Legal CPA benchmark

Legal is the most expensive vertical in the survey: attorneys and legal services average $131.63 per lead on a $9.87 average click, roughly double the $66.69 all-industry average. Case economics, not inefficiency, set that price: a signed client is worth thousands.

Every bidder in a personal-injury or mass-tort auction knows what a signed case is worth, so bids rise until lead cost approaches case economics. That is rational: a $131.63 lead converting to a client at 25% is a ~$527 acquisition against contingency fees measured in tens of thousands. The practice-area spread inside the average is enormous: high-volume traffic and immigration work runs far below tort and injury terms. Compute your own ceiling per practice area with the break-even method, using realistic signed-case rates.

• Intake speed: legal leads decay in minutes. Answering calls in one ring and forms in five minutes moves signed-case rate more than any bid change, which lowers effective CPA at constant lead cost (the CPL-to-CPA math).
• Intent capture: exact-match high-intent terms ("lawyer near me", "attorney for X") over research terms. In a $9.87-a-click market, research traffic is the expensive luxury.
• Geography discipline: bid your service radius, not the metro. The generic levers ranked on how to lower CPA all apply, but these two are the legal-specific multipliers.

Vertical context: full table; judgment framing: what is a good CPA.