infrastructure and no consistent way to screen whether a caller’s vehicle was eligible. Ad spend started from zero.

What we changed

1. Built make-, model- and problem-specific campaigns and pages. Lemon-law clients search by car and defect, so campaigns and pages were organized the same way.

2. Introduced eligibility screening before attorney review. Callers answered the questions an eligibility decision turns on before a file reached an attorney, so attorney time went to real candidates.

3. Connected signed-case outcomes to advertising optimization. Signed cases fed back into bidding and budgets, so the program optimized for cases rather than calls (Google).

The program ran on Google Search, SEO, Meta and remarketing, with content developed for both conventional and AI-assisted search discovery. 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 case: none established before launch → $2,500 at scale.
• Signed cases: 0 → 120 a month.
• Projected fee-value return on ad spend: untracked → 4×.
• Annual revenue run rate: $0 → $12M. This is the firm’s total. Many factors contributed to it, and it is not revenue we claim to have caused.
• Other wins: Spanish-language acquisition and intake; search visibility for targeted makes and models; documented AI-search mentions for selected monitored queries; faster document collection.
• Engagement: 30 months, with ad spend growing from zero to about $300K a month.

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

How it was measured

Signed cases were counted from the firm’s own case records, not from platform reports. Spend came from the ad accounts the firm owned. Projected fee-value return on ad spend is the projected attorney-fee value of signed cases divided by ad spend. A launch has no “before” to compare against, so we show where the program started and where it got to. 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 lemon-law practice can be built on search, because clients describe their problem in exact words: the make, the model, the defect. Meet those words with pages and screening that answer them. The practice detail is on our lemon law page.