Choose your sector
Markets inside legal and solicitors
Open the page that matches how you sell. Each one keeps the same commercial standard, with pipeline and stack detail for that sector.
Why operators pick us
Paid search tied to retained matters, not vanity legal enquiries.
We run Google, Microsoft and LinkedIn so partners can see which practice areas create instructions. Britton & Time is the named legal proof, with Daniel Beech on the commercial side of the relationship.
Pipeline
Why your marketing numbers and your commercial tracker never agree
How the pipeline works across practice areas
Consumer-facing practices such as personal injury, family, immigration and residential conveyancing are usually search-led. Someone has a problem today, they type a query, they call or fill a form within minutes. Cycle length can be days for a conveyancing instruction and many months for a litigated personal injury claim. Employment sits in the middle: urgent for the client, still a considered instruction for the firm. Corporate, commercial, dispute resolution and private client work behaves more like B2B. The first touch may be LinkedIn, a referral, or a branded search, and the matter may take weeks of partner conversations before an engagement letter is signed. Decision makers differ too. An HR director instructing employment counsel is not the same buyer as a home mover chasing a quote, and your CRM stages have to reflect that or forecasting is fiction.
Where enquiries leak in solicitor firms
The first leak is qualification. Agencies celebrate cost per lead while fee earners quietly delete enquiries that were never a fit for the practice or the office. The second leak is the phone. High-intent legal traffic still converts on calls, and if those calls never hit Clio Grow or HubSpot with a gclid, the campaign that paid for them looks worthless. The third leak is practice-area blending. When employment, conveyancing and commercial sit in one campaign with shared budgets, Google learns the cheapest form fill, which is rarely the highest-value matter. Multi-office firms add a fourth leak: Brighton traffic attributed to Mayfair landing pages, or the reverse, so office-level P&L never matches the ads report.
What a retained matter actually looks like in data
A usable legal pipeline usually runs enquiry, conflicts and triage, consultation or initial advice, instruction or retainer, then matter open in Clio Manage or the equivalent practice system. Marketing should not optimise to the first step alone. Offline conversion upload needs a later event the firm agrees is commercially real, typically a qualified consultation booked or an instruction confirmed, with practice area, office and fee earner attached as properties. Until that loop exists, every channel report is an argument rather than a measurement system.
Built for your commercial team
How we brief legal and solicitors work with you
You already know your market. These are the levers we use with your directors to decide spend, stages and what counts as a real win.
- SRA-regulated law firms (2023/24)
- ~9,147
- Firms by end-2025 (consolidation)
- Below ~9,000
- Practising solicitors (Jun 2026 series)
- ~177,841
- Business/commercial share of legal services value
- ~51%
- Personal injury / clinical negligence consumer segment
- ~£4.6bn
- Family and employment consumer segments
- ~£3–4bn each
SRA Authorisation Annual Report 2023/24
UK Legal Services Market Report 2026 coverage
SRA regulated population statistics
UK Legal Services Market Report 2026 coverage
UK Legal Services Market Report 2026 coverage
UK Legal Services Market Report 2026 coverage
Managing partner / equity partner
Owns P&L on practice contribution and will kill a channel that cannot show retained matters.
Head of marketing / BD
Runs Google, Microsoft and LinkedIn day to day, needs practice-level reporting for partner packs.
Operations / intake lead
Owns Clio Grow, conflicts triage and phone SLAs; blocks soft leads from reaching fee earners.
Practice area lead (employment, PI, conveyancing)
Cares about instruction quality in their desk, not firm-wide blended CPL.
Office managing partner (multi-site)
Needs office-level attribution so Brighton spend is not credited to Mayfair matters.
01
SRA firm lists and regulated population
Start with the SRA register of authorised firms and the regulated population statistics when you need firm counts, entity type and practising status. Use them to size a geographic catchment, exclude unregulated lookalikes, and keep multi-office targeting honest. This is market sizing and exclusion hygiene, not a cold-email dump of every authorised entity in England and Wales.
02
Law Society Find a Solicitor
Law Society Find a Solicitor remains useful for practice-area and location validation when building competitive sets or checking how a firm presents conveyancing, employment or private client work publicly. Treat it as a directory check alongside your own CRM and Google Ads auction insights, not as a guaranteed lead list.
03
Google Ads practice keywords
Non-brand search is still the primary capture layer for consumer practices. Build themes per practice family (employment solicitor, conveyancing quote, personal injury claim, divorce solicitor, wills and probate) with separate budgets and negative lists so high-CPC PI terms cannot drain conveyancing or commercial spend. Brand and competitor sit apart. Microsoft Ads often deserves a parallel share for older, higher-intent demographics.
