You’ve hung your own shingle, and now the phone needs to ring. Every marketing vendor has a package for you, and every channel looks urgent.
If you’ve spent your first weeks fielding sales calls and wondering which pitch to believe, you’re not alone. Here’s the problem: a solo can’t do everything at once, and trying usually means none of it works.
Below, I’ll walk you through a 90-day plan for solo law firm marketing. You’ll see what to set up first, where your hours and dollars should go, and how to tell what’s bringing in signed cases.
What Should a Solo Law Firm Do First?
A solo law firm should start with the three things every potential client checks: a Google Business Profile, a simple website, and a phone that gets answered. Everything else builds on those.
More solos have a website than a few years ago. The American Bar Association’s 2024 Solo and Small Firm TechReport found solo firms with a website grew from 53% in 2021 to 70% in 2024.
Budgets are another story. In the ABA’s 2023 TechReport on websites and marketing, 80% of solo practitioners surveyed did not have a marketing budget.
That’s understandable when you’re watching every dollar. It also means marketing tends to happen in bursts, whenever there’s a slow week, and stops as soon as work picks up.
Once the foundation is live, add one paid channel and one relationship channel, and give them time to work.
Budget Your Hours Before Your Marketing Budget
As a solo practitioner, your scarcest resource is your own time, more than money. Decide how many hours a week you’ll give to marketing before you set a marketing budget.
Every channel costs some mix of cash and attorney hours. Paid search costs money but very little of your time once it’s set up, while referrals, reviews, and content cost little cash and a lot of time.
That trade-off shapes the plan. If you have more time than money, lean on referrals, reviews, and your Google Business Profile. If you have more money than time, a small Google Ads or Local Services Ads budget buys back hours.
A realistic starting point is a fixed block of about three hours a week. Put it on your calendar like a court date, and protect it during busy weeks, because that’s when marketing usually stops.
Use the block for the work only you can do: calling referral sources, answering client questions for your website, and asking for reviews. Hand off anything a vendor or an assistant can do just as well.
The Takeaway:Â Every hour you spend on marketing is an hour you’re not billing. Spend it where signed cases come from.
Days 1 to 30: Build Your Solo Law Firm Website and Profile
The first month builds your Google Business Profile and website, the pieces every other channel depends on. None of it needs a big budget.
Pick One Practice Area and One Market
Lead your marketing with one practice area in one geographic market, even if you take other work. A solo who markets everything to everyone ends up paying for clicks that don’t fit.
Costs vary by practice, too. LocaliQ’s legal search benchmarks are based on US campaigns from April 2022 to March 2023. They put the median cost per lead at $72.24 for estate and probate and $159.17 for personal injury.
Picture an estate planning solo who focuses on one county. Their website, profile, and ads can all speak to the same people, and every dollar works harder.
You can still accept other cases from referrals. You just don’t spend marketing money chasing them yet.
Set Up Your Google Business Profile
Claim and complete your Google Business Profile before you spend a dollar on ads. It’s free, and it’s often the first thing a local searcher sees.
Follow Google’s rules from day one. Google’s guidelines say your business name should reflect your real-world name, and adding unnecessary information to it could get the profile suspended.
Fill in everything else: your primary practice area category, hours, a phone number that gets answered, and real photos of you and your office.
If you work from a home office or a shared suite, read Google’s address rules before you list it. Getting the address right at the start is easier than fixing a suspended profile later.
Launch a Simple Website That Turns Visitors Into Calls
A solo law firm website doesn’t need 40 pages to start. It needs a homepage, a page for your main practice area, an about page, a contact page, and one page answering common questions.
You’ll probably build or edit it yourself, at least at first. The ABA’s 2024 report found most solo attorneys (76%) personally manage and create their website content.
Make the phone number easy to tap on mobile, and add a short contact form. Consider an online scheduling link, too, since the same report found only 23% of solo firms let clients book online.
