Is the Money We're Spending on Marketing Worth It? A Spending Guide for Lawyers for 2026-2027
How Can We Tell if the Money We're Spending to Get New Clients Is Worth It?
How law firms can strengthen the work that keeps them visible online, make smarter decisions about where to invest, and decide whether their current digital marketing agency has a plan for the way people now search for legal help.
The right question isn't whether your marketing budget should shrink as the digital landscape changes. It's whether your marketing team is focusing intentionally on channels that deliver measurable ROI, long-term brand value, and resilience, heading into 2026 and 2027. Change does not mean your budget should shrink. If anything, the opposite is true: the work has grown more complex and more nuanced, and most firms need to expand their marketing investment to keep up, not cut it. Part of that complexity is where clients now enter your funnel. Clio's Legal Trends Report found that more than half of consumers have used or would consider using AI to answer a legal question before contacting a lawyer. That means clients are arriving at your website further along in their decision than they used to, and your marketing has to be built to account for that shift specifically.
Here's a question worth asking as you plan your marketing for 2026 and into 2027. Is your marketing team, whether that's an in-house hire or an outside agency, focusing intentionally on channels that deliver measurable ROI, long-term brand value, and resilience? The digital landscape keeps shifting, and that focus matters more than it used to. Or are they running the same playbook they ran three years ago and hoping it still works? The answer changes what your next budget conversation should look like, and it starts with clearing up a common misunderstanding about what "change" actually calls for.
Does a Changing Digital Landscape Mean You Should Shrink Your Marketing Budget?
No, and this is the most common misread of what's happening in legal marketing right now. It's easy to look at a shifting landscape, new AI platforms, more moving pieces, more ways for a client to find you, and assume the responsible move is to pull back until things settle down. That instinct runs backwards. Change in the digital landscape doesn't mean your budget should shrink. It means the work itself has grown more complex and more nuanced, and more complex work usually costs more to do well, not less.
Firms with above-average marketing investment already spend 41% more on marketing than their peers, and that investment correlates with a 21% increase in profitability, according to Clio's Legal Trends Report. Heading into 2026 and 2027, that gap is likely to widen further. Firms that treat this complexity as a reason to expand their marketing investment tend to build the resilience described later on this page. Firms that quietly shrink their budget because they feel behind tend to lose ground they don't get back.
Is Your Marketing Team Focusing on ROI, Brand Value, and Resilience?
There are three specific things worth asking your marketing team, or yourself, about right now, because these are the channels the firms getting ahead heading into 2027 are focusing on intentionally.
Measurable ROI. Can your team tell you, by channel, which one produced your last several signed clients, not just leads or website traffic? If the answer stops at impressions or click volume, that's not ROI, it's activity.
Long-term brand value. Is your team building assets, like search-optimized content and a genuine reputation, that keep working long after this month's invoice is paid, or is every result tied to spend that stops the moment the campaign does?
Resilience in a changing digital landscape. Is your team building your visibility across AI answer engines alongside traditional search, or are they still optimizing for one search engine the way everyone did five years ago? Being visible to a traditional search engine and being visible to an AI answer engine are related but separate jobs now. That's exactly why answer engine optimization has become its own discipline rather than a subset of SEO. It's also why it now deserves a real, dedicated share of your budget rather than a smaller add-on line.
If your team can answer all three with evidence, they're likely already ahead of where most firms are heading into 2026 and 2027. If they can only point to leads and impressions, that gap is worth addressing before your next budget cycle, not after.
Firms with above-average marketing investment spend 41% more on marketing than their peers and see a corresponding 21% increase in profitability, per Clio's Legal Trends Report.
If you're not sure how much of your current budget is actually going toward AI visibility, that's worth finding out before your next planning cycle.
Schedule a CallWhat Does Long-Term Brand Value Mean for Your Firm?
Brand value in legal marketing used to mean name recognition from a billboard or a bus bench. It still can, but the more durable version today shows up in two quieter places. One is whether a prospective client searches for your firm by name after seeing you cited as an authority somewhere else. The other is whether an AI answer engine mentions your firm when someone asks it a question about your practice area.
