Your First 90 Days as a Solo Attorney: A Marketing Checklist
Your First 90 Days as a Solo Attorney: A Marketing Checklist
The first 90 days of a solo practice are not the time to figure out marketing later. They’re the time to build the foundation that either supports your growth for years or makes everything harder than it needs to be.
Most attorneys who go solo focus heavily on the operational side in those first months — getting the IOLTA account set up, choosing practice management software, furnishing the office. All of that matters. But the attorneys who hit their first year in a strong position are almost always the ones who treated marketing as a parallel priority, not an afterthought.
This checklist breaks the first 90 days into three phases. Each phase builds on the last. None of it is complicated. All of it matters.
Quick Answer
The first 30 days should focus on building your essential marketing foundation — website, Google Business Profile, and professional presence. Days 31 to 60 are about activating your visibility and reaching your referral network. Days 61 to 90 are about putting systems in place so your marketing runs consistently whether you’re busy or not. Do it in this order and you’ll be ahead of most solo attorneys who’ve been practicing on their own for years.
Days 1–30: Build the Foundation
Before you do anything else — before you run a single ad, before you post on social media, before you ask for a single review — you need the fundamentals in place. These are the things that every other marketing effort points back to. If they’re weak, everything downstream suffers.
Get Your Website Up (And Make It Work)
Your website is the most important marketing asset you own. It’s not optional, it’s not something you can replace with a social media profile, and it’s not something you should rush with a $99 template and call good enough.
At minimum, your website needs to do the following: clearly state who you are, what you do, where you practice, and why someone should call you instead of the attorney two tabs over. It should have a clear phone number in the header, practice area pages that explain what you handle, a page that introduces you as a human being (not a resume), and a contact form that actually works.
If budget is tight, a professionally designed entry-level site in the $3,000–$5,000 range is a reasonable starting point for most markets. In competitive areas, invest more.
Set Up Your Google Business Profile
This is free, it’s local, and it directly impacts whether you appear when someone nearby searches for an attorney in your practice area. Set it up the day you have an address — even if it’s a virtual office or co-working space. Fill out every field. Upload photos. Write a genuine business description using the terms your clients actually search.
Verifying your profile is the step most attorneys delay and then forget. Get it verified in week one.
Claim Your Directory Listings
Avvo, Justia, FindLaw, and your state bar’s online directory should all have accurate, complete listings for your firm. These serve two purposes: they help potential clients find you, and they help search engines confirm that your firm is a legitimate, established business. Consistent information across listings — name, address, phone number — matters more than most attorneys realize for local SEO performance.
Set Up Professional Email and Intake Tracking
Your email address should be yourname@yourfirmname.com — not a Gmail address. Beyond presentation, it protects attorney-client communications with better control. And from day one, set up a way to track where clients are coming from. A simple intake question — “How did you hear about us?” — logged consistently will tell you more about your marketing ROI than any analytics platform alone.
Key Takeaway: Nothing else works well without the foundation. Before you spend a dollar on advertising or outreach, make sure someone who hears about you and searches your name finds exactly what they need.
Days 31–60: Activate Your Visibility
With the foundation in place, the next 30 days are about turning on your presence — reaching out to your network, starting to accumulate reviews, and making sure the right people know you exist.
Tell Your Network You’re Open
This sounds basic because it is. But a surprising number of solo attorneys launch quietly and wait for the phone to ring. Don’t do that.
Send a personal email or note to former colleagues, opposing counsel you’ve worked with, clients from your previous firm (being mindful of your ethical obligations), former classmates, and anyone else who should know you’re on your own now. Not a mass email blast — personal, direct communication. Tell them what you’re doing, what you’re focusing on, and that you’d appreciate referrals.
This is your fastest path to early clients, and it’s free. Do it in the first 60 days while the news of your launch is still fresh.
Start Collecting Google Reviews
Google reviews are one of the highest-ROI activities a solo attorney can do, and most wait far too long to start. Reviews build trust with potential clients before they ever speak to you. They influence where you rank in local search results. And they compound — 15 reviews is meaningfully better than 5, and 40 reviews is meaningfully better than 15.
Ask every satisfied client and professional contact who can appropriately leave a review. Make it easy — send them directly to your Google Business Profile review link. Don’t offer anything in exchange (that violates platform policies), but do make asking part of your standard follow-up process.
Set Up Basic Social Media Presence
You don’t need to be on every platform. You need to be findable on the platforms where your clients actually are. For most solo attorneys, that means LinkedIn at minimum, and Facebook if you’re in a practice area like family law, estate planning, or criminal defense where clients are active there.
Set up your profiles properly — professional photo, complete biography, link to your website — and post something at least once a week. It doesn’t need to be elaborate. A short answer to a question you hear frequently from clients. A brief explanation of a process people find confusing. Something that demonstrates you know what you’re doing and you’re willing to help.
