Legal / Employment law
Employment law marketing for employees and employers, which cannot share a site.
An employment practice that markets to both sides is usually marketing to neither. A worker who has just been dismissed and a human resources director planning a restructure are not looking for the same thing, and a site that addresses both convinces neither.
How do employment law firms get clients?
Employment law splits into two distinct businesses. Plaintiff side work reaches individuals who search after something has happened to them, usually within days of a dismissal, a complaint or an unpaid wage issue. Management side work reaches employers, is bought on relationships and authority, and is usually an ongoing advisory relationship rather than a single matter.
They need different marketing. Individuals search the event: wrongful termination, unpaid overtime, harassment, retaliation, a severance agreement they have been asked to sign. Employers search the risk: policies, classification, investigations, restructure and compliance.
Attempting both from one site and one voice usually fails both, because a worker reading employer focused reassurance and an employer reading worker focused advocacy each conclude the firm is not for them.
Plaintiff side and management side are different companies.
Firms that do both usually run them as separate brands or separate sections for exactly this reason.
Open the full comparison: Plaintiff side and management side are different companies.Hide the full comparison: Plaintiff side and management side are different companies.
| Item | Acting for employees | Advising employers |
|---|---|---|
| Who buys | An individual, recently affected | A business owner, HR director or general counsel |
| Trigger | Dismissal, harassment, unpaid wages, a severance offer | A risk, a complaint, a restructure, an audit |
| Urgency | Days, sometimes with a deadline attached | Weeks, occasionally immediate |
| How they find you | Search, on a phone, describing the event | Referral, reputation, professional network |
| Fee model | Contingency or hybrid | Hourly or retained advisory |
| Relationship | One matter, then it ends | Ongoing, expanding, and worth many matters |
| Marketing channel | Search and content | Authority, referral and professional presence |
Note the last two rows. An employer relationship compounds, which means the acquisition economics justify a much longer and slower approach than plaintiff side work does.
What a dismissed employee actually searches.
Almost never the practice area. Always the event, and usually in their own words.
Was that legal
Immediately after the event. Exploratory, uncertain, and often researched at night. This is where content reaches people before any firm's practice area page would.
Should I sign this
A severance agreement with a deadline attached. One of the highest intent searches in the category, because there is a date on the document.
What am I owed
Unpaid overtime, misclassification, final pay, unused leave. Concrete, numerical and frequently the most straightforward matters to assess.
See the remaining steps: What a dismissed employee actually searches.Hide the remaining steps: What a dismissed employee actually searches.
Who do I complain to
Agency processes have their own deadlines and many people do not know they exist until they have passed. Explaining the route accurately is genuinely useful.
Can they do this to me
Retaliation, accommodation, leave. Ongoing rather than post employment, and often from somebody still in the job and frightened of making it worse.
Each is a page, each is specific to your state as well as to federal law, and each reaches somebody days before they would search for an employment lawyer.
Employers do not search for you, they ask someone.
An employer facing an employment problem rarely starts with a search engine. They ask their accountant, their existing counsel, another business owner or their professional network. By the time they look a firm up, the recommendation has already been made and the search is a confirmation.
That means management side marketing is an authority and relationship discipline. Practical material written for employers rather than for workers. Presence where business owners and human resources professionals actually are. Relationships with accountants, insurance brokers and business advisers who encounter these problems before a lawyer does.
Read the full breakdown: Employers do not search for you, they ask someone.Hide the full breakdown: Employers do not search for you, they ask someone.
The content that works is preventive rather than reactive: what a defensible investigation looks like, what a handbook should cover, how classification decisions are examined, what changes when headcount crosses a threshold. It is useful, it demonstrates competence, and it reaches the buyer months before there is a matter.
The honest constraint is that this is slow. An employer relationship built this way may take a year to produce work and then produce work for a decade. A firm that needs revenue this quarter should not fund it from this channel, and should be told that plainly rather than sold a campaign that will disappoint.
If you act for both sides, separate them properly.
The structural mistake is a single site with both audiences interleaved, which reads as unfocused to each of them.