Both of those outcomes are built the same way: consistent, accurate, well-structured content published under a real attorney or firm leader's name, over enough time that search engines and AI systems alike start treating your firm as a dependable source. This is a large part of why a coherent content and local SEO strategy keeps paying off years after a single ad campaign would have stopped.
It's also why brand-building and lead generation shouldn't compete for the same dollars in your budget. A page that answers a real client question thoroughly does both jobs at once. It's the kind of asset that belongs under your firm's broader digital marketing strategy, not treated as a one-off campaign.
How Has the Client Journey to Your Website Changed?
Here's the part that should change how you think about your own website. Before contacting a lawyer, more than half of consumers have used, or would consider using, AI to answer a legal question, according to Clio's Legal Trends Report. By the time that person lands on your website, they've often already identified what kind of legal problem they have, formed a rough idea of what it might cost, and narrowed their options to a short list.
That means the visitor arriving at your website today is, on average, further along in their decision than the visitor who arrived five years ago. They're not there to be educated from zero. They're there to confirm that your firm is credible, responsive, and the right fit for a decision they've already mostly made. A website built for an earlier-stage visitor, one full of general introductions and light on specific answers, is now working against the way people actually arrive at it.
Practically, this means your service pages need to answer the specific question a visitor searched, not just describe the practice area in general terms. It means credibility signals like case results, attorney credentials, and client reviews need to be immediate, not buried three clicks deep. And it means the path from "this looks like the right firm" to "I've made contact" needs to be short, because a visitor who has already done their research has little patience for friction at the finish line. Firms that treat their answer engine and search visibility as one connected system, rather than separate projects, tend to handle this shift best.
How Should You Review Your Marketing Results?
A review that only looks at traffic, clicks, or leads will tell you a flattering story that has little to do with revenue. The review that matters traces a signed client back to the channel that produced them, which means three things need to be in place before the numbers mean anything.
First, a defined conversion. A submitted contact form isn't a win. A signed matter is. If you measure success at the lead stage, you'll end up funding channels that generate a lot of unqualified contact and quietly defunding the ones producing your best clients. Second, call tracking and a CRM connected to each channel, so a phone call or form fill can be traced back to the search term, page, or campaign that produced it. Without that link, "which channel is working" is a guess dressed up as an answer. Third, a fixed review cadence, monthly at minimum and quarterly for budget decisions, so a channel isn't judged on one good or bad month.
This isn't a small gap in the industry, and you may not be alone if it applies to your firm. Clio's own guide on marketing ROI for law firms puts it plainly: for most firms, a lack of marketing spend isn't the problem, it's that they can't tell what's actually working. That gap shows up as budget decisions made with no data behind them, or worse, with a vendor's own reporting as the only source. Your review is only as trustworthy as the tracking underneath it, and that tracking should sit somewhere your firm controls, not solely inside the dashboard of whoever is asking you to keep the budget.
For most law firms, a lack of marketing spend isn't the problem, it's not being able to tell what's actually working, according to Clio's guide on marketing ROI. That's why tracking leads per channel, not just totals, matters more than the size of the budget itself.
Where Should Your Budget Go Now?
Once you can see cost per signed client by channel, the allocation question gets simpler, and the honest answer for most firms right now is that AEO and AI visibility deserve a bigger slice than they're currently getting. This isn't about spreading your budget thinner across more channels. It's about recognizing that the work of being visible has genuinely expanded, and funding it to match.
In practice, that usually means increasing the share of your budget going toward search engine optimization and answer engine optimization together, plus a website built specifically to convert the further-along visitor discussed above. These are owned, compounding channels: they take longer to ramp than paid ads, but they keep producing clients long after the initial investment, which is exactly the kind of resilience you're now optimizing for.
A smaller, clearly bounded share can stay with paid channels, tested against the same cost-per-signed-client standard as everything else. Don't exempt it just because it's labeled "brand awareness." Reputation and review management deserve a fixed line item too, since they influence conversion on every other channel you run. And if no one at your firm is accountable for this whole picture, rather than just the execution of individual pieces, that's the actual gap to close. A fractional CMO exists specifically to hold that responsibility without adding a full-time executive salary.
