Over the years I have audited a lot of law firm websites and marketing systems, and some of what I find is simply atrocious and difficult to justify.
Which raises a fair question: how does that happen to firms run by smart people?
The answer is not carelessness. The reality is that most attorneys are busy experts in their domain — the legal world — who trusted a marketing company or whoever handles their marketing to guide them through areas outside their own field: SEO, websites, advertising, analytics, AI search visibility, and more.
Sometimes, that trust gets repaid with marketing that looks impressive on the surface but quietly works against the firm.
This post is the first in a series I am calling The Legal Marketing Malpractice Files. Each file will cover one discrete problem I keep running into in the wild. I’ll explain why it happens, what it costs the firm, and what to look out for.
The goal is not to bash agencies. There are excellent agencies in the legal space, and I run one, so I have no interest in pretending the whole industry is rotten. The goal is to help law firms recognize the difference between marketing built to grow a firm and marketing built to scale an agency, and to give lawyers the specific questions that expose which one they are paying for.
We are starting with the problem I consider the most consequential, because it decides what happens to every dollar a firm ever spends on marketing — who actually owns the marketing infrastructure.
Finding Out What You Actually Own
Here is a scenario I have watched play out more times than I would like.
A law firm decides to part ways with its marketing agency. Maybe the results dried up. Maybe communication fell apart, or the firm simply outgrew the relationship. The reason doesn’t matter as much as what happens next.
The firm asks for its website files. The agency explains that the website was built on their proprietary platform and cannot be transferred. The firm asks for access to Google Analytics. There is no login to hand over because the property lives inside the agency’s account. The firm asks about the Google Ads account, with its years of performance history and conversion data. Same answer. The firm asks about the tracking phone number that has been published on its website, its Google Business Profile, and a dozen legal directories for the past four years. That number belongs to the agency’s call tracking account, and it stops forwarding thirty days after the contract ends.
In the span of one conversation, the firm learns that after years of paying for marketing, it owns almost none of what was built. The money is gone, and most of the assets are leaving with the agency.
I want to be clear about what this is. This is not a firm losing a vendor. This is a firm losing its website, its measurement history, its advertising infrastructure, and in some cases its published phone number, all at once. And the worst part is that the firm usually agreed to this arrangement without realizing it, years earlier, on page six of a services agreement nobody read closely.
And while the agency breakup is the version I see most often, this trap has other shapes. The solo attorney whose web designer registered the domain a decade ago and has since disappeared. The firm whose former in-house marketer set up every account under a personal email that walked out the door with them. Different setups, same discovery: the firm does not control the marketing system it paid to build.
Your marketing assets are business assets. They should belong to your business. That sounds obvious when you say it out loud, yet the arrangement I just described is common enough in legal marketing that I check for it in every audit I do. This post walks through the assets in question, how firms lose control of them, and the specific questions that will tell you where you stand.
How Law Firms End Up Locked Out of Their Own Marketing
Nobody sets out to rent their own marketing. It happens gradually, and it usually happens for understandable reasons.
Lawyers are busy. When an agency says they will handle everything, that is a feature, not a red flag. The agency registers the accounts because it is faster. The agency builds the site on its own platform because that is how its operation scales. The agency sets up call tracking under its own master account because managing hundreds of client numbers in one place is efficient. Every one of these choices can be defended as a convenience in the moment.
The problem is that convenience during the relationship becomes leverage at the end of it. An agency that controls your website, your data, and your accounts does not have to earn your renewal. Leaving becomes so expensive and disruptive that most firms stay longer than they should, not because the work is good but because the exit is painful. Some platforms in the legal space have built their entire retention model on this. Their client retention is not a measure of satisfaction. It is a measure of switching cost.
Some responsibility falls on the firms too, and I say that as someone firmly on the law firm’s side of this issue. Too many firms hand over the keys on day one and never ask a single question about ownership until the day they want to leave. Lawyers, of all people, know that the terms you never negotiated are the ones that hurt you later. The same discipline firms apply to client engagement letters rarely gets applied to their own marketing agreements.
