Juris Digital Tools

What an in house marketing team actually costs your firm

Salary is the number partners quote each other. It is usually about 60 percent of the real figure. Build your hypothetical team below and see the fully loaded annual cost next to an agency retainer, then see how many signed cases each option has to produce before it pays for itself.

Start from

The team you would hire Check a role to add it. Drag to match salaries in your market.

Payroll burden Taxes, insurance, and employer contributions on top of salary.

Payroll taxes and workers compensationFICA at 7.65 percent plus unemployment and workers comp

Health insurance per employeeEmployer share, single coverage

Retirement matchPercent of salary

Annual bonusPercent of salary

Overhead and supervision What it costs to seat, equip, and manage the people.

Office space per employeeAnnual, roughly 150 square feet

Computer, phone, and furniturePer employee, amortized annually

Training and conferencesPer employee per year

Time you spend managing themHours per week

Value of an hour of your timeBilling rate or partner opportunity cost

Software and data The stack an agency already pays for. Uncheck anything you would skip.

Turnover and ramp The line item that never makes it into the spreadsheet.

How long the average hire staysYears

Cost to recruit and hirePercent of first year salary, recruiter fees plus your hiring time

Days before a new hire is fully productivePaid in full, producing at roughly half output

Days the seat sits empty after someone leavesValue of the work that stops. Set to zero to exclude it.

The other side of the ledger What you would pay an agency, and what a case is worth to you.

Agency retainerPer month, all inclusive of labor, software, and management

Average value of a signed caseFee to the firm, not gross settlement

Annual cost, fully loaded

In house team

$0 per month

Agency retainer

$0 per month

Where the money goes

Cases needed, in house

per year to break even

Cases needed, agency

per year to break even

Cost per day the work gets done

after time off and holidays

Disciplines your hires cover

0 of 9

an agency pod covers all nine

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Cost is only half of it. Here is the coverage gap.

Two salaries buy you two skill sets. Modern legal search takes nine. This table updates as you change the roles above.

Discipline	Your in house team	Agency pod

Read this before you use the number

When hiring in house genuinely wins

You already have a marketing leader who can hire, direct, and evaluate specialists. Without one, you are buying activity and hoping.
You have enough volume to keep a specialist busy every day. A part time workload paid at a full time salary is the most common way firms lose money on this.
You want the institutional knowledge to live inside the firm and you can absorb the risk of it walking out the door.
Your case values are high enough that one extra signed case per quarter covers the difference. At that point the cost question stops mattering and execution is all that counts.

How this calculator handles the math

Paid time off is not added as a separate dollar cost. Counting it twice is the flaw in most of these calculators. Instead it reduces the productive days used for the cost per day figure.
Advertising budget is excluded from both sides. You pay Google the same either way, so including it would flatter one column for no reason.
Turnover, ramp, and vacancy are spread across the expected tenure rather than charged in year one, which is the conservative treatment.
Every default is editable. If a number looks wrong for your market, change it. The comparison is only as good as the inputs you give it.

Salary defaults reflect 2026 United States market ranges for legal marketing roles from Glassdoor, Indeed, and ZipRecruiter. Payroll burden follows Bureau of Labor Statistics employer cost data, which puts total burden at 25 to 40 percent above wages. Software pricing reflects published list rates for the tools most legal SEO programs run on. This tool produces an estimate for planning purposes and is not accounting, tax, or legal advice.

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