What Law Firms Actually Spend on Marketing, and Against Which Number
The short answer
Two real figures exist, and they measure different things. Clio found solo firms put 9% of their expenses into marketing, and small and mid-sized firms 5%. Hinge found high-growth firms spend a median 16.5% of revenue, against 5% for firms that are not growing.
A share of expenses is not a share of revenue. Mixing the two is how a 5% rule and a 16% rule end up in the same sentence. The arithmetic to convert one into the other takes a minute and is below.
Ask what a law firm should spend on marketing and you get a percentage. Ask where the percentage came from and the room goes quiet.
There are two sound numbers in circulation. They come from different studies, measure against different bases, and answer different questions. Knowing which is which is most of the work.
The two numbers that exist
Almost every budget article quotes a percentage of revenue. Almost none says where it came from or when it was measured. These two do.
| Figure | Measured against | Sample | Collected |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solo firms: 9% on marketing | Total expenses | 1,028 legal professionals; 1,437 Clio customers | 2024 |
| Small and mid-sized: 5% | Total expenses | Same survey | 2024 |
| High-growth firms: 16.5% | Revenue | 76 law firms | 2023 |
| No-growth firms: 5% | Revenue | Same study | 2023 |
The Clio figures sit inside a fuller picture of where the money goes. For a solo firm the top expenses run partner salaries at 19%, staff salaries at 18%, office expenses at 11%, marketing at 9% and rent at 7%. For small firms the shape changes: staff salaries take 30% and marketing drops to 5%.
The Hinge figure is narrower and more pointed. It compares firms that grew quickly against firms that did not, and finds the fast growers putting roughly three times as much of their revenue into marketing. That is a correlation in 76 firms, not a lever you pull.
Both studies disclose their method, which is why they are usable. Clio names its sample sizes and its field dates. Hinge names the number of firms and the year. Any figure that cannot tell you those two things is a number someone repeated, not a number someone measured.
Why expenses and revenue are not the same base
This is the part that causes the confusion, and it is ordinary arithmetic.
Revenue is what comes in. Expenses are what goes out. Marketing is a slice of the second, and the second is a slice of the first. So 9% of expenses is always a smaller number than 9% of revenue, and how much smaller depends on what your firm keeps.
Run it with real figures. A firm bills $800,000 a year and runs at a 35% profit margin, so its expenses are $520,000. Marketing at 9% of expenses is $46,800. As a share of revenue, that same spend is 5.9%.
The two framings describe one budget and differ by about a third. A firm that reads “9%” and applies it to revenue would set aside $72,000 and believe it was matching the benchmark. It would be overspending against that benchmark by more than $25,000.
| If your margin is | Expenses are | 9% of expenses equals |
|---|---|---|
| 25% | 75% of revenue | 6.8% of revenue |
| 35% | 65% of revenue | 5.9% of revenue |
| 50% | 50% of revenue | 4.5% of revenue |
The conversion is one step. Take the expense percentage, multiply by your expenses as a share of revenue, and you have the revenue percentage. Do it with your own margin rather than an assumed one, because that is the number that makes the two studies comparable.
What the percentage hides
Even converted properly, a percentage is a weak way to set a budget. It tells you what firms like yours did. It tells you nothing about what a client is worth to you.
Consider two firms that each bill a million dollars. One runs a high-volume practice with an average matter worth $2,500, so it needs roughly 400 matters a year. The other does estate planning for business owners at an average of $25,000, and needs 40.
Those firms need completely different marketing, and a shared percentage would send both of them wrong. The first lives or dies on cost per signed case. The second can spend far more to win one client and still come out ahead.
The percentage is a sanity check at the end, not a plan at the start.
This also explains why the published figures cluster where they do. Survey averages are dominated by the practice areas with the most firms in them, which means a national percentage describes a composite practice that nobody actually runs. Your own case value is the correction for that distortion, and it is a number sitting in your own accounting software right now.
Build the budget from the case math
Work forward from what a matter is worth, then test the total against the benchmarks.
