Law firm marketing strategy: a one-page plan for small UK firms.

A law firm marketing strategy for a small or medium firm fits on one page. It says who your clients are for each type of work, why they should instruct you over the firm down the road, what a new matter is worth, which channels you’ll use and in what order, and how you’ll know it is working. Everything sits inside the SRA’s rules on publicity and pricing, so the plan has to account for those from the start.

This guide is for owners and partners of high street and niche firms in England and Wales: conveyancing, wills and probate, family, employment and personal injury. For the general version for any small business, see our guide to small business marketing strategy. There are worked plans for other businesses too: a construction or trades business, a dental practice and a small clothing business.

How clients choose a solicitor

Most clients only need a solicitor a few times in their lives, so they don’t have a firm in mind. They tend to choose in a fairly predictable way:

• They ask someone they trust. A friend, a relative, an estate agent, an accountant or a previous solicitor gives them a name.
• They search Google for the type of work and the town, such as “divorce solicitor Swindon” or “conveyancing solicitors near me”, and look at the map results, the reviews and the first few websites.
• Even with a recommendation, they look you up. Your reviews and website either confirm the recommendation or put them off.
• They want to know roughly what it will cost before they call. A firm that publishes clear fees removes a reason to hesitate.
• They contact two or three firms and often go with whoever answers the phone or replies first and sounds like they understand the problem.

Speed of response rarely gets counted as marketing, but if enquiries go to voicemail at lunchtime or web forms wait until the next day, the marketing that produced them is partly wasted. Put response times in the plan.

A marketing plan for a law firm that fits on one page

Who your clients are, by practice area

Write a short description for each practice area you want to grow. The differences between them shape the whole plan.

Why they should choose you

“Friendly, professional and experienced” is on almost every solicitor’s website, so it won’t win you anything. Look for the reasons that are true of your firm and that a client can check:

• Fixed fees, published openly, for the work you do most.
• Who does the work: a named solicitor and their experience, with a photo.
• Response times you commit to and then meet, such as replying to every enquiry the same working day.
• Accreditations a client can verify, such as the Law Society’s Conveyancing Quality Scheme or membership of Resolution for family lawyers.
• Access: evening appointments, home visits for wills, video meetings, parking, a ground-floor office.
• A narrow focus. A firm that only does employment law for employees, or only probate, can say so in a way a general practice can’t.

Write it as one sentence: “We help [client] with [type of work] in [area], and unlike most firms we [the thing you can prove].” Every page, ad and review request should support that sentence.

What a matter is worth, and what you can pay to win one

You need three numbers per practice area, most of which your case management or accounts system can give you:

1. The average fee per matter, excluding VAT and disbursements.
2. The cost of the fee earner time and overheads to deliver it, which gives you profit per matter.
3. The share of enquiries that become instructions.

Multiply profit per matter by the instruction rate and you have the most you can pay for one enquiry and still break even on the first matter. Then think about what else a client brings. A conveyancing client may come back for a will, a will client’s family may come to you for probate, and a happy family client may recommend you to friends. That repeat and referral work is why you might reasonably pay more than the first matter alone justifies.

Example, with invented figures: if a residential purchase earns £1,000 in fees and £400 of that is profit, and one in three conveyancing enquiries instructs you, you can pay up to about £130 per enquiry before the first matter loses money.

The SRA and advertising rules your marketing must follow

Solicitors can advertise, run Google Ads, post on social media and ask for reviews. The rules mainly govern what you say and how you approach people. What follows is a summary for planning: check the SRA’s guidance, or ask your compliance officer, before publishing anything you’re unsure of.

Price and service information

The SRA Transparency Rules require firms to publish price and service information on their website for a set list of services. The list is residential conveyancing, uncontested probate, motoring offences (summary offences), immigration (excluding asylum), employment tribunal claims for unfair or wrongful dismissal, debt recovery up to £100,000, and licensing applications for business premises. For those services you need to show the total cost (or an average or range), the basis of your charges such as a fixed fee or hourly rate, what the fee covers and anything a client might expect that it doesn’t, likely disbursements, whether VAT applies, the main stages of the work and how long each usually takes, and the qualifications and experience of whoever does and supervises the work. Every firm also has to publish its complaints procedure, including how and when a client can complain to the Legal Ombudsman and to the SRA. The SRA’s website has the detail.

Treat these as sales pages. People search for “conveyancing fees” and “probate solicitor cost”, and a price page that is easy to find and honest about what’s included helps win the client. If your main work is outside the list, guide prices or a plain explanation of how your fees work can still set you apart from firms that say “call us for a quote”.

The SRA badge

Firms regulated by the SRA must display their SRA number and the SRA’s digital badge in a prominent place on their website. A footer that appears on every page is a simple way to meet that. It shows visitors that you are regulated and links to your details on the SRA’s register. Check that your web developer has used the code the SRA supplies, and that the badge appears on any new site or landing page you launch.

Accurate publicity and the CAP Code

The SRA’s Code of Conduct requires your publicity to be accurate and not misleading, including what you say about your charges. Your ads, website and social posts also fall under the UK Code of Non-broadcast Advertising (the CAP Code), which the Advertising Standards Authority enforces. In practice:

• Only describe yourself as a specialist, an expert or the best if you can back it up.
• If a fee is quoted, say whether it includes VAT and what isn’t included.
• If you advertise “no win, no fee”, make clear what the client might still pay, such as a deduction from their compensation.
• Don’t promise outcomes you can’t guarantee.