The Assets Every Law Firm Should Own
Let me walk through each asset one at a time. For each, I will cover why it matters, what going wrong looks like based on what I have seen in practice, and what to check. Not every agency controls all of these. Plenty of good agencies control none of them, but you should know where you stand on every single one.
Your Domain Name
Why this matters. The domain is the deed to the property. Everything else, the website, the email, the search rankings, the links other sites have pointed at you for years, sits on top of it. Lose the domain and you lose all of it at once.
What goes wrong. I have audited firms whose domain was registered by a web designer a decade ago, under the designer’s personal registrar account, with the designer listed as the registrant. If that person disappears, retires, or decides to be difficult, the firm has a real problem. Recovering a domain from an uncooperative or unreachable registrant is slow, sometimes expensive, and occasionally impossible without legal action.
What to check. Your domain should be registered in an account your firm controls, with the firm as the registrant, with billing attached to a firm credit card, and with at least two people at the firm able to access the registrar login. If your agency manages DNS for you, that is fine. Management is not ownership. The registrar login belongs to you.
Your Website and Hosting
Why this matters. The website is usually the single largest marketing investment a firm makes, and it is the asset that appreciates. Every page that earns rankings, every link it attracts, every improvement to its conversion rate adds to its value. That only benefits you if the site is yours to keep.
What goes wrong. There are two ways to lose your website. The first is contractual. The agreement says the agency owns the design, the code, or the content until some condition is met, or forever. The second is technical. The site is built on a proprietary platform that only exists inside the agency’s ecosystem. There is no WordPress installation to migrate, no files to export, no database to copy. When you leave, the site simply ceases to exist for you. The proprietary platform model deserves special attention because some of the largest players in legal marketing use it. The pitch sounds reasonable: an integrated system, everything in one place, no technical headaches. What it means in practice is that every dollar you spend improving that website is a dollar invested in an asset you can never take with you. Firms in this situation are not building equity. They are paying rent, and the improvements stay with the landlord.
What to check. Confirm the site is built on an open platform you could move, like WordPress. Confirm you have administrator access, not just an editor login. Confirm you know where the site is hosted and that your firm either owns the hosting account or has a written right to a full copy of the site, files and database included, on request. I have seen firms with beautiful sites they could not touch because the only admin credentials belonged to an agency that had stopped returning calls.
Your Business Profiles: Google, Bing Places, and Apple
Why this matters. For many consumer-facing practice areas, the Google Business Profile drives more phone calls than the website does. And Google is no longer the only map that matters. Bing Places feeds Bing and the AI assistants built on it, and Apple Business Connect controls how your firm appears in Apple Maps and Siri, which is what a large share of iPhone users see when they search for a lawyer nearby.
What goes wrong. Every Google Business Profile has a primary owner, and that ownership structure is invisible to anyone who is not looking at the account permissions. If an agency created your profile, there is a good chance the agency’s Google account holds that role, and your firm is a manager at best or absent entirely. I have seen firms locked out of their own profile after a breakup, unable to respond to reviews, update hours, or correct information, while the profile sat orphaned inside a former vendor’s Google account. The Bing and Apple listings have a different failure mode. Most firms never claimed them at all, so whoever gets there first, including an agency using its own account, controls them.
What to check. Open your Google Business Profile’s user settings and see whose email address is listed as primary owner. If it is not an account your firm controls, request a transfer now, while the relationship is good. Transfers are simple when everyone is cooperating and miserable when they are not. Then confirm your Bing Places and Apple Business Connect listings are claimed under accounts your firm holds, with the agency added as a user where needed.
Google Analytics
Why this matters. Analytics data is your firm’s memory. It tells you what has worked over the years, what your seasonal patterns look like, which pages produce inquiries, and what happened the last time you redesigned the site. That history is the baseline against which all future marketing gets judged.
What goes wrong. When the Analytics property lives inside an agency’s account, leaving the agency means losing the memory. You start over at zero, and the next agency has no baseline to work from. Whoever inherits the account is flying blind for the first year.
