Criminal Defense Marketing: Who Answers at 2 a.m.?

Criminal defense marketing starts with the phone. Arrests happen at any hour, and an ad that rings a line nobody answers can pay for a caller who then dials the next firm. So first decide who picks up in every hour of the week. Then run ads only in the hours that are covered, and judge every channel by retained clients and fees.

Quick answer

1. Write down who answers the firm's phone in each block of the week, nights and weekends included.
2. In Google Ads, match the ad schedule and the call button's schedule to that list; campaigns run all day unless someone changes it.
3. Turn on call reporting and read missed calls by hour every week.
4. Keep client lists, site-visitor lists and bail bond offers out of the campaigns.
5. Reply to reviews without a word about any case.
6. Each month, count answered calls, consultations, retained clients and fees by source, from your intake records.

Who answers when someone calls at 2 a.m.?

The caller may be the person arrested or a relative, and for a DUI the clock starts fast. In California, for example, a driver has 10 days from receiving a suspension or revocation order to request a DMV hearing (California DMV, checked 2026-10-04). Return that voicemail the next afternoon and the caller may already have hired another firm.

Put the coverage on paper hour by hour, because every ad setting below copies it. How intake turns a first call into a retained client picks up the story once someone answers.

Where should a small criminal or DUI firm advertise?

A search like "dui lawyer near me" can show three kinds of Google results. Search ads charge per click, and you control the words, keywords and hours. Local Services Ads are a separate format, billed by the lead. The third is your Business Profile, which costs nothing and appears on Search and Maps with your hours; Google asks you to enter your "regular customer-facing hours of operation" (Google, checked 2026-10-04).

Criminal lawyer and DUI lawyer both appear in Google's US legal categories for Local Services Ads. Google runs a state bar license check on each lawyer in the category and verifies identity, and it requires professional liability insurance in places where local law calls for it (Google, checked 2026-10-04). Google's page on leads names a valid lead that arrives outside your business hours as one it will not credit. A voicemail left at 2 a.m. therefore costs the same as one left at noon (Google, checked 2026-10-04). Google also says "Missed calls may negatively affect your responsiveness," and responsiveness is one input to how these ads rank (Google, checked 2026-10-04).

Two Google Ads policies apply directly to this practice area. Google does not allow "promotion of bail bonds services that offer to act as surety in order to secure bail for a defendant," and its examples include bail bondsmen and bail bonds financing services (Google, checked 2026-10-04). Its personalized advertising policy treats "Commission of a crime" as a sensitive interest category, names criminal defense lawyers and bail bond services as examples, and sets no country limit for it (Google, checked 2026-10-04).

For ads that fall in that category, advertiser-curated audiences are off the table. That rules out Customer Match (contact lists you upload), your data segments (what Google used to call remarketing: people who already interacted with your site or business), audience expansion and lookalike segments (Google, checked 2026-10-04; Google, checked 2026-10-04). You can still target by location, and Google's predefined audiences, in-market and affinity segments among them, remain available.

What do criminal defense and DUI clicks cost?

Here is what Google Ads Keyword Planner estimated for the US in October 2026:

CPC means cost per click, and the last column is the span of bids the planner gives for appearing at the top of the page. Read all of it as national figures. A click in your own county will be priced differently, and no number in that table is a price your firm will actually be charged. At the planner's $61.61 average, $1,000 would buy about 16 DUI clicks. A missed call from any of them is an expensive miss. The break-even math, from click price to cost per signed case, is in PPC for lawyers.

How do you match ad hours to answering coverage?

Call reporting comes first. It places a Google forwarding number on your ads (a number Google owns that rings through to your line) and keeps a log entry for each call with its start time, its length and whether the call connected (Google, checked 2026-10-04). Setting up a Google forwarding number walks through it. Then go looking for the misses:

1. In Google Ads, click Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then Report editor, and under Ads and assets choose Call details. Each row has a start time, duration, caller area code and a status of missed or received (Google, checked 2026-10-04).
2. Download the last eight weeks and count missed calls by day and hour.
3. Lay that count over your coverage list. Misses inside covered hours are a staffing problem; misses outside them mean the ads ran with nobody there.
4. Fix the second kind in two places. Campaigns show ads "All day" by default, and the ad schedule limits them to the hours you pick or adjusts bids by hour (Google, checked 2026-10-04). The call asset, the call button on your ad, has its own schedule under Advanced options, and Google's own example is showing it "only when your business is answering phone calls" (Google, checked 2026-10-04).

