Case studies / Legal
Full-funnel legal marketingOne firm, two marketing problems. Nothing about them was alike.
Hoey & Farina run railroad and catastrophic injury cases across all fifty states, and personal injury and medical malpractice inside Illinois. Those are opposite challenges: a specialist practice with barely any search volume, and a crowded local market with far too much. One budget had to serve both.
One Chicago firm, two very different injury practices.
Hoey & Farina, P.C. handles FELA railroad and catastrophic injury cases nationwide, along with personal injury and medical malpractice cases in Illinois.
The two practices barely resemble each other. One runs nationally against almost no competition and almost no search volume. The other runs locally against every personal injury firm in the state. Both needed to be funded from the same marketing budget, without either one starving the other.
A narrow audience is easier than a broad one.
Most firms marketing two practice areas run them as one campaign and report one blended cost per lead. This account kept them separate, which meant we could see something the average would have hidden: the specialist practice with almost no search volume qualified at four times the rate of the busy local one.
Illinois auto, workplace and medical malpractice.
Familiar categories with real search volume, competing against every personal injury firm in the state. Plenty of enquiries, but most callers are shopping several firms, outside the statute of limitations, or describing a matter the firm doesn't take.
- Search volume High
- Competition Every PI firm
- Geography Illinois
- Qualification rate 5%
Train accidents, FELA and catastrophic injury.
Almost no search volume and almost no competitors, because very few firms litigate against railroads. When someone with a genuine railroad injury does surface, there are only a handful of firms in the country equipped to take the case, and Hoey & Farina is one of them.
- Search volume Very low
- Competition A handful of firms
- Geography All 50 states
- Qualification rate 20%
$800 a lead, and unpredictable month to month.
Hoey & Farina were already investing in legal marketing. The problem wasn't absence of activity: it was that the pieces weren't connected, and the cost of acquiring a single enquiry had reached $800.
At that price, a month of budget buys twenty enquiries. Split across two practice areas with different qualification rates, twenty enquiries is not a pipeline. It's a rounding error with a monthly invoice attached.
Five things were driving it.
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Two practices needing opposite strategies
Railroad injury runs nationally against almost no competition and almost no search volume. Illinois personal injury and medical malpractice run locally against enormous competition and plenty of volume. Funding both from one budget means constantly deciding which one deserves the next dollar.
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On the railroad side, the client doesn't know the category exists
An injured railroader assumes workers' compensation. They're wrong: railroad employees are excluded from it entirely and must prove employer negligence under FELA. So they search "hurt at work lawyer," not "FELA attorney." The campaign has to intercept a search built on a false premise.
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National reach from a single Chicago office
Very few firms litigate against railroads, so this one takes cases in all fifty states. That means bidding everywhere while being local nowhere, against firms with a geographic advantage in every market.
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Lead flow swung month to month
Unpredictable volume makes budget planning guesswork, and makes it impossible to tell whether a slow month is a market problem or an account problem.
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Enquiries went cold after first contact
Some enquiries weren't being nurtured past the initial call. In a practice where a single case can be worth a year of marketing spend, a lead that goes cold is not a small loss.
Five parts, built in this order.
Acquisition first, because nothing downstream matters without leads. Then intake, because leads without a response are just an expense.
Two campaign structures, not one
National campaigns for railroad and catastrophic injury, built around the language railroaders actually use rather than the statute they've never heard of: train accidents, railroad work injuries, workplace injury, wrongful death, with FELA terms for the minority who know the word. Separately, Illinois-only campaigns for auto, workplace, and medical malpractice, where the competition and the bidding logic are completely different. Full conversion tracking on calls and forms across both.
Cost per lead began falling from $800.
Meta to reach people who aren't searching yet
Facebook and Instagram campaigns using audience segmentation and behavioural targeting to reach railroad workers who haven't started looking for a lawyer, plus retargeting for everyone who touched an ad or landing page. Multiple creative variations tested to find which framing of the problem landed.
Reach beyond the small pool of people actively searching.
Landing pages and CRO
Simplified form structures, mobile UX rebuilt, call-to-action placement reworked, trust signals added, and page speed improved. Behaviour analytics identified where users dropped out, and iterative A/B testing on layout, messaging, and flow closed those gaps.
More of the traffic already being paid for converted.
Thirty second response, around the clock
Automated SMS fired within 30 seconds of any enquiry, backed by a call centre and managed virtual assistant team covering inbound calls 24/7. Every enquiry reached a human, qualified against the firm's criteria and routed, regardless of the hour or the time zone it came from.
The gap where leads used to go cold was closed.
Nurture and lead management
Email sequences carrying educational content and consultation reminders through a decision cycle measured in weeks, plus SMS re-engagement for unresponsive leads. A centralised CRM handled routing, status tracking, and reporting on lead quality by source and practice area.
Lead flow became predictable enough to plan against.
The same budget, five times the leads.
Cost per lead fell from $800 to $150: an 81% reduction. That figure is worth translating, because a percentage understates it.
At $800, a $16,000 monthly budget buys 20 enquiries. At $150, the same budget buys 107. Nothing was added to the spend. The firm simply stopped paying five times over for each conversation.
- Google Ads $10,000 / mo
- Meta Ads $6,000 / mo
- Cost per lead, before $800
- Cost per lead, after $150
- Leads at old CPL ~20 / mo
- Leads at new CPL ~107 / mo
Across all sources, total lead flow reached roughly 200 enquiries a month.
The qualification split is the interesting part
Not every lead is a case, and the rates differ sharply by practice area. Railroad and FELA enquiries qualified at 20%. Illinois auto, workplace, and medical malpractice qualified at 5%.
That's the opposite of what most firms expect. The specialist practice with almost no search volume, marketed across fifty states, produced four times the qualification rate of familiar categories in the firm's home market: because when a genuine railroad injury surfaces, only a handful of firms in the country are equipped to take it. In Illinois personal injury, every firm is equipped to take it, and the caller usually rings three of them.
Qualification was assessed against statute of limitations and fit with the firm's practice areas.
Hear it from the firm.
Hoey & Farina recorded their own account of working with us.
Three things that hold for any specialist practice.
Market the injury, not the statute
If your clients don't know the legal category they fall into, bidding on its name reaches almost nobody. Target the language they use to describe what happened to them.
Narrow can beat broad
Low search volume looks like a weakness until you count qualification. Twenty percent of a small number of genuinely relevant enquiries beats five percent of a large number of people ringing three firms.
Track qualification by practice area
A blended rate hides everything. Separated, this account showed a 4x difference between practice areas, which is a budget allocation decision hiding inside an averaged report.
What went into it.
Eight of our services, working as one system.
What is a lead actually costing your firm?
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