In-house, agency or fractional CMO: how to staff marketing at a law firm

Picture a firm with three marketing vendors.

An SEO agency. A pay-per-click agency. A web developer. The office manager coordinates all three in between payroll and the phones.

Every month, three reports arrive. SEO shows rankings went up. Pay-per-click shows cost per lead went down. The developer shows the site loads faster.

Every report is good news. Signed cases are flat.

Nobody is lying. Each vendor owns a piece of the activity. Nobody owns the result.

The result runs through intake

A signed case has a path. Search, click, call or form, intake, consultation, signed retainer.

Marketing vendors stop at the call. The firm owns everything after it, and that is where many paid-for cases are lost.

In 2019, Clio had a research firm contact law firms by email and phone with the questions a new client would ask. Only 40% of firms responded to the email, and 39% of the calls went to voicemail, according to Clio's Legal Trends Report.

Every one of those missed inquiries was paid for by somebody's marketing budget.

So before you decide who runs the ads, decide who owns the number from the first click to the signed retainer.

The three options, plainly

In-house. A marketing director or coordinator on payroll. Strong on daily work, speed and knowing the firm. It is hard to find one person who can set strategy, run paid search, fix tracking and coach intake, and a senior hire costs a full salary before a dollar of ad spend.

An agency. Specialists and tools you could never hire alone. Strong on execution in one channel. An agency is paid to improve its channel, so it reports on its channel.

A fractional CMO. A senior marketing leader for part of the week. Sets the strategy, owns the number, holds the agencies to signed cases and works with intake. Does not replace the people who do the daily work.

The excuse: "The agency is the expert"

They are, in their channel. That becomes a problem when they are the only expert in the room.

A pay-per-click agency will rarely tell you to move half its budget to referral partners, even when that is the right call. Nothing in its contract asks it to.

How to decide

1. Write down the number and the owner. Signed cases per month and cost per signed case, with one name next to them.
2. List the work and who does it today. Strategy, budget, each channel, the website, tracking, intake and reporting to the partners. Circle every line with no owner.
3. Fill the gap you have. Missing direction: bring in senior leadership, full-time or fractional. Missing hands: hire in-house or add an agency. Missing both: leadership first, so the hands have a plan.
4. Put signed cases in every vendor report. Each vendor reports leads, consultations and signed cases from its work, using the firm's own intake data.
5. Treat intake as part of marketing. Response time, answer rate and consultation-to-signed rate get reviewed in the same meeting as ad spend.

One law firm my team and I worked with grew from 1 location to 7. Growth like that needs someone whose job is the whole path, from the ad to the signed retainer.