Evaluate Google Ads as a Bridge Strategy
If you need calls sooner than SEO can deliver them, this is the time to seriously evaluate Google Ads. A well-managed campaign in most practice areas can start generating consultations within the first few weeks. It costs money, but for practice areas where a single case can generate thousands in fees, the economics are usually sound.
Review your options for Google Ads for law firms and decide whether paid search makes sense as a bridge while your organic presence builds. If you pursue it, hire someone who manages legal campaigns specifically — general digital agencies often mismanage legal ad budgets.
Key Takeaway: The second phase is about getting in front of people — through outreach, reviews, and early advertising. Visibility doesn’t happen by itself. It requires direct, deliberate action in the early months.
Days 61–90: Build Systems That Last
The first two phases are largely about setup and activation. Phase three is about building the systems that make marketing sustainable — so it keeps working whether you’re in trial or taking a week off.
Start Investing in SEO
If you haven’t already begun working on law firm SEO, the 60-day mark is a good time to start. The reason: SEO takes time. Every month you delay is a month further from when your organic traffic starts delivering consistent leads. Starting the clock at day 60 means you’re roughly 12 months from meaningful organic growth, which puts you in year two — exactly when referrals start showing their limits and you need digital channels to fill the gap.
Good law firm SEO includes practice area pages written for real search queries, a blog strategy that answers the questions people actually type into Google, technical optimization of your website, and local citation building. It’s not something to DIY if your goal is to compete seriously in your market.
Formalize Your Intake Process
Your intake process is a marketing asset. The experience someone has when they call your firm — how quickly you answer, how you handle the initial inquiry, how clearly you communicate next steps — directly affects how many inquiries turn into paying clients.
By day 90, you should have a clear process for handling new inquiries: who answers the phone, what they say, how quickly you respond to web form submissions, and how you follow up with people who express interest but don’t book immediately. This isn’t operational overhead — it’s conversion rate optimization for every dollar you spend on marketing.
Review and Adjust
At the 90-day mark, take a half-day and review what’s actually working. Where have your consultations come from? What channels have been active? What has your website traffic looked like month over month? What’s your Google Business Profile showing in terms of searches and calls?
This review shapes your marketing priorities for the next quarter. Some channels will have exceeded expectations. Others won’t have moved the needle yet. That’s normal — the important thing is that you’re making decisions based on data rather than assumptions.
Key Takeaway: Systems replace willpower. The attorneys who grow most consistently are the ones who build processes — for intake, for reviews, for content — so marketing keeps moving even when life gets busy.
A 90-Day Marketing Summary Checklist
Here’s a condensed version of the full checklist for quick reference:
- Professional website built and live
- Google Business Profile created, verified, and fully completed
- Avvo, Justia, state bar, and other key directory listings claimed and accurate
- Professional email address set up
- Client intake source tracking in place
- Personal outreach to referral network completed
- Google review link created and first reviews requested
- LinkedIn profile complete and active
- Google Ads evaluated (and launched if appropriate for your market)
- SEO strategy in progress or underway
- Intake process formalized and documented
- First 90-day marketing review completed
Frequently Asked Questions
What if I can’t afford a professional website right away?
Start with a clean, minimal template site — something credible — and plan to invest in a professional build within six months. A mediocre website is better than no website. Just don’t run paid advertising to a mediocre website, because you’ll waste the budget on traffic that won’t convert.
How many Google reviews should I try to get in the first 90 days?
Aim for at least 5 to 10 if possible. Even a handful of genuine reviews dramatically changes how your profile appears to potential clients compared to a profile with zero. There’s no magic number — more is always better, and the goal is to make it an ongoing habit rather than a one-time push.
Should I hire a marketing company in the first 90 days or handle it myself?
It depends on your budget and your time. The activities in days 1 to 30 are largely DIY-friendly if you’re willing to invest the time. Once you get into SEO and paid advertising, professional management tends to produce significantly better results than self-management — and the mistakes are expensive enough that the management fees usually pay for themselves.
Do I need to be on social media if my clients aren’t really using it?
At minimum, have a complete LinkedIn profile and a basic Facebook page — even if you’re not active on them — because people will look you up there as part of their credibility check. Active social media marketing is worth considering for some practice areas, but it should never take priority over website, GBP, and SEO fundamentals.
To Summarize
The attorneys who look back on their first year and say “I wish I’d done this sooner” are almost always talking about these 90-day fundamentals. The ones who set up this foundation early spend their second and third years building on it. The ones who skip it spend those same years trying to fix what they didn’t do at the start.
It doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Work through it in phases, invest where it matters, and treat marketing as a business priority — not an interruption to your real work.
If you want help putting this plan together for your specific practice area and market, reach out to LuckyFish Media. We help solo attorneys build real marketing foundations that generate real results — and we can tell you exactly what your first 90 days should look like.
