Growing an Estate Planning Law Firm: From Unmeasurable Ad Spend to 60 Leads/mo with LSA
PROJECT SUMMARY
Tuohy Law Offices, an estate planning law firm in the Chicago suburbs, partnered with Pronto Marketing to turn a hard-to-measure ad budget into a predictable source of new clients. By moving the firm’s spend into managed Local Services Ads, backed by weekly budget optimization and transparent monthly reporting, the program grew from 9 leads to 60 leads per month while cost per lead stayed essentially flat.
in 18 Months
Growth
Company Background
Tuohy Law Offices has served Chicago-area families for more than four decades. The firm has prepared over 7,000 living trust estate plans and helped clients preserve more than $2.5 billion in hard-earned assets, alongside small business and personal injury work. Its client base is built on first responders, teachers, laborers, and small business owners across Cook and DuPage counties.
Founder Tom Tuohy has worked with Pronto since February 2023, starting with website support for the firm’s site.
A Surging Market He Could Not Reliably Capture
Despite four decades of results and a market moving in his favor, Tom faced three connected bottlenecks that kept growth unpredictable.
A Demand Wave Without a Capture System
The boomer retirement wave was driving estate planning searches across Chicagoland, and local competition for those searches was rising with it. The opportunity would go to whichever firm showed up consistently at the moment families searched for help.
An Ad Spend He Could Not Evaluate
Tom was spending $600 to $800 per month on generic, self-managed Google Ads with no reliable way to connect that spend to signed estate plans. “I don’t know how to assess it… whether my spend is right,” he says of managing ad platforms on his own. For a solo practitioner, that uncertainty is expensive in both directions: overspending wastes money, and underspending hands clients to competitors.
Word-of-Mouth Could Not Scale
Referrals had sustained the practice for decades, but they arrive on their own schedule. A firm positioned in front of a demographic wave needs an inquiry stream that grows with demand without consuming the owner’s time.
A Pay-Per-Lead Engine on a Managed Foundation
In November 2024, we recommended shifting Tom’s budget from broad Google Ads into managed Local Services Ads, a channel built for exactly this kind of local, high-intent service business.
The Pivot to Local Services Ads
Local Services Ads appear above traditional paid results with a Google Screened badge, rank partly on review strength, and, most importantly, charge per lead rather than per click. Tom pays when a prospective client calls or messages the firm, not when someone clicks an ad and leaves. Our team scaled the budget to match the market, moving from the old $600 to $800 spend toward $2,000 to $3,000 per month as lead flow proved out.
Weekly Budget Optimization and Lead Quality
Management is what separates an LSA program from an LSA experiment. Our ads specialists run a weekly budget optimization cadence on the account: reviewing every lead, disputing invalid ones so Tom does not pay for them, and tuning bids and budgets as volume grows.
Transparent Monthly Reporting
Every month, an LSA performance report lands in the firm’s support portal showing exactly what the channel produced in leads, calls, and spend. Tom sees the results without touching the platform.
6.7x Lead Growth at a Flat Cost Per Lead
Between January 2025 and June 2026, the program scaled steadily while holding its efficiency.
Lead Generation and Pipeline
In January 2025, the first tracked month, the account produced 9 leads. By June 2026, monthly volume reached 60 leads, peaking at 67 in March 2026. Over the full 18 months, the channel generated 776 total leads, including 699 phone calls and 86 messages.
Volume up 6.7x while cost per lead stayed in a narrow band across the full 18-month period
Tom reports that the firm closes at least 50% of these leads, at an average value of $3,000 to $5,000 per signed matter. Using the low end of both figures, those 776 leads translate to roughly $1.16M in pipeline revenue against $32,552 in total ad spend. That is an estimated 35x ROI, before referrals and follow-on work.
Cost Efficiency at Scale
Paid channels usually punish scale. Here, monthly spend grew more than 6x, from $410 in January 2025 to the $2,500 to $2,900 range in 2026, while cost per lead held in a narrow range: $45.56 in the first month, $43.00 in the most recent, and $41.95 on average across the full period.
Tom’s own summary is more direct: “We are killing it on Google, we get about 8 to 14 pretty hot leads a day.” That daily figure is his blended estimate across every Google surface the firm appears on; the platform-reported LSA numbers above are the conservative, attributable core of it.
A Predictable Engine in a Growing Market
For a solo-founder law firm, the change is operational, not just statistical. A predictable, always-on inquiry stream replaced an ad spend Tom could not evaluate, and he does not manage any of it. His description of the current state of the practice: “It’s been actually crazy busy.”
The unit economics make the result durable. At roughly $42 per lead, a single signed estate plan more than pays for weeks of lead flow, which is why the budget keeps earning its increases. “Yeah, I am happy with the Google leads that we’re getting,” Tom said in June 2026. With a steady flow of 60 leads per month and millions of boomers still to retire, Tuohy Law Offices is positioned to keep converting a generational demand wave into signed estate plans.
🔍 Data Context and Methodology:
To ensure full transparency, the metrics and financial projections in this case
study are drawn from direct platform data and stated market benchmarks.
- Tracking Platforms: Lead, call, and spend figures come from the Google
Local Services Ads platform, covering January 2025 through June 2026.
Client quotes come from a recorded June 2026 call. - Lead Qualification: A lead is a phone call or message reported by Google’s
Local Services platform. The “8 to 14 hot leads a day” figure is Tom’s own blended estimate across all Google surfaces and is quoted as client
commentary rather than a platform metric. - Attribution Boundary: All reported results are LSA-only. A separate Google
Ads budget managed outside this program is excluded.
Pipeline Revenue Calculation: The $1.1M+ estimate is a projection based on 776 leads x a 50% signed-client rate x a $3,000 average matter value, the low end of the firm’s client-reported figures (a close rate of at least 50% and $3,000 to $5,000 per signed matter). It excludes referrals, amendments, and probate or trust-administration work. This is a projection based on client-reported averages, not a measure of closed revenue.
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