Your about page does more work for a solo than for a big firm. People are hiring you specifically, so tell them who you are, why you practice this area, and what working with you looks like.
Days 31 to 60: Turn On Google Ads, Referrals, and Reviews
The second month adds Google Ads or Local Services Ads, referrals, and reviews while the foundation starts to pay off. Keep each one small enough to manage in your weekly block.
Start With Local Services Ads or a Small Google Ads Campaign
Local Services Ads and Google Ads are the fastest way for a new solo firm to show up when someone needs a lawyer right now. Start small, narrow, and in your one practice area.
Local Services Ads are Google’s pay-per-lead listings with the Google Screened badge, and they often show at the top of the results for legal searches. You pay for leads, not clicks, which makes the budget easier to control.
A small law firm PPCÂ campaign in Google Ads works well alongside it. Keep it to a handful of tightly matched keywords, add negative keywords from the first week, and send clicks to your practice area page.
Set a monthly cap you’re comfortable spending while you learn. At LocaliQ’s $111.05 median cost per lead for legal search ads, $1,500 a month would buy about 13 leads.
Your market may cost more or less than the median. The first month of data tells you what a lead costs where you practice, and that’s worth paying for.
Build Referral Relationships With Other Attorneys
Other attorneys are a strong referral source for a solo, because they turn away cases outside their practice every week. Your job is to make sure they think of you.
Start with a list of lawyers in practice areas next to yours. A family lawyer and an estate planning solo, for example, see a lot of the same clients at different moments.
Aim for about ten real conversations in your first 30 days of outreach: coffee, a call, or a local bar association event. Bring a one-page summary of the cases you take and the ones you don’t, so they know exactly when to send someone your way.
Then follow up every few months so you stay on their list, and send referrals back when you can. Check your state’s rules before you agree to any referral fee or reciprocal arrangement.
Ask Every Client for a Review on Your Google Business Profile
Reviews build trust faster than anything else you can add to your profile. Ask every satisfied client, starting with your very first one.
Send a short text or email with a direct link to your review page the week the case wraps up. A link people can tap is easier to act on than a request buried in a closing letter.
Don’t pay for reviews or write them for clients. Reply to the reviews you get, briefly and without case details, so the next person reading sees a lawyer who pays attention.
Days 61 to 90: Add SEO Content and Measure Signed Cases
The third month adds SEO content and the tracking habit that tells you what’s working. By day 90, you’ll know your cost per lead.
Write SEO Content for the Questions Clients Ask
Write one page of website content for each question clients ask on consultation calls. Those questions are what people type into Google before they call a lawyer.
You’ll stand out by doing it at all. The ABA’s 2024 report found blogging remains uncommon among solos, at 11%.
An estate planning solo might start with what happens without a will in their state and how a trust differs from a will. A third page could cover what to bring to a first meeting. Each answers one question and ends with a way to reach you.
Begin with your practice area page, then add two or three of these each month. Over time, this is the content that law firm SEOÂ builds on.
Track Every Lead to a Signed Case in a CRM
Log every lead in a CRM or a spreadsheet with its source, date, and outcome. Once you’re past a handful of leads a week, a simple CRM is easier to keep current than a spreadsheet.
Ask every new caller how they found you, and write it down. Add columns for the practice area, whether you spoke with them, and whether they signed.
At day 90, divide what each channel cost by the signed cases it brought in. Our guide to measuring ROI on law firm marketing spend shows how to turn that log into a cost per signed case by channel.
Decide What Stays in Your Marketing Budget
At day 90, keep the channels that signed cases at a cost you can afford, and cut the ones that didn’t. Then add one new channel at a time.
If you’ve paid for something for three months and still can’t tell whether it worked, that’s a tracking problem before it’s a marketing problem. Fix the tracking first, then decide.
Say your Local Services Ads signed four clients and your referral outreach signed three. Both stay, and the next quarter’s question is whether to add Google Ads or more SEO content.