What Should You Do to Keep Your Marketing Resilient?
Resilience doesn't come from picking one channel and defending it. It comes from building a marketing program where no single platform change can take down the whole thing.
That usually looks like owned, well-structured content that ranks in both traditional search and AI answer engines. It also means a reputation and review presence that compounds over time, and a website built around the questions today's visitors are actually asking, not the ones they asked a decade ago. It also often means having someone accountable for the whole picture rather than a patchwork of vendors each optimizing their own slice, which is the gap a fractional CMO is built to close.
None of this means every part of your marketing budget needs to grow. It means being deliberate about where growth belongs, specifically in AEO and AI visibility, while being honest about which older channels have stopped earning their keep. A broader look at digital marketing for attorneys is a reasonable place to start that audit.
A changing digital landscape is not a reason to shrink your marketing budget. It's a reason to check whether your marketing team is intentionally focusing on measurable ROI, long-term brand value, and resilience, and to expand your investment where the work has genuinely gotten more complex, especially in AEO and AI visibility. Clients reaching your website today have often already done a round of research with AI before they ever typed your firm's name, so heading into 2026 and 2027, the question isn't whether to keep marketing. It's whether your team and your budget are built for the landscape those clients are actually searching in.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does a changing digital landscape mean my law firm should shrink its marketing budget?
No, and this is the most common misread of what's happening right now. A changing digital landscape means the work has gotten more complex and more nuanced, which usually means it costs more to do well, not less. Firms with above-average marketing investment already spend 41% more on marketing than their peers, and that investment correlates with a 21% increase in profitability, according to Clio's Legal Trends Report. Heading into 2026 and 2027, that gap is likely to widen for firms that treat complexity as a reason to expand their investment rather than shrink it.
Is my law firm's marketing team focusing on the right things?
Ask whether your team is intentionally focusing on three things. First, measurable ROI you can trace to signed clients by channel. Second, long-term brand value that keeps compounding after a campaign ends. Third, resilience across a digital landscape that now includes AI answer engines alongside traditional search. A team that can speak to all three with evidence is likely ahead of where most firms are heading into 2027. A team that can only point to leads and impressions has a gap worth addressing before your next budget cycle.
What counts as long-term brand value for your firm?
Long-term brand value is the recognition and trust that make a prospective client search for your firm by name. It's also what makes an AI answer engine cite your firm as an authority on a practice area, months or years after the content that built it was published.
How has the client journey to your website changed?
Before contacting a lawyer, more than half of consumers have used or would consider using AI to answer a legal question, according to Clio's Legal Trends Report. That research and comparison work now happens before a visitor ever lands on your website, so visitors arrive further along in their decision and expect the site to confirm a choice rather than introduce one.
How should you review your marketing results?
Review results against signed clients and revenue per channel, not clicks or impressions. That requires call tracking and a CRM tied to each channel, a defined conversion (a signed matter, not just a submitted form), and a set review cadence. Clio's own research on marketing ROI for law firms found that for most firms, the core problem isn't spending too little, it's not being able to tell what's actually working.
Where should your budget go now?
Increase the share going to AEO and AI visibility work specifically, since that discipline now covers more ground than traditional SEO alone. Keep a smaller, clearly tested share for paid channels that can prove a cost per signed client, and reduce funding to anything that cannot show its results within a full review cycle.
What should you do to keep your marketing resilient?
Build a marketing program around owned assets like search visibility, AI answer engine presence, and a reputation that compounds, rather than around any single paid channel that a platform or algorithm change could take away overnight.
April Atwater
April Atwater is President of Dashing Digital Marketing, an agency working exclusively with law firms on SEO, answer engine optimization, and full-service digital marketing. She has worked in digital marketing since 2004, speaks nationally on AI search visibility for attorneys, and has been published in Iowa Lawyer, Arizona Attorney Magazine, Wyoming Lawyer Magazine, and The Gavel.
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