Services: SEO, AI search and ads for law firms

Probative does two kinds of work for law firms and judges both on one number. SEO and AI search help people find your firm, and name it, when they look for a lawyer. Ads, search and social win the click when they are ready to call. Both are judged on signed cases, counted in your own records and reported every Monday.

Two pillars, and the work under both

If you want all of it as one program, law firm marketing is the page that puts the pieces in order.

The one number: a signed case

A signed case is a client who signed your engagement agreement, as recorded in your own case-management system (your CRM, such as Litify, Lead Docket, Clio Grow or Filevine). We count it once, on the date it was signed. For practices that don’t work on contingency, such as family, criminal defense, estate planning and immigration, a signed case means a retained client.

Every Monday you get a report that shows what each signed case cost, by channel and by language, checked against your records. If our count and yours differ, the report prints the gap. The rules behind every number are published in The Probative Standard, and the method page shows how we will report results.

We count this way because the usual numbers mislead. A platform’s “conversion” can be a two-second call. A ranking can bring traffic that never calls. A lead can be a job seeker. A signed case is the one number a managing partner already trusts, because it lives in the firm’s own records.

How pricing works

Every service has a published, flat monthly price, shown on its own page and on the pricing page. You can buy a package or pick from the menu.

• Packages bundle the work most firms want. There are four: Google + SEO, Search, Full Ads and Full Service. The anchor is Google + SEO: Google and Microsoft search ads, Local Services Ads, SEO and AI search, local SEO and your Business Profile, intake checks and the Monday report, judged together.
• The menu prices every service on its own, so you can add one line at a time.
• You never pay more than the matching package. If the services you pick from the menu cost more than the cheapest package that covers them, you pay the package price.
• Fees are flat, by published bands. Ad-service prices step with the ad spend we manage on Google, Microsoft, Local Services Ads, Meta and YouTube, measured as a three-month average, in five published bands. ChatGPT ads and streaming TV have their own fee schedules, so their spend doesn’t move your band. A fee is never a percentage of your ad spend, never a price per lead and never a price per case. SEO is priced by the size of your market instead.
• Practice areas included. Search and Google + SEO cover up to 2 practice areas, Full Ads and Full Service up to 4, and from $100k a month of managed ad spend there is no limit. Each extra practice area has its own monthly price on the card.
• You pay the platforms directly. Google, Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI bill your firm for your ads. We add no markup.

Bar rules limit how a law firm may pay a marketer. Texas bars giving a marketing vendor a share of the firm’s revenue (Opinion 706), and Florida treats a fee share or a flat charge per case accepted as impermissible (Opinion 18-1). So our accountability sits in the terms instead: a weekly signed-case count from your records, written service levels, and the right to leave any month after the first 90 days.

Rules that hold for every service

• You own every account. Google Ads, Local Services Ads, your Google Business Profile, Meta, call tracking, analytics, your website, your domain and your CRM stay in your firm’s name, on your payment method. Every ad runs under your firm’s own verified Google advertiser account, never ours, and anyone can check whose name appears under “Ads funded by” in Google’s Ads Transparency Center.
• Your attorney approves every ad. We draft to your state’s rules and prepare any bar filing. Your responsible attorney approves each version in writing and files it.
• No audiences built from client lists. We never build Customer Match or lookalike audiences, in any practice area. Remarketing runs only where each platform’s policy allows it: Google bars it in sensitive categories that include health, crime and relationship hardships (Google).
• Uploads carry no case details. When signed cases go back to Google so bidding can learn from them, the upload carries a click ID, a neutral stage name, a value band and a time. Never a name, an injury, a charge or an immigration status.
• No promises we can’t keep. We never promise a ranking, a number of leads, a number of cases or a mention in AI answers. We promise the work and the reporting.
• Every state and every practice. Firms in any state, and in any of our seven practice areas, are welcome from day one.

Every service, in one line each

• Law firm marketing: the full program, SEO and ads planned together and judged on signed cases.
• Law firm SEO: technical fixes and practice-area pages in English and Spanish, built to rank and to be quoted.
• AI search: how often AI answers name your firm, measured monthly with honest error ranges, plus the fixes.
• Local SEO: your Google Business Profile, listings, reviews process and map rankings.
• Local Services Ads: every lead rated, every missed call caught, hours and budget tuned, every lead matched to a signed case.
• Google search ads: campaigns that learn from signed cases, with hourly search-term screening.
• Microsoft search ads: Bing, Copilot and partner sites, run from the same plan as Google.
• Meta and YouTube: Facebook, Instagram and YouTube ads made from your own footage, tested before budget grows.
• Ads in ChatGPT: a measured pilot in the newest ad channel for lawyers.
• Websites: fast, accessible sites and landing pages built to sign cases and owned by your firm.
• Legal content: pages and guides written by legal writers, approved by your attorney.
• Intake monitoring: calls graded, missed calls caught, speed to answer tracked by line and language.
• Fractional CMO: one senior person who owns the plan across every channel and vendor.
• Signed-case reporting: the Monday report, included in every plan.
• Independent measurement: keep your agency, and we count what it signs.
• The Spanish program: Spanish ads, pages and intake checks, written by native writers and reported on their own line.

Where to start

• You want a plan for search and SEO together. Start with the Google + SEO package on the pricing page.
• You already have an agency and want to know what it signs. Look at independent measurement.
• Calls come in but cases don’t sign. Start with intake monitoring; the leak is often on the phone, not in the ads.
• Many of your clients speak Spanish. Read about the Spanish program.
• You want someone senior to own all of it. See the fractional CMO.
• You want to see before you buy. Ask for a free video review of your firm’s public ads, a free AI check of what AI answers say about you, or the measurement study of your own numbers.

Every practice has its own page with its search, ads and intake detail: start at practice areas.