Can Lawyers Buy Leads? (What They Don't Tell You Before You Sign Up)

Someone searched "can lawyers buy leads" recently. The answer is yes, absolutely. But there's a lot more to the story that most pay-per-lead agencies won't volunteer before they take your money.

This article breaks down how lead buying works for Australian law firms, what you're actually paying for, the regulatory landscape that matters, and when buying leads makes sense versus when it's quietly bleeding your business dry.

How Lead Buying Actually Works

I was speaking with a personal injury lawyer recently who was buying workers compensation leads for $100 each. He thought that was a reasonable deal.

What he didn't know was that we could generate those same leads for $15 to $30 through his own campaigns. Same leads. His budget. His brand. Significantly cheaper.

That gap is where the pay-per-lead model lives. The agency runs ads on Meta or Google, collects inquiries from people who've been injured or need legal help, and sells those contacts to you with their margin baked in. You pay for their ad spend, their infrastructure, their staff, and their profit. Sometimes that's a fair trade. Sometimes it isn't.

Whether it's a fair trade depends a lot on what type of lead you're buying and how much pre-qualification has happened before it lands in your inbox.

A basic workers comp lead might cost $15 to $30 to generate, but you could be paying $100 or more through a vendor. That margin is where the model lives.

A basic workers compensation lead might cost the agency $15 to $30 to generate. You might pay $100.

A motor vehicle accident lead that's been contacted, qualified, and confirmed is a different product entirely. Those can cost $300 to $400 or more, and in some cases higher, because the agency has done meaningful work to filter out the rubbish before it reaches you.

Some agencies run full call centres specifically to activate and pre-qualify leads. If that infrastructure is in place, the price premium is more justified. You're not just buying a name and a phone number. You're buying a warmer conversation.

The Real Cost Per Lead (It's Higher Than You Think)

The price you pay per lead is rarely the number that matters. What matters is your cost per contactable lead, and then your cost per qualified case.

I spoke with a firm in the personal injury space paying $150 per lead. Reasonable enough on paper. But their contactability rate was sitting at roughly 50%. Half the leads they purchased couldn't be reached.

Do the maths. At 50% contactability, you're not paying $150 per lead. You're paying $300 per contactable lead before anyone has assessed the case, before you've spent time on intake, and long before you've signed anyone.

Always ask your lead vendor for contactability rates and conversion benchmarks before committing to volume. If they can't provide them, that tells you something.

From there, not every contactable lead has a viable case. Not every viable case converts to a signed client. By the time you've worked through the full funnel, your cost per acquired client can sit well into the thousands depending on the practice area and how well your intake process performs.

The agencies aren't necessarily lying. What they're not volunteering is what those leads actually cost your business by the time they produce a client. Ask for contactability rates and conversion benchmarks before you commit to volume.

Category benchmarks from PixelRush client data showing real lead cost ranges across industries. Law firm leads range from $50 to $254 per lead across $285,753 in total ad spend.

When you factor in cost per qualified lead and average client value, the numbers tell a very different story. Law firm cost per qualified lead sits between $356 and $1,285, but average client value ranges from $4,080 to $5,070.

Exclusive Leads vs Shared Leads

This is one of the most important distinctions in the lead buying market, and it's one worth understanding clearly.

Shared leads are sold to multiple firms at the same time. Typically two to three buyers, sometimes more. The price is lower because you're not the only one receiving the contact. What this means in practice is that you're racing your competitors to the phone. Speed to contact becomes the most important factor in your conversion rate, and if you're not calling within minutes of receiving the lead, you've often already lost.

If you're buying shared leads, set up instant notifications and aim to call within 60 seconds of receiving the lead. Speed is the only competitive advantage you have.

Exclusive leads are sold only to you. The price is higher, but at least the playing field is level. You generated none of the initial interest, but at least you're the only firm trying to convert it.

Reputable pay-per-lead agencies will tell you upfront which model you're buying. If an agency is vague about exclusivity, that's worth probing. Your close rate on shared leads will always be lower than on leads you generate yourself, simply because the prospect is being contacted by multiple firms simultaneously and you have no control over who reaches them first.

When Lead Buying Actually Makes Sense

Not everything about buying leads is bad, and it's worth being honest about that.

For firms that are just getting started, or going through a slow patch, or haven't yet built their own advertising infrastructure, pay-per-lead can be a reasonable bridge. You're paying for speed and simplicity. No need to build campaigns, manage ad accounts, or interpret data. You write a cheque and the phone rings.

Personal injury is probably the clearest case for this. Most PI firms in Australia operate on a no-win-no-fee arrangement, which means there can be a 12 to 24 month gap between signing a client and seeing any revenue. When you're in the early stages and cashflow is tight, buying leads to get cases moving is often the most practical starting point.

Buying leads isn't automatically a bad deal. The agency absorbs risk and complexity. The problem is when it becomes the only strategy.