One gap remains. The report lists only calls to Google forwarding numbers, so calls from your Business Profile, or from site visitors who did not arrive through an ad, need tracking numbers of their own.

What can you say when you reply to a review?

I am not a lawyer, and neither this section nor the next is legal advice. State bars each write their own rules. ABA Formal Opinion 496 (2021) says Model Rule 1.6(a) bars revealing information relating to a client's representation, and that a negative review alone does not meet the rule's self-defense exception (ABA, checked 2026-10-04). It also notes, citing Formal Opinion 480, that information relating to a representation stays confidential even when it is in the public record.

The opinion suggests not replying at all, inviting the person to talk privately, or a line such as "Professional obligations do not allow me to respond as I would wish." Its footnotes cite discipline cases, including a six-month suspension in Colorado in 2016 for a lawyer whose replies to online reviews revealed criminal charges against former clients. Your state's rules control.

Can you contact people after an arrest?

Before any outreach, read your own state's rules or ask your bar. Attorney advertising rules covers what ads may say and how New York, Florida and Texas differ.

ABA Model Rule 7.3 defines solicitation as a communication directed to a specific person the lawyer knows or reasonably should know needs legal services in a particular matter, offering to provide them. When a significant motive is the lawyer's pecuniary gain, the rule bars soliciting by live person-to-person contact. It makes exceptions for another lawyer, for someone with a prior business or professional relationship (or a family or close personal one) with the lawyer or firm, and for someone who uses that kind of legal service routinely for business. Paragraph (c) bars any solicitation involving coercion, duress or harassment, or aimed at someone who has told the lawyer they do not want to be solicited (ABA, checked 2026-10-04). Per the comments, live contact includes live phone calls but not chat rooms, text messages or other written communications that recipients may easily disregard. A website is not solicitation either, and neither is a communication produced automatically in response to electronic searches (ABA, checked 2026-10-04).

Letters are where states add their own rules. The Florida Bar's advertising handbook treats mail or email to someone the lawyer knows was arrested as a targeted advertisement under Rule 4-7.18: marked "advertisement" on the envelope and each enclosure (an email's subject line starts with the word), saying how the lawyer learned of the matter, and with nothing on the envelope that reveals the legal problem. The handbook adds that a criminal defense letter can meet the disclosure rule by saying the lawyer knows only the name, contact details, date of arrest and charge (The Florida Bar, checked 2026-10-04).

Which source actually brings retained clients?

Ad reports count calls and forms. Clients show up only in your intake records, so the source has to be captured there. Add one required intake field, "How did you find the firm?", with a fixed list of answers (Google ad, Local Services Ad, Business Profile, referral, other). Then fill in a sheet like this every month, one column per source.

Illustrative: I invented every figure in this sheet for a fictional solo DUI practice; none of them belongs to a client.

From those rows:

• Answer rate = row 3 ÷ row 2 = 38 ÷ 48 = 79 percent.
• Retained per answered call = row 5 ÷ row 3 = 7 ÷ 38 = 18 percent.
• Cost per retained client = row 1 ÷ row 5 = $6,000 ÷ 7 = $857.
• Fees per ad dollar = row 6 ÷ row 1 = $21,000 ÷ $6,000 = 3.5.

Now the misses. Ten ad calls went unanswered, 7 of them between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m. Suppose those 7 callers would have hired the firm at the answered-call rate (7 ÷ 38) and paid the average fee (row 6 ÷ row 5 = $3,000). They were then worth about 7 × 7 ÷ 38 × $3,000 = $3,868 in fees. That estimate rests on one assumption. Still, it is a figure to hold against a monthly quote for night coverage, and if the quote is higher, switch the ads and call asset off overnight. Local Services Ads take the same rows, with lead charges in row 1.

Questions for whoever runs your ads

• Which hours do the ads and the call asset run, and do they match my coverage list?
• How many ad calls were missed last month, and at what hours?
• Do any campaigns use client lists, site-visitor lists or lookalike segments?
• Does any ad or landing page offer to post or finance a bond?
• Who writes review replies, and has any reply mentioned a case?
• Will the monthly report show retained clients and fees by source, from my intake records?