At minimum, plaintiff and management content should occupy clearly separate sections with their own entry points, their own navigation and their own tone. A worker reading about protecting your business from claims will not contact you, and an employer reading about fighting for wronged employees will not either.
Several firms go further and run separate brands. That has its own costs and it removes the problem entirely, which for a firm with meaningful volume on both sides is often the right call.
There is also a conflicts dimension that is a legal matter rather than a marketing one, and it affects what can be advertised and to whom. That is a question for the firm before the site is structured, not after.
Whatever the structure, search behaves accordingly. The two sides attract different queries, and a well separated site allows each section to be optimised for its own audience without competing against itself.
What legal advertising costs, for scale.
LocalIQ aggregates its own customers' Google and Microsoft Ads accounts. These are whole category legal figures rather than employment specifically.
SourceLocalIQ, Search Advertising Benchmarks, 2026
Paid search generally works better on the plaintiff side, where the search behaviour exists. Management side buyers are rarely reached in an auction. Results vary by market, budget, competition and other factors. Nothing here is a guarantee of a ranking, a lead volume or a revenue outcome.
What employment law marketing must respect.
- ABA Model Rule 7.1 says a lawyer shall not make a false or misleading communication about the lawyer or the lawyer's services. Every state adopts its own version, so compliance is a state question and the responsibility sits with the firm, not the agency. We write to the stricter reading and send everything for your review before it publishes.
- No page we write for a law firm promises an outcome, predicts a recovery or compares one firm's results to another's. Past results are described as past results, with the disclaimer attached, because a communication that creates an unjustified expectation is exactly what the rule prohibits.
- Specialist, expert and certified are restricted terms in legal advertising, and the governing test is the one your own state adopted rather than the ABA's. ABA Model Rule 7.2(c) allows a lawyer to state certification as a specialist only where the certifying organisation is approved by an appropriate state authority or accredited by the American Bar Association, and is named in the communication. Illinois is stricter than that. Illinois Rule 7.4(b) provides that the Supreme Court of Illinois does not recognise certifications of specialties in the practice of law, and Rule 7.4(c) bars certified, specialist and expert outright, except where the term identifies a certificate, award or recognition an agency or organisation actually issued. Rely on that exception and Rule 7.4(c) requires the reference to be truthful and verifiable, and to state that the Supreme Court of Illinois does not recognise certifications of specialties and that the certificate is not a requirement to practise law in Illinois.
- Meta does not allow an ad to assert or imply that it knows a personal attribute of the person seeing it, including a medical or health condition, financial status or criminal history. "Depression counselling" is allowed. "Depression getting you down?" is not.
- The FTC's rule on fake reviews and testimonials took effect on 21 October 2024. It covers buying reviews, writing your own, and suppressing negative ones. Every review we help collect is first party, requested from a real customer, and never gated on the rating they intend to leave.
Meta's personal attributes standard applies squarely to plaintiff side creative, because the obvious copy asks whether the reader was fired, harassed or underpaid. Describing the service without addressing the reader's circumstances is the compliant version.
Deadlines are the thing people most need and least know about.
Employment claims are bounded by filing periods that many workers discover only after they have expired. Agency charge deadlines, statutory limitation periods and contractual notice provisions all bite quietly, and somebody who spends three months deciding whether to make a fuss can lose the option entirely.
Content explaining those timelines accurately, for federal law and for your state, is the single most useful thing an employment firm can publish on the plaintiff side. It is genuinely urgent, which means it converts, and it is urgent for a real reason rather than a manufactured one.
Read the full breakdown: Deadlines are the thing people most need and least know about.Hide the full breakdown: Deadlines are the thing people most need and least know about.
Accuracy and maintenance are essential. These periods differ by claim type, by agency and by state, and somebody will rely on what you publish. Date every page, state the claim types the timeline applies to, and note clearly that the specific deadline depends on the facts.
Severance agreements deserve a page of their own for the same reason. They arrive with a review period stated on the document, which creates a natural and honest deadline, and the search volume around whether to sign is substantial and badly served.
Two dashboards, because the two sides do not share a metric.
