One hundred eighty-one dollars. That’s what a single click on “personal injury lawyer” costs in Google Ads right now. Not a lead. Not a consultation. Not a signed retainer. A click. Someone taps your ad, glances at your site, and maybe bounces. You still pay $181.
The number shocks most people. It shouldn’t. Personal injury is the most expensive advertising vertical in the US, and it isn’t close. What should shock you is that most PI firms have no idea what they actually pay per signed case. They know their ad budget. They know their monthly spend. But the full funnel from click to lead to consultation to retainer? Almost nobody maps it.
We did.
The Funnel Nobody Calculates
Here’s how the math works for paid search. Start with that $181 click. Google Ads conversion rates for legal services run 6 to 8%. That means for every 100 clicks, six to eight people fill out a form or call.
Do the math. At $181 per click and a 7% conversion rate, you’re paying roughly $2,586 per lead. Not per case. Per lead. That lead still has to answer the phone, show up for a consultation, have a viable case, and sign.
PI firms typically convert 20 to 30% of qualified leads into signed cases. So that $2,586 lead becomes a $8,600 to $12,900 cost per signed case through PPC alone.
That’s the expensive end. The range across channels is enormous.
Those ranges depend on market, case type, and firm operations. A firm in rural Alabama pays less than a firm in Los Angeles. A truck accident case is worth more than a fender bender. But the relative order holds across every market we track.
PPC: The $181 Starting Point
Personal injury keyword CPCs range from $70 to $250 depending on the market and keyword. “Personal injury lawyer” averages $181 nationally. Truck accident keywords push past $1,000 in competitive DMAs. Even bottom-of-barrel long-tail terms rarely dip below $40.
The conversion math is unforgiving. WordStream’s 2025 benchmarks put legal at 6.98% conversion rate, the lowest of any industry they track. That’s not because legal ads are bad. It’s because the decision to hire a lawyer isn’t impulsive. People research. They compare. They bounce.
Here’s what the PPC funnel looks like at scale.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Average CPC | $181 |
| Clicks per lead | 13-17 (at 6-8% CVR) |
| Cost per lead | $250-400 (competitive markets $400+) |
| Leads per signed case | 4-6 (at 20-30% sign rate) |
| Cost per signed case | $5,000-13,000 |
The math still works. A single PI case can generate $50K to $500K in fees. Even at $13,000 per signed case, the ROI is strong. The problem isn’t the cost. It’s that firms pour budget into PPC without calculating the real cost per signed case, then wonder why their cost per acquisition feels high.
Broadcast TV: Big Reach, Blurry Math
Broadcast television captures 56% of legal advertising spend nationally. Across 210 markets, we track $141M monthly in legal ad spend. More than half goes to broadcast. That’s the legacy of firms like Morgan and Morgan ($17.2M monthly across 23 markets), Thomas J. Henry, Jim Adler, and Morris Bart. They built their brands on local TV over decades.
Broadcast CPMs run $15 to $30. Affordable. The problem is waste.
A 30-second PI spot during the local news hits everyone watching that station in that DMA. Retirees, teenagers, people who already have a lawyer, people who’ll never need one. Generous estimates say 20% of broadcast impressions reach someone who could plausibly become a client. That pushes the effective CPM from $20 to $100 per relevant impression.
Attribution is the bigger issue. A viewer sees your TV spot on Tuesday. They Google your firm name on Thursday. They call on Saturday. Did the TV ad generate that case? Maybe. Probably. But broadcast can’t prove it the way digital channels can. Most firms running broadcast treat it as a brand tax. Necessary spending they can’t directly tie to signed cases.
The cost per signed case through broadcast is genuinely hard to calculate. Firms spending $100K to $500K monthly on TV typically estimate $3,000 to $8,000 per signed case based on intake volume during flight periods. But that estimate includes the halo effect of every other channel running simultaneously.
Shared Leads: Cheap and Worthless
Lead vendors sell the same personal injury lead to three to seven firms simultaneously. Cost per lead runs $200 to $400. Sounds reasonable next to $2,586 PPC leads.
Then reality hits.
Contact rate on shared leads is 15 to 25%. Three-quarters of the people you paid for never answer the phone. Of those who do answer, most have already spoken with competing firms. You’re not first. You’re not exclusive. You’re bidding against firms that got the same name 30 seconds before you did.
The race to call first creates a toxic dynamic. Firms staff intake teams around speed, not quality. They invest in dialers and automation. They optimize for contact rate when they should be optimizing for case quality. Our analysis of the shared lead problem shows the full picture.
The math on shared leads looks cheap until you factor in close rates.
| Metric | Shared Leads | Exclusive PPC Lead |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per lead | $200-400 | $250-400 |
| Contact rate | 15-25% | 60-80% |
| Qualified rate | 30-40% | 50-70% |
| Close rate | 5-10% | 20-30% |
| Cost per signed case | $4,000-8,000 | $2,500-5,000 |
The sticker price is lower. The actual cost per signed case isn’t.
CTV: The Channel That Changes the Math
Connected TV advertising costs $25 to $45 CPM for programmatic buys. Premium inventory pushes $45 to $60. Those numbers look expensive next to broadcast’s $15 to $30 CPM.
