Twenty enquiries to find one worth a fee-earner’s time.
A boutique law firm was drowning in enquiries that rarely instructed: free-advice seekers, out-of-scope matters, and prospects too small to serve. Beeyacorp introduced aggressive negative-keyword screening, practice-area landing pages, and qualification steps. Enquiry volume fell from around 140 to 65 a month while the viable-matter rate rose from 34% to 71%, cutting fee-earner triage time from six hours a week to two.
A boutique law firm was drowning in enquiries that rarely instructed: free-advice seekers, out-of-scope matters, and prospects too small to serve. Beeyacorp introduced aggressive negative-keyword screening, practice-area landing pages, and qualification steps. Enquiry volume fell from around 140 to 65 a month while the viable-matter rate rose from 34% to 71%, cutting fee-earner triage time from six hours a week to two.
Plenty of enquiries, almost none worth a fee-earner's time
The firm’s marketing optimised for enquiry volume, and the platforms delivered exactly that: a high count of low-quality contacts. Fee-earners spent billable hours triaging leads that were never going to instruct, which cost the firm far more than the ads did. Volume looked like success on paper while quietly draining the practice.
Optimising for volume told the platforms to maximise enquiries regardless of quality, weak negative-keyword coverage let free-advice and wrong-scope searches through, and generic pages with no scope signals attracted the wrong enquiries in the first place.
Objectives
- Raise viable matters. Move the viable-matter rate off its 34% baseline toward something a fee-earner could actually work with.
- Protect fee-earner time. Shield it from unqualified triage.
- Screen out the wrong searches. Filter free-advice and out-of-scope queries before the click.
- Measure engaged matters. Judge success by engaged matters, not enquiry count.
What the evidence pointed to
Every engagement starts the same way: a full audit. What we found below is documented directly from the account.
| Area | Finding |
|---|---|
| Paid Media | Campaigns optimised for enquiry volume, matching a wide range of low-intent searches. |
| Keywords | Minimal negative keyword coverage, so free-advice and out-of-scope queries flooded in. |
| Landing Pages | Generic pages that did not state scope or set expectations, attracting mismatched enquiries. |
| Qualification | No qualification before enquiries reached fee-earners. |
None of this was a spend problem. It was a measurement and screening problem, rooted in campaigns optimised for volume and pages that never stated scope, so no amount of budget would have fixed it on its own.
How we chose to fix it
Optimise for the right enquiries, not the most. We built aggressive negative-keyword screening, practice-area pages that set scope and expectations, and qualification steps that filtered enquiries before they reached fee-earners.
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What we did
- Built a substantial negative-keyword base. Screened out free-advice and out-of-scope searches.
- Created practice-area landing pages. Stated scope and set expectations for each area of law.
- Added qualification steps. Placed ahead of the fee-earner intake.
- Rebuilt reporting. Centred it around viable matters rather than enquiry volume.
How it was sequenced
| Phase | Timeframe | What Happened |
|---|---|---|
| Audit | Days 1–7 | Search-term and qualification review |
| Screen | Weeks 2–4 | Negative keywords and practice-area pages built |
| Qualify | Weeks 3–5 | Qualification steps added to intake |
| Optimise | Month 2+ | Bidding aligned to viable matters |
Trading enquiry volume for viable matters
What follows is taken straight from the account: the documented outcomes of the engagement.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Viable-matter rate | 34% | 71% |
| Fee-earner triage time | 6 hrs/week | 2 hrs/week |
| Enquiry volume | ~140/month | ~65/month |
| Success metric | Enquiry count | Engaged matters |
| Free-advice traffic | Unscreened | Screened out |
For professional services, fewer better enquiries beat more worse ones, because fee-earner time is the scarcest resource, and legal buyers in particular are high-value and research-intensive, so volume-optimised campaigns attract exactly the wrong people. Negative keywords and scope-setting pages did more for lead quality than any bid adjustment, and measuring success by engaged matters, not enquiries, changed which campaigns got funded. More on our professional services marketing page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Because fee-earner time is the firm's scarcest resource. High volumes of free-advice seekers and out-of-scope enquiries consume billable hours in triage and cost far more than the ads that generated them, even when the enquiry count looks impressive.
They stop ads from matching searches that indicate the wrong intent, such as free-advice or out-of-scope queries. Screening those out before the click concentrates budget on prospects who could genuinely instruct the firm.
They state scope and set expectations, so enquiries arrive already aligned to what the firm handles. A prospect who reads a specific practice-area page is far more likely to be a viable matter than one dropped onto a generic services page.
By engaged matters and fee-earner time saved, not by raw enquiry count. Measuring the outcome that reflects real business, rather than the volume metric, changes which campaigns get funded.
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