The fix:Â Change one thing at a time, so you know what caused the result.
How to Handle Intake as a Solo Attorney
As a solo attorney, intake is the hardest part of marketing, because you can’t answer the phone from a courtroom. Plan for coverage before you start paying for leads.
Many firms miss calls they paid for. In Clio’s 2024 secret shopper test, 48% of firms neither answered the phone nor called back.
We often see solo practitioners lose good leads on court days, when the phone rings for hours with no answer. A lead who reaches voicemail may call the next lawyer on the list.
There are affordable fixes. An answering service for law firms can take calls in your firm’s name, and an instant text reply can tell callers when you’ll call back.
Online scheduling lets people book a consultation without waiting for you. Block two short windows a day for callbacks, and protect them like hearings.
Where LinkedIn and Facebook Fit in Solo Attorney Marketing
LinkedIn and Facebook are useful for staying visible to people who already know you, but they rarely bring in a solo’s first clients on their own. Treat them as support for referrals, not as a lead source.
Most solos are already there. The ABA’s 2024 report found 70% of solo attorneys on LinkedIn, down from 95% in 2021, and Facebook presence among solos at a high of 63%.
LinkedIn works best for referral relationships with other lawyers, accountants, and financial advisors. A short post now and then about a case type you handle reminds those contacts exactly what to send you.
Facebook keeps you in front of past clients and neighbors. Share a useful answer now and then, and keep posts within your state bar’s advertising rules.
Give social media a small, fixed slice of your weekly block, such as 20 minutes. If it starts producing referrals you can trace, give it more.
Solo Law Firm Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
Many solo law firm marketing mistakes come from trying to do too much at once, or from paying for marketing nobody is measuring. Here are four we see most in solo practices, and our post on law firm marketing mistakes covers the rest.
- Too many channels: five small experiments rarely produce enough data to judge any of them.
- Long contracts: avoid locking a new practice into a year with a vendor before you know your numbers.
- A generic website: a template that could belong to any firm gives people no reason to call you.
- Going quiet when busy: marketing that stops during busy months creates a slow season later.
When a Solo Practitioner Should Hire Help
A solo practitioner should hire marketing help when it starts costing more in billable hours than it would cost to hand off, or when calls are going unanswered. Those are the two signs that your time is now the bottleneck.
Hire in this order. Intake help comes first, because missed calls waste everything else. Ad management comes next, then SEO and content once you know which practice areas sign the best cases.
Before you hire any vendor, ask what they’ll report each month and how it ties to signed cases.
When you add a second attorney or a full-time staff member, you’ll need a written plan instead of a 90-day sprint. Our guide to building a small law firm marketing plan picks up where this one ends.
Final Thoughts: Start Small and Measure Signed Cases
Good marketing for solo lawyers is simple: build the foundation, add one paid channel and one relationship channel, and measure everything against signed cases by day 90.
You don’t have to do it all at once, and you shouldn’t. Doing a few things well beats doing ten things halfway.
Not sure where to start with your practice? I’m a former Googler who ran an SEO division in Sydney from 2010 to 2013. Neon Ambition has 12+ years in digital marketing, and we measure our work in signed cases.
Call Neon Ambition at 512-865-8050 or book a free 30-minute call. We’ll look at your market and tell you what we’d do first.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Big Should a Solo Attorney’s Marketing Budget Be?
Set your marketing budget from how many new cases you need each month and what a lead costs in your practice area, then work backward. Our guide to how much a law firm should spend on marketing shows the math.
Do Solo Lawyers Need a Website?
Yes. Many people check a lawyer’s website before they call, and the ABA found 70% of solo firms had one in 2024. A simple, fast site with clear contact options is enough to start.
Is SEO Worth It for a Solo Practice?
Yes, as a long-term channel. SEO usually takes months to bring in steady leads, so start with a few strong pages now and pair them with paid search while rankings build.