They’re not. Not when you calculate what you actually get.
CTV targets at the household level. Your ad runs on Hulu, Peacock, or Tubi in front of a specific household that matches your demographic and geographic criteria. Completion rates exceed 90%. You’re not paying for teenagers watching cartoons. You’re paying for households in your DMA that match your client profile.
The targeting efficiency flips the CPM comparison. Broadcast at $20 CPM with 20% relevance gives you an effective $100 CPM per qualified impression. CTV at $35 CPM with 60% relevance gives you an effective $58 CPM. Higher sticker price, lower real cost.
Attribution is the real advantage. CTV tracks household exposure, then matches it against website visits, phone calls, and form fills. Firms running connected TV for legal markets can draw a line from ad impression to signed retainer. Try doing that with a billboard.
Yet only 22.7% of legal ad spend goes to streaming nationally. The gap is absurd.
The 56% Problem
More than half of all legal advertising spend goes to broadcast television. Meanwhile, streaming captures 44.8% of total TV viewing nationally. The audience moved. The money didn’t.
Where Firms Spend
- 56% broadcast TV
- 15-25% radio
- Only 22.7% streaming
- Optimized for 2010 viewing habits
Where People Watch
- 44.8% streaming
- 25.6% cable
- 21.4% broadcast
- Streaming share grew every quarter since 2020
This mismatch isn’t uniform. Some markets have figured it out. Others haven’t come close.
High CTV adoption: Atlanta allocates 48% to streaming. Los Angeles runs 33%. Las Vegas sits at 33%.
The laggards: Washington DC sends just 3% to streaming. Dallas runs 10%. New York sits at 11%. Boston allocates 9%.
The largest, most expensive broadcast markets have the lowest streaming adoption. That’s not a coincidence. Broadcast incumbents in those markets have deep station relationships, long-term buying commitments, and agencies that optimize for the channel they know. Shifting 20% of a $2.4M broadcast budget to CTV means renegotiating station contracts, retraining teams, and rebuilding measurement systems.
It also means reaching households that $2.4M in broadcast completely misses.
What Firms Spending $50K to $500K Monthly Should Do
The answer depends on your market, your budget tier, and how fast you need results. But the data points in one direction.
Know your market’s CTV gap. If you’re in Dallas (10% streaming), Washington DC (3%), or Boston (9%), there’s open field. The dominant broadcast spenders in those markets haven’t moved to streaming. Your $50K monthly CTV budget faces almost zero competition from firms spending 10 times more on broadcast.
Stop buying shared leads. The cost per signed case through shared leads ($4,000 to $8,000) is comparable to PPC and broadcast, but you build zero brand equity. Every dollar goes to a vendor’s pipeline, not yours. Invest that budget in channels where the lead is exclusively yours.
Run the full-funnel math before picking channels. Cost per click is meaningless without conversion rate. Cost per lead is meaningless without close rate. The only metric that matters is cost per signed case. Calculate it for every channel you run. If you can’t, you have an attribution problem before you have a media problem.
Allocate 25 to 40% to CTV. Not five percent as a test. The firms seeing results from streaming, Dozier at 81%, Thompson at 69%, Montlick at 55%, treat it as a primary channel. A $10K test budget won’t generate the frequency needed for brand recall. Three to six household exposures per month is the minimum. Budget accordingly.
Keep PPC for high-intent capture. Paid search is expensive and it works. Someone searching “personal injury lawyer near me” has intent that no other channel matches. Don’t abandon PPC. Working with a team that runs paid search for PI attorneys keeps negative keyword lists tight and landing pages optimized. Just don’t make it your entire strategy. Pair it with CTV for awareness and SEO for long-term organic growth.
The Real Question
Personal injury advertising costs aren’t a mystery. $181 per click. $250 to $400 per lead. $2,500 to $13,000 per signed case, depending on the channel. The numbers are knowable. Most firms just never bother to calculate them.
The firms that do the math have an advantage. They know which channels produce signed cases at which cost. They know where the competition spends and where it doesn’t. They shift budget to the open field instead of fighting for frequency on crowded broadcast stations.
That advantage compounds. Every quarter a firm spends building CTV presence in a low-adoption market is a quarter their broadcast-only competitors fall further behind. The cost per case on streaming drops as frequency builds. The cost per case on broadcast rises as more firms compete for the same inventory.
The $181 click isn’t the problem. It’s spending $181 per click without knowing what it costs to turn that click into a signed case. That’s the expensive mistake.
References
- WordStream. "Google Ads Benchmarks 2025." 2025.
- First Page Sage. "Average Personal Injury Cost Per Lead (CPL): 2026 Report." 2026.
- ATRA. "Legal Services Advertising Report, 2020-2024." 2025.
- Nielsen. "Streaming Shatters Multiple Records in December 2025 with 47.5% of TV Viewing." 2026.
- eMarketer. "US TV and Connected TV Ad Spending Forecasts, H2 2025." 2025.
- National Law Review. "How to Sign 300 Cases Per Month with PPC Advertising." 2025.
