We took a look at the average legal lead cost across several different divisions in 2024. Our process involved analyzing the publicly available data in addition with a compendium of our internal data and organizing it based on various factors that are critical to law firms looking to extend their practice. The following information is available below:
Legal Lead Cost by Practice Area: 2024 Data
The following table takes the common legal practice areas and compiles the average cost per lead for each.
Law Practice Area | Average Cost per Lead ($) |
Business and Corporate Law | 60.40 |
Bankruptcy Law | 69.75 |
Criminal Defense Law | 175.93 |
Employment Law | 35.35 |
Estate Planning Law | 59.88 |
Family Law | 64.80 |
Immigration Law | 45.53 |
Intellectual Property Law | 61.15 |
Real Estate Law | 30.18 |
Personal Injury Law | 782.43 |
Tax Law | 125.25 |
Legal Leads with the Highest Demand Differentials in 2024
Key Takeaways: Legal Lead Cost Changes in 2024
As the graph above shows, the 2024 legal lead landscape has mostly stayed the same in terms of demand. Practice areas that showed significant growth this year:
- Immigration – Possibly due to more prosecutions and policy changes from the Biden administration
- Intellectual Property – Increased demand may come from large language models and AI services needing to crawl vast amounts of data in order to train their models
- Slip-and-fall – The American population is aging and older residents are at the highest risk for slip and fall injuries due to reduced awareness of dangerous situations and lowered reflexes.
The same demographic rationale for slip-and-fall leads rising in demand is also likely to explain why estate planning has seen such significant growth. More Americans are aging and also aware of the importance of preserving their assets for family and loved ones. Still, it’s interesting that it is the only practice area where there has been significant growth even within the past year.
2024 Legal Lead Cost by Traffic Source
We also took a look at how things differed for legal leads based on traffic source, as many lead generation agencies have moved beyond simple pay-per-click strategies and moved into omni-channel plaintiff recruiting efforts for their clients. Below are the results, with some obvious trends like video remaining a high-cost source.
Traffic Channel | Average Legal Lead Cost |
TV | $183.83 |
Digital Video | $169.25 |
Paid Search | $154.68 |
Social Media | $140.10 |
Programmatic Display | $125.53 |
Radio | $110.95 |
Podcasts | $96.38 |
Billboards | $81.80 |
$67.23 | |
Influencer Marketing | $52.65 |
Regional Differences in 2024 Legal Lead Costs
We conducted an analysis of regional differences in legal leag costs driven by Google pay-per-click data and publications by regional sources across the US.
The states were grouped as follows:
Region | States Contained |
Northeast | Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania |
Southeast | Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas |
Midwest | Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas |
Southwest | Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona |
Mountain West | Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, Nevada |
Pacific | Washington, Oregon, California, Alaska, Hawaii |
Below are the results of the analysis:
Average Lead Cost by Region | Average |
Northeast | $70.141 |
Southeast | $68.24 |
Midwest | $59.91 |
Southwest | $89.66 |
Mountain West | 17.236 |
Pacific | $81.30 |