Yes, I can generate legal leads, and yes, legal is the most expensive vertical in UK paid search. The average legal click costs £5.42 and the average legal enquiry £104.20, against an all-industry average of £44.30. In London, add 20% to 40%.
That number is the whole problem with buying legal leads on a benchmark. For a commercial litigation firm, £104 an enquiry is cheap. For a wills and LPA practice, it is roughly three times what the work can carry. Everything on this page works backwards from your ceiling instead, because the practice areas differ more than the suppliers do.
Four things worth knowing first
- The blended legal average is above what several practice areas can pay. Generic terms like "solicitor near me" attract every practice, so their price is set by whoever has the most valuable case. If you sell £600 wills, you cannot win that auction and should not be in it.
- Buying advertising is not the same as buying a referral. Referral fees in personal injury and fatal accident claims have been prohibited since April 2013 under sections 56 to 60 of LASPO. Paying for marketing that generates enquiries directly to your own firm is a different arrangement, but the distinction has to be real, documented and defensible.
- A shared lead is a race you probably lose. Sold to four firms, the enquiry goes to whoever calls first. If your intake is "someone will ring them back tomorrow", buy exclusive or do not buy at all.
- Nobody beats the auction by 60%. If a supplier quotes far below the media cost of creating a legal enquiry, the lead is being resold, recycled, or is not what it says it is. There is a ninety-second test for this in the supplier guide.
01 / ScopeThe work I generate
Legal is not one market. It is a dozen markets that happen to share a regulator, and the economics of each one are different enough that a supplier quoting a single price across all of them is not paying attention.
| Practice area | Demand in search | What decides it |
|---|---|---|
| Residential conveyancing | High, price-led | Speed of quote and fixed-fee clarity |
| Wills, trusts & probate | Steady, low value per matter | Tight cost control; probate carries the economics, wills rarely do |
| Family & divorce | High, urgent | Discretion and same-day contact |
| Employment (claimant) | High, seasonal spikes | Fast triage; most enquiries fail merit |
| Personal injury & clinical negligence | High, expensive | Compliance structure before anything else |
| Immigration | High, very specific | Matching visa route to query; generic ads waste money |
| Commercial, corporate & disputes | Lower volume, high value | Can absorb a high cost per enquiry, so easiest to make work |
| Housing disrepair & landlord/tenant | High volume, thin margins | Qualification, or you drown in non-cases |
| Criminal defence | High, mostly legal aid | Rarely viable on paid search outside private work |
If your practice area is not listed, ask. The answer is either yes, or a straight explanation of why the arithmetic does not work, which is more useful than a proposal that quietly ignores it.
02 / MoneyWhat a legal enquiry is worth to you
Before comparing anyone's price, work out your own ceiling. Fee per instruction, multiplied by gross margin, divided by enquiries per instruction, divided by your target payback multiple. Anything above that number is a loss, however good the case studies look.
| Practice area | Fee per instruction | Enquiries per instruction | Ceiling per enquiry |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wills & LPAs | £600 | 3 | £33 |
| Residential conveyancing | £1,300 | 4 | £54 |
| Immigration | £1,800 | 5 | £60 |
| Housing disrepair | £2,500 | 6 | £69 |
| Employment (claimant) | £3,000 | 8 | £63 |
| Probate | £3,500 | 5 | £117 |
| Family & divorce | £4,000 | 6 | £111 |
| Commercial litigation | £15,000 | 10 | £250 |
Those fee figures are illustrative, at 50% gross margin and a three-to-one payback target. Substitute your own three numbers and the table rebuilds itself in about a minute. The conveyancing row is anchored to published 2026 research putting average freehold conveyancing fees at roughly £1,300 including VAT.
Read the two tables together
The average legal enquiry from UK paid search costs £104.20. Only three rows above can carry that, and one of them barely. This is why so many firms conclude that "PPC does not work for law" after a year of buying generic keywords: the channel was fine, the queries were unaffordable. A wills practice with a £33 ceiling can still be reached profitably, but only on narrow, specific, unglamorous search terms that the firms bidding £40 a click have never bothered to build out.
03 / BenchmarksWhat legal leads actually cost
Legal sits at the top of every UK paid search cost table, and has done for years. These are 2026 UK Google Search figures, with the all-industry average for scale.
| Sector | Avg CPC | Conversion rate | Cost per lead |
|---|---|---|---|
| Legal | £5.42 | 5.2% | £104.20 |
| Finance & insurance | £4.18 | 4.5% | £92.90 |
| B2B services | £3.45 | 4.2% | £82.10 |
| All industries | £1.95 | 4.4% | £44.30 |
Two caveats that matter more than the headline. London runs 20% to 40% above the national average, so any supplier quoting you a London campaign against a national benchmark is flattering themselves. And the £5.42 is a blend: competitive injury and negligence terms trade far above it, while a well-built long-tail campaign in probate or immigration can sit well below.
On pay per lead, I price per practice area rather than publishing one number, for the reason the tables above make obvious. The sensible sequence is: you tell me your ceiling, I tell you whether I can generate enquiries under it at the volume you want. If I cannot, I will say so on the call rather than three months into a contract.
Want to know if your numbers work?
Send me your average fee per instruction and roughly how many enquiries it takes you to win one. You will get a straight answer on whether legal enquiries can be bought under your ceiling, including when the answer is no.
04 / ComplianceReferral fees, marketing, and the difference
This is the part most lead generation companies skip when they sell to law firms, and it is the part your COLP will ask about first.
Since 1 April 2013, sections 56 to 60 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 have prohibited paying or receiving referral fees in claims for damages following personal injury or death. The SRA reads "payment" broadly: fee sharing, benefits in kind and payments routed through a third entity are all capable of being caught. The regulator has also been explicit that structuring an arrangement to sit outside the letter of LASPO does not resolve the wider duties in the Codes of Conduct.
