See each consultation request the day it lands, whoever sends it.
Built for a criminal defense practice, whoever runs the marketing. TruLata reads your Google accounts, your Business Profile and the consultation requests from your own site's forms, runs the watching and the drafting on a schedule while you are in court, and leaves approvals and compliance review of what goes out with the firm.
Is this built for a criminal defense practice?
Yes. It is built for a criminal defense practice, a solo defense attorney or a firm of several, that takes DUI, drug, theft and other state and federal matters in the courts where its attorneys appear, and a practice with a second office fits the same way. The marketing often falls to an attorney once the morning docket is done, the client meetings are over and the discovery has been read, and a firm with an office manager or a marketer gets the same screen. Search, ads, content and the counting run on a schedule whether or not anyone had time this week, every consultation request is counted from your own site, and one screen shows what happened and what it cost.
A defense consultation is asked for in a hurry and in private. Someone has been charged, a first court date is set, and the request can come from the person charged or from a parent, a spouse or a friend asking on their behalf, by phone or through the form on your site, at whatever hour the news arrived. They search the charge and the county, read your reviews and the attorney pages to see who will actually stand next to them, and reach out to the practice that looks like it will call back. The form handler emails your team the moment a request lands, so a request sent at night is waiting at the top of the Leads view in the morning.
A request that sits unanswered is a request another practice can answer first. That is why the screen leads with the requests your own forms took, newest first, and asks one question when you are done with each one: what did it become. The screen counts requests, consultations and signed matters next to what the marketing cost, and approvals and compliance review of what the firm publishes stay with the firm.
Who sends the consultation request
The person charged
- Searches the charge and the county
- Reads the reviews and the attorney pages
Someone on their behalf
- A parent, a spouse or a friend
- Asks by phone or through the form, at whatever hour the news arrived
Either way
- Emailed to your team the moment it lands
- Waiting at the top of the Leads view in the morning
A request that sits unanswered is a request another practice can answer first.
What does the screen show a criminal defense firm?
It leads with the consultation requests. When someone fills in the form on your site, the form handler appends the row to a lead sheet server-side and emails your team, whether or not a tracking tag fired. The Leads view reads that sheet newest first, and each row carries what your form recorded: the name, the contact details, the kind of matter, the county, whether the request is for the sender or for someone else where the form asks, and the message. Keep the form to scheduling details: the screen needs the request, not the facts. Set what each request became from the screen, contacted, quoted, won or lost, or not a lead with the reason, and it stays on the row; for a firm, won means a signed matter, nothing else. The leads page covers the ledger and the daily watch behind it.
Google Ads gives spend, conversions and cost per conversion by campaign, so a DUI campaign and a drug charge campaign are judged apart. Search Console gives the queries you appeared for, impressions, clicks and average position, two to three days behind; for a defense practice those queries are the charge and the county, the criminal defense attorney near me search, record sealing questions and your attorneys' names, and the positions are Search Console's own averages, not a rank tracker. GA4 gives sessions, sources, which pages were read, the charge pages, the attorney pages, the page on what happens at a first appearance, and the key events you count as a request, hours behind intraday. Google Business Profile gives your reviews, your rating and your listing performance through a manager invitation you can revoke; what the firm does with reviews, and whether and how it replies, stays with the firm.
Where intake runs on a CRM with an API, it connects during setup and the intake pipeline appears live, stage by stage, with a coming-soon card rather than a number until the data is trustworthy. Your case management system stays in your own systems today; a source with an API can be connected during setup. Card data is never read. Your inbox and calendar stay outside the screen today and connect during setup where your engagement calls for them. A phone call counts as a lead where your CRM records it, and a call-tracking platform you already run connects during setup like any other source with an API, which matters to a practice that takes its first contact by phone as well as by form.
The screen needs the request, not the facts.
What runs while I am in court, and what waits for the firm?
Your Google Ads account is watched every morning. At 7:05 Eastern the ads change watch reads the account's change history and its user list, sets our own writes and routine churn aside, and raises a material change made by anyone else the same morning, including the recommendations Google applies on its own. Where we manage your search campaigns on all tiers, a budget or bid change is made within the limits set for your engagement and lands in the account's own change history, so the DUI campaign and the drug charge campaign each keep the budget you set for them. A new address given access to the account reaches your team the next morning.