-
Start with the average value of a matterTake last year’s collections and divide by the number of matters opened. This is the only figure in the whole exercise that is specific to your firm, and it is the one that decides everything else. -
Decide what a new matter may cost to winA common starting point is a tenth of the matter’s value, adjusted for whether clients come back and whether they refer. On a $5,000 matter that is $500 to sign a client. -
Work back through your intake rateIf one in four consultations signs, and half of inquiries become consultations, each signed client needs eight inquiries. That multiplier is where most budgets quietly fail. -
Multiply by how many matters you needNow you have a budget built from your own numbers. Convert it to a share of revenue and compare it against 5.9% and 16.5%. If it lands far outside both, something in the chain above needs checking.
Paid search is where this arithmetic bites hardest. Legal is the most expensive vertical in Google Ads, with an average cost per click of $9.87 and an average cost per lead of $131.63 across 13,474 US campaigns. At those rates, eight inquiries to sign one client costs about $1,053 before anyone does any legal work.
The whole calculation, run once
Here is the arithmetic end to end for a firm that wants fifty new matters in a year, so the chain is visible rather than described.
The firm collected $600,000 last year across 120 matters, which puts the average matter at $5,000. It runs at a 30% margin, so its expenses are $420,000 of the $600,000 that came in.
It decides a new matter may cost up to a tenth of its value to win, which sets a ceiling of $500 per signed client. Intake converts one consultation in three, and roughly half of inquiries reach a consultation, so six inquiries are needed for each client who signs. That puts the ceiling on an inquiry at about $83.
Fifty new matters therefore need three hundred inquiries, and at $83 each the budget comes to $24,900. Against revenue that is 4.2%, and against expenses it is 5.9%.
Both of those land just under the measured benchmarks, which is the useful part. The allocation was calculated from the firm’s own case value and its own conversion rate. The published benchmarks arrived at the end as verification rather than at the beginning as instruction. Had the calculation produced 20% of revenue, the suspicious element would not be the benchmark but the conversion rate feeding it.
The conversion rate is the cheapest element on that list to improve. Moving intake from one consultation in three to one in two reduces the inquiries needed for fifty matters from three hundred to two hundred. That removes a third of the budget requirement without purchasing anything additional. Most firms discover it is easier to improve the percentage than to locate the money.
Where the money goes inside the budget
Once the total is set, the split matters more than the total does, and it is the part benchmarks say nothing about.
Divide the budget into what you keep and what you rent. Work that stays with the firm includes the website, the practice area pages, the content and the intake system that answers the phone. Reach that stops when payment stops includes paid search, directory listings, sponsorships and anything else billed monthly for placement.
A workable allocation for an established practice is roughly two thirds to assets and one third to rented placement. Shift toward rented placement when the firm needs matters quickly, and back toward assets once the pipeline steadies. A new practice frequently inverts that proportion for its opening year. Nothing of its own is producing yet, so attention has to be purchased while the owned material is still under construction.
The difficulty is leaving that inverted proportion permanently in place. A practice five years established, still directing most of its marketing budget toward rented placement, has been paying rent on identical ground for five years. Nothing remains when the payments stop.
What moves the number for your firm
Three things shift a sensible budget more than any benchmark does.
How old the firm is. A practice with no referral base and no search footing has to buy attention it will later earn. Early budgets run high as a share of revenue and should fall as the firm’s own assets start producing. A mature firm spending like a new one is usually renting what it should own by now.
What the matters are worth. Covered above, and it outranks everything else on this list.
Where the firm competes. The same practice area costs very different amounts in different cities, because the auction price is set by local competition rather than by any national average. Checking your own market is the only way to know.
One thing not to do. Do not set the budget as a percentage of last year’s revenue and leave it there. That makes marketing spend follow results rather than cause them, cutting the budget hardest in the year the firm most needs new work.
A sane first budget
For a firm with no reliable history to work from, this is a defensible starting position.
Set aside between 6% and 10% of revenue for a year. That brackets the converted Clio figure at the low end and leaves room to buy attention at the high end without reaching the territory of firms chasing fast growth.
Split it in two. The larger share goes to assets you keep, which means the site, the content and the intake that turns calls into clients. The smaller share goes to reach you rent, which means ads and listings you can increase or stop within a quarter.
Put a tracking number on everything you rent, review it at six months, and move money toward whatever signed clients. A budget set this way survives a bad quarter, because you can see which part of it was working. Six months is also the point at which a law firm SEO timeline has produced something measurable or has not. Pay-per-lead channels such as local services ads for lawyers report back far faster, which is a reason to review them on a different clock. The same goes for law firm google ads cost, which you can read off your own account inside a month. It also gives you something concrete to hold any law firm marketing proposal against, rather than a feeling about whether the price sounds fair.
