Law firm marketing Criminal defense
Practice area · DUI, misdemeanor, felony
Criminal defensemarketing
The most time-compressed buying decision in the legal vertical. There is a court date, it is close, and whoever is reachable first usually gets the retainer.
The short version. Criminal defense inquiries arrive at the worst possible hours and resolve within days, against a fixed deadline nobody controls. Speed to answer decides more outcomes here than in any other practice area.
What most firms miss is who they are answering. The person dialing at two in the morning is frequently not the person you would represent, not the person paying, and not the person who decides. Ads and intake scripts written for a defendant get read by a mother, and that mismatch loses matters that speed alone will not save.
The thing that makes this practice area different
Four roles.Rarely one person.
Read your own ads with that in mind and most of them fall apart. Copy addressed to "you" assumes the reader is the person charged. Landing pages ask the visitor to describe their case, when the visitor knows only what a police officer told a relative an hour ago. Intake scripts screen for facts the caller does not have.
None of that is a copywriting nicety. It is the difference between a caller who feels understood in the first ten seconds and one who works down to the next firm. And it compounds with the deadline: this decision gets made in the days before an arraignment, not over weeks, so there is no second chance to be found later.
Practically, that means ads and pages written to the person searching on someone's behalf, intake that captures the caller's relationship to the defendant before anything else, payment that can be taken remotely from a third party without anyone driving to an office, and campaigns split by charge type because a first DUI and a felony are not the same buyer at the same price. For click prices and how to pull your own market numbers, the personal injury page carries the method, and it works identically here with charge-type terms in place of injury terms.
Coverage against when demand actually happens
There are 168 hoursin a week
Arrests do not observe business hours. Most firms are reachable for about a quarter of the week and compete for a market that runs all of it. This prices that gap using two different sign rates: what happens when someone reaches a human, and what happens when they reach voicemail.
Your numbers
Your week 27% covered
Each block is one hour of the week. Lit blocks are hours a human answers. Shown as a proportion, not a schedule.
Live answering only. A voicemail box is not coverage.
Check your call log rather than guessing. It is usually higher than firms expect. As you raise coverage this is capped against the hours left open, so full coverage leaves no gap.
What that means
- Fee revenue sitting in your uncovered hours, per year
- $388,800
- Inquiries hitting voicemail each month
- 18.0
- Matters signed now, per month
- 9.3
- Matters at full live coverage
- 16.5
- Matters lost to the gap, per month
- 7.2
- Cost of each uncovered hour
- $61
- Fee revenue you capture now, per year
- $502,200
You are reachable for 27% of the week. The uncovered hours hold $388,800 in fees a year.
What we actually change
Coverage first.Then the ads.
We do not increase spend on a criminal defense account until the coverage gap is closed, because buying more inquiries into an unanswered phone makes the arithmetic worse rather than better. Depending on the firm that means rotating attorney on-call properly, a service briefed to screen rather than take messages, or AI answering that can capture the caller's relationship to the defendant, the charge, the custody status and the court date, and route the ones that need a human immediately.
After that: campaigns split by charge type rather than one criminal defense bucket, ad copy and landing pages written for whoever is actually searching, and remote payment that works from a phone at midnight without anybody visiting an office. Google Screened is worth the setup here too, since it places a verified firm above the ad block, though the star-rating requirement is a real obstacle in this practice area and is worth planning for rather than discovering.
Everything is reviewed against the California Rules of Professional Conduct before it runs, and criminal defense copy drifts toward outcome claims faster than most. The advertising rules guide covers what Rules 7.1 through 7.5 permit. For the other practice areas and the regional pages, go back to law firm marketing.
Nothing on this page is legal advice, and we are a marketing agency rather than your compliance counsel. Confirm anything touching the Rules of Professional Conduct with a lawyer who advises your firm on ethics.
Questions we get from defense firms
Straightanswers
Isn't the public defender our real competition?
Partly, and it is the one thing that makes this practice area structurally unlike the others. Every prospect has a free, constitutionally guaranteed alternative, which no personal injury or family law client has. Pretending otherwise in your copy reads as either ignorant or dishonest to a family that has already been told about it.
The families who retain privately are usually deciding on attention rather than on outcome promises, which is not something you are allowed to make anyway. Availability, caseload, and who actually appears in court are the honest differentiators, and they happen to be the ones you can substantiate.
Do we need a real person on call, or is an answering service enough?
A service is enough if it is briefed to screen rather than to take messages. The failure mode is a generic operator who collects a name and number, because that produces a callback the following morning against a decision the family is making tonight.
What matters is whether whoever answers can capture the charge, the custody status, the court date and the caller's relationship to the defendant, and can escalate the urgent ones to an attorney immediately. That standard is achievable by a service, by rotating on-call, or by AI answering. It is not achievable by voicemail.
Should we advertise for DUI separately?
Almost always. DUI carries the highest search volume in this practice area and attracts the most competition, so it behaves like its own market inside your account. Running it in the same campaign as felony defense means one bid strategy serving two very different buyers at two very different fees.
Split it out, bid it on its own merits, and let the volume tell you whether the economics work. Serious felony work is lower volume and usually better served by reputation and referral than by search.
Our clients won't leave reviews. How much does that hurt?
More than most firms realize, because it is not only a persuasion problem. Google Screened carries a minimum star rating, so a thin review profile can keep you out of the placement that sits above the ad block entirely.
The constraint is real and we would not pretend otherwise. What works is asking at the right moment, which is at resolution rather than mid-matter, making it effortless, and accepting reviews that say nothing about the case. A client who writes only that they were kept informed and their calls were returned is a perfectly good review, and it is one most people are willing to leave.
Next step
Thirty minutes.
No pitch deck.
We'll pull up your call log, work out where in the week your matters are going, and tell you what we would change first. You can go and run it yourself afterward.
★★★★★ 4.9 across 312 reviews No obligation · Usually booked 1-2 days out