Direct calls, at every hour
Click-to-call from every page and every ad, routed to a human at three in the morning. An after-hours contact form is not intake in this practice area — it is a record of the case you lost.
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Criminal defense marketing
Almost every enquiry is urgent, made under stress, and often by a family member rather than the defendant. Decisions happen in hours. That makes answering the phone at midnight worth more than another blog post.
A decision measured in hours, not weeks.
Criminal defence compresses the entire buying process into a window most practice areas would consider a rounding error. Someone was arrested last night. A spouse or parent is searching at six in the morning, calling from a phone in a car park, and will retain someone before the end of the day. There is no consideration phase to nurture and no email sequence that arrives in time.
The firm that answers is very often the firm that gets retained. Not the best firm, and not the highest ranked — the one that picks up.
The second thing that shapes everything is who is actually searching. It is frequently not the defendant, who may be in custody and unable to search at all. It is a family member, who has never hired a lawyer, does not know what the charge means, and is looking for reassurance as much as representation. Content that speaks to the defendant misses the person holding the phone.
Where the cases come from.
Urgency and proximity dominate. Everything else is secondary.
Map coverage around courthouses and jails
Searches cluster geographically around detention centres and courthouses, often made from exactly those locations. Proximity-driven map coverage there is worth more than metro-wide averages suggest.
Charge-specific pages
DUI, assault, drug possession, domestic violence, federal charges, expungement. Each is searched differently and carries different case values. One criminal defence page serves none of them well.
Paid search, structured by severity
A felony and a first misdemeanour are worth different amounts and justify different bids. Segmenting by charge severity is what keeps the account from spending its budget on the cheapest possible cases.
What we run for you.
The same five disciplines, weighted for this practice area.
Charge architecture
Pages per charge type per jurisdiction, written for someone who does not know what the charge means or what happens next — often a relative rather than the defendant.
Around-the-clock routing
Call handling and after-hours routing built into the funnel rather than bolted on. This is the single highest-leverage change available to most defence firms.
Courthouse-area coverage
Map pack and local pages targeted at the jurisdictions you actually appear in, where the searches physically originate.
Reassurance-first content
What happens after an arrest, what a charge carries, what the first hearing involves. The questions being typed at five in the morning, answered plainly.
Reviews within confidentiality limits
A review process that respects client confidentiality and your state's rules — harder here than in any other practice area, and worth doing properly.
The reviews problem nobody solves.
Criminal defence has the hardest review dynamics in legal. Clients are rarely eager to publish a signed account of the time they were charged with something, confidentiality constrains what may be said, and outcomes are not always what anyone would want to advertise. Meanwhile reviews are a genuine ranking factor in local search and one of the strongest reassurance signals a frightened caller has.
The workable version is a systematic ask, timed to when a matter resolves well, with an explicitly optional and anonymous-friendly route. Some clients will decline and that is the right outcome. A slow, genuine accumulation beats an aggressive campaign that produces complaints — and beats the far more common approach of never asking at all.
Rules on testimonials differ by jurisdiction and some restrict them heavily. We build the process around your state’s rules, and final sign-off stays with the firm.
What you get told, every month.
One number leads. The rest explains it.
- Signed cases by charge type and jurisdiction
- Speed to answer, including after-hours — and every call that went unanswered
- Map coverage around the courthouses and facilities that matter
- Review volume and recency, and what was asked of whom
- Cost per signed case by charge severity, not blended across the practice
We will not bid you against another client.
Agencies that sign every firm in a metro end up running the same keywords for competing clients. It inflates both firms’ costs and it is quietly indefensible — you are paying an agency to bid against another of its own clients.
If your city is taken, we will say so on the first call rather than sell you a diluted version of the same service.
So we take one firm per practice area per market. Availability is genuinely limited, and that is a constraint on our growth as much as a promise to you.
Criminal Defense marketing questions.
Because arrests do not happen during office hours and the decision is made within a day. A family member calling at two in the morning will work down the search results until somebody answers, and will usually retain that firm. An unanswered call in this practice area is not a delayed enquiry — it is a case that went to a competitor before you knew it existed.
Usually the family, and most firms get this wrong. The defendant may be in custody and unable to search at all. The person typing is a spouse, parent or sibling who has never hired a lawyer, does not understand the charge, and is frightened. Content addressed to 'you' as the accused misses them entirely, and reassurance matters as much as credentials.
Both, weighted toward whichever fills your capacity soonest. Paid search and the map pack produce enquiries immediately, which suits a practice area where the decision window is hours. Organic takes quarters but produces a materially lower cost per case once it establishes. Most defence firms we work with start on paid and local while organic builds underneath.
By making anonymity an explicit option in the ask and never pressing. Some clients will decline outright and that is the correct outcome. The realistic goal is steady accumulation from the minority who are comfortable, not the volume a personal injury firm can generate. Your state's rules on testimonials also apply, and they differ.
Yes, and separately. Federal matters carry different case values, a longer decision window and a national or regional rather than local search pattern, so they behave almost nothing like local misdemeanour work. Mixed into a general defence budget they get outbid by cheaper clicks; run separately they are often the strongest segment in the account.
No. One firm per practice area per market, so we are never bidding two clients against each other in the same jurisdiction. If your market is already taken we will tell you on the first call.
Is your market still open?
A free growth plan: we audit your search coverage around the courthouses you appear in, test how your intake handles an after-hours call, and tell you what it is costing you.
The other practice areas we work in.
Each has different economics, and a different plan.
Personal InjuryThe most contested inventory in legal search
ImmigrationBilingual, and often national
Family Law & DivorceMonths of private research first
EmploymentMost claimants never search at all
BusinessThin volume, high value
Bankruptcy & TaxA thin ceiling on cost per case
DUI & TrafficStatutory deadlines compress everything