What LASPO plainly contemplates is that firms can still pay for genuine marketing services. The distinction is whether you are paying for the introduction of a client, or paying for advertising that produces enquiries which come to you directly. Under campaign management, that distinction is unambiguous: the advertising runs in your firm's name, the enquiry arrives on your line without passing through anyone else's hands, and the fee is a fixed monthly amount that does not vary with how much work arrives. Nobody is being paid per client introduced, because nobody is introducing anyone.
Three things to have in writing
What the fee is for. A marketing arrangement should be priced as marketing: a fixed fee for defined services, or a price per enquiry generated, not a share of your fees or of a client's damages.
Who the client contacts. Enquiries generated in your firm's name, arriving on your line, are not introductions. Ask any supplier to show you exactly what the prospect sees at the point of enquiry.
Disclosure. Paragraphs 5.1 to 5.3 of the SRA Code of Conduct for Solicitors require any referral or fee-sharing arrangement to be disclosed to the client and to leave your independence intact. Even where an arrangement is pure marketing, having the analysis written down before you start is cheaper than reconstructing it later.
On the data side, the ceiling for a PECR breach rose from £500,000 to £17.5m or 4% of global turnover on 5 February 2026, so the days of treating consent wording as somebody else's problem are over. Enquiries I generate are inbound: the prospect searches, clicks, and submits their own details to a form that tells them who will contact them. Nobody is cold-called and no list is bought.
None of the above is legal advice, which would be a strange thing for me to offer you. It is the analysis your compliance team will want to do, listed so you can do it quickly.
05 / FitWhy work with me
Fifteen years buying paid traffic for enquiry-led UK businesses, mostly in verticals where the cost per lead is high enough that getting it wrong is expensive: financial services, insurance, energy, home improvement and professional services. Legal behaves like all of them at once, which is why the same discipline transfers.
Three things that tend to matter to firms:
- You deal with the operator. There is no account manager relaying questions to someone else. The person who builds the campaign is the person who answers the phone.
- Flat fees, never a percentage of spend. A percentage fee pays your supplier more for spending more of your money. On campaign management it is £500 a month for a single office and £1,250 for national, plus your media budget.
- An honest read, including when it is no. I publish independent guides that score my competitors and, in places, recommend them over me. The same applies on a call: if your ceiling is £33 and your market is central London, I will tell you.
Worth reading alongside this page: the best lead generation companies in the UK for the wider supplier market, and lead generation for small businesses if you are a two or three partner firm deciding whether to hire anyone at all.
06 / QuestionsWhat law firms ask before starting
How much do legal leads cost in the UK?
The average enquiry from UK paid search in the legal sector costs £104.20, against £44.30 across all industries, on an average click price of £5.42 and a 5.2% conversion rate. London runs 20% to 40% higher. That average is close to meaningless on its own, because a commercial litigation enquiry and a wills enquiry sit at opposite ends of it. Price against your own ceiling: fee per instruction times gross margin, divided by enquiries per instruction, divided by your payback multiple.
Is buying leads the same as paying a referral fee?
Not necessarily, and the difference matters. Sections 56 to 60 of LASPO have prohibited referral fees in personal injury and fatal accident claims since April 2013, and the SRA treats fee sharing and benefits in kind as payment. Paying for advertising that generates enquiries arriving directly at your own firm, under your own name, is a marketing arrangement rather than an introduction. The distinction has to be genuine rather than cosmetic, so document what the fee buys, keep the enquiry route direct, and check paragraphs 5.1 to 5.3 of the Code of Conduct before you start.
Can you generate personal injury and clinical negligence enquiries?
Yes, and this is the practice area where the compliance structure has to be settled before the campaign is built rather than after. In practice that usually means campaign management rather than pay per lead, because it removes any question about what the payment is for: advertising running in your firm's name, enquiries arriving directly on your line, and a fixed monthly fee that does not move with case volume. Expect the highest click prices in UK search and plan the budget accordingly.
Are the leads exclusive to my firm?
They can be, and for most firms they should be. A shared enquiry sold to several firms goes to whoever calls first, so the effective cost per instruction is far higher than the headline price suggests unless you have someone able to call within minutes, every time. Exclusive enquiries cost more each and convert better. On campaign management the question does not arise, because the enquiry only ever reaches you.
How quickly can we start receiving enquiries?
On pay per lead, days. On campaign management, expect two to three weeks between starting and the first enquiries, because the build includes ad accounts, landing pages, call tracking and conversion measurement. The first month is a calibration month in either model: what a legal enquiry costs in your practice area and your postcodes is knowable in advance only to a range.
Do you work with small firms as well as large ones?
Yes, with one honest caveat on campaign management. At £500 a month plus media, the realistic floor is around £1,200 a month all in, and below roughly £2,000 of monthly media spend too large a share of your budget buys management rather than clients. If that is where you are, pay per lead is the better model this year and a campaign becomes the right move later.
Are we tied into a contract?
No. Campaign management is rolling and monthly, with no minimum term, so you can stop at the end of any month. What that buys you is the ability to leave if it is not working, rather than sitting out a twelve-month commitment while the numbers argue with the proposal. The campaign build itself, meaning the accounts, landing pages and creative, is built and owned by The Lead Gen Company and stays with The Lead Gen Company if we stop. Enquiries generated while we are working together are yours, along with the client data attached to them. On pay per lead there is nothing to unwind at all: you stop ordering and the invoices stop.
Ready for a price?
Seven questions, ninety seconds, and you get volume and cost estimates for your practice area and your area of the country. No obligation and no sequence of follow-up emails.