What a legal client really costs
Every figure published about what a law firm pays for a client comes from somebody else's firm or somebody else's average. Here they are side by side, set against the cost of a signed client, with a way to work out your own.
What we found
- A signed auto case costs $2,000 to $3,000 in most markets, by one PI firm's managing partner, and $4,000 to $6,000 in California and a few other states. Two other owners put the figure above $4,000.
- Bought shared leads come to roughly $1,000 to $7,500 a signed case, by our estimate from the vendors' own prices and sign rates.
- Most clicks don't become a lead. The average legal search ad converts at 5.55%, so about 94 of every 100 clicks don't convert.¹
- The cheapest clicks can carry the most expensive cases. "Medical malpractice lawyer" costs about $4 to $37 a click, and the cases often take two to four years.
The question
What does one signed client cost your firm, channel by channel?
Most marketing reports stop short of it. They count clicks, impressions, calls, or leads, because those arrive this month and a signed client may not. A cheap click that never becomes a client costs more than an expensive one that does, and a lead that never signs is money already spent.
Clicks
What Google estimates advertisers bid to show at the top of the page, nationally:
| Practice | Searches | Top-of-page bid, per click |
|---|---|---|
| Family law | the short searches, such as "divorce lawyer" | about $3–$5 at the low end to $30–$39 at the high end |
| Personal injury | the short searches, such as "lawyer for a car accident" | from about $66 at the low end to about $495 at the high end |
| Personal injury | many truck-accident searches | $1,000, the highest figure Google returned |
| Medical malpractice | "medical malpractice lawyer" | about $4–$37 |
| Medical malpractice | specific harms | up to about $350 for "lawyer birth injury" and over $500 for "wrongful death attorney" |
| Mass tort | "mesothelioma attorney" | about $120–$290 |
A click isn't a client. In one ad vendor's 2026 benchmarks, the average legal search ad converted at 5.55%, at a $131.63 cost per lead.¹ That means about 94 of every 100 clicks don't convert, before anyone has asked whether the people who did ever signed.
Local Services Ads, directories, and lead sellers
These channels charge by the lead or by the month, which makes them look easier to count. Here is what their sellers publish:
- Google's Local Services Ads, charged by the lead. One agency, relaying another vendor's averages, puts the average lead at about $127 for personal injury, $89 for family law, and $50 for estate planning.² Calls during your business hours can be charged even when nobody answers, once the caller has stayed on the line more than 20 seconds. And Google no longer takes manual disputes on bad leads, so each one has to be checked and rated, and Google decides on any credit.
- A national lawyer directory lists its profiles from $399 a month and gives every other price on request.³
- A lead-matching service sells memberships from $455 a month.³
- A lead seller that works with family, immigration, and estate lawyers charges about $50 to $100 a lead, by a legal software company's estimate.³
- Personal-injury leads run from about $50 to $1,500 each in vendors' published tables.⁴
Owners who've paid for them report both ends. A solo family lawyer, reviewing a lead seller in public, wrote, "I am able to comfortably pay for the service." A lawyer reviewing a directory wrote, "despite paying approximately $400 per month, I received absolutely no benefit." A family lawyer on a state bar section's forum said of the same lead-matching service, "once they hook you, the cases are crap."⁵
None of those prices says what a signed client costs. A lead can be shared with other firms, unreachable, looking for free help, or never real. The signed-client cost is the price of the leads divided by the ones that sign, and only your firm's records hold that second number.
