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A two-lawyer firm in Salt Lake City can't outspend the injury firms on I-15 billboards or the big firms in the downtown towers. It can win the Google search from someone in Sandy, the referral from the lawyer down the hall, and the client who wants to explain the problem in Spanish.
Small and mid-size Salt Lake City law firms get the most from four things: Google Local Services Ads, which charge per lead and show a Google Screened badge after Google checks your bar license; a separate Google Business Profile for each staffed office in places like Sandy, Murray and West Valley City; referral relationships built through Utah State Bar sections and the Salt Lake County Bar Association; and Spanish-language intake for the west side. Every ad has to follow Utah Rule of Professional Conduct 7.1, which bans false or misleading claims.
Third District Court cases in Salt Lake City are heard at the Matheson Courthouse at 450 South State Street. The large firms sit a few blocks away in the downtown office towers, with full marketing departments. The personal injury firms buy the billboards along I-15 and the late-night TV spots.
The person searching "divorce lawyer Sandy" at 10 p.m. taps one of the first three names on the phone, reads a few reviews, and calls whoever picks up. The injury lawyer who gets a call about a will sends it to the estate planner they had lunch with last month. A family in West Valley City calls the office where someone answers in Spanish. Those are the three places a small firm wins.
Local Services Ads are the boxes with a photo and a Google Screened badge that sit above the regular search ads. You don't pay when someone clicks. Google charges per lead, and its help page lists what counts: an answered call, a missed call during business hours where the caller stayed on longer than 20 seconds, a text or email, a voicemail, or a booking request. A repeat contact from the same phone number or email within 15 days of a charged lead is not charged again. When you hit the monthly maximum you set, the ad stops showing until the next month.
For lawyers, Google says it verifies the active law license of every lawyer on the account and skips a separate background check, since the state bar already ran one.
Missed calls are where small firms lose money. If the ad runs while nobody is at the desk, you pay for calls you never return. Schedule the ad for the hours someone picks up. Google reassesses lead quality over 30 days and credits some bad leads on its own, and you can flag the rest in the lead feedback survey, so go through the lead list every week.
Google's Business Profile guidelines allow one profile per location. A firm with a downtown office near the courthouse and a second office in Sandy or Murray can have a profile for each, and each one competes in the map results for searches near it. But it has to be a real office. Google says a virtual office or mailbox is not eligible unless it is staffed during business hours, and a coworking suite only qualifies if it has your signage, receives clients, and has your own staff there during the hours you list.
So the Sandy satellite that a lawyer works from on Tuesdays and Thursdays can have a profile, but its hours should say Tuesday and Thursday. A rented mail drop in West Valley City with nobody in it cannot, and a profile built on one risks suspension.
Google also lists lawyers as individual practitioners, so a lawyer who meets clients at the verified office can have a personal profile next to the firm's. A solo practitioner at a branded office shares one profile with the firm, named "Firm Name: Lawyer Name". Extra words in the name are not allowed, so "Smith Law: Best Divorce Lawyer Salt Lake" gets flagged. Pick the category that matches the practice, and don't stack categories to chase keywords.
The Utah State Bar runs 37 practice sections, from Family Law and Estate Planning Law to Bankruptcy Law, Criminal Law and Small Firm Practice. The Bar says the sections offer CLE programming, peer networking and public service work. A section lunch is where the bankruptcy lawyer meets the family lawyer whose divorce clients keep showing up with debt problems.
The Salt Lake County Bar Association is open to every attorney practicing in the county and runs CLE, Bar and Bench, and social committees. Its site says it does not refer clients, so treat it as the room where you meet the lawyers who do. The Bar's list of regional and specialty bars also includes the Hispanic Bar Association, the Utah Minority Bar Association, Women Lawyers of Utah, the Utah Association for Justice and the Utah Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
The Utah State Bar's Find a Lawyer page sends the public to its Licensed Lawyer referral tool. Fill out your Licensed Lawyer profile for each practice area you take. It takes about an hour and puts your name in front of people already looking for a lawyer.
West Valley City is the second largest city in Utah, with 140,230 people in the 2020 Census, and 55,278 of them, or 39.4%, were Hispanic or Latino. Add Kearns, Magna, Taylorsville and the west side of Salt Lake City, and a firm doing immigration, family, criminal defense or injury work is leaving clients on the table without Spanish intake.
Start with the phone. Put someone who speaks Spanish on it during the hours your ads run, because a Spanish ad that rings through to an English voicemail wastes the lead. Next, have a person write a Spanish page for each practice area instead of relying on a translation plugin, and say in your Google profile and Local Services Ads details that you serve clients in Spanish. Paid media comes last: Telemundo Utah (KTMW) broadcasts from studios on South Redwood Road.
A sponsorship works for a law firm when the people in the room are the clients you want. An estate planner gets more from a senior center newsletter in Murray than from a 5K banner. Before you pay, get in writing what you get: a logo on the shirt, a line in the program, a table at the event, or a link in an email.
We sell ads in The Salt Lake Valley, a free newsletter that goes to 2,419 Salt Lake County subscribers every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The Neighbor plan is $179 a month for a written shout-out in two issues, The Closer is $149 a month for the closing spot in four issues, and a Local Directory listing is $49 a month. We write the copy, and a law firm ad in it follows Rule 7.1 the same as a billboard does. The plans are on our advertising page, and the Local Directory is the cheaper way to be listed by practice area. If you're hiring a paralegal or receptionist who speaks Spanish, a job post on our jobs board is $49 for 30 days.
This is a summary for planning, not legal advice.
Utah handles lawyer advertising differently from most states. The Utah Supreme Court rewrote Rule 7.1 of the Utah Rules of Professional Conduct and deleted Rules 7.2 through 7.5, as the Utah State Bar's Ethics Opinion 22-02 of March 7, 2022 explains. On utcourts.gov today, the pages for Rules 7.2 and 7.3 read "This Rule number is reserved." Rule 7.1, now filed as Rule 3-7.1 and effective May 1, 2024, carries three limits.
Rule 7.1(a) bans false or misleading communication about you or your services. A message is misleading if it misstates a material fact, leaves out a fact needed to make it accurate, creates unjustified expectations about results, or uses a testimonial that breaks the rule. Comment 4 warns that advertising past verdicts can mislead without context. Comment 5 lets you say you specialize in an area, but you may only claim to be a certified specialist if an outside organization certified you and you name it.
Rule 7.1(b) bans coercion, duress or harassment of a prospective client. Rule 7.1(c) bars contacting someone directly to get hired about a disaster, personal injury or wrongful death unless the event was more than 30 days ago, you have a family, close personal or prior professional relationship with them, or they contacted you first.
Opinion 22-02 also keeps an older opinion, 14-04, in force: you can advertise a "best" or "super" rating only if the rating group looked into your fitness, you didn't pay for the rating, its method is public, and the ad says the Utah Supreme Court and the Utah State Bar don't endorse it.