What to check. The Analytics account should be created under a Google account your firm owns, with your firm holding the administrator role and the agency added as a user with appropriate permissions. Access can be granted and revoked. History cannot be rebuilt.
Search Console and Webmaster Tools: Google, Bing, and Beyond
Why this matters. Google Search Console is the closest thing you have to Google telling you directly what it thinks of your website. Which pages are indexed, which queries produce impressions, which pages Google has looked at and declined to index. It is also where Google sends warnings about penalties, security issues, and technical problems. Bing Webmaster Tools does the same job for Bing, and Bing’s index reaches further than most people realize. It powers DuckDuckGo and feeds several of the AI assistants people increasingly use to find lawyers. If your firm serves communities that use other search engines, Yandex offers its own webmaster tools as well. The principle is the same everywhere — these tools are the search engines speaking to you directly, without an intermediary.
What goes wrong. Firms without their own access are dependent on the agency’s version of reality. Every number in the monthly report is filtered through the party being evaluated by those numbers. I am not suggesting agencies routinely falsify reports. Most do not. But verification should never require trust, and these tools are free.
What to check. Your firm should be a verified owner of its own property in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, full stop, with the agency granted access under your ownership. If your agency resists giving you that access, the resistance itself is information.
Your Advertising Accounts: Google Ads, Local Services Ads, and Meta
Why this matters. Advertising accounts accumulate value the longer they run. A mature Google Ads account that has been feeding conversion data to Google for years performs differently than a brand new one. Your Local Services Ads profile carries your verification status, your reviews, and your responsiveness history. Your Meta ad account holds the audiences and creative results that took real money to learn.
What goes wrong. Some agencies run client advertising out of their own accounts rather than creating accounts the client owns. The mechanics vary, but the outcome is the same: the campaign history, the conversion data, the audience lists, the experiment results, and the account performance record all live in an account you will never control. When you leave an agency that owns your ad accounts, you are not just changing vendors. You are abandoning years of paid learning and starting the algorithm’s education over from scratch, at your own expense, at hundreds of dollars per click in some legal markets.
What to check. Every ad account of record belongs to the firm, opened under the firm’s email, with the firm’s billing. The agency links to your accounts through their manager account, Google’s MCC on the ads side and Meta Business Manager on the social side, rather than housing your campaigns inside accounts they own. When the relationship ends, you unlink them and everything stays put. For Local Services Ads, the profile and its verification should be tied to the firm, with agency access granted on top.
Call Tracking Numbers
Why this matters. Call tracking is a useful thing. Knowing which channels produce phone calls is basic accountability, and I recommend it. But tracking numbers are provisioned inside a call tracking account, and whoever owns that account owns the numbers.
What goes wrong. If a tracking number was ever published anywhere persistent, on your website, on your Business Profile, in directories, in a print ad, on a billboard, then that number is out in the world attached to your firm. When the agency relationship ends and the number gets released or reassigned, every place it still appears now points to a dead line, or worse, to whoever the number gets recycled to. I have seen a firm’s former tracking number end up forwarding to nothing while it was still listed on legal directories the firm had forgotten about. Every call to those listings was a potential client hitting a disconnected number.
What to check. Two rules keep you safe here. First, the call tracking account should be yours, with the agency granted access to manage it. Second, your primary published number, the one on your Business Profile and in directories, should be your real number, with tracking numbers used in the places where they can be swapped instantly, like your website and your ads.
Your Directory Listings and Citation Management
Why this matters. Your firm’s listings across Avvo, Justia, FindLaw, Martindale, the state bar, and dozens of general directories do two jobs. They feed the consistency signals that local search runs on, and they are increasingly the sources AI tools draw from when someone asks for a lawyer. Those listings are assets, and so are the logins that control them.
What goes wrong. Two failure modes show up here. The first is simple. The agency claimed and manages all the directory profiles under its own logins, and when the relationship ends, nobody at the firm can correct so much as a phone number. The second is a little trickier to untangle. Many agencies manage citations through a paid data aggregator subscription, and with some of these services, the listings they control can revert to their old, incorrect information when the subscription is canceled. A firm can leave an agency and watch years of citation cleanup quietly undo itself across the web.