What a signed injury case costs, in owners' words
In personal injury, some owners have said the number in public. Three of them:
- "In most markets, firms are spending $2,000 to $3,000 to acquire each signed auto case." A Pennsylvania PI firm's managing partner, in a blog published by a software vendor his firm uses. He put California and a few other states at $4,000 to $6,000.⁶
- "To think that we would reach a point where the average acquisition costs would be over $4,000." A South Carolina managing partner, on a PI marketing agency's podcast.⁶
- "A target is like 5, 6K CAC." A California trial attorney and firm CEO, on the same podcast.⁶
For bought leads, the arithmetic gets there quickly. Worked from vendors' published prices for shared leads, $50 to $150 each, and the 2 to 5 in 100 that a vendor says sign, a signed case from bought leads comes to roughly $1,000 to $7,500, by our estimate.⁷
Medical malpractice: cheap clicks, slow cases
By Google's own estimates, the plain search "medical malpractice lawyer" costs about $4 to $37 a click at the top of the page nationally, and it stayed at $75 or less in 9 of the 10 metro areas we checked. The clicks look cheap, and the cases cost a great deal to bring.
A general click is rarely a case: one California firm says it accepts about 2% of the cases it's offered involving living patients. Med-mal cases often take two to four years, so a monthly report on clicks and leads can't say which of them became a case worth bringing. One analytics vendor's guide tells med-mal advertisers to "float $20,000 to $50,000 per case for 18 to 36 months."⁸
The number that tells a med-mal firm whether advertising pays is followed from the source to screening, acceptance, filing, and resolution. That takes years, so the tracking starts on day one.
Mass tort: the price rises as a tort ages
In mass tort, firms often buy signed cases outright. In prices vendors have published or relayed, a signed case runs from about $350 to the low five figures, depending on the tort.⁹
The price also moves. The longer a tort runs, the more firms advertise for it, and the more each case costs. Bloomberg Law reported, paraphrasing a Missouri mass tort firm's founder, that referral costs for Depo-Provera cases rose from $350 to $1,500 a case.¹⁰ A firm that buys cases pays up front and waits years for a settlement, so it needs its own cost per signed case, by source, as the tort ages.
Results from the system
- One client firm: about 75 times its ad spend back in estimated case value.¹¹
- Another client firm: about 11 times its ad spend back in estimated case value.¹¹
- Three client firms: a 14.1% conversion rate, against a 5.55% average for legal search ads.¹
How to work out your own number
The number I go by is signed clients. It's the only way to work out your client acquisition cost, what it actually costs you to get a client.
- Take one channel at a time. Google Ads, Local Services Ads, a directory, a lead seller, referrals, your own website and resources.
- Add up what it cost. The spend, plus any monthly fee, plus what an agency charges to run it, plus your own time and your team's: the hours spent on calls, consultations, and follow-up for that channel, at what those hours are worth.
- Count the leads it produced, then take out the ones that were shared, unreachable, outside your practice, or never real.
- Count the consultations. This is its own step, because it shows where people drop off between the first contact and sitting down with you.
- Count the signed clients. Only the ones who signed and stayed.
- Divide the cost by the signed clients. That's your client acquisition cost for that channel. Set it beside the others.
Then look at lifetime value: what a client brings over time, including coming back with a new matter and referring other clients. Some kinds of cases bring more of that than others, which is why it's worth tracking. A channel or a practice area can look expensive on acquisition cost alone and still be the better one, because the clients it brings turn into strong referral sources. In med mal, mass tort, and serious injury cases, that also means following each case to resolution before you judge what the client was worth.
If one source sends plenty of leads that aren't right for you, look first at how those leads arrive: the ad, the page, the offer, and the questions on the form. A change there can improve the leads before you drop the source. If the leads are right and they stall between the first call and the signed engagement, that's an intake problem, and I train intake and sales teams to sign more of the qualified leads that come in.
And if you can't trace a signed client back to where they came from, start there, because every other number depends on it.
Mid-page assessment
If you don't know your number yet, your assessment is where we find it. On the call, we work out how your clients find you now and what each one costs, channel by channel, and you leave with a map of where the budget leaks.
Joshua David Little is a Fractional CMO for law-firm owners and the founder of Aquila Law Firm Marketing. He has run his own consulting firm since 2004, and has done hands-on work helping attorneys prepare complex litigation for trial in family law, medical malpractice, personal injury, and unjust enrichment cases. He ran the first family-law ad on ChatGPT, before the platform allowed legal-services ads.