If your law firm is looking for a partner to handle your website design and digital marketing, it’s likely that you’ve come across Scorpion.
Scorpion Marketing is one of the longest-standing players in the law firm digital marketing space. It has grown into a sizeable company in part by deploying aggressive sales tactics (at one point sending tablets to potential clients).
Related: GNGF Clients: Navigating Your Digital Marketing After the Scorpion Acquisition
Since you’re reading this, perhaps you’re being actively pursued by Scorpion, and maybe you’ve even been treated to a delicious cookie basket (several times a year we are informed by our clients of this solicitude 🙂 ).
Because of the scope of Scorpion’s reach, our potential clients frequently ask us for our thoughts on the efficacy of their service offerings and our overall assessment of the company.
While it might seem strange for us to be giving free ad space to a competitor, we are content marketing evangelists, and we make it our policy to identify questions our clients ask a lot and then answer them in public right on our website.
We give our clients this advice all the time, so why wouldn’t we follow it ourselves?
My name is Matt Green, and I am the Chief Strategy Officer at Juris Digital. I have spent the last 12 years of my life helping law firms grow their business online. Over that time, I have analyzed hundreds of Scorpion law firm websites and marketing campaigns. In this post, you’ll find my top insights for law firm owners and legal marketers who are considering working with Scorpion Marketing.
I hope you find this information helpful. If you have more questions about Scorpion, or about our thoughts on the most effective marketing for your law firm, I hope you’ll reach out to start a conversation.
8 Things for Law Firms to Know About Scorpion Marketing
1. Overall, Scorpion is a Solid Company
I caught you off guard with that one, didn’t I? This is not a hit piece. Scorpion is a solid company with solid leadership. You pretty much have to be to have been around as long as they’ve been and to have achieved the growth that they’ve achieved.
Over our years in business, we have lost bids to Scorpion, and we have also gained (and kept) clients who weren’t satisfied with their experience with Scorpion.
The fact is, there is no single provider of law firm marketing who is better than the rest. The experience that any given law firm has with any given marketing agency will depend on a myriad of factors. For every dozen clients who we’ve delighted we’ve have one who – for whatever reason – things don’t go as well. Sometimes in the world of B2B services, companies just aren’t a good fit, and that’s ok. Just like other companies, Scorpion Design gets complaints.
If you’ve received a proposal for Scorpion, I hope you’ll pause before signing on and reach out to us as well. We’d be happy to speak with you about your goals, review what Scorpion is proposing, and give your our thoughts for the approach that will be most effective for your law firm.
2. Scorpion Design Doesn’t Focus Exclusively on Law Firm Marketing
In the early days, Scorpion niched exclusively into legal marketing. As happens often, their growth ambitions seemingly led them into other industries. On their website, Scorpion states that they help law firms, home service businesses, dentists, franchise businesses, multi-location brands, and other businesses:
At Juris Digital, we are often asked why we work exclusively with law firms. After all, folks say, don’t you have to turn down a whole lot of business from companies in other industries? The answer is simple: We don’t believe we can be the best in the world at digital marketing for all types of service businesses. But we know that we can be the best in the world at digital marketing for law firms, so that’s all we do.
3. Scorpion’s Websites Are Built on Proprietary Technology
I am sure that there are good and valid reasons why Scorpion chose to build their own website content management system (CMS) instead of using an open-source CMS like WordPress. However, I don’t know what those reasons are or what benefits Scorpion’s clients gain from this proprietary website backend.
But I do know that the key upshot that law firms need to understand is this:
Because Scorpion builds its clients’ websites on a proprietary CMS, you won’t be able to take your website with you if you decide to stop working with Scorpion. In other words, no one outside of Scorpion’s organization can make meaningful changes to your website. If you move on from Scorpion you are necessarily signing up for a new website.
Again, I am sure there are good reasons why Scorpion operates this way. However, we have worked with several law firms who were frustrated when we informed them that we would be unable to execute our SEO and digital marketing services using Scorpion’s website for the simple reason that we could not access the backend of the website. This is one of the most regular things mentioned in Scorpion marketing reviews. It’s also a reason they can be more flexible on scorpion web design costs.
We hear the same thing across practice areas. One criminal defense attorney we work with gave Scorpion real credit for getting him off to a good start, but his frustration was simple: on paper he owned his website, yet he had no real control over it. If you cannot change your own site or take it with you, do you really own it?
At Juris Digital we build our law firm websites on WordPress, which is the most popular website CMS in the world, powering nearly 40% of all websites on the web. It’s used by brands like The New York Times, Microsoft, Etsy, and FiveThirtyEight. What this means for our clients, if nothing else, is that they truly own their own website, and can take it with them even if they decide to move on from our services. Click here to check out our portfolio of law firm website built on WordPress.
