A family law firm builds its first Google Ads campaign, sets the location to its state and launches. The next morning a click comes in from a woman three states away. She's been reading about the firm's city because her sister lives there and she's thinking about moving. She typed "divorce lawyer" plus the city name, and Google decided she was close enough.
She isn't. Most states require one spouse to have lived there for a set period before a divorce can be filed, and she lives somewhere else. The firm paid for a click that had no way of becoming a case.
Google's settings know where people are and what places they're curious about. They know nothing about where a lawyer is licensed to practice. This chapter covers the location setting that causes that click, the five other settings to change before launch, and the one group of out-of-state searchers a firm should actually want.
"Presence or Interest" Reaches Anyone Curious About Your State. Your License Covers the Cases Filed There.
Choosing Nevada, or Ohio, or Georgia on the map is only half the decision. Google offers two readings of who counts as being there:
- Presence or interest, the one already selected. The ad can reach someone standing in the state, someone who commutes into it, and someone in another state entirely who has been reading about it.
- Presence. The ad reaches the first two and stops there: people physically in the state or there on a regular basis.
Google calls the broad default a best practice for Search, then names the case for the narrow one: an advertiser who wants the people in its locations, not the out-of-towners interested in them. A firm licensed in one state is that advertiser. For a law firm, that's most campaigns. A license is drawn around a state, and most matters are drawn around the client's own life, where they live, work and drive.
The switch is easy to miss. The choice between the two lives in a separate "Location options" area of the campaign's location settings, and a firm that never opens it launches on the default.
So the main campaigns run on Presence, aimed at the state or at the counties the firm actually serves. If the firm only takes cases near its offices, aim tighter. A Presence campaign covering the whole state can still bring in a call from four hours away that nobody at the firm can handle.
Your ads may also have to say where the firm is. Texas requires an ad to identify the responsible lawyer's primary practice location, and California's amended rule asks for the city, town or county of a real office. A Presence campaign and an ad that names your city tell the same story.
A Visitor Arrested in Your City Is Still Your Case. Give Out-of-State Searchers Their Own Campaign.
Here's the exception, and it's real. Some matters happen in your state to people who don't live there.
Our review sample from the example market, Las Vegas, has them. An Arkansas resident charged with a felony while visiting writes that he "only had to return for court one time." Someone settling a grandmother's estate from out of state found a firm online. A tourist with a DUI looked for a lawyer who spoke French. About 30 of the 3,886 reviews and posts we read mention being from out of state or visiting. Your city may have far fewer visitors than Las Vegas, or more. A college town has students whose parents call from home. A beach town has summer renters. A city on an interstate has truck crashes involving drivers from every state.
These people often search after they've gone home, which puts them outside a Presence campaign. The default would catch them, along with everyone merely curious about your city. The better answer is a separate campaign built just for them:
- Location: the whole United States, on Presence.
- Keywords: exact match searches that name your city or state, such as "las vegas dui lawyer" or "nevada probate attorney." The keyword does the geographic work the location setting can't.
- Practice areas: only the ones where the case stays in your state no matter where the client lives. A DUI or criminal charge is heard where it happened. A crash case can usually be brought where the crash happened. Probate of property in your state runs through your courts. Family law almost never qualifies.
- Its own budget and pages, so a slow week for visitor searches never borrows from the main campaigns, and the page tells an out-of-state client how the firm handles a case they can't attend in person.
This is our reading of how jurisdiction usually works, not legal advice. Check where your own practice areas are heard before you build it.
Search Partners and Display Spend Money Where Nobody Is Looking for a Lawyer.
Two more defaults decide where your ads appear, not who sees them.
