14 yrs
With my DWI client in New York, still month to month
My DWI client in New York has been up there since 2012. Fourteen years, month to month, never once under a contract. I am now taking on a small number of DUI attorneys, and only one firm per market.
Get your free site review One page. Your real rankings. No obligation, no sales call required. Or see who I work for.I do not know, and I am not going to pretend I do. Every practice is different. But it is usually some mix of these four, and each one behaves differently.
Avvo, Justia, Nolo, LegalMatch, the lead brokers who call you every spring. The same arrested twenty-six year old gets sold to you and three other firms, and whoever calls back first usually retains him. You pay for the hangups, the wrong numbers and the people who already hired somebody, same as the real ones. Rates go up, you dispute the junk, and the day you stop paying the phone goes quiet.
Google Ads and Local Services Ads. Better than a shared lead, because the click is yours alone. But DUI is one of the most expensive categories in the entire auction, you are bidding against every firm in the county, and it works for exactly as long as the card keeps getting charged. Pause it for a slow month and the next month starts at zero.
Former clients, the bondsmen, the lawyers down the hall who do not touch DUI, the bar referral line. Nothing converts like somebody saying call this guy, he handled mine. No argument from me. But referrals come from cases you already took, so last year's case count quietly sets this year's ceiling.
Somebody in your county searches the charge he is facing at two in the morning, finds you, and calls. That call is yours alone. No split, no bidding against three other firms, no monthly fee keeping it alive.
And it compounds. More cases means more former clients, more lawyers who know what you do, more results worth writing about. Those calls cost you nothing at all.
Plus the rest of it: the billboard, the jail phone list, the radio spot, the directory profiles you pay to keep upgraded. Some of that is genuinely good. But everything you rent works the same way. It produces calls for exactly as long as you keep paying, and it stops the month you do not.
Referrals are downstream of cases. Every case the website brings in is another former client telling somebody at work, another prosecutor and another judge who knows your name in that courtroom, another disposition worth writing a page about. The website does not compete with your word of mouth. It feeds it.
And if you are already running ads, you have made my argument for me. You are paying every single month to sit at the top of a search results page, because you already know that is where the cases are. The only thing left to decide is whether you rent that spot forever or own a piece of it.
You do not have to choose today either. If you are running ads I can take them over, and I usually get more out of the same budget than a generalist does, because I know what a DUI retainer is actually worth and which searches are people looking for free advice. But here is what tends to happen. Once the rankings come in, most of my clients dial the ads back, and some shut them off completely. That is the point. You should end up spending less for the same phone calls, not more.
If referrals alone are keeping your calendar as full as you want it, that is a healthy practice and you do not need me. The question is only whether you want next year to be bigger than last year, because word of mouth on its own can hold you steady but it cannot grow you much faster than it already is.
One more thing, and I mean it. If any of these are working for you right now, keep using them until they stop. I am not here to talk you out of anything that is putting cases on your calendar. I am handing you one more tool for the box.
It is a long term play. It will not do much for you next Tuesday, and I am not going to pretend it will. But it is the only tool on that list you actually own, which makes it the one you control, and it is the one still working five years from now.
Ads produce the day you switch them on. Nothing I do is that fast and I am not going to tell you otherwise. That is a real advantage and it is the only one.
Name a $500 a month DUI ad campaign that was not a win for Google. Now name one that was a win for the lawyer.
DUI sits in the most expensive neighborhood of the entire Google auction, right next to personal injury and insurance. Google sets the prices, runs the auction and collects the money, and the price has moved in one direction for twenty years.
Here is what a modest budget actually buys you now. At what a competitive DUI click costs in a real metro, five hundred dollars is a handful of clicks a month. Not a hundred. A handful. If one in ten of those turns into a phone call, you might get one. You cannot tell a good search term from a bad one on numbers that small. You cannot cut what is wasting your money, because you cannot see it. You cannot even tell a bad month from bad luck. That is not a campaign, it is a lottery ticket, and the money is gone either way.
The firms still making ads pay at that level are running budgets with a zero on the end and a specialist watching them daily. If that is not you, you are mostly paying for the education.
That is the part that actually matters, and it has nothing to do with cost per click. When the ad money is gone it is gone. You have the cases you closed and nothing else. Shut the ads off to save money and the next month starts at zero, in the exact spot you started the first time.
Your own site does the opposite. Month three might be quiet. But every one of those pages is still sitting there in month four, and month twelve, ranking a little higher than it did. Year one might bring you good work without changing your practice. Then you walk into year two holding all of it and build on top. That is a snowball. Ads are a faucet.
Most lawyers have a website because somebody told them they needed one. A brochure with a photo of a courthouse that nobody ever sees. The entire job is turning that into the thing that brings the cases in.
DUI is one of the best practice areas on the internet, because nobody searches for "lawyer." They search the specific charge they are facing, in the county where they have to appear, usually on a phone, usually within a day of being released. Your site gets a page for every one of these, in every county you cover.