4. Scorpion Is Primarily a Paid Ads Company, Not an SEO Company
If you take one thing away from this review, make it this. Scorpion is, first and foremost, a paid advertising company, and they are genuinely good at running ads. What they are not especially known for, in our experience and in the experience of the firms who have left them for us, is SEO. The firms that come to us from Scorpion almost never come because they loved the organic results.
If you’re considering Scorpion, you’re likely interested in what their SEO capabilities look like. The overarching trend that I’ve seen – through speaking with clients and prospective clients of Scorpion and through my own competitive research of their client’s websites – is that they are prioritizing paid search methods (Google Adwords, social media advertising, display advertising, etc.) over organic search and SEO.
I do believe that for their highest-paying clients, Scorpion does execute aggressive SEO campaigns with local SEO, content marketing, link building, etc. However, it would not at all surprise me if Scorpion has decided that – for law firms with smaller budgets ($1k – $5k per month) – it can be far more profitable managing paid advertising campaigns than it can be with full-service SEO and organic online marketing.
I have seen Scorpion websites rank high in organic search results many times. I have no doubt that they have capable SEO professionals on staff who are able to drive real results with search engine optimization. What I do doubt is that Scorpion is committed to SEO over the long term.
Simply put, SEO is hard, it’s time-consuming, and there are no shortcuts. If Scorpion has made the decision that it can be more profitable by focusing more and more on paid advertising over organic marketing, I would expect its interest and investment in the latter to dwindle.
It is also why we increasingly see Scorpion’s clients missing from AI search results like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews, the channels that are quietly becoming the new front page. Showing up there takes the kind of sustained organic and content work that an ads first shop tends to deprioritize.
“Scorpion is, at its core, a paid ads company. They are very good at spending your money on Google and Facebook, but the firms that come to us from Scorpion almost never come because of their SEO. The complaint we hear most is about the money. Nobody can tell exactly how much went to real ad spend versus Scorpion’s cut, and that cut grows every time the answer is to spend more. A law firm should always know where every dollar of its marketing budget is going.”
Casey Meraz, Founder, Juris Digital
At Juris Digital we are committed to SEO for our law firm clients. While we certainly advise our clients to pair SEO with paid search marketing (PPC and Local Service Ads) when appropriate, we generally believe that SEO creates long-term value and so should never be fully neglected in favor of paid advertising that produces little residual value.
5. Scorpion Isn’t Always Transparent About Ad Spend
This is probably the most consistent feedback we have heard from Scorpion clients: That they don’t know exactly how much of their total investment with Scorpion is going towards actual ad spend vs. what they are paying Scorpion for its services.
Our understanding is that Scorpion makes little or no distinction between what you pay them and what you pay the various ad platforms they use (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc.). Some clients find this frustrating, especially when they aren’t necessarily satisfied with the results from their paid ad campaigns and want to understand exactly what they are spending on ads compared to what they are paying Scorpion for managing those campaigns.
There are two layers to this. The first is the billing itself: many firms simply cannot see how much of their monthly invoice is the management fee and how much is actual ad spend. The second is the model behind it. Scorpion marks up a percentage of your ad budget, which means that when a campaign is not working, the instinct can be to spend more, and spending more increases what you pay them.
One family law firm we now work with put it bluntly. She wondered aloud whether “Drunk Uncle” was running her account, because the budget kept getting overspent month after month. Her hardest month still stings years later. Early on, back when she ran the practice from home before she had an office, Scorpion burned through her entire marketing budget, roughly seven thousand dollars, and produced not a single lead. She told us she could not pay herself that month, and that it left a sour taste she has never forgotten.
At Juris Digital, it’s our policy to bill our clients only for our services. This means that we don’t pay advertisers directly out of the retainer our clients pay us. Instead, our clients pay the advertiser separately, which means they always understand exactly how much they spend on paid ads.
6. Scorpion Spends Big on Both Outbound Sales and Acquisitions
I mentioned earlier that Scorpion routinely sends out cookie baskets to try and poach our clients. Our clients have been sent iPads loaded up with video testimonials from Scorpion clients. We’ve also known Scorpion to send Montblanc pens to prospective clients, which can cost upwards of $500 apiece.
In addition to spending big on outbound sales, the company is also aggressive with acquisitions of both competing and industry-adjacent companies. A quick Google search reveals that the company has acquired 3 marketing agencies and an SEO software company in the last few years, and that’s just the deals they’ve made public by issuing press releases.
Let me be clear: There is nothing wrong with any of this. Scorpion is an ambitious company that invests aggressively in its own growth.
At Juris Digital, we also value growth, but these tactics don’t align with our ethos. We rely almost exclusively on inbound marketing and word of mouth to earn clients because that’s the sort of marketing we believe in, and it’s the sort of marketing we do for our clients. We are also conscious of our client-to-employee ratio. While we embrace automation where it makes sense, we believe exceptional marketing requires time and attention from creative and strategic human beings. For this reason, we prioritize investing in our team while working towards sustainable growth, which keeps the interests of our existing clients at the forefront.