Search partners. Every new Search campaign arrives with search partners already switched on, by Google's own description. These are other sites with their own search boxes and results pages, from site directories to YouTube search results. Some are useful. Many send clicks that are hard to judge, and in our experience bot-like traffic shows up there first. Turn search partners off at launch. After a few months of clean numbers from Google's own results pages, try partners as a controlled test, and keep them only if they produce consultations. Judge them the way Chapter 7 judged ad groups: by cost per qualified consultation, segmented by network, not by click price. Partner clicks are often cheap, and cheap is exactly how a bad source looks in its first month.
The Display Network. A Search campaign can also show image-style ads across websites when the Display Network box is checked. Someone reading a news article isn't looking for a lawyer at that moment. Make sure the box is unchecked. Image ads come later, in a campaign built for them, the subject of Chapter 11.
AI Max Writes Ads Your Bar Never Saw. It Starts Switched On.
This is the setting that matters most for a law firm, and it's on before you touch anything. Google switches AI Max on for every new Search campaign. It's a bundle of features that widen matching, swap landing pages and write new ad text.
The ad text part is called text customization. It drafts extra headlines and descriptions from the firm's own website and mixes them into your ads. Campaigns that used the older version, automatically created assets, have been moved into AI Max since September 2026.
For most businesses that's a control problem. For a law firm it's also a rules problem. Several states want to see a firm's ads, or want the firm to keep them:
- Nevada: each ad filed within 15 days of first use, with a fee per ad.
- Texas: filed with the Advertising Review Committee within 10 days after first use.
- Florida: filed at least 20 days before first use, unless the ad stays within the safe-harbor content the rule allows.
- Louisiana: filed before or at the same time as first use.
- New York: no filing, but the firm must approve its ads and keep copies.
A headline Google wrote from your fee page last Tuesday is an ad nobody at the firm approved, filed or saved. Whether each Google-written variation counts as a new ad under your state's rule is a question for your bar. We didn't find a ruling either way. It's simpler not to create the question.
So at the build, turn AI Max off, and confirm text customization went off along with it. Keep broad match off in the Isolation campaign too, since exact match is the whole point of it. AI Max comes back last, once everything else in the account is proven, and Chapter 13 covers when and how.
Without Auto-Tagging and Call Reporting, a Signed Case Can't Be Traced to the Click That Bought It.
The last two settings go the other way: on, not off.
Auto-tagging adds a click ID to the address of every page someone reaches from your ad. That ID is how Google ties the click to the calls, forms and consultations that follow, and it helps the signed cases Chapter 1 sends back match the click that started them. Google turns auto-tagging on by default for new accounts. Confirm it anyway, especially in an older account, and make sure any redirect on your site passes the ID through to the landing page.
Call reporting shows a Google forwarding number in your call assets and records each call from the ad. Chapter 1 set it up and explained the recording question. If it's off, the calls still ring, but Google never learns which searches produced them, and a law firm that gets most of its cases by phone ends up bidding blind.
A few smaller settings round out the list:
- Language. The old campaign language picker is gone from Search as of this September. Google now reads the language of the ad itself and matches it to searchers. A firm that serves Spanish-speaking clients needs Spanish ads in their own ad groups with Spanish pages, which Chapter 16 covers.
- Ad rotation. Leave it on "optimize," so Google favors the ads that perform.
- Budget. Start low enough to read real bid estimates and search terms before the money moves faster, as Chapter 3 laid out.
- Brand. Your firm's own name stays in its own campaign, as Chapter 2 described, not mixed into the case campaigns.
Six changes, then: location to Presence, search partners off, Display unchecked, AI Max off, text customization off, call reporting on. Plus a check that auto-tagging is on. None of it is hard. Skipped, it means a first month of clicks from people your license can't serve, and ads your bar never saw.
Performance Max Treats Divorce and Criminal Defense as Sensitive. Your Client List Stays Out.
Performance Max, the campaign that buys placements on YouTube, Maps, Gmail and Search at once, comes next. Google treats criminal defense and divorce as sensitive, and Chapter 10 explains what that takes away.
See every chapter on the guide home. Want the account set up right before the first click? See our Google Ads management.