Notice the last one. Somebody typing that has already decided he is hiring a lawyer and is now shopping on terms. That is the cheapest client you will ever get and almost nobody writes a page for him.
Built for DUI defense and your courts. A page for every charge you defend (first offense, refusal, aggravated, felony, CDL, underage, license hearings) and every county you appear in. Live in 2 to 3 weeks.
On my own server that I have run for two decades. Something breaks, you call me, not a ticket queue.
The work that moves you up: content, Google Business Profile, reviews strategy, technical fixes. Every month, without you asking.
Every month you see exactly where you rank for searches like "DUI lawyer [your county]." Google it yourself and check me. That is the deal.
All of it: $500 a month Month to month. Cancel anytime.
New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are $750, because the competition there is a different sport and the work is heavier. New York has been taken since 2012.
Almost every lawyer I talk to has tried this in one form or another, and most of them got the same thing. A twelve month agreement, an account manager who changed twice, reports full of progress. Impressions up, traffic up, rankings up. And a phone that rang about as much as it did the month before.
A bot crawls your site and finds technical problems. Duplicate meta tags, missing descriptions, pages loading slow. You get a report saying this is why nobody can find you, and it lands, because finally somebody has explained it.
So they fix those errors. They send you another report showing them fixed. You settle in and wait for the phone to start ringing, paying every month while you wait, eight months into a twelve month term.
The errors were real, and fixing them was worth doing. But cleaning up the technical side on its own moves almost nothing. What actually moves a site is real pages about the real things people search for, written properly, and added to as you go. That is the work. It is also the part a bot cannot do, which is exactly why it is the part that gets skipped.
I built this offer so you never have to take my word for any of it.
Jonathan Kaye is a former prosecutor who defends drunk driving cases in New York City and out on the Island: Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, Manhattan, Nassau and Suffolk. He became my client in 2012. I built the site, I host it, and I have looked after it every month since.
That site is where his cases come from. Fourteen years, month to month, never once under a contract.
The site is nydwi-lawyer.com. Go look at it, then go search for what his clients search for.
A word about checking that yourself, because I would rather say this than have you wonder. Google shows different results in different places, on different days, and sometimes it just has a bad hour. Half the top of the page is ads and map boxes now, so a listing sitting at number one organically can be well below where you start scrolling. If you type something in and do not see him, that is normal and it does not mean I am making this up. Get me on the phone and I will pull up the actual tracking while you watch, and you can pick the searches.
Fourteen years on it is still up there and still bringing cases in. Not a campaign he restarts every quarter. An asset that keeps producing. That is the difference between something you own and something you rent.
Your site will not look like that on day one, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Year one is the heavy part: the build, a page for every charge and every county, and the work every month to climb. Year fourteen is a client calling to say keep doing what you are doing. Getting you from the first one to the second one is the entire job.
When we started he was doing what most defense lawyers do. A little of everything that walked in the door, DWI among it, and pricing every case the way everybody prices every case: it depends.
I told him he should put a flat fee on a first offense and put the number on the front of the website.
He laughed at me.
Then he thought about it, and he did it. He set the number, he added the qualifier about who it applies to, and he put it in his title tag where every person searching would see it before they ever clicked. Somebody arrested on a Friday night does not want an hourly rate and a consultation. He wants to know what this is going to cost him and whether he can stop panicking. Kaye was the only one on the page answering that question.
It did more than bring in cases. It changed the practice. The mixed bag of defense work narrowed down into an exclusive DWI practice, which is what he had wanted in the first place.
I am not promising I will hand you a business model. I am telling you what I actually do, which is pay attention to how people are shopping for you and then say so out loud, even when it is not my lane and even when the client laughs.
Get on the phone with me for twenty minutes and I will screen share the actual rank tracking, month by month, going back years. Not a screenshot I picked out. The dashboard. You can call out a keyword and I will pull it up while you watch.
I will do the same thing with your site before you ever pay me anything, so you can see exactly where you stand.
Set up a callI built this business on mortgage websites. Two decades in one of the most competitive corners of the internet, where every competitor has real money to spend on outranking you and nobody is asleep. That is where I learned what actually moves a site up and what is just noise.
One of those clients is selectcommercial.com. They hold a top three position nationally for "commercial mortgage rates", against banks and lenders with real budgets, and they have held it for years. That is a harder problem than ranking for DUI defense in your county by a wide margin, and it is the same skill pointed at a different industry.
So no, I am not a legal marketing agency with two hundred lawyers on the roster. I am a search guy with twenty-four years of it, one DWI firm since 2012, and a decision to open a small number of DUI markets. You would be the second DUI practice I have ever taken on. That is not a slogan about exclusivity. It is just the truth, and you can decide for yourself whether it is a problem.
