A law firm marketing plan that cannot be updated in a partner meeting is a brochure. Keep it to one page and one quarter. Name the channels, the owner of each, the budget, and the number you will look at besides clicks.

Below is the one-page template we use, a filled-in example row, and the ninety-day cadence that keeps it honest. Law firm marketing is the hub; this document is how you run it for ninety days. The sequence of work is in how to market a law firm.

The one-page template

Copy these six blocks into a doc. If a block takes more than a few lines, the plan is too big for one quarter.

Offer and geography. Which practice areas and cities you will actually staff if the phone rings. Two or three, not twelve.
Quarter goal. One number: qualified intakes or signed cases, by practice. Not “more visibility.”
Intake SLA. How fast a new lead is touched, and who owns nights and weekends.
Channel rows. One row per channel you will staff (format below).
Budget. Fixed work versus pass-through ad spend, on separate lines.
Scoreboard and review date. The inputs you will inspect and the date the partners look at them.

If blocks 1–3 are fuzzy, the rest of the plan is decoration.

Channel rows, not a wish list

Give each channel one row with five columns: channel, owner, what ships this quarter, budget line, and the metric you will check. A filled-in example for a two-city family law firm:

Channel: Local search. Owner: office manager plus vendor. Ships: GBP category and service fixes for both offices; one unique city page per office. Budget: fixed. Metric: GBP calls and map-pack intakes by city.

The usual rows:

SEO — which practice hubs and blog posts ship this quarter. Use the SEO checklist before you publish volume.
Website — templates, mobile speed, and intake forms.
Local — GBP, NAP, and city pages you will actually make unique. The GBP spoke is Google Business Profile for lawyers.
Paid — search versus social, and whether PI advertising is its own campaign. Compare platforms in Facebook ads vs Google Ads.
Referrals and reviews — a set point in the matter to ask for a review, and “referred by” as a required intake field.

Skip the row if you will not staff it. A plan with eight channels and one marketer is fiction.

Budget that survives a partner meeting

Separate the managed work from media. Cadence MSO runs LawVert as ops plus documented pass-through. If the plan only shows “marketing: $X,” you cannot tell whether a bad month was creative, bid strategy, or a dead landing page.

A workable default: most of the fixed budget on whichever row is weakest (usually intake or the website), and one capped paid test on one practice and one geography, sized so you can read it in 60–90 days. For what other firms spend, see law firm marketing statistics.

Do not put a signed-case guarantee in the plan. Put a review date and the inputs you will inspect.

The scoreboard

Speed to lead: median minutes from form or call to first human contact.
Qualified intakes by source: organic, map pack, referral, paid.
Signed cases by source, and cost per signed case for paid.
URLs shipped from the plan, and which ones produced calls.

Rankings and traffic are inputs, not the score. If a vendor report stops there, ask for the intake export.

Proof you can cite, and proof you cannot

Use your own Search Console and intake export. If you need an operator example, Conduit Law’s public numbers are on the case study — 7.61K clicks and 2.0M impressions in twelve months; 9.2× click growth from December to July; 162 organic-search leads and 66 SEO-attributed signed cases in the trailing year. Copy the measurement habit, not the totals. Markets differ.

A ninety-day cadence

Week 1. Baseline GSC, ads, and intake. Kill orphan campaigns. Fill in the six blocks.
Weeks 2–8. Ship the URLs and GBP fixes named in the channel rows. One paid test at a time.
Week 12. Review signed cases by source. Keep, cut, or rewrite each row for next quarter.

Common mistakes

A 40-page annual plan nobody opens after January.
Channels with no named owner.
One “marketing” budget line that mixes fees and ad spend.
Judging SEO after 30 days, or paid after 12 months.

Write the next quarter on the same one-pager. If you want the same cadence under Cadence MSO, start with services or a strategy call.

Law Firm Marketing Plan: A One-Page Template for the Quarter