How to market a new law firm is mostly a sequencing question: a brand-new firm has no reviews, no rankings and no data, so the order of the work matters more than the budget behind it.
This page is the first-year slice of law firm marketing, the hub that covers every channel for firms at any age.
The short version: build the assets Google reads before you spend, let the slow ones compound while your first clients arrive through people who already know you, and measure from month one so a number picks your first paid channel.
Marketing for new lawyers: what you have on day one
The market around a new firm is large and mostly small: the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted about 863,700 lawyer jobs in 2025, with 52% of them in legal services and 11% of lawyers self-employed.
Below the employee line, Census counted about 274,000 legal-services businesses with no paid employees in 2023, taking in $23.2 billion in receipts, roughly $84,500 on average each.
That Census count covers NAICS 5411, which is broader than law firms and includes many part-time or side businesses, so read it as the no-employee tier, not a count of solo lawyers, and the average as a scale check, not a first-year target.
The cheap ground is real: in the ABA's 2024 Legal Technology Survey, 90% of respondents had a website, including 70% of solo respondents, which means about 3 in 10 solo respondents reported no website at all.
Those respondents are ABA survey takers rather than a census of firms, but the direction holds: a new firm that ships a complete profile and a clear site in week one is ahead of a large minority of its peers.
What a new firm lacks is exactly what marketing accumulates: reviews, links, rankings and its own conversion data, which is why everything below is ordered by what compounds slowest.
Starting a law firm: the setup that is hard to undo
A few marketing decisions are cheap once and expensive to fix, worth an hour each before the doors open, because errors in them propagate to every listing that copies them.
Claim the profile on day one
Google may already show an unclaimed listing for your office, and everything else reads from it, so claim and verify before any other marketing work.
Name it after the sign on the door
Google's guidelines say that when one practitioner is the only public-facing person at a branded location, it is best to share one profile named like "[brand]: [practitioner name]"; Google's published example is an insurance agent, not a law firm, so take the format, not the example.
Set a phone that rings where you are
Google's guidelines require a number that connects to the individual business location and stays under the business's direct control, prefer a local number to a call-center helpline, and ban numbers that redirect callers to another business.
Add a booking link and test it end to end
Google lets a business turn on bookings through a supported provider or add its own booking link, and a provider may charge for bookings made through Google, so read the terms before connecting one.
Sync Bing Places last
Bing Places lets a business link its Google account to import Google listings and update matched listings with Google's data on sync, which is why the Google profile gets fixed first, so its errors never carry over.
The profile also reaches past the map: Google's AI optimization guide, last updated July 2026, says Business Profiles can help a business's services show up in AI responses and in other Google Search results, and "can help" is Google's phrasing, not a guarantee of appearance.
The field-by-field detail, including categories and service areas, is in Google Business Profile for lawyers, and the map-pack system around it is in local SEO for law firms.
A new law firm marketing plan for year one
A new firm's plan is mostly an order of operations, because the assets differ wildly in how long they take to pay.
Illustrative: a new firm's first year
Months one to three go to the foundation: the profile, the phone, the booking link, a website that puts the phone number and a short consultation form where thumbs land, and a review ask built into every matter close.
Months three to nine are the compounding stretch: practice-area pages, citations, replies to every review, and the first real content, none of which peaks early and all of which still pays in year three.
Months nine to twelve are the reassessment: consultations by source, signed cases by source, and a first paid channel added only when the site's own numbers show it can turn extra traffic into consultations.
The document version, with the six build steps and the 12-month calendar, is in law firm marketing plan, and the tactic-by-tactic menu is in law firm marketing ideas.
What a new law firm should spend
No credible published benchmark sets marketing spend as a percentage of revenue for law firms, so a new firm has no outside number to copy and has to work from its own.
The working question runs backwards: what is a signed case worth to your firm after fees and costs, and therefore what can you afford to pay per signed case?
Illustrative: a new firm's first measured month
Twenty contacts, twelve consultations and four signed cases is a month you can price: at $6,000 of spend that is $1,500 per signed case, and only your case values say whether that works.
For scale context, counting filers of every age rather than new firms: in IRS Statistics of Income data for tax year 2023, legal-services sole proprietorships filed 316,370 returns reporting $43.2 billion in business receipts, and 77% of them reported a net profit.
Those figures cover sole-proprietorship filers in one tax year, so they are not a survival rate for new firms, and a sole proprietor's net income includes the owner's own pay.
Budgeting is a weak spot at the solo end: in the ABA's 2024 survey, 65% of respondents budgeted for technology but only 41% of solos did, so write the marketing line item down rather than funding it from whatever is left.
What each channel costs, with published price points, is in law firm marketing cost, and the small-firm version of the budget math is in small law firm marketing.
How a new law firm gets its first clients
Cold spend is the hardest place to find a first client, and the referral data explains why: in Clio's 2019 survey of 2,000 US consumers, 59% of people shopping for a lawyer sought a referral, and the sources were friends and family (32%), another lawyer (16%) and a non-legal professional (9%).
The first two live in the network you already have: personal contacts, former colleagues and opposing counsel who know your work, plus the lawyers in adjacent practice areas who regularly turn away matters they do not take.
Announce the firm to all of them in week one, and make yourself findable to the next tier through the sources in how to get more clients as a lawyer, with the long game in how to get referrals as a lawyer.
Responsiveness is the other edge a new firm carries: in Clio's 2019 survey, 64% of people who contacted a firm they did not hire said it never responded by phone or email, so a new firm that answers fast competes against firms that, in that survey, often did not answer at all.
Reviews start the same way: your first matters are your first reviews, so decide how you will ask and how you will reply before client number one signs.
The rules before your first ad
New firms tend to advertise earlier than established ones, so the rules deserve a read before the first dollar rather than after the first complaint.
ABA Model Rule 7.2(a) says a lawyer may communicate information about their services through any media, and the Model Rules are a template that binds no one until a state adopts them, so your state's versions of Rules 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3 control what your ads, profile and website must say and show.
One thing nobody can sell you at any firm age: Google says there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking, so treat a guaranteed map-pack spot as a red flag.
The rule-by-rule detail is in attorney advertising rules, and before you run anything, confirm the specifics with your state bar's ethics counsel or an ethics lawyer.
Frequently asked questions
What should a new law firm set up before it opens?
The Google Business Profile, set up once and correctly: the real-world firm name, a phone that rings at the office under the firm's direct control, and a tested booking link. Then a simple website that puts the phone number and a short consultation form where a phone user can reach them.
How does a new law firm get reviews with no past clients?
From your first matters. Decide how you will ask and how you will reply, and build both into the close of every matter from client number one, because a review flow that starts late is the hardest one to start.
Should a new law firm pay for ads before it has reviews?
Ads buy immediate visibility while the profile and rankings mature, but judge them by cost per signed case from the first month. Expect a page with no reviews and no past results to work harder for the same trust, which is why the conversion path gets fixed before the spend gets scaled.
What marketing should a new law firm skip?
Skip anything that promises a ranking: Google says there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. Skip a second paid channel before the first one is measured, and skip expensive branding projects before the phone rings.