Attorney lead generation and referral services have morphed from simple Yellow Pages ads to complex online campaigns that keep evolving.

With the radical transformation in the digital marketing space, competition for leads has become stiffer.  Today, many lawyers are struggling to attract qualified case leads that turn into high-paying clients.

Smart attorneys have turned to pay per call marketing which is a relatively low-risk marketing channel. With attorney pay per call marketing, you only pay for results.

But the big question is, how exactly are these leads being generated and by whom?

In this post, we go beyond the basics and help you understand the real stuff you need to know about economics of attorney lead generation.

So, let us get started.

Understanding the Fundamentals of Attorney Lead Generation

A significant number of successful law firms have been built on the back of lead generation services. Some lawyers even have multiple vendors that drive qualified leads to their firms.

Most lead generation companies charge attorneys on the pay-per-lead model.  It means that you only pay an agreed-upon price for every lead delivered.

In the pay per call marketing space, attorneys only pay for qualified calls delivered to them. Typically, the pricing model is highly varied depending on the practice area, ranging from as low as $20/qualified call to the north of $700/qualified call.

One reason attorneys love lead generation, especially the pay per call model, is the flexibility and simplicity it offers in terms of cost-effectiveness. You only pay for results.

For instance, if a call costs $100 and the attorney typically converts 20% of the calls, that is approximately $500 per client. So, if the average client value for such an attorney is $5,000, then it is worth the effort and investment.

Things become even better if the leads are 100% exclusive.  A lead being exclusive means that the lead generation company routes the prospect to only one attorney. Therefore, there is no competition for the same prospect by multiple lawyers.

The concept of exclusivity also eliminates the risk of a prospect being overwhelmed by a mad rush of phone calls from different attorneys and paralegals.

The Caveat

An attorney lead generation company, such as PALO, delivering highly qualified calls to your law firm doesn’t mean that the leads will automatically turn into high-paying clients. This is only the first step to converting the prospects, and whether they become clients or not will depend on how you handle them.

To turn the leads into high-paying clients, you will require an efficient, highly responsive and professional staff. Simply relying on the assumption of your firm’s perceived conversion rate will most likely result in poor cost-per-lead figures leading to a poor return on investment.

Therefore, success in the attorney lead generation space also requires highly accurate and efficient tracking infrastructure to track every lead throughout the sales cycle.

Players and Models in Attorney Lead Generation Space

The truth is that there are many law firm lead generation companies out there. Some are known brands, some obscure and others only operate from the shadows of the lead SEO market.

Some of the branded players in the attorney lead generation space include Nolo, FindLaw and Martindale-Avvo. Most of them rely on SEO-driven traffic to their attorney directory pages.

Others, such as PALO, launch and run successful marketing campaigns for attorneys, yielding good results. Besides the directory pages, some players in the field, such as FindLaw, have extensive content libraries that drive a relatively large volume of law-related queries.

Although many attorneys use these directory services, they have one major drawback. Typically, leads generated by these directories are driven by a name search for a specific lawyer and then resold to other attorneys.

For instance, a prospective client may be recommended to John Doe. The prospect searches for John Doe in Google and lands on Avvo listing for John Doe. The person proceeds to fill the provided form that goes to a paying attorney or attorneys other than John Doe. Such changes can have a huge impact on one’s marketing effort since it lowers the ROI.

The Economic Success of Lawyer Lead Generation

Generally, the economics of lead generation companies that rely heavily on pay per click and other conventional digital marketing strategies aren’t so good.

Consider a scenario where a lead generation company drives website traffic through conventional pay-per-click advertising and simply resells the traffic to attorneys without performing any form of filtering and qualification.

The truth is that such traffic has little intrinsic value for the attorney because, most likely, those people aren’t looking for a lawyer.  Some of them might have landed on the publisher’s website by mistake, but they end up being passed to you as leads.

Even in cases, where the prospect is “qualified,” he/she may be sold to several attorneys. In general, the attorney is disadvantaged and is better off attracting the prospect directly to his/her own website instead of going through a lead generation company that doesn’t care.

The pay per call model offers better value and ROI because you are assured of highly qualified leads that are easy to convert.  Combining pay per call with other forms of marketing can easily propel your legal practice to the next level.

Pay per call agencies are usually growth-minded and result oriented. They strive to deliver highly qualified leads to your law firm. They also deploy accurate tracking and reporting infrastructure to improve your success rate.

Is Attorney Lead Generation Worth It?

As long as your conversion rate is reasonable, you can be sure of long-term and sustainable success. The truth is that attorney lead generation agencies are more advanced with better and specialized targeting capabilities.

For the right type of legal practice, legal lead generation can be a worthy investment in the long term. It can help you grow your practice without the lengthy time investment required for traditional forms of marketing.

At PALO, we believe that your success is our success. Therefore, we always strive to drive highly-qualified case leads to your legal practice at reasonable prices. We generate leads by running highly targeted campaigns that yield great results.

Our leads are 100% exclusive and ready to hire an attorney. Talk to us today to learn more about our attorney pay per call marketing service. We are always ready to serve you!