DUI lawyer marketing costs most firms between $1,000 and $6,000 a month for the recurring program, plus ad spend and a one-time website build. The spread is almost entirely about market size and how much of the work is bundled versus billed as separate lines. This is what sits inside each of those numbers.
Expect $1,000 to $6,000 a month for the recurring program, driven mostly by how competitive your county is.Bundled agencies quote one figure; itemized agencies start lower and grow.
Google Ads spend is separate and frequently larger than the retainer.Defense clicks run from the mid tens of dollars into the low hundreds depending on metro.
A website is a one-time build, typically from $3,000, and should be quoted on page count.Anything under about $2,000 is a template, which will not carry a charge-page strategy.
Almost every legal marketing proposal reduces to three things, and confusion about pricing usually comes from an agency blurring the lines between them.
When a quote feels hard to compare against another, it is nearly always because one agency has merged two of these buckets and the other has not.
Here is the honest problem with itemized pricing: every line sounds reasonable on its own. Google Business Profile management for $400? Sure. Review generation for $300? Reasonable. Schema implementation as a $1,500 project? Sounds technical. Reporting dashboard license at $150 a month? Fine.
Add them up and a firm that thought it was spending $1,200 is spending $3,550. Every line was real work, and the total still moved. That is the thing worth watching for when you compare quotes.
A bundled program should cover, without additional charges: local SEO and profile management, organic SEO, content production, schema and technical work, AI search formatting, review generation and response, and monthly reporting with a human on the call. If any of those are quoted separately, ask why.
Criminal defense and DUI are among the most expensive keyword sets in Google Ads. Depending on the metro, expect clicks from the mid tens of dollars into the low hundreds. That has two implications worth sitting with.
First, a small ad budget in an expensive market buys almost nothing. $500 a month at $80 a click is six clicks. Six clicks does not produce a case with any reliability, and it does not produce enough data for the account to optimize against. Below a certain floor, paid search in this vertical is not a small experiment, it is a donation.
Second, the management fee model matters. A percentage-of-spend arrangement means the agency's revenue rises with your budget whether or not the extra spend produces cases. That is a real conflict. A flat fee removes it. Neither is dishonest, but you should know which one you are on.
Take a two-attorney DUI and criminal defense practice in a mid-sized county, average retained case around $3,500, wanting meaningful growth within a year.
| Item | Monthly | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Recurring program | $1,500 | Everything earned: SEO, local, content, reviews, reporting |
| Google Ads spend | $2,500 | Goes to Google. Roughly 30 clicks at mid-market pricing |
| Ad management | $500 | Flat fee rather than a percentage |
| Website (amortized) | $400 | A $4,800 build spread across twelve months |
| Total | $4,900 | Break-even at roughly 1.4 extra cases a month |
That break-even number is the one worth checking against your own figures. At a $3,500 average case value, this program needs about one and a half additional retained cases a month to pay for itself. Whether that is easy or hard depends entirely on your county, which is exactly why any serious engagement starts with pulling your market's real numbers rather than quoting from a rate card.
The last one catches more agencies than the rest combined. A growth chart from a home-services client tells you nothing about whether a firm can rank a defense practice.
For transparency, since this post would be hollow without it: our program starts at $1,000 a month depending on the practice areas you want to compete in and how contested your markets are, and covers every recurring item listed above as one line. Websites start at $3,000, paid up front or amortized across twelve months. Google Ads management is a separate transparent fee on top of spend. We work with one firm per county. The full breakdown is on the pricing page.
Tell us your county and case mix and we will scope it properly, including telling you if the market does not justify the spend.
Family-owned since 1999 · 27 years marketing law firms · Washougal, WA