It's also worth acknowledging that paying a premium for leads isn't automatically a bad deal. The agency absorbs the risk of ad spend. They invest in infrastructure. They deal with the complexity so you don't have to. For a firm that isn't resourced to run its own campaigns, that has real value.

The issue isn't buying leads. The issue is staying there.

Why It's Not a Long-Term Strategy

Every dollar you put into a lead vendor builds their business, not yours.

They get more ad budget. Their brand gets more visible. Their platform gets stronger. You, on the other hand, stay a buyer in someone else's marketplace. You have no control over the messaging used to attract leads, no control over lead quality, no control over cost, and no control over whether the vendor will even exist in 12 months.

That last point is underestimated. Lead vendors are businesses with their own risks and decisions to make. They can go exclusive with a competitor. They can be acquired by a law firm that shuts you out. They can increase prices as their own costs go up. They can close down, change their model, or simply stop operating in your market. When any of that happens, your lead flow disappears. Not gradually. Overnight.

Start tracking your actual cost per signed client from purchased leads this month. Most firms have never calculated this number, and it's almost always higher than they expect.

Firms that become heavily reliant on purchased leads are extremely exposed to that kind of disruption.

There's also the question of brand. When a vendor generates your leads, they decide how your potential clients are spoken to. They write the ads. They set the expectations. They craft the first impression a prospect has of the legal process they're about to enter. You had no say in any of it. That matters more than most firms realise until something goes wrong.

Where Lead Buying Is Most Common

The three practice areas where pay-per-lead is most prevalent in Australian legal are personal injury, immigration, and family law. These areas share some common characteristics. They deal primarily with individual consumers rather than business clients, they're relatively high-volume, and the value of a single case can justify meaningful acquisition costs.

You don't see it as much in commercial law, high-end litigation, or specialist practice areas. That's not a coincidence. When your ideal client is a business navigating a complex dispute or a high-net-worth individual with a specific situation, a vendor casting a wide net through generic consumer advertising tends to produce poor-fit inquiries more often than good ones.

The more selective you are about who you work with, the less suited the pay-per-lead model becomes. It's built for volume, not precision.

The Case for Building Your Own System

I was recently working with a client who was already buying leads at $100 each. He'd been doing it for a while and it was producing some cases, but the cost was adding up and he had no visibility into where those leads were actually coming from or why some converted and others didn't.

When we looked at what it would cost to generate the same leads through his own Google Ads campaigns, the number came in at $15 to $30. Same type of inquiry. His brand. His ad account. His data. And critically, his agency fee structure doesn't scale with lead volume. The cost doesn't go up because he signed more clients.

The maths on this are significant. If he's buying 30 leads a month at $100, that's $3,000 in lead spend. At $20 per lead through his own campaigns, that same budget generates 150 leads. That's not a small difference. That's a different business.

These aren't hypothetical numbers. Here's what we're seeing across our own client base right now:

Owning your own ad account means your campaigns get smarter over time. None of that data belongs to you when you buy from a vendor.

The other advantage is what you build over time. Your own ad account accumulates data. Your campaigns get smarter. Your brand gets more recognisable to your target audience. None of that belongs to you when you're buying from a vendor. The moment you stop paying, it all disappears.

This is the core of what we call the Closed Loop Growth System - building infrastructure that your firm owns and that compounds in value over time, rather than renting access to someone else's.

What to Do If You're Currently Buying Leads

Don't turn the tap off immediately. You still need cases moving while you build something to replace it.

The smarter approach is running both in parallel for a period. Start building your own campaigns and start tracking your actual cost per acquisition from those campaigns. Once you have a few months of data and your own channels are producing at a comparable or better cost, you can reduce vendor spend and redirect that budget into your own infrastructure.

Run vendor leads and your own campaigns in parallel for 3 to 6 months. Once your own cost per acquisition is equal or better, start shifting budget away from the vendor.

The target is simple: know exactly what it costs you to acquire a client through your own advertising, and make that number one you control and can improve over time. At that point, the vendor's pricing becomes irrelevant because you're not dependent on them.

The firms that get here stop being buyers in someone else's marketplace. They become the ones with leverage.

The Bottom Line

Yes, lawyers can buy leads. Many do, and for some it makes short-term sense. But the full cost is almost always higher than the invoice, the quality depends heavily on how much pre-qualification has happened, shared leads put you in competition before the conversation starts, and the dependency you build creates risk most firms don't appreciate until something disrupts the supply.

The better question isn't whether you can buy leads. It's whether buying leads is the foundation you want to build your firm's growth on.

Build your own system. Own your own demand. The firms that do this stop paying a premium to sit in someone else's marketplace and start generating leads under their own brand, at a fraction of the cost, with full control over the process.

If you want to understand what that looks like for your practice area, book a strategy call with PixelRush and we'll show you exactly what it would take to move from vendor dependency to a system you own.