04
Clio, LEAP and HubSpot segments
Inside the firm stack, Clio Grow and Clio Manage (or LEAP) hold practice_area, office and fee_earner properties that should drive audiences and offline conversion actions. HubSpot lists for remarketing and LinkedIn matched audiences should enrol on qualified consultation or instruction stages, never on every form fill. Role targeting on LinkedIn is reserved for employment, corporate and commercial buyers, not for distressed consumer queries.
What we build for you
The stack that ladders to booked revenue
These are the core service programmes we run alongside this industry page. Open the one that matches your bottleneck.
Infrastructure
What we put behind the ads
Media only works when reservation data, CRM stages and offline conversions share one commercial truth.
CRM and practice systems that actually connect
Most firms we see run a split stack. HubSpot or a marketing CRM captures the enquiry. Clio Grow handles intake. Clio Manage runs the matter. Call recordings and reception logs live somewhere else again. The infrastructure job is to make those systems share a single enquiry identity, keep UTM and click IDs intact from the first touch, and write a qualified outcome back to Google Ads and Microsoft Ads. We map HubSpot deal or ticket stages to the intake reality of each practice, not a generic SaaS funnel, and we treat Clio matter open as a revenue-adjacent event even when NDA rules stop us publishing the value.
Attribution that survives partner scrutiny
Legal attribution has to answer three questions in one dashboard: which practice area, which office, and which channel created the instruction. We build weekly and bi-monthly packs that reconcile ad spend to CRM outcomes, with conversion actions named by practice where volume allows, for example legal_employment_qualified_consult and legal_conveyancing_instruction. Server-side tagging and consent mode sit underneath so the measurement plan is not wiped out by browser restrictions. If a firm will not define what counts as qualified, we stop at the measurement plan rather than inventing a conversion the partners will not defend.
Paid media structured by how the firm sells
Campaign architecture follows practice area and intent, not vanity keyword lists. Brand and competitor sit apart from non-brand. High-CPC personal injury and conveyancing terms get their own budgets and negative lists so they cannot cannibalise lower-volume commercial search. LinkedIn is reserved for practice areas where the buyer is a role, typically employment for HR leaders, corporate for founders and FDs, and commercial disputes for in-house counsel. Microsoft Ads often deserves its own share of legal budget because Bing still converts in older, higher-intent demographics that Google reports alone will miss.
FAQs
Legal and solicitors marketing FAQs
Can you market every practice area the same way?
No. Conveyancing and personal injury are usually search and phone heavy. Employment mixes search with HR-role LinkedIn. Corporate and commercial are longer cycles with fewer, higher-value instructions. Campaign structure, CRM stages and conversion events should follow those shapes, not a single firm-wide cost-per-lead target.
Do you need Clio to work with a law firm?
No, but you need an intake system and a matter system that can emit a qualified event. Clio Grow and Clio Manage are common. HubSpot alone can work for marketing-owned enquiry stages if fee earners will update instruction outcomes. The non-negotiable is a later conversion than the thank-you page.
Why do you refuse to publish CPA for Britton & Time?
The engagement is under NDA for CPA, revenue and other confidential metrics. Legal client confidentiality and firm policy limit what can appear on a public case study. We publish the operational proof that is approved: 150+ leads per month, roughly 10 practice areas, and the channel mix of Google, Microsoft and LinkedIn.
How do multi-office firms avoid messy attribution?
Separate landing paths and call tracking per office where volume justifies it, required CRM properties for office and practice area, and conversion actions that do not blend Brighton instructions into a Mayfair campaign. Shared brand campaigns are fine. Shared non-brand budgets across offices usually are not.
Is LinkedIn worth it for solicitors?
For consumer conveyancing, rarely as a primary channel. For employment, corporate, commercial and some private client work, yes, when the buyer is a named role and the firm can nurture a longer cycle. At Britton & Time, LinkedIn became an independent acquisition channel rather than a support act for Google.
How do you handle SRA and advertising compliance?
We draft within SRA publicity expectations and the firm's own compliance process: no misleading fee claims, no guaranteed outcomes, testimonials only where the firm approves them. Google Ads Editorial rules still apply. Where a Google policy line for a sensitive practice area cannot be verified from the live help document at write time, we flag it for counsel review rather than guessing.
What does a typical first 30 days look like?
Week one is account and CRM archaeology: conversion actions, Clio or HubSpot fields, call handling, practice-area volume. Weeks two and three are measurement and campaign surgery. Week four is the first pack that shows spend against qualified outcomes by practice, even if revenue values stay internal.
Next step
Tell us about the pipeline you want to build
Share the vertical, the stack, and where enquiries are leaking. We will tell you plainly whether we are the right team for it.