Here is the honest case for it. The agencies that specialize in lawyers have hundreds of firms, which means the person writing your pages has four other DUI sites open in other tabs and a quota. I have one, and I have had him for fourteen years.
The longer version of how I got here, including the phone call I am still proudest of.
I send you one page: where you actually rank, who is beating you, and the three biggest things holding you back. Keep it even if we never talk again.
If you want the problems fixed, I build your site and get the foundation right. Live in 2 to 3 weeks, and you approve every page before it goes up.
Monthly SEO work moves you up and keeps you there. You watch it happen in the monthly report.
$500 a month in most markets, month to month. $750 in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, where the competition is a different sport and the work is correspondingly heavier. New York is already taken.
That covers the site, the hosting, and the work every month to move you up in search. No contract, so if you stop seeing value you stop paying. Set it against one retained case and it is not a close call. I would rather price it where you never have to think about it than hit you with one big number up front and hope you stay.
That is your call to make and I will not pretend otherwise, because it is your license and not mine. What I do is write to the rules from the start rather than clean up afterward. No guarantees of outcome. No superlatives like best or top DUI lawyer. Prior results carried with the disclaimer your state requires. Attorney advertising labeling where your state wants it. No testimonial that says something a client cannot say.
Then you read every page before it goes live and you tell me what to change. Some states also want a copy filed or retained for a period. If yours does, that is on my checklist, not yours.
It is the reason search matters more for you than for almost anybody else. A dentist can coast on a patient list. You cannot. Every case you close is a client you will most likely never bill again, which means your practice starts near zero every single month and the only question is where the next arrest finds you.
A ranking that holds is the closest thing to a client list that a DUI practice can own. The referrals do come, from former clients and from lawyers who do not touch DUI, but those are downstream of cases you already took.
You can, and it will look fine. AI writes a practice area page in an afternoon. What it does not do is notice in week three that you slipped from sixth to eleventh, keep your Google Business Profile fed, write up last month's suppression win in a way that stays inside your bar's rules, or pick up the phone when your contact form quits while you are in trial. Building the site is the easy part now. Running it for twenty years is the job.
Maybe not, and I will tell you so if that is the case. But every referral you got came from a case you already took, so last year's case count quietly sets this year's ceiling. Worth knowing too: almost everybody who gets referred to you still looks you up before they call, and his family looks you up before he does. What they find is either reassuring or it is not.
It depends on your county and who you are up against, and anybody handing you a date is guessing. But you are probably not starting from nothing. If you already own a domain with years of history on it, that matters more than most people realize. A brand new site starts from zero and takes about a year. Rebuilding one Google already knows about is a different animal.
In a normal metro that usually means real movement inside three months and something substantial by six. The site itself is live in 2 to 3 weeks. Every month after that you get a report showing exactly where you rank, and you can check it yourself on Google in ten seconds. If you are not seeing movement, fire me that month. That is what month to month is for.
You do. The content, the domain, all of it. If you decide to go somewhere else I hand it over and help the next person get set up. Any company that holds your website hostage is telling you they already expect you to want out.
Then we find out whether it is worth keeping. Sometimes it is fine and the only problem is that nobody can find it. Sometimes it was built on a platform that is quietly working against you, or the marketing company that built it still owns the domain. The free review tells you which one you have, and you get that answer whether or not you ever hire me.
No, and that is the whole point. One DUI firm per market. Once you are a client I turn your competitors away and I tell them exactly why. If your market is already taken when you ask, I will tell you that on the first call instead of taking your money anyway. New York is taken and has been since 2012.
Structure, not promises. No contract, so I have to earn it again every month. Rankings you can check yourself instead of taking my word for it. You talk to me, not an account manager who changes every eight months. One DUI firm per market, so I am never selling against my own client.
And my DWI client in New York signed on in 2012 and is still here, month to month the whole way. Nobody fakes fourteen years.
Not for what you signed up for. I still have clients paying $12.95 a month, because that is what a website and hosting cost when they came aboard twenty years ago and I have never gone back and repriced anybody. New client rates go up as the work gets better. Existing ones stay where they are.
The only time a number has ever changed is when a client asked me to take on something new, and we agreed on it before anything started.
When a company sends me a price increase notice, I do not think about the money. I think I should probably go see what else is out there. I am not going to hand you that thought.
Short term, usually yes. Ads work the day you switch them on and rankings take months, so the ads cover the gap while the site climbs. I can run them for you and I will normally get more out of the same budget than a generalist would, because I know what a DUI retainer is worth and which searches are people hunting for free advice. Longer term, most of my clients dial the ads back once the rankings come in. That is the goal. If you are still spending the same on ads in year two, I have not done my job.
Fill this out and I will personally put together your review: your rankings, your top three competitors, and what to fix first. If your market is already taken, I will tell you that too.
One note on timing. If your domain already has history you are not starting from scratch, but this still builds over months rather than days. Three months in you should see real movement.