What should a law firm pay per signed case from Google Ads?

I’m a marketer, not a lawyer, and nothing here is legal or financial advice.

The formula

Cost per signed case is paid search spend divided by signed cases from paid search, for the same period. Count each case against the month of the click that produced it, not the month it signed. Otherwise a slow month of signings makes a good month of advertising look bad.

This is about ad spend. Paying a vendor per signed case raises separate questions under the rules on fee sharing and paying for referrals (ABA Model Rules 5.4 and 7.2(b)), and those are for counsel.

You need two numbers most firms don’t keep in one place: spend, which lives in Google Ads, and signed cases by source, which lives in intake or the CRM. Most of the work is joining them. The setup is on tracking Google Ads leads to signed cases.

Why cost per lead misleads

Two campaigns, same budget:

	Campaign A	Campaign B
Cost per lead	$150	$250
Leads that sign	1 in 12	1 in 4
Cost per signed case	$1,800	$1,000

Campaign A looks cheaper on every report that stops at leads. It costs 80 percent more per client. Smart Bidding pointed at cost per lead will move budget toward A, because that’s the number it was told to lower.

The gap usually comes from search intent. Broad terms bring in callers researching a problem, people looking for free advice, and cases the firm doesn’t take. Narrow terms written the way a client describes their situation bring fewer calls and more matters.

Setting the target from your own fees

Start with the average fee for the matter type, then decide what share of that fee the firm will spend to acquire the client. A firm earning $6,000 on an average matter that’s willing to spend 20 percent of it on acquisition has a ceiling of $1,200 per signed case. The share is the partners’ call. It depends on margin, how often clients return or refer, and how much capacity the firm has.

Set a separate ceiling for each practice area. A contingency-fee injury case and a flat-fee estate plan don’t belong under one number.

What the benchmarks show

The click side is well measured. WordStream and LocaliQ’s 2026 Google Ads benchmarks put attorneys and legal services at a $9.87 average cost per click, the highest of 23 industries, with a 5.55 percent conversion rate and an average cost per lead of $131.63.

From there the funnel decides the cost. If a quarter of those leads qualify and 40 percent of qualified leads sign, one lead in ten becomes a client, and the cost per signed case is about $1,320.

The case side isn’t well measured. Published cost-per-signed-case figures for law firms come almost entirely from agencies quoting their own clients, with no method or sample size. I don’t use them to set targets. Your own intake data, even three months of it, beats any of them.

Turning the number into a bid target

Smart Bidding can’t see a signed case quickly enough to bid on it directly, because cases sign outside its learning window. Bid on the qualified lead instead, and derive the target from the case ceiling:

Target cost per qualified lead = ceiling per signed case x share of qualified leads that sign.

With a $1,200 ceiling and 40 percent of qualified leads signing, the qualified-lead target is $480. If the firm sends a value per matter type, use Maximize Conversion Value and let the values steer toward the bigger matters.

Recheck the signing rate every quarter. If intake gets better at converting consultations, the qualified-lead target can rise, and the account can afford more of the competitive searches.

When a separate practice-area campaign costs more

Firms often split their best practice area into its own campaign to give it more budget. On that firm’s account, a new campaign for one practice area was costing about seven times more per booked matter than the firm’s general campaign. Budget wasn’t the limit. It was losing about half its eligible impressions to ad rank and only about 15 percent to budget, most likely because a new campaign starts without the quality history the old ad groups had built. Raising its budget wouldn’t have fixed that. Check the rank and budget split before moving money.

Is it the ads or intake?

Before blaming the ads for a high cost per case, split the funnel. Pull last month’s paid calls and check how many were answered, how many reached a consultation, and how many signed. If calls go unanswered or callbacks take a day, the cost per case rises with no change in the ads. Fix the phone first.

On one firm I work with, the partners saw almost no new cases in one practice area in August 2026 and assumed the ads had stopped working. The call data said otherwise. Inquiries in that practice area had roughly doubled since May, and intake was booking them at its best rate of the year. The gap came after the booking. I read the transcripts of the 40 booked consultations that month, and 36 ended with the prospect told to call the firm back at a set time. None had the firm committing to make the call. Clients retained on the first call fell from 12 in May to 2 in August. More ad spend would have bought more calls into the same gap.

First-party data

Who had to make the next call

36 of 40

Prospect told to call the firm back at a set time

4 of 40

Ended another way. None had the firm committing to call.

One warning from that analysis: don’t measure this with a keyword search. A search of the transcripts for “call back” found 17 of the 40. Reading each one for who had to make the next contact found 36.

What changed on one account

On a law firm account I took over, every form submission counted as a conversion, spam included. Once the conversions counted qualified calls and the campaigns were split by case type, spend fell by half and cost per qualified lead was down more than 60 percent by day ninety. Google Ads never saw a signed case on that account, so signed cases only show up in the firm’s intake log. Later I scored those calls and put the firm’s own price on each qualified one by matter type, held in the call-tracking platform.

When to bring me in

Bring me in when the account reports leads that never sign, when intake can’t tell you which calls came from ads, or when cost per signed case keeps rising.

I'm Conner Crowe, and I write every audit myself. Send the free audit request and add me as a read-only user, and within 24 hours of access you'll have a written read on what your account counts as a conversion and what to fix first. No call needed, and nothing in your account or store changes.

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