Hire an offshore legal team and the retainer stops adding up

One firm told us it pays up to $12,000 a month for SEO, website management and Google Business Profile management. The number is defensible. Against the cost of hiring that same capability in the US, I would defend it myself. Against a mid-level SEO specialist in the Philippines at $1,300 to $1,500 a month, it collapses. The comparison a firm picks decides the answer before the math starts.

Why most law firms never hired a marketing person at all

Most US law firms outsource marketing to a third-party agency and do not employ an in-house digital marketing specialist. It is the common setup, not the exception. I do not know why.

What I can see is what an agency sells. A scope. A monthly report. One invoice, one contact, one throat to choke. A managing partner who has never built a marketing function is buying a finished answer to a question he does not want to study. Nobody at the firm has to learn what a landing page test is. Nobody has to sit in a one-on-one with a designer and judge the work. The retainer covers the ignorance and the management in the same line item, and that is worth real money.

It is also priced against the wrong thing.

What it costs to hire an offshore legal team instead

A mid-level SEO specialist in the Philippines sits between $1,300 and $1,500 a month. An expert-level specialist sits between $1,500 and $2,000. Put that beside $12,000 and the invoice stops reading like a service. Six expert-level specialists at $2,000 fit inside one month of it with nothing left over.

No firm needs six. The point is what the gap does to the decision. At US salary levels the choice is genuinely hard, because a domestic hire plus payroll plus a manager's time lands somewhere near the retainer and carries more risk. Offshore, the choice is not close. The retainer was never expensive in the abstract. It was expensive against one specific alternative, and most firms never priced that alternative.