HubSpot for Lawyers: A Comprehensive Guide

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is an all-in-one customer relationship management (CRM) platform designed to help businesses attract, engage, and delight customers. It integrates marketing, sales, service, and content management tools, making it a powerful solution for organizations looking to streamline operations and enhance client interactions.

Who is HubSpot For?

HubSpot is used by businesses of all sizes across various industries, from startups to large enterprises. It is particularly beneficial for service-based businesses that rely on client relationships, making it a great fit for law firms that need structured client management, marketing automation, and reporting capabilities.

Why is HubSpot Good for Law Firms?

Law firms require efficient processes to handle client intake, marketing, and case management. HubSpot provides a flexible CRM system that allows firms to:

• Automate client intake and tracking.

• Manage marketing campaigns with built-in attribution tracking.

• Generate insightful reports to make data-driven decisions.

• Leverage an integrated CMS to manage their website with ease.

• Integrate with third-party legal tech solutions.

• Reduces the number of tools necessary to achieve all of the above. 

Intake: Automate Your Leads

A law firm’s intake process can be complex, requiring careful tracking and follow-up. HubSpot’s Lead objects, deals and pipeline features enable firms to:

• Track where leads are in the intake process.

• Identify where potential new clients (PNCs) fall out of the funnel.

• Automatically send appointment reminders.
• Immediately follow-up with prospects when they fill out a form. Even after business hours.
• Create sequences to educate your prospects about what to expect when working with your law firm. 

For Firms with an Intake Team

• Use lead queues to manage and assign leads efficiently - track which leads are qualified vs disqualified.

• Track why leads are being disqualified. 

• Utilize Playbooks—predefined scripts to guide intake staff through client conversations.

For Attorneys Handling Intake Themselves

• Maintain detailed notes within HubSpot, reducing the need to remember details manually.

• Streamline communication with automated follow-ups and reminders.

Marketing: Advanced Tracking & Nurturing

HubSpot’s marketing tools eliminate the need for third-party email marketing software and provide robust tracking capabilities:

• Attribution Tracking: Understand where visitors come from and what actions they take. Take advantage of multi-attribution modeling to understand the full path your prospects are taking before reaching out to your law firm. 

• Self-reported attribution tracking: Create automation around the sources that are generating demand for your law firm. Compare how those self-reporting metrics align (or not) to what your systems are telling you for a more complete understanding of your firm's marketing investments.

• Email Marketing: Manage email campaigns directly within HubSpot.

• Webinars & Podcasts: Run and manage online events seamlessly.

• Send specific events back to Google Ads: For law firms investing a significant amount of money into Google Ads, letting that system know what is amounting to qualified leads and clients can make it run even better, reducing your advertising costs.

Reporting: Data-Driven Decision Making

Combining marketing and intake data in a single system allows firms to gain the data and insights necessary for smart business decisions. HubSpot's reporting dashboards allow you to pull in custom reports that matter to each department. Track the number of new matters your firm signs up quarter over quarter, and how that compares year over year. 

Is your firm asking how your leads heard about your firm? Does your CRM allow you to effectively categorize that data in order to report on it?

HubSpot can helps lawyers: 

• Connect marketing investment with client acquisition.

• Reduce dependency on third-party analytics tools like GA4.

• Gain deep insights into conversion rates and lead sources.

• Understand the sales velocity of your leads.
• Gain insights about your funnel: Leads --> Intake Qualified Leads --> Attorney Qualified Leads --> Clients
• Understand which intake specialists and attorneys convert the most PNCs to clients.
• Avoid jumping out of your CRM or exporting data into sheets to create the graphs your firm needs to make wise business decisions. 
• Track referrals to your firm, as well as the prospects your law firm refers out to other firms. 

CMS: A Legal Website Solution Without Drama

HubSpot’s CMS give law firms the ability to quicky spin up a website without the need for code. It also doesn't come with the same security risks other CMS come with when you inevitably forget to update them. Consolidating your website technology into the same CRM platform allows you to spend more of your time being a lawyer, rather than IT. 

