In-House Marketing Coordinator vs Agency for a Five-Attorney Firm: The Real Cost Comparison

Short answer: A full-time coordinator costs a five-attorney Los Angeles firm about $90,000 to $115,000 a year all-in and is excellent at the work that needs to be inside the firm: intake tracking, the review asks, the profile, social posting, event and referral follow-up. An agency at $2,000 to $5,000 a month ($24,000 to $60,000 a year) is better at the work that needs specialists: technical fixes, legal content written to be cited, schema, citation measurement, and knowing what changed in search this quarter. Most firms this size do best with a part-time or shared coordinator for the inside work and an agency for the specialist work, and worst with a coordinator asked to do both.

What does each cost?

Ranges reflect Los Angeles salaries and the agency benchmarks on our pricing page. A senior in-house person with a legal marketing background costs more than the top of the range and is rare.

What does a coordinator do well?

The work that depends on being in the office and knowing the clients:

• The intake question ("how did you hear about us") asked and recorded every time.
• The review asks at matter milestones, and the responses, with the attorney's sign-off.
• The Google Business Profile: photos, posts, hours, Q&A, the weekly rhythm.
• LinkedIn for the partners, drafted from conversations rather than from a content calendar.
• Referral relationships: the CPAs, the care managers, the bar sections.
• Keeping the agency honest: opening Search Console, reading the report, asking the five questions.

None of this can be done well from outside, and an agency that claims to do it is doing it thinly.

What does an agency do well?

The work that needs someone who does only this:

• Technical: Core Web Vitals, crawlability, schema, redirects, migrations.
• Content written to be cited: courthouse, process and cost pages with the answer at the top, checked against the current law, in the structure the engines quote.
• Entity and directory work across a dozen listings, quarterly.
• Citation measurement: the fixed query list, the runs, the log.
• Knowing what changed: AI Mode, the ad tests, a core update, and what it means for this firm's pages this month.
• The bar-rule review of everything published (Rules 7.1 to 7.3), applied consistently.

A coordinator can learn any one of these. Learning all of them, while doing the inside work, is where the role fails.

Where do firms go wrong?

• Hiring a coordinator and cancelling the agency, then discovering the coordinator cannot fix a Core Web Vitals failure or write a probate page that a lawyer will sign off on.
• Hiring an agency and having nobody inside to ask the intake question, send the review asks or approve content within a week. The agency's work stalls on the firm's side.
• Hiring a junior coordinator to "do SEO" with a $500 tools budget and no training. Eighteen months of activity, no leads.
• Paying a large agency $8,000 a month for a firm this size, and getting the same deliverables a $3,500 retainer buys elsewhere plus an account manager.

What arrangement works for most five-attorney firms?

A part-time or shared coordinator (fifteen to twenty hours a week, often an office manager with the marketing tasks added and the hours protected) for the inside work, and an agency at the middle tier for the specialist work. Annual cost: roughly $35,000 to $50,000 for the coordinator's time plus $36,000 to $48,000 for the agency, with clear ownership: the coordinator owns intake, reviews, profile and referrals; the agency owns technical, content, entity, measurement and reporting; the partner approves content and reads one report a month.

When the firm passes eight or ten attorneys, the coordinator becomes full-time and the agency scope narrows to technical and measurement. Below three attorneys, the coordinator role is the partner's assistant and a small agency retainer.

What questions decide it?

1. Does anyone inside the firm currently ask every caller how they found us? If not, that is the first hire's first job, whoever it is.
2. Does the site pass Core Web Vitals and carry correct Person markup? If not, that is agency work.
3. Are the practice pages specific enough to be cited? If not, that is agency writing plus attorney review.
4. Is there a monthly number for calls by source? If not, nothing else can be judged.

What does not work?

• Judging either option on sessions. Neither should be reporting sessions as the outcome.
• Expecting an agency to build referral relationships.
• Expecting a coordinator to know what changed in search this month.

Our pricing page states the three tiers and what each includes, so a firm can compare it with a job description line by line. The budget fit tool gives a recommended tier for the firm's size, practice and cities. The free visibility check is a reasonable first task for whichever option the firm chooses; it shows what the work has to fix.