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For Criminal Defense Firms

Answer first. Sign the retainer.

Criminal defense leads are in crisis. They need to hire someone today, not next week. GavelGrow captures them the moment they reach out, routes to the right attorney, and keeps your intake running 24/7 for DUI, drug, and assault cases.

Marketing for law firms — and no one else · Every channel · Since 2015

Modelled market ranges, not quotes

Market cost per click

$15–$60

The intake window

Hours — representation is decided before arraignment

After-hours answering is the marketing strategy: the firm that picks up at 11pm signs the case the nine-to-five firm never hears about.

Modelled + illustrative · your ledger is built from your own numbers

Where criminal defense cases are lost

The case is decided at intake, not in the ads.

Every practice loses cases the same way — between the click and the conversation. Here is how that moment actually goes in criminal defense, and what the system does about it.

1. The moment

   The call comes at 11pm, sometimes from the county line. Someone is scared, the court date is already printed, and the family is searching from the kitchen table.

2. The window

   Representation is usually decided within hours — before arraignment, before the weekend ends, before your office opens.

3. The play

   24/7 automated intake answers when your staff can't, after-hours routing reaches whoever is on call, and every conversation lands recorded with the case details captured — so Monday starts with a retainer-ready record.

The record of what breaks

Three ways criminal defense firms bleed cases.

Leads call at 2am — nobody answers

A DUI arrest happens at 1am. They call five firms and retain the one that picks up — the others find a voicemail at 9am and a client already gone.

Local SEO is a full-time job

'DUI lawyer [city]' has 40 competitors in your market. Ranking is table stakes — and staying ranked requires weekly tuning.

Retainer urgency gets lost in handoffs

Lead comes in at 3am → assigned to intake the next morning → attorney calls back at 2pm. By then they've hired someone else.

Tuned to the practice

What the system runs for criminal defense firms.

The same spine every page on this site describes — click to signed case — with the pieces that matter most in criminal defense doing the heavy lifting.

24/7 automated intake

Every lead gets an SMS + email response in under a minute, regardless of what time it hits. Captures case type, arresting jurisdiction, next court date.

After-hours call routing

Night and weekend calls route to the on-call attorney's mobile with the client's context pre-loaded — so after-hours calls reach a person instead of voicemail.

Retainer-ready lead records

Lead records include jurisdiction, charge, bond status, court date, and prior record. Everything the attorney needs to quote a retainer on the first call.

Local SEO attribution

Organic leads tracked back to the keyword, page, and search location, where available. Measure which SEO pages actually generate retainers, not just traffic.

Want the whole mechanism, end to end? Read the platform page →

Against firms like yours

Good numbers are relative.

Benchmarked against defense firms whose intake runs nights and weekends — the cohort where answering speed is the practice.

The platform's benchmarks are modelled for your practice area and market size — labeled as modelled, never passed off as measured — so a criminal defense firm is judged against its own economics, not against the whole profession's average.

Before you ask

Criminal Defense questions, answered.

The questions criminal defense firms ask on the first call — answered here so the call can be about your firm.

Yes. Call routing rules can be set by time of day, day of week, or emergency flag. Each tracking number can route to different attorneys based on case type (DUI vs. drug vs. assault).

We track every organic search lead back to the exact keyword and landing page. See which 'DUI lawyer [neighborhood]' pages generate retainers vs. which just get traffic. Budget tuning becomes obvious.

Yes. Pre-built criminal defense intake templates ask jurisdiction, charge, bond posted (Y/N), bond amount, next court date, and prior convictions. Fully editable.

Yes — Track ($199/mo) is built for lean firms: 5 seats included, 2 tracking numbers, 1,000 client SMS a month, unlimited leads and cases, and all the automation you need to compete with larger firms. Move up to Optimize when you run more than one ad account.

The next thirty minutes

Talk to someone who knows criminal defense.

A legal-only strategist reads your market and your numbers, then tells you honestly what would move them — run it yourself on the platform, or have us run it as your agency of record. Both answers happen on the call.

Prefer to see how an engagement runs first? Read the services page →