On Launch, Growth and Command, the content engine researches and drafts on your cadence the articles someone reads the night before calling a lawyer: what happens at a first appearance, how bond works, what to bring to a first meeting with a defense attorney, and how record sealing works. Each topic passes a demand gate on real search volume and what already occupies the result page, the research cites current sources, the dedupe reads the titles already published on your site, and each piece is filed as a Google Doc in your Drive with a featured image. Auto-publish is a per-client setting and approval is optional. Approvals and compliance review stay with the firm: with auto-publish off, each piece waits as a draft until the firm approves it.
On Command, the outbound engine sources prospects weekly to the target profile set with you, which for a defense practice can be the attorneys who refer criminal matters out: family law, personal injury and estate practices that do not take them. It finds a deliverable address or routes the prospect to a contact-form path and drafts into a review-first queue; a person releases them, or the queue releases on the schedule set for the engagement, and every send is logged with the draft, the mailbox and the time. Replies are classified, and not-interested and bounced addresses are suppressed.
Every day at 7:20 Eastern, on an instance whose forms feed the sheet, the lead watch runs five checks across the sheet, GA4 and Ads, so a dead tag, a blind ad account or a consultation form that stopped submitting is flagged the next day rather than at the end of the quarter. Every night at 12:01 Central a fallback snapshot is baked, and a failed pull leaves the previous page up. What stays with a person is the judgement: the limits on spend, and anything that answers a prospective client or their family. From the screen you can set a lead outcome, request a website change, and request a content, keyword, category or targeting change; each request goes to the team as a logged ticket, and the engine's writes to your ad accounts and your site go through their APIs and land in each account's own change history, so the firm has a record of every change to review.
Every change to the ad account while you are in court
- Our change, within the limits set for your engagement
- A recommendation Google applies on its own
- A setting or a new user added under another login
- Our own writes, marked as ours
- Routine churn, set aside
- Material changes, raised the same morning
Can I see it before I talk to anyone?
Yes, with your name and email in front of it. The demo is the same engine code every client runs, pointed at a fictional company called Meridian so it can be public. Every number is invented, and the screen says so. Open the Leads view, the Google Ads view and the search view and you are looking at the screen a criminal defense practice gets, with your sources in place of Meridian's.
Then put your own practice in the seat. You are in court in the mornings, your phone takes the calls that cannot wait, and whoever runs the marketing does it after the docket. That is the practice this page, the setup and the tiers are written for, and what changes is the evening work: the scheduled work runs whether anyone had time, every consultation request is counted from your own forms, and one screen shows what happened and what it cost. Part of it runs on your own numbers during setup: the first pull, the answer-engine baseline and the ads watch run on your accounts in the first two weeks, before most of the engines are switched on. The broader view for every practice area is on the law firms page.
One thing about the search view is worth knowing before you open it. Ranking is not earning, so the view puts the requests your own forms took beside the queries and positions that earned them. A position there is Search Console's average for that query, not a rank tracker's guess. A page that climbed for a county DUI search and a page that brought in a signed matter are told apart on the same screen.
Which tier fits a criminal defense practice?
Starter includes the TruLata dashboard, full analytics, leads, search visibility, the AI visibility program, managed Google Ads search, the assistant and briefings and support tickets. The content engine is on Launch, Growth and Command. Meta ads are on Growth and Command. The outbound engine, for a practice that wants referral relationships with attorneys in other practice areas, is on Command. Command adds the outbound engine, ad creatives and your full marketing team, always on.
Seats are three on Starter, three on Launch, ten on Growth and unlimited on Command, so each attorney and the person who answers the phone can sign in with a seat of their own, and a seat you remove is revoked within 30 seconds. Starter is $400 a month, Launch $650, Growth $1,200, and Command is scoped per engagement. Every tier is month to month with nothing metered, and committing annually takes twenty to twenty-five percent off the monthly. The pricing page carries the same figures as every other page.
