Case Study · The Cleverly Law Firm
We Tested This on
Our Own Firm First.
A Google Ads account. A broken conversion tag. A second ad product nobody was watching. Every figure below comes from a live account over a single month.
A note on who this client is
The Cleverly Law Firm is a client of Drake River Group, the holding company that also owns Panther City AI.
We’re telling you that up front.
Presenting a connected business as an arm’s-length client success story might make for better marketing, but it also erodes trust the moment someone discovers the connection. That’s not how we want to operate.
The Cleverly Law Firm is where many of Panther City AI’s systems, processes, automations, and marketing strategies are first tested in a real operating business. We use the firm as a proving ground — implementing the same kinds of tools we recommend to clients, measuring what works, identifying what doesn’t, and improving the system before applying it elsewhere.
This is not a hypothetical case study. It is a live business with employees, clients, deadlines, marketing costs, revenue goals, and real-world consequences.
Our philosophy is simple. We should be willing to use our own playbook before asking you to use it.
The situation
A three-person estate planning firm in Parker County, Texas. Google Ads running at a stated budget of $30 per day. A website getting traffic. A calendar that wasn’t filling.
The owner believed he was spending roughly $900 a month on advertising.
What we found
The reported conversion rate was 82%. No advertising channel converts at 82%. The conversion tag had been installed to fire on every page view rather than on form submissions, so the account was counting visits as leads. Twenty-three conversions were reported for the month. Around four were real.
That bad data was setting the bids. The campaign used automated bidding, which raises bids on clicks it believes will convert. Having been told that 82% of clicks converted, the system bid accordingly. Two single clicks cost $57.24 and $51.30 — together, 46% of the entire week’s search spend.
The live campaign had no negative keywords. Twelve existed in the account, but all twelve were attached to a campaign that had been paused since 2024. When the new campaign was built, none of them carried across. It had been running completely open.
A second ad product was spending money nobody was watching. Local Services Ads was running in parallel at $100 per week with a $435 monthly maximum — invisible in the campaign reports the owner was reading. One lead had cost $71.95.
$1,335
Actual monthly exposure
$900
What the owner believed
82%
Reported conversion rate
What we changed
We added 65 negative keywords covering wrong practice areas, DIY and template shoppers, competitor names, and non-US search terminology.
We moved bidding from automated to manual with a $15 ceiling, so no single click can ever cost $57 again.
We switched Local Services Ads to manual bidding at $25 per lead — against a market rate of $37 for estate law and $81 for general law — with a $35 weekly cap.
We fixed the conversion tag, then verified it by loading the confirmation page and reading the actual network traffic rather than trusting the dashboard. This matters: the first diagnosis was wrong. The booking tag was working correctly all along, and only a live test proved it.
Total daily spend is now genuinely $30, for the first time.
What we found that had nothing to do with ads
While reviewing where enquiries actually came from, one number stood out.
A single one-hour presentation at a community centre produced seven people who asked to book a consultation. The same month’s paid search — 28 clicks and $280.69 — produced zero booked consultations.
We would not have seen that without fixing the measurement first. That is the entire point of the measurement.
What we don’t know yet
Whether any of this produces more signed clients. It has been one month.
Any consultant who shows you a case study without this section is selling you certainty they don’t have. What we can tell you is that the account is now honest, the waste is stopped, and the next decision will be made on real numbers instead of a tag that was counting page views.
Why this is the case study we chose to publish
We could have written something with bigger numbers and no disclosure. Most firms do.
We think the more useful thing to show a Fort Worth business owner is what an actual audit finds: a broken tag, a forgotten setting, a second account quietly spending money, and one channel nobody had measured that outperformed everything else.
If your account has been running for more than six months without someone looking at it properly, we would expect to find something similar. We usually do.
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