What to check. Ask for a list of every directory where your firm has been claimed or listed, and confirm who holds the login for each. Ask specifically whether your citations are managed through a subscription service, which one, and what happens to the listings if that subscription ends. If the answer is that the listings revert, you want to know that before you are standing in the blast radius.
Your Social Media Accounts
Why this matters. Your LinkedIn company page, Facebook page, YouTube channel, and any other social presence carry your followers, your reviews in Facebook’s case, and years of published content. They are also tied into your advertising through Meta Business Manager.
What goes wrong. The classic failure is that the only admin of the firm’s Facebook page is an agency employee, or worse, a former agency employee’s personal profile. Meta’s recovery processes for orphaned pages are slow and uncertain. On the Business Manager side, if the agency’s Business Manager owns your page and ad account rather than being granted partner access to assets you own, you are one relationship breakdown away from losing both.
What to check. Your firm should hold admin on every social account, with at least two firm-controlled admins on each so one departure cannot orphan a page. Your pages and ad accounts should live in a Meta Business Manager your firm owns, with the agency connected as a partner.
Your Email List and Email Platform
Why this matters. Your email list is one of the only audiences you fully own. No algorithm sits between you and it, and it cannot be taken away by a ranking change or a policy update. That makes it exactly the kind of asset worth protecting.
What goes wrong. Firms let the agency run email out of the agency’s own platform account, and the list, the templates, the automations, and the engagement history all live there. Leaving means asking your former agency to please export your own clients’ contact information, and hoping the export is complete.
What to check. The email platform account should belong to the firm, with the agency added as a user. Confirm you can export your full contact list yourself, today, without asking anyone. And confirm that email is being sent from your own domain rather than an address the agency controls.
Your Marketing Data and Intake Records
Why this matters. Years of lead data, source attribution, and intake history tell you where your cases actually come from. That record is the foundation for every future budget decision the firm makes.
What goes wrong. Some legal marketing platforms bundle everything: website, ads, tracking, and a built-in CRM where your leads and client communications accumulate. The integration is the selling point. It is also the trap. All of that data lives inside a system that may not offer a meaningful export, and even when an export exists, the data often arrives in a format no other system can use without a painful migration project.
What to check. Before you ever put intake data into a platform, know how it comes out. Ask for a sample export. If the answer to “how do we get our data out” is vague, assume the real answer is “you mostly don’t.”
Your Content, Brand, and Media Assets
Why this matters. The blog posts, practice area pages, and guides on your site are what your search visibility is built on. Your logo files, attorney photography, and video footage are what your brand is built on. All of it was paid for with firm money.
What goes wrong. Some contracts license content to the firm rather than assigning ownership, which means the content can be reclaimed, reused, or held back when you leave. On the media side, the common failure is quieter: the firm has the exported logo on its letterhead but has never possessed the source files, the raw photography, or the video project files, so every future vendor has to start from scratch or work from compressed copies.
What to check. Read your agreement and find out who owns the content. It should be work made for hire or explicitly assigned to the firm. This is one place where being a lawyer is an advantage. You already know how to read an IP clause. Read yours. Then ask for delivery of source files for your logo, brand assets, photography, and video, and store them somewhere the firm controls.
The Contract Language That Gives It All Away
Almost every ownership problem I have described was authorized by a contract the firm signed. The language is rarely hidden, but it is written to sound routine. A few patterns worth knowing.
Watch for license language where ownership language should be. If the agreement says the firm receives a “license to use” the website, the design, or the content during the term of the agreement, then the firm owns nothing. A license that exists during the term ends with the term.
Watch for platform clauses. Language noting that the website is “built on and inseparable from” the provider’s proprietary system is a plain statement that you can never take the site with you. It reads like a technical detail. It is actually the whole deal.
Watch for account provisions that make the agency the party of record. Anything that says the agency will “create and maintain” advertising or analytics accounts, without specifying that those accounts are opened in the client’s name and ownership, usually means the accounts will live under the agency.