• A flexible, AI-powered website builder.

• Easy content management with no need for custom development.

• Integrated tools that work seamlessly with the HubSpot ecosystem.

Legal Technology Integrations

Integrating with other legal technology is where HubSpot shines! If your law firm is trying to integrate your CRM with other legal technology, chances are one already exists in the HubSpot Marketplace, something can be created using Zapier, or a custom integration is possible via the open API.

HubSpot integrates with various case and matter management systems, phone tracking tools, and client communication platforms

Case/Matter Management Systems

• Clio Manage: Native integration is available, but Zapier provides more control over data flow.

• Other integrations via Zapier or API connections.

Call Tracking

• CallRail: Native integration enhances tracking for phone calls, including conversational intelligence.

E-Signature Solutions

• Docusign, Pandadoc, or HubSpot Quotes: Various e-signing options based on firm needs.

Live Chat & After-Hours Answering Services

• Native HubSpot Chat: Avoid third-party chat tools and keep everything in one place.

• Smith.ai: Integrates smoothly with HubSpot for after-hours client inquiries.

• Client Chat Live: This chat does offer the ability to pass information through to HubSpot via their support.

How HubSpot Compares to Legal-Specific Technology

Advantages Over Legal CRMs

The problem with legal specific technology is that they are usually supported by smaller teams. Their operations just aren't as large as HubSpot's.

They all seem to demo well, and then shortly after you start using them you run into limitations that don't have a real solution. Even worse, update ideas may spend years on the "roadmap" prior to being released. 

Since HubSpot is built for business of all sizes, it offers:

• Flexibility: Adaptable to how your firm operates.

• Best-in-Class Automation: Workflows and triggers enable automated follow-ups and data processing.

• Supportive Partner Ecosystem: HubSpot provides extensive resources and support for partners.

• Robust Marketplace & API: Integrate with numerous legal tech solutions.

Law Firms Outgrowing their legal Specific CRM

The cost of a CRM isn't just the monthly price of the software. It also includes the Invesment to get onboarded to the system, the training it takes to understand the system, and having the infrastructure (read: processes and accountability chart) to make sure the technology is being used. 

The last thing you want to do as a business owner is invest all of that time and money into implementing a system that you'll outgrow in a few years of growth. 

Many law firms outgrow traditional legal CRMs such as:

• Clio Grow

• MyCase

• PracticePanther

• Captorra Intake

• LawRuler
• Smokeball
• and many more

Implementing HubSpot in a Law Firm

Implementing HubSpot in a law firm often seems like a huge undertaking for lawyers. This is where ElevAmp comes in. We specialize in HubSpot implementation and ongoing support and training so that law firms aren't left to figure out how to use this extremely powerful tool on their own.

To get support simply contact us and request a demo of how HubSpot can be built specifically for a law firm. 

For those interested in the DIY path, continue reading!

Understanding HubSpot’s Hubs for Lawyers

In order to begin to assess HubSpot for your law firm, you first need to understand the difference between the Hubs HubSpot offers:

Sales Hub Pro (Intake Management Hub)

Think of this as the intake management software piece of the CRM/Hubs. This hub unlocks features necessary to understand where your prospects are within your law firm's intake process. The Sales Hub gives you access to leads, deals, pipelines, and more. 

It allows lawyers to:

• Tracks leads and PNCs - Make sure no prospect falls through the cracks by leveraging Deal stages and automation. 

• Enables automation for intake workflows.

• Comes with sequences but not meant to automate marketing emails at scale.

Marketing Hub 

The Marketing Hub is what made HubSpot...HubSpot. This is another differentiating factor when it comes to comparing HubSpot with other legal specific CRMs. Nothing else comes close. This hub allows your marketing team to work in the very same system as your intake team to connect as many dots as possible with regards to your marketing investments. 

The tiers and features that are most applicable to lawyers are:

• Starter: Basic email marketing tools.