7. With Scorpion, You May Be Pooled With Your Competitors
This one surprises a lot of firms. Because of Scorpion’s scale, you may not be the only firm in your market and practice area on their roster, and firms have told us they did not feel they were getting an equal level of service across that pool. One family law firm asked us directly, before she signed, exactly which other firms we serve in her city, because with Scorpion she had been aggregated alongside her competitors. It is a fair question, and you should ask it of any agency you are considering.
At Juris Digital we are upfront about who we work with in your market and practice area, because you should never have to wonder whether you are paying an agency to help your competition too.
8. Whether Scorpion is Right for You Depends on What You Value in a Marketing Partner
Scorpion Marketing is not the right choice for every law firm; neither are we! No single agency is the right choice for every law firm.
We believe Scorpion does a lot well, and we know that many firms have a positive experience with them and see solid results. However, we have also worked with many law firms that did not have a positive experience with Scorpion for various reasons, some of which I’ve recapped here.
Whether or not Scorpion is the right choice for your law firm depends on what you value, both in terms of client experience and in terms of marketing strategy. At Juris Digital, we are evangelists of holistic, organic seo legal marketing because it’s what we know, it’s what we do best, and it’s what we believe adds the most long-term value for our clients.
Scorpion’s approach here tends to be different. Scorpion bets more on paid advertising on the big tech platforms, and they tend to put less emphasis, in general, on organic lead generation channels, particularly for law firms with smaller budgets.
At Juris Digital everything we do is driven by our core values: Empathy, Honesty, Quality, Generosity, Gratitude, Communication, and Respect. We believe in building relationships with our clients that are rooted in trust and a shared commitment to a common goal. If that sounds like the sort of company you’d like to do business with, I hope you’ll reach out to discuss your law firm’s marketing.
How Much Does Scorpion Marketing Cost?
One of the most common questions we hear from firms weighing Scorpion is a simple one: how much does Scorpion marketing actually cost?
Scorpion does not publish flat pricing on its website. Like most full service legal marketing agencies, it builds a custom quote around your market, your practice area, and the channels it recommends. From what our clients and prospective clients have shared with us over the years, Scorpion engagements tend to start in the low thousands per month and climb well into five figures in competitive personal injury markets, and that number often blends the management fee together with your actual ad spend.
It is also worth understanding how Scorpion structures cost. Rather than a flat management fee, firms tell us Scorpion takes a percentage of your ad budget, so as your spend grows, so does their cut. That is a common model in the ads world, but it can quietly misalign incentives, because the agency earns more whenever you spend more, whether or not the spending is actually working.
That blending is worth pausing on. As I covered above, many firms tell us they cannot easily separate what they pay Scorpion from what goes to Google and Facebook. So when you compare Scorpion web design costs or monthly retainers against another agency, make sure you are comparing the management fee on its own, not the fee and the ad budget rolled into one figure.
At Juris Digital we quote our service fee separately from your ad spend, so you always know exactly what you are paying us versus the ad platforms. If you have a Scorpion proposal in hand and want a second set of eyes on the numbers, reach out and we will walk through it with you.
Scorpion Marketing Alternatives for Law Firms
If you are reading reviews of Scorpion, there is a good chance you are also weighing the alternatives, and that is healthy. The firms that get the most from their marketing are usually the ones that compared a few agencies before they signed anything.
When you compare, look past the sales pitch and ask each agency the same four questions: Do you specialize in law firms, or do you also market dentists and home services companies? Will I own my website if I leave? Do you separate your fee from my ad spend? Are you committed to SEO for the long term, or mostly running paid ads?
We built Juris Digital to answer all four the way we would want them answered as the client. We are not the only good option out there, but if those four answers matter to you, we are worth a conversation.
Scorpion Marketing FAQ
Is Scorpion Marketing a good choice for law firms?
For many firms, yes. Scorpion is an established agency with capable people and a long track record. The honest answer is that it depends on what you value, which is what this whole review is about.
Can I keep my website if I leave Scorpion?
Generally no. Scorpion builds on a proprietary CMS, so if you move on you are usually starting over with a new website. We build on WordPress so our clients own and keep theirs.
Does Scorpion focus on SEO or paid ads?
In our experience Scorpion leans toward paid channels, especially for firms with smaller budgets, while reserving its heaviest SEO investment for its top spenders.
What are the best alternatives to Scorpion for law firms?
Compare a handful of agencies on specialization, website ownership, billing transparency, and long term SEO commitment. Juris Digital was built around those four.
How long does SEO take to start generating leads for a law firm?
Usually three to six months to see movement and closer to a year for compounding results, depending on your market and your starting point. Anyone promising overnight rankings is selling you something.
Should I hire a local or a national SEO agency for my law firm?
What matters far more than location is whether the agency actually specializes in legal work and gives your account real strategic attention, rather than slotting you into a template.
