A law firm marketing plan is a one-page document that fixes who the firm serves, which practice areas it wants to grow, how clients will find it, what it will spend, and how it will measure enquiries, reviewed quarterly. Write it by answering eight questions with your own intake numbers and checking each line against law society rules.
Many law firms already own the parts of a marketing program: a website, a Google Business Profile, social accounts, perhaps an ad campaign someone set up years ago. What they rarely own is a written decision about which of those parts gets the next dollar and which gets switched off.
The cost of that gap shows up at budget time. Partners argue from anecdote, the agency reports clicks instead of clients, and nobody can say what a signed matter costs from any channel. Meanwhile prospective clients are searching, reading reviews and asking AI tools before they call anyone.
A plan fixes this when it is short enough to finish and specific enough to measure. Below is a one-page law firm marketing plan with eight boxes, a filled-in example for a fictional two-office New Brunswick personal injury firm, the channels to fund first, a way to calculate cost per signed matter, the law society rules every line must respect, and a 90-day sequence for a firm starting from nothing.
Most firms skip the plan because marketing decisions get made one at a time, by whoever argues hardest that month. Without a written plan there is no agreed number for what a new client should cost, so nothing can be judged.
A September 2026 feature in Canadian Lawyer put it plainly: almost every firm has a website, a Google Business Profile and a social account, but far fewer have a plan, a person, or a partner turning that presence into a full intake calendar.
The same feature reports that more than half of consumers turn to the internet when they anticipate a future legal need, and roughly 28 percent say AI has directed them to contact a lawyer. A firm whose website and search presence are not built for that first look can lose the file before anyone picks up the phone.
The template has eight boxes, each answered in a sentence or a short list. If a box needs more than a few lines, the decision behind it has not been made yet.
Example firm (fictional): a plaintiff personal injury practice with two offices, in Saint John and Fredericton, New Brunswick. The firm, its wording and its rankings are invented to show how each box gets filled.
Box Question to answer Example entry (fictional firm) Position Who do we act for, what do we decline, and what can we say that a competitor could not sign? Injured people in southern New Brunswick, plaintiff side only. No insurer defence, criminal or family files. "Every file stays with the lawyer who first met the client, at the office nearest them."Practice areas to grow Which areas, ranked, and what is provincial search demand for each? Motor vehicle injury, then long-term disability claims, then slip and fall. Demand pulled from Keyword Planner, New Brunswick only. Channels How will clients find us, in order of expected cost per signed matter? Referrals and reviews, a profile for each office, practice-area pages, Google Ads on motor vehicle injury only, social content, community. Website Does the site do its five jobs? Mobile intake, a page per ranked area, a page per office, reviews, fast on a phone. Budget What will we spend, and on what? A total built from target signed matters, split across channels, with a target cost per signed matter for each. Measurement How will we know what worked? Intake log, call tracking by channel, form tracking, reported monthly. Compliance Does every line meet our law society's rules? No superiority claims, no outcome promises, testimonials checked against the provincial code. Quarterly review What do we change, and what do we stop? Channels signing matters get more; channels with none get fixed or cut.
The position box decides what the firm says yes to and what it turns away. The test for the signature line is whether a competitor across the street could sign it unchanged; if they could, it is a slogan. Our guide to law firm branding shows how the position carries into the identity, and how to design a law firm logo covers the mark itself.
Pull search demand from Google Ads Keyword Planner with the location set to your own province, using the terms clients actually type for each area. Then weigh demand against fee value and the capacity your lawyers really have. An area with strong demand but no lawyer free to take files is not a growth area yet.
Every channel sends people to the website, so it gets its own box. The site has five jobs:
For structured data, the homepage and office pages carry the firm's LegalService markup, while practice-area pages use Service markup with a provider reference back to the firm. If the current site cannot do these five jobs, that is a law firm website design project to plan for before adding channels.
