Winning a market where nobody writes honestly
An employment law practice in Munich, competing against directories and lead brokers. We made them the most useful thing on the German internet for people who had just been fired.
The problem
German legal SERPs are owned by directories and lead-generation brokers who sell the same enquiry to four firms. Kessler & Roe were paying €14,000 a month to buy back their own market.
Their existing content was written by a marketing agency that had clearly never read the Kündigungsschutzgesetz. It was fluent, confident, and wrong in places — a genuine liability for a law firm.
The founding partners were sceptical of content marketing for exactly this reason, and they were right to be.
What we did
- 1
Make the lawyers the authors
Every piece is written by a named partner, with their bar registration and case history on the page. In a YMYL category Google is explicit that this matters, and more importantly it is true.
- 2
Answer the question at the worst moment
Someone who received a termination letter this morning wants to know their deadline, not the firm's history. We built the content around the fourteen decisions a person actually faces, in order, with the statutory deadlines stated plainly.
- 3
Publish the calculator nobody else would
A severance estimator that gives a real range and tells you when you do not need a lawyer. It cost the firm some enquiries and earned 94 referring domains, because it is the only honest one in the market.
What it returned
The lead-broker spend went to zero. Consultations rose sevenfold and, per the partners, arrive better informed and easier to advise.
Two years is the honest timeline. There was almost nothing to show at month five, which is the part of this story most case studies leave out.
“We told them we would not publish anything we could not defend in front of a judge. Instead of arguing, they built the process around it. That is why it worked.”