Making a Case for Elite Legal PPC
Pareto Legal came to us through a referral with a highly specific brief: hire a senior Paid Media leader to own the Paid Media function at one of the fastest-growing legal paid performance marketing agencies in the US.
They didn’t just need an exceptional PPC Director: they needed someone with deep legal sector expertise, experience managing millions in ad spend, leading teams, and optimising accounts hands-on.
Most importantly, they needed someone who understood the full legal marketing funnel: intake, lead quality, retained cases, and revenue – not just CPL and CPA. It was a rare combination, and exactly the kind of search we love.
It was an incredibly specific brief. Exactly what we have done many times over for our clients in the legal space.
- Legal
The Client
- Legal
Pareto Legal is a fast-growing, fiercely independent US performance marketing agency with a deep focus on one highly competitive vertical: legal.
The Challenge
Pareto didn’t just need an experienced PPC Director. They needed a true player-coach to release the founder from the day-to-day.
This needed to be someone senior enough to set the strategy, lead a fast-growing team and be the right arm to the CEO. All of this, whilst still being technical enough to get into the weeds of accounts.
Legal experience was non-negotiable. Not someone who had managed a handful of law firm accounts, but someone with genuine plaintiff-side expertise across areas such as personal injury, criminal defence, mass torts, medical malpractice and workers’ compensation.
Crucially, they needed to understand what happens beyond the ad platform. They needed to live and breathe intake, be able to connect lead quality, qualification, lead conversion and retained cases to the true commercial performance of a campaign.
After all, a great CPL means little if those leads don’t become profitable cases.
Finally, they needed the commercial confidence to challenge extremely senior, successful lawyers and law firm owners, and communicate performance in terms of cases, revenue and ROI – not just clicks, leads and CPA.
That combination narrowed the market considerably.
How We Got to Work
We mapped the market around senior Paid Media leaders who had spent a meaningful part of their careers inside legal marketing and law firm acquisition.
The assessment went far beyond platform experience.
- Could they diagnose why a campaign generating leads at an apparently strong CPL wasn’t producing enough retained cases?
- Could they interrogate what was happening within intake?
- Could they connect advertising spend to case acquisition and revenue?
- Could they confidently explain those findings to a senior lawyer?
And could they simultaneously lead a team, build systems and remain close enough to the work to challenge performance themselves?
This wasn’t about presenting Pareto with a pile of PPC Directors who could probably do the job.
It was about identifying the small number of people who genuinely understood the entire journey from ad click to signed case.
We interviewed 9 people for the role, from which we whittled it down to 2 solid candidates. Just 2.
The Result
After an incredibly targeted search, we narrowed the field to two elite legal Paid Media specialists, both with the sector expertise, technical depth and senior client skills the brief demanded.
Ultimately, Cathy Trowbridge shone through.
Cathy brought exactly the combination we had been searching for: deep legal marketing experience, serious paid media expertise and, crucially, the commercial understanding to look beyond platform metrics and connect marketing performance with intake, signed cases and genuine ROI.
She also had the presence and communication skills to operate comfortably with senior law firm stakeholders while providing the leadership Pareto needed internally.
Nine months into the role, Cathy is already excelling, with Pareto Legal founder Bo Royal extremely impressed by the impact she’s making on the business.
For such a specialist search, this is the secret: not finding lots of people who could potentially do the job, but narrowing an incredibly small market down to two exceptional options and ultimately finding the person who could genuinely move the business forward.
Facing a similar hiring challenge?
We specialise in recruitment across SEO & AEO, Paid Media, Digital PR, Growth Marketing, eCommerce and SaaS Marketing.
Results That Speak For Themselves
A selection of successful hires and long-term partnerships across the digital marketing industry.
- Agencies
From the UK to the Gold Coast
Edge Marketing is an Australian marketing agency on the Gold Coast.
Co-founder Rohan Dwyer was looking for a Head of SEO who could take ownership of the agency’s SEO department, shape its SEO proposition and drive the service line forward.
- Agencies
Seven Years. 17 Hires. One Future MD.
Reboot is an independent digital marketing agency specialising in Search, Digital PR and Paid Media.
Our relationship with the agency developed over seven years, meaning we were able to support the business as its hiring requirements evolved.
That included finding specialist practitioners across SEO and Paid Media, commercial Growth hires and, eventually, senior leaders capable of taking significant responsibility for the direction and operation of the agency.
As the business grew, the hires became increasingly strategic.
Two searches in particular would ultimately help shape Reboot’s senior leadership team: Director of Growth and Director of Operations.
- Agencies
Putting a Leader Behind Mediavision’s Growth
Mediavision is an established independent digital agency, working with ambitious brands across Search and digital performance.
Having built a successful agency and strong client base over more than a decade, the business was ready to put greater senior ownership around growth.
Until this point, responsibility for winning new business and growing the agency had been shared across the senior team. The next stage required someone who could take proper ownership of it.
This wasn’t simply about hiring a salesperson.
Mediavision wanted someone who could work across the entire agency, bringing together sales, new business, marketing, positioning and brand visibility into a coherent growth strategy.
- eCommerce
Finding an SEO Who Speaks Sneaker
The Sole Supplier is one of the UK’s leading footwear and streetwear platforms, helping sneaker fans discover the latest releases, news and trends from some of the biggest brands in the world.
The business has grown significantly, building a highly engaged audience alongside a team with a genuine passion for the space.
That culture was particularly important to them.
This isn’t a business where people simply happen to work in footwear and streetwear. The team genuinely lives and breathes the product outside of work, and preserving that as the company grows is a major priority.
SEO was already an important acquisition channel and The Sole Supplier had an external agency supporting its activity. The next step was to bring somebody senior enough in-house to take proper ownership of the channel.
- eCommerce
Five Years. One Trusted Partner.
Founded in 1810, Heal’s is one of Britain’s most iconic furniture and interior design brands. For the past five years, we’ve partnered with Head of eCommerce Mark Hammond, supporting the growth of his digital team through specialist hires across eCommerce, performance marketing and design.
- Agencies
Taking the Weight Off the Founder
Tacomi is a specialist Search agency with deep expertise across SEO, technical SEO and the evolving AEO landscape.
We had already been working with founder Chad Conlon and the team when they approached us about one of the most important hires they were about to make to date.
The agency was already operating at a very high technical level, but Chad remained heavily involved in the day-to-day. The next stage of growth required someone senior enough to take genuine ownership from him, without compromising the quality of work that had helped Tacomi build its reputation.
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