A law firm website in the US generally lands between $2,500 and $30,000. The spread comes down to three things: how many practice areas need their own real page, whether the intake form has to write into your case management system, and whether anyone is doing the bar compliance review. A solo estate planning attorney does not need what a twelve-attorney PI firm needs, and paying the same for both is how firms end up disappointed.
| Approach | Typical range | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| DIY builder (Squarespace, Wix) | $200 minimum to about $2,000 | A template you configure. Real pages, decent mobile, no bespoke logic. |
| Template implementation (WordPress) | $2,500 to $8,000 | A licensed legal theme, your branding, 8 to 20 pages, a contact form, basic on-page SEO. |
| Custom build, small to mid firm | $8,000 to $30,000 | A CMS modelled around attorneys and practice areas, multi-step intake, integrations, structured data. |
| Multi-office or multi-language PI build | $30,000 to $150,000+ | The above plus location architecture, Spanish-language parity, results libraries, CRM plumbing. |
What moves you up a band is rarely aesthetics. It is page count, integrations, and how many people have to approve each sentence.
Template or build: the decision that sets the price
The difference is not visual quality. Good templates look good. The difference is who owns the structure.
With a template, someone else decided what a practice area page contains, in what order, with which fields. Want an FAQ block on PI pages but not estate planning ones, and you either fake it in the page editor or pay a developer to modify a theme they did not write.
With a build, you define the content types first: attorney, practice area, office, result, testimonial. Every page assembles from those, so a fourteenth practice area added two years later inherits the schema, the internal linking and the layout.
When the template is the right call
- A solo or two-attorney firm, four to six practice areas, no plans to add offices.
- Your intake is a phone call and an email, and you are fine with that.
- Your budget is going into local SEO and reviews rather than the site, which for most small firms is correct.
A clean template on WordPress or Squarespace with good copy beats a custom build still in wireframes six months later. Spending $20,000 on a site while your Google Business Profile has eleven reviews is solving the wrong problem.
When you need the build
- More than about eight practice areas, or multiple cities.
- Intake has to land in Clio, MyCase, Filevine or Litify without anyone re-typing it.
- You run paid search, where landing page structure is a cost variable, not an aesthetic one.
- You need Spanish-language pages that are genuinely translated and separately indexable.
Practice-area architecture is most of the build cost
The biggest structural mistake is one Practice Areas page listing fourteen services as bullet points. Nobody searches for practice areas. They search for a truck accident lawyer in their city, or a contested guardianship attorney.
Each practice area that matters commercially needs its own page: what the process looks like, what it costs, what the deadlines are, who handles it. Typically 700 to 1,500 words of genuinely different content per page, and the writing is the slow part, not the code.
The second dimension is what gets expensive. Six practice areas across four cities is twenty-four pages. Build them as permutations with the city name swapped and you have a doorway-page problem. Write twenty-four distinct pages and the content bill exceeds the build.
So build the practice-area pages first, and add location pages only where you have something real to say: an office, local court experience, named attorneys who appear there. That discipline is what makes law firm marketing work, and it is worth settling before anyone opens a design tool.
Intake forms and the handoff to Clio or MyCase
A contact form with Name, Email and Message is not intake. It is a suggestion box. Real intake does four things.
- Qualifies. Conditional questions by matter type: date of incident for a limitations check, county for jurisdiction, opposing party for a conflicts check.
- Sets expectations in writing. A visible line stating that submitting the form does not create an attorney-client relationship and that the visitor should not send confidential information.
- Routes. Family law to the family law paralegal, PI to the intake coordinator, the rest to the front desk.
- Writes into the system of record. Not just an email.
That last item is where the integration cost sits, in three tiers.
Native embed, cheapest. Clio Grow gives you a hosted intake form to embed, and MyCase has its own lead capture. Almost no development. The trade-off is styling somebody else's form in an iframe, and it never quite matches the site.
Middleware, a few hundred dollars plus a subscription. Your own form, built with Gravity Forms or WPForms, posts to Zapier or Make, which creates the contact or matter. Fine at moderate volume. It breaks silently when a field name changes.
Direct API, real developer hours. Writing to the Clio or MyCase API from your own backend, with field mapping, duplicate detection, retry handling and a log you can audit when a lead goes missing. Budget several thousand dollars, and confirm at the outset which plan tier includes API access. That detail causes more scope surprises than anything else here.
Add call tracking too. Most law firm enquiries still arrive by phone, and unattributed calls make every other number meaningless. Pair CallRail with analytics and reporting so signed matters, not form fills, are what you count.
Bar advertising compliance: small line item, large consequence
Your website is attorney advertising, regulated by the bar of every state where you are licensed. The rules descend from ABA Model Rules 7.1 through 7.3, but the state-level detail is where sites go wrong.
- Filing. Texas requires most advertisements, websites included, to be filed with the State Bar's Advertising Review Department for a fee, and the fee is higher if you file after publication. Florida runs a comparable regime. Check your state's rule before launch.
- Results disclaimers. If you publish verdicts or settlements, you generally need a disclaimer that past results do not guarantee a similar outcome, placed with the figures rather than in the footer.
- Specialisation claims. Specialist and expert are restricted in many states unless you hold a recognised certification. In Texas, if you are not board certified you cannot imply that you are.
- Testimonials. Some states restrict them, particularly ones referencing outcomes. Widgets that pull ratings automatically also pull in text nobody approved.
- Jurisdiction. State where each attorney is licensed, so a multi-state page is not an offer to practise where you cannot.
Budget two to four hours of attorney review before launch, and hand the builder the required disclaimers up front. Retrofitting compliance language into a finished design costs more than designing around it. Accessibility sits in the same line: law firm sites draw ADA Title III demand letters, and building to WCAG 2.1 AA costs far less than remediation under legal pressure.
Why PI firms pay more than estate planning firms
Not because PI attorneys have more money. Because the arithmetic supports it.
A personal injury firm works on contingency, commonly a third of recovery, so one signed case can be worth tens of thousands in fees. Estate planning is usually flat-fee work, often $1,500 to $3,500 for a standard package.
Now run the acquisition maths. In competitive metros, clicks on terms like "car accident lawyer" routinely cost well into three figures. Take a $150 click. If the landing page converts 4% of visitors into a form or a call, each enquiry cost $3,750. If one in eight enquiries becomes a signed case, that is $30,000 per case. For a firm whose average fee sits well above that, the channel works. For an estate planning firm at $2,500 a matter, it does not survive a second look.
That cascades into the site. The PI firm can justify conversion testing, a landing page per accident type and a hard performance budget, because one point of conversion rate is worth thousands. The estate planning firm is better served by a credible, fast site plus local search and referrals.
In the first camp, personal injury marketing and paid search management have to be designed together. In the second, look at what a family law or estate practice site actually needs, which is usually less than the proposal in front of you.
What to do with the budget you actually have
Under $2,000: buy a good template, write the copy yourself, and put the rest into your Google Business Profile and reviews. Our own work starts from $200 as a minimum, and at that end the honest advice is to spend on content, not code. Between $2,500 and $8,000 you get a template implementation done properly, which covers most firms under six attorneys. Above $8,000 you are paying for a custom build with the content model, the integrations and the conversion work all in scope; where you land inside our pricing depends on which of those three you need.
Before commissioning anything, run two cheap diagnostics. Put the site through a speed test: a poor mobile score means you may be losing enquiries you already paid for. Then submit your own contact form and time how long a human takes to respond. If the answer is next business day, the problem is not the website.
For a second opinion on which band you belong in, tell us what you have. We will say so plainly, including when the answer is that you do not need a new site.
