Estate planning is a marketing discipline of its own. The need is nearly universal, the urgency is low, the decision is emotional as well as legal, and the buyer often does not act until their seventies. You win by meeting people the moment they finally decide to plan, and by being the firm that makes a hard, deferred task feel safe and simple.
Only about a third of US adults have a will, and the share who have a living will or health-care directive is nearly identical. The barrier is almost never that people do not understand they need a plan: it is procrastination, the perception that planning is only for the wealthy, and not knowing who to trust. The demand exists. It just sits unconverted for years.
That is why a generic legal-marketing approach underperforms for estate planning. The intent builds slowly, the trigger is often a life event (a new child, a diagnosis, an aging parent, a death in the family), and the trust bar is high because you are asking someone to plan for their own death and their family’s future. We build around those exact moments, and every claim on this page is backed by a real source, listed at the bottom.
The case for doing this differently is not our opinion. It is what the data says, every figure sourced below.
Two in three adults have no will at all.
Pew Research Center found that only about 32% of US adults have created a will that says what to do with their assets, and a nearly identical 31% have a living will or advance health-care directive. The defining feature of this market is not lack of awareness. It is the gap between knowing you should plan and finally doing it.
For an estate-planning firm, that gap is the opportunity. The people you are marketing to already agree they need what you sell. The job is not to convince them estate planning matters: it is to be the firm in front of them when they finally decide to act, with a first step that feels simple instead of daunting. We build the content, search presence, and intake to catch that moment, because demand that sits unconverted for years converts for whoever makes it easy.
Only about a third of adults have a will. The demand is there; it just sits unconverted.
The plan most people know they need and never make
Most people do not plan until their seventies.
Will ownership climbs steeply with age. In Pew’s data, two-thirds of adults in their seventies have a will, versus fewer than half of those in their sixties and roughly a third or fewer of adults under sixty. Gallup’s polling shows the same shape: 76% of adults 65 and older have a will, against 53% of those 50 to 64 and 36% of those 30 to 49.
This tells you who to reach and how. The core buyer skews older, which shapes everything from the channels that reach them to the reassurance the page has to provide. At the same time, the under-60 group is the largest pool of unconverted demand and the one most often triggered by a life event. We build for both: a presence that an older buyer trusts on sight, and content that catches a younger family the moment a new child, a diagnosis, or a parent’s decline finally moves them to act.
The decision keeps getting pushed back
Half of families have not had the conversation.
A quiet driver of estate-planning demand is the adult child planning for a parent. Pew found that among adults under 65 with a living parent age 65 or older, only half (50%) say that parent has discussed their medical-care wishes if they cannot decide for themselves, and 51% say the parent has discussed what to do with their belongings. In half of these families, the conversation simply has not happened.
That is a large, motivated, and largely unaddressed audience: people searching on behalf of someone else, often after a health scare. The searches look different (“how to help a parent set up a will,” “power of attorney for elderly parent”) and the emotional stakes are high. We build content and answer-engine presence for the family researcher, not just the client signing the documents, because the adult child is frequently the one who finds the firm and books the first meeting.
Half of adult children say a parent has not discussed their medical-care wishes. That is the opening.
The conversation that has not happened yet
When they finally call, most firms never pick up.
The estate-planning prospect waited years to act. Lose that moment and they go right back to putting it off. Yet Clio’s secret-shopper test of 500 US firms found only 40% answered the phone and only 33% replied to an email, both down from 2019. Martindale-Avvo found 80% of legal consumers will move on to another attorney if they do not hear back within 48 hours.
For a practice where the prospect is ambivalent by nature, a missed call is not a delay: it is a lost plan, permanently. We pair the demand we generate with fast, tracked intake, because firms that use proper intake tooling see roughly 50% more potential clients and revenue. The lead you already earned, after years of that person deferring, is the cheapest plan you will ever sign.
The window most firms miss
And 80% of legal consumers move on if they do not hear back within 48 hours.
Source: Clio 2024 Legal Trends ReportReviews and the AI answer decide who they trust.
Estate planning is bought on trust, and trust is now read online. In Martindale-Avvo’s data, nearly 9 in 10 consumers weigh online reviews when choosing an attorney, and nearly all weigh online ratings and reviews when they decide. When they read reviews, the star rating (54.1%) and the number of reviews (53.7%) matter most, with recency close behind (40.1%). About 70% of legal consumers research online before they ever reach out, often with a location-plus-practice-area search such as “estate planning attorney near me.”
Search itself is changing on top of that. Pew found about 18% of Google searches now return an AI summary, and when one appears people click a traditional result far less often: 8% of the time versus 15% with no summary. Being on page one is no longer enough; you have to be the firm the AI names and the reviews vouch for. That is the work: schema, entity clarity, strong local signals, a steady ethical review engine, and pages built to be quoted, not just ranked.
The reputation signals that earn the trust
Beat the “only for the wealthy” reflex, and stay inside the rules.
Two things quietly suppress estate-planning demand. The first is perception: planning is widely seen as something only the rich need, which keeps middle-income families on the sidelines even when they have a home, kids, and retirement accounts to protect. Income tracks closely with whether a plan exists, but the need does not, so the marketing job is to reframe estate planning as ordinary and accessible, not as a service for large estates. The right content meets each life stage (new parents, homeowners, blended families, business owners, retirees) where it lives.
The second is compliance. Legal advertising is regulated in ways most marketers never touch: state bar rules govern testimonials and disclaimers, ban misleading “specialist” or “expert” claims where you are not certified, and prohibit anything that promises a specific outcome, with rules that differ by jurisdiction and penalties that land on the firm. We build campaigns to comply by design, so you never have to choose between a program that performs and one that keeps your license clean.
As people age … they face the reality that having an estate plan is important.
Sally Hurme, Elder Law Attorney, AARP
A health care power of attorney is more important for your personal well being than a will.
Sally Hurme, Elder Law Attorney, AARP
Our assessment of legal services in the United States shows that law firms are remarkably out of sync with the needs of today’s clients.
Jack Newton, CEO and Co-founder, Clio
Ready to turn intent into signed plans?
Tell us your service areas, the clients you want (young families, business owners, high-net-worth, elder-law), and where the pipeline is leaking, and we’ll show you exactly where the demand is and how we’d win it. Senior people, transparent pricing, and reporting on signed matters instead of vanity traffic.
Frequently asked
What does an estate-planning law firm marketing agency do?
Why is estate planning hard to market if everyone needs it?
Who is the typical estate-planning client and how do you reach them?
How fast do we need to respond to a new estate-planning inquiry?
Will my firm show up in AI search and “near me” results?
How do you handle bar advertising rules?
Every figure on this page comes from a primary platform, an independent study, or a named industry source. No competing-agency stats, no made-up numbers.
- Pew Research Center: Experiences With Estate Planning and Discussing End-of-Life Preferences (2025)
- Pew Research Center: How Americans Are Thinking About Aging (full report PDF, 2025)
- Gallup: How Many Americans Have a Will? (2021)
- AARP: Survey on Americans Who Lack a Will or Estate Plan (Sally Hurme)
- Clio 2024 Legal Trends Report (response rates, intake)
- Clio: Law Firms Struggle to Respond to Client Inquiries (Legal Trends Report)
- Martindale-Avvo: Understanding the Legal Consumer 2023
- Pew Research Center: clicks when an AI summary appears (2025)
