Thinking about leaving your legal marketing agency?
Do these things before you give notice, not after. The order matters more than the timing, and a transition handled well costs a few weeks instead of a few quarters.
Secure the assets before you announce the decision.
Once notice is given, cooperation becomes goodwill rather than obligation, and goodwill is thin at the end of a relationship that is ending badly. None of what follows is adversarial. It is the same sequence any competent operations person would run. Do it quietly, do it in order, and be courteous the entire way through.
Seven steps, in this order.
Notice period, automatic renewal date, early-termination language, and anything about what happens to the site and the accounts. Diary the renewal date immediately, because most of these agreements renew themselves if nobody writes a letter.
Get into the registrar account, or get the authorisation code and move the domain to an account in the firm’s name. Everything else can be rebuilt. Losing the domain is the one genuinely unrecoverable outcome.
Every page, every post, every image, every PDF. Even if the design cannot come with you, the words can, and the words are what rank. A crawler or a straightforward save of each page is enough.
Analytics history, Search Console data, call recordings and transcripts, form submissions, and the contact list. Anything you might want to compare against next year.
Google Ads, Local Services Ads, and any social ad accounts. Transfer ownership to the firm and leave the agency as a manager until the handover is complete. The conversion history is the valuable part.
Make sure a firm email address is the primary owner. This is the asset most closely tied to the phone ringing, and it is the one most often left in an agency account.
A gap in coverage is expensive in a market where the cost per click runs to tens of dollars. Have the new site staged and the accounts ready, then give notice.
Switching is not automatically the answer.
Sometimes the agency is not the problem. Legal is one of the most expensive and most defended markets in the country, and a firm that switches every eighteen months never accumulates the compounding that makes the work pay. Before you move, make sure you can name the specific thing that is broken: the leads are unqualified, or nobody can tell you the cost per signed case, or you have found out you do not own your own site. If you cannot name it, a new vendor will not fix it.
If you can name it, then move, and take everything with you.
Bring us the contract and we will read it with you.
No charge and no obligation. We will tell you what you own, what you do not, and what we would do in your position, including when that answer is to stay where you are.