What does a legal lead actually cost?

The figure worth holding onto is not the click price but the lead price, because the gap between them is where legal advertising quietly becomes expensive. A click at $9.87 is dear but survivable. The same click becomes a $131.63 lead because most of the traffic a legal keyword buys does not convert into an enquiry at all — the visitor is comparison-shopping, or researching, or looking for the free answer to a question that will never become a matter.

That arithmetic is the reason response time in a law firm has a different economic weight than it does elsewhere. Every enquiry arriving in the inbox has, on average, that much advertising behind it before anyone has read the first line. A firm that answers eight enquiries out of ten has not lost two enquiries; it has thrown away the acquisition cost of two, and the ones lost are disproportionately the ones that arrived outside office hours, which is when people in legal trouble tend to go looking.

The second cost, which nobody itemises, is the one paid to the firm that answered first. Legal enquiries are rarely exclusive. Someone with an urgent problem contacts three firms in an evening, and in most practice areas the first substantive reply gets the consultation — not because it was better, but because a person who has retained counsel stops looking. The remaining two firms paid the same lead cost and bought nothing.

None of that is an argument for spending more. It is an argument for auditing what the existing spend already reaches: which enquiry paths arrive where, how long each one waits, and whether the after-hours path arrives anywhere at all. In firms that have never measured it, that audit is usually worth more than any change to the campaigns above it, and it costs a fraction as much.