In a conversation with Arthur Rothrock on The Litigator’s Path, McNally walks through how he runs Meta ad campaigns that produce leads at the firm’s lowest cost-per-lead of any channel, why he believes a solo attorney can start generating cases with as little as $100 a week, how he approaches marketing for sexual abuse cases without re-traumatizing potential clients, and what he checks before trusting any marketing vendor with a dollar. The through line: legal marketing works best when it answers real questions with real faces and drops the legalese that makes prospective clients feel like outsiders to their own cases.
Why McNally Thinks Solo Attorneys Should Start Running Meta Ads at $100 a Week
The most immediately useful part of McNally’s playbook has nothing to do with a 20-attorney firm’s budget. He argues that a solo practitioner, particularly one handling employment or straightforward personal injury cases, can start generating leads on Meta platforms for as little as $100 per week. His reasoning is practical: Meta’s automated targeting tools have improved to the point where the old manual process of selecting audience segments by interest and behavior is no longer necessary. "You can just give that to the AI that Meta’s developed and it works really well," McNally says, adding that it now outperforms the customized targeting he used to build by hand.
The key, in his view, is matching the simplicity of the ad to the simplicity of the legal issue. For employment cases, the message can be direct and specific: you were pregnant, they fired you, contact us. For practice areas carrying more stigma, like sexual abuse, the investment needs to be higher because the creative itself needs to be more carefully produced. McNally recommends giving any Meta campaign at least two months before deciding whether it’s working. If leads haven’t materialized by then, the ads probably need to change. For attorneys who aren’t comfortable with graphic design, he suggests hiring a freelancer on contract for a few pieces of creative and watching a single YouTube tutorial on Meta’s ad manager. The platform itself, he notes, will show you cost-per-lead and conversion data across multiple ads running simultaneously, and UTM tracking can layer additional detail on what’s actually driving calls.
McNally is blunt about the industry’s tendency to tell small firms they need five- or six-figure monthly ad budgets to compete. "Vendors will tell you if you’re not spending $100,000, you might as well burn your money," he says. His counter: Meta runs on an auction system, and while bigger spenders see their ads served first, lower-budget advertisers will still reach real people. A solo attorney spending modestly on a clear, well-targeted ad will eventually generate responses, especially in less competitive practice areas like pre-litigation employment disputes.
How McNally Markets Sexual Abuse Cases Without Re-Traumatizing Potential Clients
Arias Sanguinetti handles a significant volume of sexual abuse cases, and McNally considers the marketing for this practice area fundamentally different from anything else the firm does. Many of the people who eventually call the firm have never told anyone about their experience. Some are reaching out a decade or two after the abuse occurred. The firm’s intake team goes through trauma-informed training because, in many instances, they are the first human being a survivor has ever disclosed to.
This reality shapes every ad, every landing page, and every piece of social content McNally produces for the practice area. He operates on two tracks: people-based creative and informational content. On the people side, the firm’s ads almost always include the face of an attorney the caller might actually work with. One of the firm’s highest-performing ads features several of its women leaders with the line "women fighting for women." McNally says the firm gets "inundated with leads" from that single ad because it communicates advocacy without requiring a potential client to relive their trauma just to find a lawyer.
On the informational side, McNally builds out content answering specific questions: what is the statute of limitations, what are my rights, what should I expect. He describes the standard approach across the industry as failing these potential clients entirely. A search for "can I sue after sexual assault" returns pages full of generic language about free consultations and big verdicts. McNally’s goal is to answer the question in the first sentence, provide the statute of limitations, and introduce the actual human beings who will handle the case. He also flagged a recent ad he found disturbing: an AI-generated person using AAVE to market sexual abuse legal services, which he described as the kind of content that could discourage survivors from taking action with any firm at all.
Elijah McNally’s SEO Strategy: Answer the Question First, Rank Second
McNally’s approach to search engine optimization starts with a principle borrowed from user experience rather than keyword research: answer the question someone is actually asking, and answer it immediately. He compares the standard law firm SEO page to a recipe blog that buries the cooking instructions beneath a life story. "Just tell people, yes, you can sue after sexual assault," he says. "Here’s the statute of limitations. Here’s a video of the actual people you’ll be talking to."
This strategy, which McNally initially adopted for client experience reasons, has turned out to align with how AI-driven search results now work. Google’s AI overviews and other large language model search tools reward pages that directly answer user queries, and Arias Sanguinetti has seen a measurable uptick in appearing in those results. McNally notes that the shift in search behavior has been significant: Google searches have moved away from phrases like "personal injury lawyer near me" and toward full questions, because AI can now process and answer them.
