The legal profession has never been shy about advertising, not since the Supreme Court decided in 1977 that attorneys had a First Amendment right to tell people they existed. What has changed is where the ads appear and who builds them.

ADSQUIRE, a digital advertising agency in Philadelphia that focuses exclusively on pay-per-click campaigns for law firms, was named PPC Agency of the Year at the Search Engine Land Awards, the trade publication announced on Saturday. The honor, now in its 12th year, recognized the agency's work on a campaign that it said delivered a return on investment of approximately 8,000 percent in a single month on $4,000 in advertising spending.

(The phrase "approximately 8,000 percent" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, but set that aside.)

Anthony Higman, the chief executive of ADSQUIRE, said in a statement that the agency was built around "a straightforward idea: law firms deserve advertising management that understands their business." The agency specializes in Google Ads and Google Local Services Ads, the platforms through which people searching for, say, a personal injury lawyer in Bucks County are matched with attorneys willing to pay for the introduction.

Legal advertising has become one of the more expensive categories in paid search, a distinction it shares with insurance, home services and addiction treatment. The competition for clicks has made the field a natural home for specialist agencies, much as the pharmaceutical industry spawned its own agency ecosystem in the 1990s.

ADSQUIRE, which works only with law firms, argues that its focus allows it to optimize campaigns around signed cases rather than raw traffic — a distinction that matters to attorneys who measure success in retainers, not impressions.

The award puts the agency in a category previously occupied by larger, more generalist shops. Whether the trophy leads to more law firm clients remains, as lawyers like to say, to be determined.

Original story published in Adweek: "ADSQUIRE Named 2026 PPC Agency of the Year by Search Engine Land"