Want it run for you?
You have two doors. Managed TruLata is our team running the program on your accounts, and every change we make lands in your account's own change history, which the same 7:05 Eastern watch reads and sorts as ours. Approvals and compliance review stay with the firm on that door too: a content piece with auto-publish off waits as a draft until the firm approves it. Local services marketing is TruLata's agency work for the same buyer, search and paid search with a daily account watch among it.
What a defense firm's screen reads, and how fresh it is.
| What | Where it comes from | How fresh |
|---|---|---|
| Consultation requests | Your site's forms, appended to a lead sheet server-side and emailed to your team; the Leads view reads it newest first | Live, the moment the form is submitted |
| Spend, conversions, cost per conversion | Google Ads, by campaign | Intraday lags hours; change history read daily at 7:05am ET |
| Sessions, sources, pages, key events | Google Analytics 4 | Hours behind intraday |
| Queries, impressions, clicks, average position | Search Console; its own average positions, not a rank tracker | 2 to 3 days behind |
| Reviews, rating, listing performance | Google Business Profile, with our Google account as a manager you can revoke | Refreshed on its own schedule, separate from the Ads and GA4 lag |
| Intake pipeline, and calls your CRM records as leads | Your CRM, where intake runs on one with an API | Live; a coming-soon card until the data is trustworthy |
| The page itself | Snapshot on open, live pull behind it when older than 5 minutes, nightly bake at 12:01am CT | Header stamp says when the data was pulled |
On Monday morning, the consultation requests sent over the weekend are live on the screen, newest first, the Google Ads numbers still run hours behind, and Search Console runs two to three days behind. The header stamp says when each pull ran, the Refresh button forces a new one and never shows an error, and a failed pull leaves the previous page up rather than a blank one.
Questions, answered.
Can I tell a family member's request from the client's own?
Where your form asks whether the request is for the sender or for someone else, the answer is written to the lead sheet with the rest of the submission and read on the row, beside the kind of matter, the county and the message. You set what the request became on the same row, whoever sent it.
Do phone calls count as leads?
A phone call counts when your CRM records it as a lead, and a call-tracking platform you already run connects during setup like any other source with an API. The requests the screen counts are submissions from your own site's forms, written to a sheet server-side as they land and read newest first.
Who approves what goes out under the firm's name?
The firm does. Approvals and compliance review stay with the firm. Auto-publish is a per-client setting and approval is optional; with auto-publish off, each content piece waits as a draft, filed as a Google Doc in your Drive, until someone at the firm approves it. On Command, prospect emails leave from a review-first queue; a person releases them, or the queue releases on the schedule set for the engagement, and every send is logged with the draft, the mailbox and the time.
What does the screen count for a defense practice?
People and marketing spend: consultation requests, consultations, signed matters and what each request became, and Google Ads spend and cost per conversion by campaign. The sources it reads are your site's forms, your Google accounts, your Business Profile and your CRM where intake runs on one. Your case management system stays in your own systems today; a source with an API can be connected during setup.
Will anyone change our ad budget without us knowing?
A budget or bid change is made within the limits set for your engagement, and every change in the account lands in Google's own change history, which the watch reads at 7:05 Eastern every morning and sorts by who made it. Recommendations Google applies on its own are raised the same morning. Who has access to the account is read directly every day, because change events do not log it.
What does it cost for a criminal defense practice?
Starter is $400 a month, Launch $650, Growth $1,200, and Command is scoped per engagement. Seats are three on Starter, three on Launch, ten on Growth and unlimited on Command. Every tier is month to month with nothing metered, and a managed strategy retainer sits on top of any tier, scoped with you rather than priced on this site; <a href="/product/managed">the managed page</a> says what our team takes on.
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The demo is the real product on a fictional company, with your name and email in front of it. Pricing is three published tiers.
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- Refreshed when you open itLive data on page load, never a monthly PDF
- Counted from your own formsLeads recorded server-side, compared daily with Ads and GA4
- Seen in AI answersHow often ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok name you, measured
- Every send loggedProspect emails leave from a review-first queue, and every send is logged.