What to Ask Before Hiring a Law Firm Marketing Company (15 Questions That Reveal Everything)
The questions most law firms never ask their marketing vendors — and should. 15 direct questions that separate marketing companies who will deliver from those w
Most law firms hire marketing vendors the same way they hire any professional service: a few conversations, some reference checks, a proposal review, and a decision based largely on comfort and price. The outcome is often years of mediocre results and unclear accountability.
The problem isn’t that the vendors are dishonest. It’s that the questions most law firms ask don’t surface the information that actually predicts whether the relationship will deliver ROI.
Here are the 15 questions that do. They’re direct, specific, and uncomfortable for vendors who can’t deliver real value. That discomfort is the point.
Questions About Attribution and Measurement
1. How will you connect your work to signed retainers, not just traffic and rankings? The right answer involves call tracking, GA4 conversion events, and CRM source attribution. See our breakdown of what a complete attribution stack looks like.
2. What will our monthly report actually tell us about cases signed? Ask to see a sample report from a current client. If it shows impressions, clicks, and keyword rankings with no connection to intake data, that’s your answer.
3. How do you handle attribution when a client finds us through multiple touchpoints? A prospective client might see an organic result, leave, and see a Google Ad three days later. How does the vendor handle this multi-touch attribution?
Questions About Technical Capability
4. Who on your team will work on our website’s technical SEO, and what are their qualifications? Ask specifically about Core Web Vitals remediation, structured data implementation, and site architecture.
5. What is our current mobile PageSpeed score, and what would you do to improve it? Run your site through Google PageSpeed Insights before the conversation so you know the baseline.
6. Do you build or modify websites, or do you only do marketing on top of an existing site? Many marketing agencies don’t touch website code.
Questions About Ownership and Lock-In
7. If we stopped working with you, what happens to our website? The answer reveals more than almost anything else. If the vendor owns the hosting or uses proprietary tools your site is built on, leaving costs you your website. See our full breakdown of law firm website ownership risk.
8. Who owns the content you produce on our behalf? Content you pay to produce should be owned by your firm, full stop. Get this in writing.
9. What does your contract termination clause look like, and what is the notice period? Long notice periods and automatic renewal clauses are red flags.
Questions About Process and Accountability
10. Who will be our day-to-day contact, and what is their experience level? Large agencies often pitch senior staff and deliver junior account managers.
11. Can you show us a client who has been with you for 3+ years and describe what you’ve built for them? Long-term client retention in a results-dependent relationship is the strongest available signal that the vendor delivers value.
12. What’s the most common reason your client relationships end? Defensiveness is a bad sign. Honest self-reflection is a good one.
Questions About the Tampa Market
13. Which law firms in the Tampa Bay market are you currently working with? Vendors working with direct competitors create conflicts of interest.
14. What do you know about the Tampa Bay legal market specifically? A vendor who treats Tampa like any other market will apply generic strategies. See our Tampa Bay legal market analysis.
15. What would success look like for our firm specifically at 6 months and 12 months? This separates vendors who have genuinely thought about your situation from those presenting a templated pitch.
At Hughey, LLC, we welcome every one of these questions — because our answers are specific, technically grounded, and tied to business outcomes.
Ready to ask the hard questions? Let’s have that conversation — we’ll answer all 15 and show you exactly how we’d approach your firm’s situation.
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About the Author
Joe Hughey is the founder of Hughey LLC, a law firm marketing strategy consulting firm. With 20+ years of legal marketing experience, Joe works exclusively with law firms to build marketing operations that generate retained clients.