He also believes AI search tools are better than traditional algorithms at evaluating firm quality across multiple signals. Press mentions without backlinks, attorney directory listings, and reviews all seem to factor in. McNally points to the example of Jamie Goldstein, one of the firm’s partners, who is not a name partner and wouldn’t have generated website traffic from a passing press mention a few years ago. AI search, he theorizes, is now capable of connecting that mention to the firm and surfacing it in relevant results. The practical takeaway for smaller firms: producing direct, question-answering content and building a presence across press, directories, and review sites may yield better returns in an AI-driven search environment than traditional link-building alone.
How to Vet a Legal Marketing Vendor and Keep Them Accountable
McNally’s advice on selecting a marketing vendor comes down to volume and vigilance. He recommends talking to at least 10 vendors before signing with anyone. Peter Kalanda offers a complementary framework: get three quotes, retain independent access to your own analytics, and audit vendor output the same way you audit an opposing expert’s work product. The reasoning is that after the first few meetings, most attorneys get excited by the sales pitch, but by the tenth conversation, the pitches start to sound alike. That repetition makes it easier to identify which vendors are offering substance and which are selling flash.
Once the field narrows, McNally’s diligence test is specific: ask to see an existing client’s website, then skip the homepage. Navigate to the lowest-priority practice area page and look for typos. Expand the browser window to full width and see if the layout scales properly. "If you can’t find a mistake, you’re working with a good vendor," he says. He also recommends asking to speak directly with one of the vendor’s current clients.
After hiring a vendor, the work is not over. McNally warns against handing off marketing and assuming the job is done. He recommends Googling your own firm in an incognito browser window regularly to see unbiased results, requesting meetings with the actual people touching your website rather than just your account manager, and generally being what he calls "the squeaky wheel." Larger vendors in particular manage many law firm clients, sometimes within the same market, and the firms that stay engaged and demanding are the ones that get the most attention. This is the kind of ongoing quality control that applies equally to document production workflows, where platforms like Legion give litigators direct oversight of their output rather than relying on a black-box vendor relationship.
Translating Attorney Credentials Into Language Prospective Clients Actually Understand
One of the persistent challenges McNally navigates is that Arias Sanguinetti’s most impressive credentials mean nothing to the people who need the firm most. The fact that name partners Mike Arias and Elise Sanguinetti have served as presidents of major trial lawyer associations carries weight with referring attorneys but registers as noise to a sexual assault survivor searching for help at midnight. McNally frames this as a two-audience problem: the firm needs to maintain its reputation among the plaintiff’s bar for referral purposes while simultaneously speaking to potential clients who have never hired a lawyer and may distrust the legal system entirely.
His solution is to strip the legalese from client-facing content entirely. He cites an internal example where a marketing colleague proposed messaging around the firm’s "philosophy of pursuing efficient compensation." McNally pushed back: "What does that mean? How is that a philosophy?" The revision had to translate the same idea into language a non-lawyer would act on. He applies a simple test: if the language wouldn’t resonate with a jury, it won’t resonate with the audience you’re trying to reach before trial. For referring attorneys, the firm maintains its presence through bar association events, LinkedIn, and the professional shorthand that lawyers share. For everyone else, the rule is faces over credentials, questions over jargon, and directness over prestige.
What Litigators Can Take Away
-
A solo attorney handling employment or personal injury cases can start generating leads on Meta for as little as $100 per week, using Meta’s built-in AI targeting and a simple, specific ad, and should give any campaign at least two months before evaluating results.
-
Before choosing a marketing vendor, talk to at least 10, then test the finalists by navigating to the lowest-priority practice area page on a client site and looking for typos, broken layouts, and generic filler content.
-
SEO content that directly answers a prospective client’s question in the first sentence now performs better in AI-powered search results than pages built around traditional keyword-stuffing and "free consultation" language.
-
For practice areas involving trauma, like sexual abuse, marketing should lead with the faces of the attorneys who will handle the case and answer practical questions like statutes of limitations, rather than leading with verdict amounts or generic calls to action.
-
After hiring a vendor, regularly Google your own firm in an incognito window, ask for direct access to the people writing your content, and treat the relationship the way your most demanding client treats you: consistent follow-up is what keeps your account from falling to the bottom of the pile.
Listen to the Full Episode
Elijah McNally covers even more ground in the full conversation, including how Arias Sanguinetti’s referral relationships generate cases organically, the firm’s record-setting school abuse settlement in Clark County, Nevada, and why he thinks personality-driven short-form content is the next frontier for plaintiff’s firm marketing. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and learn more about Arias Sanguinetti Trial Lawyers at aswtlawyers.com. To reach McNally directly, connect with him on LinkedIn or email elijah@aswtlawyers.com.