Methodology

How the Legal Brand Demand Index is measured, and the rules that keep it honest.

What we measure

Brand demand share is the number of branded searches a firm's name attracts each month — the exact name, common misspellings, principal attorneys, and nicknames — as a share of all injury-related search demand in the same television market (Nielsen DMA). Branded demand is the demand that cannot be bid on or ranked for; it belongs to whoever built the brand.

How it is measured

Search volumes come from Google Ads search volume data, scoped to each market. Google groups close spelling variants and reports them at identical volume and CPC; we collapse those groups so no name is counted twice, and apply the same deduplication to the generic demand basket. Volumes arrive as Keyword Planner buckets, so every figure is a band, not a decimal — disagreements inside roughly 15% are tool noise, and we say so.

Territory status

A DMA is a fortress when its leader holds 40% or more of all demand; contested when two or more measured firms hold meaningful share; led when one firm leads below the fortress line; and unclaimed when no measured firm holds at least 10% of demand and 200 branded searches per month.

The measurability floor

Firms below 100 branded searches per month are measured but not ranked: below that line we cannot distinguish a brand from noise, and displaying a number inside its own error bars would be false precision. "We couldn't measure you yet" is a possible outcome of any scan — that is precisely what makes every published number worth something.

Inclusion and integrity

Inclusion can be purchased; results cannot. A firm may pay to be measured — that is an audit fee, and the measurement says what the data says. Market leaders in every measured DMA are indexed editorially, free, whether or not they are ever customers: a ledger missing the giants would be false, and a false ledger is worth nothing to anyone, including the firms on it.

Ownership disclosure

BrandTerritory shares ownership with Mass Tort Ad Agency, AdaptLegal, and PlatinumProfile.ai. PlatinumProfile clients receive index inclusion as a paid component of their plans. Measurement methodology is identical for all firms; no commercial relationship affects any score.

Use of rankings by law firms

BrandTerritory publishes comparative market data. Firms who republish their position in their own advertising are responsible for compliance with their state bar's rules on comparative claims; we recommend citing the index by name, with date, and linking the market page.

Known limits

DMA-level search volume from any third-party tool is modeled, not measured. Multi-state advertisers pick up brand search that market-scoped tools may attribute to local strength. Markets flagged thin coverage track fewer than three firms and will understate competition until the local field is added. And share of search is one surface of coverage — the winner of a market is ultimately decided by cost per signed case, not by any single share number.