Paid search & Local Services Ads
Birth injury and medical malpractice keywords sit among the most expensive inventory in all of paid search. A single click can cost more than an entire lead in a high-volume practice area. That is not a reason to avoid the channel — it is a reason to buy it against a signed-case target rather than a click target, and to know your break-even before the first impression serves.
The break-even you need before you bid
The only defensible bid ceiling comes from working backwards. Start with the fee a signed, viable case is expected to produce for the firm, apply the share of inquiries that become signed cases, subtract the cost of screening the ones that do not, and you have the most you can rationally pay per inquiry. Everything else is guesswork with a spreadsheet attached.
How we run the channel
- Match-type discipline over budget discipline. In an expensive category the money is lost to irrelevant matches, not to high bids. Broad match runs only against a maintained negative list and a search-term review cadence we publish in the paid media manual.
- Intent segmentation by limitations posture. A parent searching within weeks of a delivery and a parent searching about a child who is now seven are different audiences with different landing experiences. Because the limitations period for a minor’s claim runs differently in most states, the second group is real, large, and almost universally ignored. We never tell either group whether they have a claim — we route them to counsel.
- Geography priced against real market data. Bid modifiers built from our own county-level layer — births, delivery capacity, legal capacity — rather than from platform defaults. The data is public.
- Offline conversion import. Signed-case outcomes are pushed back into the ad platform so bidding optimises toward cases, not forms. Without this step, automated bidding will optimise you toward your cheapest, worst inquiries.
| Common practice | What it produces | What we do |
|---|---|---|
| Target CPA bidding set against form fills | The algorithm finds the cheapest form fills, which are systematically the least viable inquiries | Import signed-case outcomes and bid to those; keep form-fill CPA as a diagnostic only |
| One landing page for all birth injury intent | A recent-delivery parent and a parent of a school-age child get the same page; both convert worse | Separate experiences by limitations posture and by injury category, each routing to counsel |
| National campaigns with platform-default geography | Spend concentrates where competition is heaviest, not where the firm can serve | Geographic modifiers built from county-level births, delivery capacity and legal capacity |
Bar advertising, handled up front
Legal advertising rules are state-specific and they bind the firm, not the agency — which is exactly why an agency that treats them as an afterthought is a liability. Before any ad runs we assemble the required disclosures for each state in the campaign geography, route creative for firm review, and keep a dated archive of every served ad and landing page. We link the primary rule text so your compliance counsel reads the rule rather than our summary of it. The compliance publication sets out the framework in full.
Not legal advice. We are a marketing agency. Nothing here is a legal opinion about your obligations under any bar rule, and your firm’s compliance counsel makes the final call on every piece of creative.
What we report
| Metric | Role | Reported as |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per signed, viable case | Primary | Headline. Every report opens with it. |
| Cost per case surviving medical review | Primary | Reported monthly once record-review data exists. |
| Inquiry → screened rate | Diagnostic | Tells us whether the traffic is qualified or the intake is slow. |
| Cost per inquiry | Diagnostic | Reported, never headlined. It moves for reasons that have nothing to do with case flow. |
| Impression share, CTR, quality score | Operational | In the appendix. They explain movement; they do not measure it. |
| Phase | Length | What happens | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 · Diagnostic | 3 weeks | Market sizing from our data, audit of current spend against cost per signed case, screening-capacity model | A written plan and a decision. Credited in full against the first three months of any retainer. |
| 1 · Instrumentation | Weeks 1–4 | Tracking rebuilt so every inquiry carries its source through to the case management system | A funnel you can audit. Nothing is optimised before it can be measured. |
| 2 · Build | Weeks 3–10 | Channel build, creative, landing pages, intake scripts and screening rubric | Assets you own outright, in your accounts, under your name. |
| 3 · Operate | Ongoing | Weekly optimisation against cost per signed case, monthly against cost per case surviving review | A monthly report that leads with signed cases, not impressions. |
When this is the wrong service for you
If your intake cannot make first contact inside five minutes during business hours, buy speed-to-lead before you buy clicks. Paid search in this category delivers a small number of very expensive inquiries; losing one to a slow callback costs more than a month of most other channels. And if you cannot yet review the records an inquiry generates, buy screening support first — otherwise you are paying premium prices to fill a queue.
Related
Paid social
Demand creation for a population that does not know a claim may still be live. Handled without exploiting grief.
SEO & AI search
Built to be quoted by answer engines, not only ranked by search engines. Both are measured separately.
Websites & landing pages
The conversion layer, built for a parent reading on a phone at 2am and for a partner auditing the funnel.
What this costs → · Book a call → · Read the free library first →
Authorship & review
- Author
- Kevin Schwaner, Founder; Chief Marketing Officer. Credentials.
- Last reviewed
- Legal review
- Not yet assigned. This page describes marketing practice, not law, and gives no legal advice. Rules cited are linked to the primary source so you can read them directly. See Editorial Standards.
- Corrections
- Found an error? Tell us and it goes in the dated corrections log, whether or not it flatters us.