• Pro: Advanced website analytics, similar to GA4. Also has the ability to send custom events back to Google Ads for law firms running large investments into Google Ads. 

• Webinar tracking - connect Zoom webinars to HubSpot to understand who registered, attended, or missed your webinar. Build lists to nurture these contacts into prospects. 

Operations Hub

Think of this ass the data hub. This hub allows operationally minded folks custom scripts and other tools to keep the data within clean and actionable. It also unlocks some cool capabilities to pass data to other legal technology. 

• Starter tier sufficient for most firms.

• Needed for advanced data handling, such as syncing case management software or webhooks.

Content/CMS Hub

Using a third-party landing page builder? Tired of all the WordPress drama? Take a look at HubSpot Content/CMS Hub for a fresh perspective for your law firm.

• Provides an alternative to WordPress for law firm websites.

• Pro tier supports dynamic content based on user behavior.

• No more plugins, custom zaps or integrations to get your data from your website into your CRM. 

Service Hub

This is the least popular hub when it comes to HubSpot for lawyers. However, those firms who deal with a lot of incoming requests may benefit from having a system to support those requests.

• Rarely needed for law firms unless managing frequent client requests (e.g., Will/Trust updates).

Understanding HubSpot’s Tiers

Sales Hub

• Starter vs. Pro: Pro is recommended for access to automation.

• Paid seats required for features like:

  • Meeting scheduling (Calendly alternative).

  • Lead object access.

  • Workflow automation assignment to specific users.

Marketing Hub

• Database size matters—clean data is crucial. The Marketing Hub pricing is tiered based on the number of marketing contacts (read: people you want to market to) and emails being sent. Havign a clean database keeps your costs on this front down. 

• Brand Kits: Manage multiple brands within a single HubSpot instance. This is rare, however, we've seen it come into play with firms who have multiple brands they want to manage in a single CRM. 

Operations Hub

• Starter suffices for most firms needing simple data integrations.

Service Hub

• Generally not recommended unless handling numerous client service requests.

Content/CMS Hub

• Pro Tier: Ideal for firms wanting personalized user experiences based on visitor history.

The Complementary Tech Stack for Lawyers on HubSpot

• Aircall: Preferred VoIP solution. Aircall provides a friendly user interface for law firms to create phone numbers and assign them to users. The integration between Aircall and HubSpot is second to none. 

• CallRail: Essential for phone call tracking and analysis. Understand how your marketing channels are performing when someone picks up the phone and calls your law firm. Utilize their advanced call flows to route and tag phone calls to the appropriate team. No more time wasting your front desks time trying to qualify new leads and handle communications with existing clients. 

• Koalify: De-duplication tool to maintain clean CRM data. This extremely handy tool allows you to create custom matching parameters to make sure your database doesn't get polluted with duplicate entries. Extremely necessary when you've integrated so many systems together, and when multiple people are creating contacts within your database. 

• Zoom: Preferred for webinars and meetings. This tool gives you ample features to understand the attendance to your marketing webinars and intake meetings/consultations. 

• Fathom.video: AI notetaking to the next level. Automatically syncs meeting recordings, transcriptions, notes, and automated to-dos into your Zoom meeting within HubSpot. 

• Zapier: Enables smooth data flow between HubSpot and case management systems.

• Smith.ai: Highly compatible for live chat and answering services. They understand the technology law firms use and how to leverage that for a better outsourced answering service. 

Conclusion

HubSpot is an excellent choice for law firms looking for a powerful, flexible, and scalable CRM. Unlike many legal-specific platforms that law firms outgrow, HubSpot offers robust automation, seamless integrations, and a partner ecosystem that supports continued growth. By strategically implementing HubSpot’s hubs and integrations, law firms can streamline intake, enhance marketing efforts, and make data-driven decisions that drive success.

If you're interested in implementing HubSpot for your law firm, consult with a HubSpot partner specializing in legal technology to ensure a seamless transition tailored to your firm's needs.