Do you actually own your law firm’s website?
Most managing partners assume the answer is yes. Quite often it is no. Here is how to find out in an afternoon, before the question becomes urgent.
Paying for a website every month is not the same as owning one.
A lot of legal marketing runs on a rental model, though the invoice rarely uses that word. The agency registers the domain, builds on a platform only they can log into, hosts it on their servers, and holds the analytics. While the relationship is good, none of that matters. The month you decide to leave, all of it matters at once.
Nothing here is an accusation against any particular firm or vendor. Plenty of agencies do this cleanly. The point is simpler: you should know which kind you are with, and you should know it now rather than during a transition.
Eight questions. Ask your marketing company today.
Send these in an email so the answers are in writing. A good partner will answer all eight in a paragraph without getting defensive.
Look it up yourself at any WHOIS lookup. If the registrant organisation is your marketing company rather than your firm, the single most valuable asset you have is in someone else’s name.
Hosting can be moved in a day when the account is yours. When it belongs to the agency, you are asking permission to take your own site somewhere else.
Standard platforms such as WordPress export cleanly. Proprietary systems frequently do not, and firms leaving them sometimes discover the ‘export’ is a folder of raw text and images with no design and no structure. That is a rebuild, not a migration.
Practice-area pages, blog posts and attorney bios are commissioned work. Get it in writing that the copyright sits with the firm, not with whoever typed it.
Ad accounts hold years of conversion history, and that history is what makes campaigns cheap. Starting a fresh account means paying to relearn what you already know. Your firm should be the owner, with the agency added as a manager.
If your data lives in an agency Google account, your historical performance leaves when they do. You cannot compare next year to last year if last year went with somebody else.
This is the listing that drives the phone calls. Primary ownership belongs with the firm. Recovering a profile someone else claimed is a slow, unpleasant process.
Ask for the offboarding process in writing. How many days of notice, what transfers, what does not, and whether anything is billed on the way out. The answer to this one question tells you almost everything.
Bad answers are a problem, not an emergency.
You do not have to make a decision this week, and you should not fire anybody in a temper. Ownership is fixable, and it is usually cheaper to fix while the relationship is still working than after it has ended. Move the domain into a registrar account in the firm’s name. Create firm-owned Google accounts and have the agency added as a manager instead of an owner. Get the content licence in writing. Then decide about the relationship separately, from a position where leaving is possible.
The honest limit: we are a marketing company, not your lawyers, and the contract in front of you governs. Read it, or have someone at the firm read it. Nothing on this page is legal advice.
While you are auditing, check what AI says about your firm.
Ownership is one leak. Being invisible to ChatGPT, Google AI and Perplexity when someone asks for a lawyer is another, and most firms have never measured it. The scan takes fifteen minutes and the report is yours either way.