Doubling Qualified Lead Volume for a Toronto Litigation and Appeals Lawyer

About Allan Rouben

Allan Rouben is a Toronto-based barrister and solicitor with over 30 years of experience in civil litigation, appeals, professional negligence, real estate litigation, and insurance cases. Allan runs a boutique solo practice built on personal attention: he screens every inquiry himself and gives each retained file the direct involvement of a senior lawyer. His clients come to him for complex, high-stakes matters, including appeals, a specialized area of law that few litigators are comfortable taking on.

Client Challenge

Allan wanted to reorient his practice around the work he most wanted to do: appeals and complex civil litigation. He came to 1UP in early 2022 with no active advertising, no performance tracking, a dated website, and a referral pipeline that had slowed. And because a senior lawyer’s time only makes sense on substantial matters, he did not just need more leads. He needed better ones.

Our Digital Marketing Strategy

We built a full-funnel program designed for a quality-over-volume practice, where every channel works to attract serious matters and filter out the rest. Our campaign strategy included:

Tracking & Analytics

We configured GA4 conversion tracking around the two actions that matter to a solo practice, contact form submissions and phone calls, and later added qualification fields to the contact form (including estimated claim size) so lead quality could be measured, not just lead count.

Google Ads Structure

We launched a targeted search account structured around Allan’s practice areas: Civil Litigation, Appeals (including judicial review), Real Estate Litigation, Professional Services, and Brand. Continuous search term audits across 10 negative keyword exclusion lists filtered out practice areas Allan does not serve, while ad copy emphasizing “complex, high-stakes matters” qualified prospects before the click.

SEO Content Overhaul

Following a site migration, we completed technical cleanup, on-page optimization of practice area pages, internal linking, and an ongoing blog program focused on appeals and civil litigation topics. Content became one of the site’s biggest traffic drivers, and organic search grew into its largest channel.

Conversion Rate Optimization

We ran ongoing experiments on contact form placement, CTA messaging, and site navigation to convert more of the growing traffic into qualified inquiries.

Results

+125%

increase in monthly leads

-71%

Google Ads cost per lead

+83%

increase in annual website users

Comparing digital marketing performance across the engagement, from early 2022 through 2025, we saw the following success:

Google Ads Efficiency

Cost per conversion dropped from $62.68 to $18.10 while conversion rate more than doubled, from 8.2% to 20.0%. Across the engagement, the account has generated more than 6,300 tracked conversions.

Lead Growth

Tracked leads have increased every full year of the engagement: 2,383 in 2023, 2,620 in 2024, and 2,809 in 2025, the practice’s best lead year on record. Monthly averages grew from 118 in 2022 to 266 in the first half of 2025, including a record 295-lead month.

Website Traffic

Annual website users grew 83%, from 29,929 in 2022 to 54,769 in 2024, and organic search became, and remains, the site’s largest traffic source.

Google Search Visibility

The site has earned top Google rankings across its core practice areas, including #1 positions for “judicial review lawyer toronto” and “criminal appeal lawyer toronto” and #2 for “appeal lawyer toronto”, along with featured snippets for litigation-related queries. Today it holds a page-one position for “judicial review lawyer” (average position 5.9, Google Search Console, June-August 2026).

Still growing, five years in

Now in its fifth year, the partnership keeps evolving with how clients find lawyers. As legal research shifts to AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini, the same content and authority strategy is powering Allan’s visibility in AI search, where new inquiries are already arriving.

Testimonial

The volume of calls and form submissions has improved steadily, and I have been very pleased with the responsiveness of their representatives. They have consistently delivered on time and as expected, and they care deeply about their client and the quality of the work being produced. I appreciate very much everything 1UP has done.

Allan Rouben, Barrister & Solicitor, Toronto