Unsolicited approaches

The SRA’s rules stop you making unsolicited approaches to members of the public to advertise your services, with an exception for current and former clients. That rules out cold calling individuals, approaching people in person, and letters or messages aimed at people picked out from information about them, such as people recently involved in an accident. General advertising is allowed, such as online ads, social media posts and leaflets delivered to every home in an area, but read the SRA’s guidance before any direct outreach. Marketing emails to individuals also need their consent under UK privacy law, or must fit the “soft opt-in” for existing clients, with an easy way to unsubscribe every time.

Referral fees

Paying or receiving referral fees for personal injury claims is banned under the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012. That matters for any personal injury firm paying a third party for leads or introductions, so take advice before entering such an arrangement. In other areas, such as conveyancing work referred by estate agents, referral arrangements can be allowed, but clients must be told about any financial or other interest in the referral.

Reviews

Most firms collect reviews on Google, and many also use a review platform such as Trustpilot or ReviewSolicitors, which is built for law firms. UK consumer law bans fake reviews and incentivised reviews that aren’t disclosed, and you shouldn’t present reviews in a way that misleads, such as showing only the good ones as if they were all you had. When you reply to a review, your duty of confidentiality still applies. Don’t confirm details of the matter, or even that the person was a client, in a public reply. A short, polite response that invites them to get in touch directly is safer.

Which channels, in which order

A small firm can’t do everything at once, and the order matters: ads and search rankings send people to your website and phone lines, so those need to work first.

1. Answer enquiries properly. Make sure every call is answered during office hours, out-of-hours calls go to a message service or a callback, and web enquiries get a reply the same working day. Ask every new client how they found you and record it.
2. Fix the website. Give each service its own page, written for the client, with fees, who does the work, the next step and a phone number that is easy to tap on a mobile. The price pages required by the Transparency Rules should be easy to find from those service pages. See our notes on website design if the current site can’t do this.
3. Build up your Google Business Profile and reviews. Choose the most accurate category, add your services and opening hours, and ask every satisfied client for a review when the matter closes. This is what decides whether you appear in the map results for “solicitor” plus your town. Our local SEO service covers this.
4. Look after past clients and introducers. Keep in touch with past clients who have agreed to hear from you, and stay close to the estate agents, accountants, financial advisers and other firms that send you work. For many high street firms this is where most new matters come from.
5. Run search ads for your most profitable work. Once the website and enquiry handling are ready, Google Ads on searches like “family solicitor [town]” bring enquiries quickly. Start with one practice area, a fixed budget and call tracking, and judge it on instructions. Personal injury searches tend to be very competitive, so be sure of your numbers before bidding.
6. Add content and social media. Useful guides that answer the questions clients ask, such as what happens at a first family law meeting, help both search and conversion. LinkedIn suits employment and business work. Post regularly, and only on channels you have time to keep up.

Example: an invented high street firm’s plan

Example: an invented three-partner firm in a market town, with about fifteen staff, doing residential conveyancing, wills and probate, and family work. All figures are examples.

The firm also wrote down what it won’t do this quarter: no new social channels and no ads for conveyancing, because estate agents already send enough conveyancing work and the margins on it are thin. Having that in writing stops the plan drifting every time someone suggests a new idea.

What to do in the first 90 days

1. Weeks 1 to 2: Pull the numbers for each practice area: fees, profit, enquiries and instructions over the last year. Start logging the source of every enquiry from now on.
2. Weeks 2 to 4: Check your compliance basics: the SRA badge, price and service pages for any listed services, the complaints procedure, and any claims on the website you can’t back up. Fix how enquiries are answered, including lunchtimes and out of hours.
3. Month 2: Rewrite the service pages for the one or two practice areas you most want to grow. Update your Google Business Profile and start asking every client for a review at the close of their matter.
4. Months 2 to 3: Contact past clients who have agreed to hear from you, and arrange to see your best introducers. If the numbers support it, start a small Google Ads campaign for one practice area with call tracking.
5. End of month 3: Review enquiries and instructions by source, cost per instruction from any ads, and response times. Keep what is working, stop what isn’t, and write the next 90 days.

How to measure it

Many firms can see their fee income but not where the work came from. Add a “source” field to your case management system and fill it in for every new enquiry, then check these each month:

• Enquiries by source and practice area.
• Instructions by source, and the instruction rate.
• Fee income from new matters by source.
• Cost per instruction for any paid channel, compared with what you said you could afford.
• Time to first response, and how many calls were missed.
• Number of new reviews and your average rating.
• Website enquiries and calls from Google, using GA4 and Search Console.

If you use call tracking that records calls, tell callers and check where the provider stores the recordings, because those calls will contain confidential information.

If you’d like help writing the plan itself, deciding which practice areas to push and what to do first, that is what our marketing strategy work covers. Before hiring any agency, ask how they will handle the SRA rules, how they will report enquiries and instructions by practice area, and who will do the work day to day.

Frequently asked questions

Rob Curtis

Founder of The Pursuit Agency in Swindon. He has worked in SEO for fifteen-odd years and leads the agency's SEO and Google Ads work for owner-led businesses across the UK.