- Cost Comparison
- SEO Specialist
Your agency retainer is already legal process outsourcing
Firms already outsource marketing. The retainer just hides the price.
Most law firms already outsource their marketing and never call it that. One firm told us it pays up to $12,000 a month for SEO, website management and Google Business Profile management. That number is defensible. Against the cost of hiring the same capability locally in the US, it holds up line by line. Against an offshore hire it falls apart.
What law firms already hand to somebody else
Marketing is the function most firms have already given away. Most US law firms outsource it to a third-party agency and employ no in-house digital marketing specialist. That is the common setup, not the exception. I do not know why, and I have stopped pretending the reason is obvious.
One explanation survives contact with how firms actually buy. Standing up an in-house marketing function means learning how to structure it and then how to manage it. Firms already report administrative burden as a real weight on the week. An agency sells a finished answer instead. No org chart. No learning curve on somebody else's specialty.
Where a $12,000 retainer stops being defensible
The retainer is defensible against a US salary and nothing else. Price the local hire properly, with payroll and benefits and a manager's attention, and $12,000 a month for three functions reads as fair. Change the thing on the other side of the comparison and the same figure reads as six times the market.
| Arrangement | Monthly cost |
|---|---|
| Agency retainer, as quoted by one firm | Up to $12,000 |
| Mid-level SEO specialist, Philippines | $1,300 to $1,500 |
| Expert-level SEO specialist, Philippines | $1,500 to $2,000 |
Monthly cost for SEO, website management and Google Business Profile management
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. Run the retainer against the top of that range and a firm is paying many times the price for a slice of somebody's week. The comparison a firm chooses decides the answer before the math starts.
What legal process outsourcing does to attention
Legal process outsourcing buys a scope, and a scope is a boundary. The boundary is where the agency's attention stops. An agency divides its attention across a roster of clients and delivers a packaged scope, which is what makes it sellable. A full-time hire works one firm's goal every day. That is a different kind of attention and it produces a different result. Filipino working habits compound it: firms end up with a dedicated SEO worker who frequently works past the hours agreed.
The cost the retainer actually removes
Direction is the expensive part and the retainer takes it off the table. A partner who has never run marketing does not know what to ask for weekly, what a competent report looks like, or when to kill a campaign that is not working. An agency answers all of that by handing over a deliverable list on a schedule. That is worth money. But the retainer is buying the work of structuring and managing a marketing function, and a direct hire hands that work straight back.
So the real comparison is not $12,000 against $1,500. It is $12,000 against $1,500 plus the hours somebody at the firm spends directing one person.
Those hours are cheaper. They are not free.
Which comparison a firm should actually run
Run the offshore number first, because it is the one nobody put in front of you. Price a mid-level specialist at $1,500 a month, add the time a partner or a marketing lead would spend setting the weekly priorities, then look at the retainer again. Sometimes the retainer still wins. A firm with nobody to direct the work is buying management, and management is what it should pay for. What it should not do is call that a price comparison, because the two sides were never measuring the same thing. A retainer that survives the offshore number is a retainer worth keeping.
People also ask about this
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