Many law firms set their marketing budget the same way: they pick a number that feels safe, usually based on what they spent last year, what a competitor is rumored to be spending, or what feels defensible in a partner meeting. Then they spend the rest of the year hoping it was enough.
But, that approach isn’t really a strategy. It’s a guess with a dollar sign on it. The reality is that what you need to do for your firm is not necessarily what other firms are doing for themselves.
TL;DR — Key Takeaways
- Most law firms benchmark around 7-12% of annual revenue. However, that is just a starting point.
- Don’t ask, “how much should we spend?”. Instead, ask, “how much do we need to invest to meet our goals?” That single reframe changes how you build the whole budget.
- Goal-based budgeting outperforms percent-of-revenue and zero-based models for most growing firms. That’s because it ties spend directly to the number of new cases you actually need.
- Bonus tip: Before you set next year’s number, work backward from your case goal first. Then check whether that number happens to land near the 7-12% benchmark. If it’s far outside that range in either direction, that’s worth investigating before you finalize anything.
Why “How Much Should We Spend?” Is the Wrong Question
If your budgeting conversation starts with “what should we spend,” you are already asking the wrong question. Cost is not the variable that matters. Investment relative to your goals is.
I cover this in more detail in a recent presentation, but the short version is this: a firm that spends $30,000 a month without a clear case goal attached to it has no way to know if that number is working. A firm that starts by asking, “how many new cases do we need this year, and what does it actually take to get them,” has a number they can defend, adjust, and measure against.
This is not just semantics. It changes the entire structure of the budget conversation, from a defensive one (“can we justify this spend?”) to a proactive one (“does this spend get us where we want to go?”).
Related: The Profitability Paradox: Why Growing Law Firms Often Become Less Profitable
Three Ways Law Firms Typically Build a Marketing Budget
There are three common frameworks firms use to land on a number. Each has a place, but they are not equally effective.
1. Percent-of-Revenue Budgeting
This is the most common approach, and the one most firms default to when asked how they set their number. You take your annual revenue and allocate a fixed percentage to marketing, typically somewhere in the 7-12% range for law firms, depending on practice area, market competitiveness, and growth stage.
Percent-of-revenue is easy to explain and easy to benchmark against other firms, which is exactly why it’s popular. The problem is that it ties your marketing investment to what you already made, not to what you’re trying to achieve. A firm with aggressive growth targets and a firm that’s happy maintaining its current caseload could both land on the same percentage, even though their actual investment needs are completely different.
2. Zero-Based Budgeting
Zero-based budgeting throws out last year’s number entirely and rebuilds the budget from scratch each cycle, allocating dollars based on the proven ROI, capacity, and performance of each channel rather than carrying forward whatever was spent before.
This model forces useful discipline. It stops firms from funding underperforming channels out of habit. But it’s also resource-intensive, requires solid attribution data to do well, and doesn’t inherently connect the resulting number back to a growth target either. You can build a very well-optimized budget through zero-based reasoning and still not know whether it’s actually large enough to hit your goals.
3. Goal-Based Budgeting
This is the model we recommend for most firms, and it starts from a different place entirely: your goals, not your revenue and not last year’s line items.
Goal-based budgeting works backward. You determine how many new cases you want to bring in over a given period; you calculate what it actually costs to acquire a case in your practice area and market; and you build the budget from that math, rather than from a percentage or a prior spend figure. If hitting your case goal requires more than your revenue-based percentage would suggest, that’s important information, not a problem to paper over.
Related: How New Law Firms Can Compete in the Map Pack
Watch the Full Breakdown
I recently put together a presentation that walks through these three models in more depth, along with the reframe from “what should this cost” to “what do we need to invest,” and how to actually apply it to your own numbers.
Once You Have a Number: The Core/Explore Split
Building the right total budget is only half the job. Once you know what you’re investing, you still have to decide where it goes, and that’s where a lot of firms lose discipline.
We recommend a Core/Explore Split, built around a simple 70/20/10 allocation:
- 70% to proven, high-ROI channels that already have a track record in your firm;
- 20% to promising channels that are showing early signs of performance but don’t yet have a long enough track record to be “core”; and
- 10% to experimental or new tactics you haven’t tried yet.
This structure keeps your budget grounded in what’s already working while still leaving room to test new channels before they become mainstream. Firms that skip the “explore” portion entirely tend to miss emerging opportunities until competitors have already claimed them. Firms that over-invest in experimentation, on the other hand, risk under-funding the channels that are actually driving cases today.
Putting This Into Practice
If you’re ready to move away from a gut-feel number, here’s a simple path forward:
- Define your case goal for the next 12 months. Be specific, by practice area if you handle more than one.
- Calculate your real cost per case acquisition using your own historical data, not industry averages, wherever possible.
- Multiply that out to get your goal-based number, then compare it against the 7-12% revenue benchmark as a sanity check, not a ceiling.
- Apply the 70/20/10 split across your channels once the total is set.
- Revisit the number quarterly, not just once a year. Goals change, and so should the budget behind them.
You Don’t Need to Guess Your Way Into a Budget
A defensible marketing budget isn’t the one that matches an industry benchmark most closely. It’s the one that’s actually built to get you where you’re trying to go, and one you can explain to your partners with real math behind it instead of a gut feeling.
If your firm is still setting its number based on last year’s spend or what a competitor is rumored to be doing, it’s worth revisiting. At Juris Digital, we help firms build goal-based budgets tied to real case targets and real cost-per-acquisition data.
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