Watch for silence. The most common problem is not a hostile clause. It is a contract that says nothing at all about what happens to the website, the accounts, the data, and the phone numbers at termination. Silence means the outcome gets decided later, by whoever holds the logins, at the exact moment your leverage is lowest.
None of this requires a hostile reading of agencies. Plenty of these contracts were written for operational convenience rather than as a trap. But the effect on the firm is identical either way, and intent will not get your analytics history back.
The Ownership Audit: What to Ask For This Week
You do not need a consultant to figure out where you stand. You need one email to whoever handles your marketing and about an hour of checking. If marketing lives in house, run the same exercise on your own logins. Here is what to request.
First, ask for a written inventory of every account, profile, listing, and asset that has been created or claimed on your firm’s behalf. That includes the domain registrar, hosting, the website platform, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, every advertising account, the call tracking account and every number in it, every directory login, every social account and the Business Manager they sit in, the email platform, the CRM, and anything else with a login. For each item, the inventory should state who owns the account of record and who currently has access.
Second, ask for credentials or ownership transfer on everything that should be yours, which is most of it. Accounts of record move to firm ownership. The agency keeps working access under your ownership, granted by you, revocable by you. Store the credentials in a password manager the firm controls, with at least two people at the firm holding access, so no single departure, on your side or theirs, can orphan an account.
Third, ask the exit questions directly. If we terminated this agreement today, do we keep the website, and in what form? What happens to our tracking numbers? What happens to our directory listings if your citation subscription ends? Can we see a sample export of our CRM and email data?
A good agency can answer every one of these quickly, and the answers will mostly be “you own it, here is the inventory, here is the transfer.” I know this because it is how well-run agencies already operate. The firms that should worry are the ones whose agency responds with delay, defensiveness, or a sudden meeting request to “walk you through how our platform works.”
One more suggestion. Ask these questions while the relationship is healthy. Ownership transfers that take a day when everyone is friendly can take months when the same request arrives attached to a termination notice.
What Ownership Should Look Like in a Healthy Agency Relationship
None of this means a firm should manage its own marketing infrastructure day to day. That is what you hire an agency for. The distinction that matters is between access and ownership. An agency needs access to do its work. It does not need ownership, and a confident agency does not want it.
The healthy structure looks like this. Every account of record, from the domain registrar to the ad accounts to the call tracking, is opened in the firm’s name under credentials the firm holds. The agency is granted access at whatever permission level the work requires, through the proper mechanisms each platform provides for exactly this purpose. Reporting draws from accounts the firm can log into and verify independently. The firm keeps a current inventory of every asset and login. And the agreement states in writing that all assets, accounts, data, and content belong to the firm, during the relationship and after it.
Under that structure, the agency keeps the client the only way it should — by doing work worth paying for. The firm can leave at any time, which means the agency has to earn every renewal. That pressure is healthy. It is exactly the pressure the lock-in model is designed to remove.
When I talk to firms about this, I sometimes hear a version of “our agency would never do this to us.” Maybe so. But ownership is not an accusation. It is a structure. You carry insurance without accusing anyone of planning a fire. Owning your marketing infrastructure is the same kind of decision, and the time to make it is before you need it.
The Question Worth Sitting With
Marketing spend is supposed to build something. Rankings that persist, an advertising account that gets smarter every quarter, a growing base of reviews, data that tells you what works, a website that appreciates in value as it earns authority. When the firm owns the infrastructure, every dollar spent adds to an asset the firm keeps. When someone else owns it, the same spending buys a service that evaporates on the day the relationship ends.
So here is the question I would ask every managing partner to sit with — if you fired your marketing team tomorrow, what would you lose?
If the answer is “a vendor,” you are in good shape. If the answer is “our website, our data, our ad accounts, and possibly our phone number,” then you have some emails to send this week. The audit costs you an hour. Finding out at termination costs you years.
If you want a second set of eyes on where your firm actually stands, I do this kind of review with law firms regularly. You can book a strategy session here. No pitch. Just a straight conversation about what you own, what you don’t, and what’s possible.