It costs money to make money, as they say, and that is certainly true with running law firms. I think that there are some people who are the exception that may have networks and referral partners or they’re sufficiently niche that they are irreplaceable and they don’t have a lot of competition that may not need to spend the same sorts of dollars on marketing and advertising as other lawyers do. But I have heard as a rule of thumb that law firms might spend somewhere between 10 and 20% of their gross revenue on advertising and marketing. And while that may seem like a shockingly high figure, particularly if you like me have a law firm that generates seven figures of gross revenue, it does take money to make money. And as long as your cost of acquiring clients are less than their lifetime value for you, it can make sense to spend a good amount of money on marketing and advertising.

And I do not pay for leads. I don’t do pay-per-click. I don’t do any paid advertising. I dabbled with local service ads, LSAs through Google in the past for us on a second. I don’t do that anymore. My marketing is video and LinkedIn and YouTube and mostly having an outstanding website and trying to play the organic search engine optimization game to try to make sure that when people search for esoteric long lead … I’m sorry, sorry, long tail keywords, that they will find a lot of content on my website that the LLMs or Google will serve up to them. But even though I’m not paying for ads, even though I’m not doing the pay-per-click thing, which is how a lot of small law firms spend an awful lot of money chasing after clients, I still spend a pretty good amount of money on marketing and advertising.

And I think I’ve mentioned on other videos that my website for my law firm is the second most expensive thing that I’ve ever bought in my life after my home, which is the most expensive thing I’ve ever bought. And I’ve spent more on my law firm’s website than I spent on my law firm education, I’m sorry, my law school education. And I went to a private school and I borrowed my way all the way through. So I did not get a lot of scholarship. I spent an awful lot on law school. And when I say that I have spent probably double on my website, what I spent on law school education, that is saying something. However, there is no question in my mind that my spend on marketing has been worth it. And I have absolutely doubled down in the last 24 months on my marketing spend.

I have completely recreated my website. I believe that at present, it’s got more than a hundred videos. I think it’s pushing almost 500 pages because I’ve got a lot of content about specific things that I’ve done for different clients. And it is all set up and coded and cross-linked and consistent with best practice to make sure that it is as visible as it could possibly be to the LLMs and to Google. And I am absolutely in a stage right now where I have not received the return on investment, the ROI on the dollars that I’ve put into this website over the course of the last two years, but I think that I’ve made an investment in the next decade and I am very happy to have sunk the time and the money to get my website where it is. And so I don’t think it’s crazy to think about spending 10 to 20% of your gross revenue on acquiring new clients as long as you’re doing it in a smart way.

I mean, you do not want to sell widgets at a loss and try to make it up by selling a greater volume of them. That math doesn’t work. So having an understanding about your cost to acquire a client, having an understanding about what their lifetime value is for you, having an understanding about what it costs for you to produce the work, it’s all what you need to be thinking about when you figure out how much you’re going to spend on advertising and marketing. And there are law firms out there, they don’t compete with me in the B2B space, but I mean, there are personal injury law firms out there that are spending hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of advertising every month. And so whatever number you’re thinking about spending to advertise on your law firm, if you’re a lawyer like me, if you’re leaving Big Law, if you haven’t spent any money at all on advertising and marketing, you’re probably going to have to just bite down hard and spend a little bit more than what you’re planning on doing.

I wouldn’t do it blind. I wouldn’t do it without doing some arithmetic on cost to acquire clients, on lifetime value, on what it costs for you to produce a widget. But there’s absolutely a spending money to make money element here. And I think that most people should prepare to spend more money than they’re probably thinking is appropriate at a gut level if you are leaving a large law firm and it’s not been your job to think about videos and developing websites and sponsorships of local sports teams and all of the things that we do as law firm owners, as long as you have a pretty good understanding of what your return on investment is likely to be, spending a lot of money on advertising and marketing can be a very smart thing.