On the plaintiff side, count matters accepted by claim type and source, and track the proportion of enquiries declined. Employment attracts a very high volume of enquiries that do not amount to a legal claim, and a report showing only contact volume will always look healthier than the practice is.
On the management side, the unit is relationships rather than matters. New employer clients acquired, revenue per client over time, and where each relationship originated. A single advisory relationship can be worth more than a year of plaintiff enquiries, and reporting them together makes the more valuable channel look weaker.
Read the full breakdown: Two dashboards, because the two sides do not share a metric.Hide the full breakdown: Two dashboards, because the two sides do not share a metric.
The vanity metric across both is website sessions. Employment content attracts enormous national readership, because people everywhere want to know whether something that happened to them was lawful, and almost none of those readers are in your jurisdiction.
Segment by location before drawing a conclusion from any traffic figure, and judge the management side on a horizon of years rather than months.
One further plaintiff side number is worth capturing and almost nobody does: how long after the triggering event somebody made contact. If most enquiries arrive weeks after a dismissal rather than days, the content is reaching people too late and the deadline material is not doing its job. That is a fixable content problem hiding inside what looks like ordinary demand.
Reviews cut both ways in this practice area.
Plaintiff side clients are often willing to leave detailed reviews, because the matter mattered to them and the outcome felt personal. That is valuable and it carries a risk: a review describing a workplace situation can identify an employer, a colleague or the client themselves, and a reply that engages with the facts compounds it.
The working rule is to ask only after a matter has fully concluded, never to solicit anything that describes the substance, and to reply without confirming or denying any detail about the representation. A short, human acknowledgement is enough and anything more is a risk.
Read the full breakdown: Reviews cut both ways in this practice area.Hide the full breakdown: Reviews cut both ways in this practice area.
On the management side, public reviews are rare and largely irrelevant. Employers assess a firm through referral, published material and how it handles the first conversation, not through a star rating. Effort spent chasing employer reviews is usually effort wasted.
That asymmetry is another reason to keep the two sides structurally separate. A review strategy that makes sense for one is close to meaningless for the other.
Positioning follows the same logic. Employment law is broad enough that a firm claiming everything communicates nothing, and a practice known for wage and hour work, or for a particular industry, is found more reliably than one describing itself as an employment law firm.
Employers apply that test even harder, because the risks in hospitality, healthcare staffing, construction and professional services are not the same. It also solves a search problem: broad employment terms are contested nationally by publishers and large firms, while industry specific and claim specific pages are contested by almost nobody.
What we would build.
SEO Content Strategy
Event based pages on the plaintiff side and preventive material for employers.
LinkedIn Marketing
Where employer buyers and human resources professionals actually are.
Technical SEO
Site architecture that keeps two audiences genuinely separate.
Google Ads Management
Plaintiff side campaigns on event vocabulary, where the search behaviour exists.
CRM Implementation
Two reporting views, because the two sides do not share a unit of success.
Your website works alongside the case management system you already run.
We do not replace your case management system, we do not migrate it, and we do not ask you to change it. The site links to it from the places a client is ready to act, and embeds the vendor's own widget where the vendor publishes one. Being plain about the mechanism: that is all it is. Nothing is synced, nothing we build reads or writes your records, and the names below are systems our clients run, not partners of ours. Employees enquire from personal devices, on their own time, about a current employer. Anything in the handoff that looks like it could be traced back is where the enquiry stops.
Case and practice management
The system your matters live in stays exactly where it is. Where it publishes a client portal or a payment page, the site links straight to it, so a client arrives at the thing you already pay for rather than at a second login you would have to support.
- Clio, including Clio Manage and Clio Grow
- MyCase
- Smokeball
- Filevine
- PracticePanther
- Rocket Matter
- CasePeer
- Neos, and the Needles practices still running on it
Intake and lead management
Where your intake tool publishes a hosted form, we embed it on the page somebody is reading or link straight into it. An enquiry then lands in the queue your team already works from, instead of in a second inbox that nobody has been made responsible for.