Fund the channels that cost mostly time first, then add paid search once intake can answer every call. The example orders six channels by expected cost per signed matter; your own intake log decides the final order.
For ways to raise enquiry volume across these channels, see how to generate more leads for your law firm.
Work backward from the cost of a signed matter you can afford, then split that total across channels. Measure each channel by signed matters, not clicks or calls.
A percentage of revenue is a common starting point for a law firm marketing budget, but that percentage should come from your own history or a published legal-industry survey you trust, not a sales pitch. Build the number from the bottom up:
Channel Main cost What goes on the budget line Referrals and reviews Partner and staff time Hours per month for review requests and referral follow-up Google Business Profile Staff time Hours per office for updates, photos and review replies Local SEO and practice-area pages Writing time or agency fees Pages per quarter and who writes them Google Ads Media spend plus management A monthly spend cap on one practice area to start Social content Staff time Posts per week and who approves them Community Partner time and sponsorship fees Events and sponsorships for the year
For the paid line, our guide to how much Google Ads cost is a sensible place to set the cap.
Track four numbers for every channel: enquiries by source, consultations booked, signed matters, and cost per signed matter. Cost per signed matter is the channel's spend, including valued time, divided by the matters it signed in the period.
The intake log is what makes the other numbers honest, because calls and forms only show who enquired, not who signed.
Canadian law societies enforce conduct rules that reach how lawyers market themselves, and the details differ by province. Treat every ad, page, post and receptionist script the plan produces as something your law society could read.
The Federation of Law Societies of Canada developed the Model Code of Professional Conduct with the law societies to harmonize conduct rules across Canada, and its Interactive Model Code links each rule to the matching or related rule of every law society. That gives you a direct route to your own province's version. The Canadian Bar Association also publishes The Ethics of Advertising: A Toolkit for Lawyers, prepared for its Ethics and Professional Responsibility Subcommittee.
Compliance box for the plan
Check What it means for the plan No superiority claims Keep words such as best, leading or top out of the position line, ads and pages. No guaranteed outcomes Never promise or imply a result in ad copy, on practice-area pages or in an intake script. Testimonials and endorsements Rules vary by province. Confirm your law society's position before publishing client quotes or reviews on the site or in ads. Accurate and verifiable Publish only statements about fees, experience or results you can prove. A named reviewer One partner signs off each quarter that new marketing meets the provincial code.
A firm with nothing in place can get a working plan live in 13 weeks by doing four blocks of work in order. Each block feeds the next, so resist starting with ads.
At the end of the quarter you have a plan built on your own data, which is what the next budget conversation needs.
We work with four New Brunswick law firms on websites, branding, SEO, social and AI receptionists. Each engagement covers different boxes of the one-page plan, which is why the plan comes before the tactics.
CLG Injury Law. Our work for CLG covered a rebrand, a Webflow site, a social content system and an AI receptionist across six offices in three provinces. In plan terms, one engagement touched the position box, the website hub, the social channel and the intake step. The CLG Injury Law rebrand and website case study walks through the process.
Moss Hachey Law. For Moss Hachey the engagement spanned a website redesign, SEO, social and Google Ads. That maps onto the website, local SEO, paid search and social lines of the plan, the kind of multi-channel mix where an intake log and cost per signed matter keep every line accountable. The Moss Hachey Law marketing engagement case study shows how it was put together.
We also delivered branding, a website and an AI receptionist for Costin and Associates, and a bilingual website for Gandy and Associates.
A law firm marketing plan earns its place when it forces decisions: who you act for, which practice areas get growth money, which channels get funded first, and what a signed matter is allowed to cost. Put those answers on one page, check every line against your law society's rules, and let the intake log settle the arguments that used to go to whoever spoke loudest. Review it each quarter, move budget toward what signs matters, and stop what does not. If you want help turning that page into a website, search presence and intake system that report back honestly, book a free consultation with our team in Saint John.