Weigh the rented half against what a law firm website cost would buy outright. One stops producing the day you stop paying. The other keeps earning, and it is the half most firms underfund.
Key takeaways
- Clio measured marketing at 9% of expenses for solo firms and 5% for small and mid-sized firms, from 2024 fieldwork.
- Hinge measured a median of 16.5% of revenue for high-growth firms against 5% for no-growth firms, across 76 law firms using 2023 data.
- Those two bases are not interchangeable: at a 35% margin, 9% of expenses is 5.9% of revenue.
- A percentage is a sanity check. Build the budget from the value of a matter, your intake rate and the number of matters you need.
- Split the budget between assets you keep and reach you rent, and put a tracking number on the rented half before the first invoice.
Common Questions
What percentage of revenue should a law firm spend on marketing?
No benchmark covers firms generally, and anyone quoting one without a source is repeating something. There are two measured anchors. Clio puts solo marketing at 9% of expenses, which converts to roughly 5.9% of revenue at a 35% margin. Hinge puts the median at 16.5% of revenue among high-growth firms. For a firm with no history to work from, 6% to 10% of revenue is a defensible first year.
Why do published figures disagree so widely?
Mostly because they measure different bases and nobody says which. A share of expenses and a share of revenue produce numbers about a third apart for the same budget. Then add firms at different stages, in different practice areas, and figures from different years with no date attached. A 2% claim and a 16% claim can both be describing something real.
Is 16.5% of revenue a target to aim for?
Treat it as a description rather than an instruction. It is the median among firms that grew quickly, drawn from 76 firms using 2023 data. Firms that grow fast do tend to spend more. But spending more does not by itself produce growth, and a firm that cannot convert the extra inquiries will simply buy more of them.
Should a new firm spend more than an established one?
As a share of revenue, usually yes. A new practice has no referral base and no search footing, so it has to buy attention that an older firm earns from work already done. The important part is that the share should fall over time. If it has not moved in five years, the firm is renting reach it should own by now.
Does marketing spend include staff time?
In the Clio figures it is an expense line, so it reflects what firms categorized as marketing in their books rather than a strict definition. If you count a paralegal’s hours on content, your number will look higher than a firm that counts only invoices. Pick one definition, write it down, and keep it the same year to year so your own trend means something.
Where these figures come from
The expense figures come from Clio’s 2025 Legal Trends reporting. That survey covered 1,028 US legal professionals between June 5 and 23, 2024, and 1,437 Clio customers between April 15 and 25, 2024. The revenue figures come from the Hinge Research Institute’s 2024 High Growth Study, law firm and legal services edition, covering 76 firms with data collected in 2023.
Hinge published a 2026 study covering 495 firms across professional services, reporting 12% of revenue for high-growth firms against 5% for no-growth. It offers industry breakouts for architecture and engineering, accounting, consulting and technology. There is no legal edition, so the 2024 legal figure remains the most recent one specific to law firms.
The cost per click and cost per lead figures are WordStream’s 2026 benchmarks, drawn from 13,474 US campaigns. Every source is linked below so you can check the base and the date yourself, which is the whole point of the article.
AttorneyPlot sells websites to law firms, so it competes for part of the budget described here. That is a reason to check the sources rather than take the page on trust.
- Clio — 2025 Legal Trends for Solo and Small Law Firms, expense breakdown
- Clio — 2025 Legal Trends for Mid-Sized Law Firms, with survey field dates
- Clio — 2025 Legal Trends Report, methodology
- Hinge Research Institute — 2024 High Growth Study, legal edition
- Hinge Research Institute — 2026 High Growth Study, cross-industry
- WordStream by LocaliQ — 2026 Google Ads benchmarks
- American Bar Association — 2023 Websites & Marketing TechReport
- Bureau of Labor Statistics — Occupational Outlook Handbook, lawyers
- Thomson Reuters — 2026 State of the US Legal Market
- US Small Business Administration — marketing and sales guidance
- Google Search Central — do you need an SEO?
Last reviewed October 17, 2026 · How this is researched · Report a correction
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