- Lawmatics
- Lead Docket
- Captorra
- Intaker
Signatures and documents
Engagement letters, retainers and fee agreements keep running through whatever you use now. The site's job is to bring somebody to the point of signing and hand over cleanly. It never holds the document.
- Docusign
- Dropbox Sign
- Adobe Acrobat Sign
What we actually change
Not the system: the path to it. Where the button sits on the page, whether it says what happens when you press it, how many taps it takes from a phone, whether it appears again at the point a client has finished reading and decided, and whether somebody who is not ready yet has a second way to reach you. That path is ours, it is measurable, and in most firm audits it is the part doing the damage.
Where the handoff is only a link
Some vendors publish an embeddable widget and some publish nothing at all. Where there is nothing to embed and no deep link worth pointing at, the site sends the visitor to your booking page or your login and stops there. That is a perfectly good outcome and we would rather say so than describe a seam we cannot remove. What we can do is make the destination unsurprising, so nobody arrives wondering whether they are still dealing with you.
Get an employment practice review.
We look at whether your two audiences are genuinely separated, what your deadline content covers, and where your employer relationships actually come from.
One caveat on all of that. These are descriptions of rules as they are published today, not legal advice about your situation. They differ by state and they change, sometimes quietly, so check the current wording with your own counsel or compliance officer before you rely on any of it. Where a rule touches your marketing we write to the stricter reading and send it to you for sign off before anything publishes.
Straight answers.
Can we market to employees and employers from one website?
Not effectively from one voice. A worker reading employer focused reassurance and an employer reading worker focused advocacy both conclude the firm is not for them.
At minimum use clearly separate sections with their own entry points and tone. Firms with meaningful volume on both sides often run separate brands. There is also a conflicts dimension that is a legal question for the firm rather than a marketing one.
What content works best on the plaintiff side?
Event based pages written in the words people use: was my dismissal lawful, should I sign this severance agreement, am I owed overtime, what happens if I complain.
Deadline content is the most useful of all, because filing periods are the thing most workers do not know about until they have passed.
How do we reach employer clients?
Through authority and relationships rather than search. Employers ask their accountant, their existing counsel or another business owner, and look you up afterwards to confirm.
Preventive content written for employers, presence in the professional networks they use, and relationships with accountants, brokers and advisers who see these problems first.
How long does management side marketing take to work?
Longer than most firms expect. A relationship built this way may take a year to produce work and then produce work for a decade.
A firm that needs revenue this quarter should not fund it from this channel, and we would say so rather than sell a campaign that will disappoint.
Why do our employment ads get rejected on social platforms?
Because the obvious copy addresses the reader about their own situation. Meta does not permit an ad to assert or imply knowledge of a personal attribute.
Describing the service and the subject matter without addressing the reader's circumstances clears review.
We get lots of enquiries that are not claims. Is that a targeting problem?
Partly, and partly the nature of the practice area. A great many workplace situations feel unfair and are not unlawful, and people contact a lawyer to find out.
Publishing clear explanations of what the law actually requires reduces the volume of unviable enquiries and builds credibility with the people whose situations do qualify.
Where this comes from.
Primary documentation and published research behind the guidance on this page.
- American Bar Association, Model Rule 7.1: communications concerning a lawyer's services (opens in a new tab)The ABA's own page, which reproduces the rule itself.
- American Bar Association, Model Rule 7.2: communications concerning a lawyer's services, specific rules (opens in a new tab)Rule 7.2(c) carries the restriction on stating or implying specialist certification.
- Illinois Rule of Professional Conduct 7.4: communication of fields of practice and specialization (opens in a new tab)The Supreme Court of Illinois does not recognise certifications of specialties in the practice of law.
- Illinois Courts: Rules of Professional Conduct, Article VIII (opens in a new tab)Every Illinois rule of professional conduct, each linked as the court publishes it.
- US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (opens in a new tab)
- US Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division (opens in a new tab)
- Meta Transparency Center: privacy violations and personal attributes in ads (opens in a new tab)
- LocalIQ: search advertising benchmarks (opens in a new tab)
Talk to the team
A short call, a look at how the business currently shows up, and a straight answer on what we would do first.