Law firm marketing Cost per signed case
Guide · Legal marketing economics
Forget cost per lead.What does a signedcase cost?
Two firms buy the same leads at the same price in the same market. One is paying four times as much per signed case as the other. Nothing in a cost-per-lead report can tell you which one you are.
The argument in one line. Cost per lead measures what you bought. Cost per signed case measures what you got. Only the second one is connected to whether the firm makes money.
Every budget conversation in legal marketing goes wrong at the same point: someone compares two lead prices and picks the lower one. This guide is the arithmetic for doing it properly, including why the sum is different for contingency, hourly and flat-fee practices.
Same market, same lead price
A $400 lead is cheapor ruinous
Both firms below spend $40,000 on 100 personal injury leads at $400 each. The only difference is what happens after the lead arrives.
Firm A
- Leads bought
- 100
- Cost per lead
- $400
- Reach a consultation
- 40%
- Consults that sign
- 30%
- Signed cases
- 12
- Cost per signed case
- $3,333
Firm B
- Leads bought
- 100
- Cost per lead
- $400
- Reach a consultation
- 20%
- Consults that sign
- 15%
- Signed cases
- 3
- Cost per signed case
- $13,333
Firm B is not being cheated by its lead source. It is losing the cases after they arrive, and because the only number anyone is watching is the lead price, the loss is invisible. Firm B will very likely respond by negotiating the lead price down, which changes nothing that matters.
Where the cases actually go
One number,three different problems
A poor cost per signed case has three possible causes and they need completely different fixes. Splitting the funnel tells you which one you have.
Track those two conversion rates separately from the day you start spending. A firm that knows only its overall lead-to-signed rate can tell that something is wrong but not what, and will usually guess at the campaign because that is the part with an invoice attached.
Run your own figures through the calculator on the law firm marketing overview, which will also show you what happens to the same account at three different sign rates. If you would rather work backwards from what you can afford, the max CPL calculator sets the ceiling instead.
Why one formula does not fit
Three fee structures,three different sums
Injury and similar
Revenue per signed case is a distribution, not a figure. You recover a share of an outcome that might be nothing, and you fund the case while you wait.
Compare cost per signed case against expected fee, not average fee. See the haircut below. Timing is a separate problem and it is covered on the personal injury page.
Family, employment, business
Revenue is roughly knowable at signing, but only if the matter runs as estimated and the client keeps paying. Billed and collected are different numbers.
Compare against collected fees rather than billed, and remember the consultation itself costs billable time. That calculation is on the family law page.
Criminal, immigration, estate
The cleanest arithmetic in the profession. The fee is known at signing and usually collected up front, so cost per signed case compares directly against a real number.
Compare against the fee, then against lifetime value where repeat and referral work is real. That is worked through on the estate planning page.
The practical consequence is that a firm running two of these side by side cannot hold one target for both. A flat-fee criminal practice and a contingency injury practice inside the same firm have different affordable acquisition costs, different payback periods and different risk profiles, and blending them into a single cost per signed case produces a number that describes neither.
The contingency adjustment nobody makes
Your average case valueis not what you get
Signed is not the same as paid
Firms budget against the average fee on cases that resolved. But some signed cases resolve for nothing, get dropped after investigation, or turn out to have a defendant with no coverage. Those cases still consumed acquisition spend.
Average fee on resolved cases · $25,000 Share of signed cases producing nothing · 15% Expected value per signed case · $21,250
That is a 15% overstatement in every budget decision that used the headline figure, and it compounds with any error in the sign rate. Illustrative numbers; the one you need is the share of your own signed matters over the last three years that produced no fee, which your case management system knows and almost nobody asks it.
Mass tort works differently again, because lead tiers and when you enter the litigation change both the cost and the expected value in ways ordinary injury work does not. That arithmetic is on the mass tort marketing guide.
Once you have an expected value, the ratio you care about is straightforward. At $3,333 per signed case against $21,250 expected, you are spending roughly one dollar to earn six. At $13,333 against the same expected value, you are spending one to earn a little over one and a half, before any case costs, before overhead, and before waiting a year or more to find out.
Want this run on your actual numbers?
Thirty minutes. Bring your spend, your lead counts and your signed matters for the last twelve months and we will build the real figure with you, split by practice area.
Every figure on this page is illustrative and exists to demonstrate a method. There are no benchmarks here and no claimed industry averages, because the only conversion rates that should drive your budget are your own. Nothing on this page is legal advice, and we are a marketing agency rather than your compliance counsel.
Questions firms ask us about this
Straightanswers
What is a good cost per signed case?
There is no useful benchmark and anyone quoting you one is guessing. It depends entirely on your expected value per case, your overhead and how long you wait to collect, all of which vary enormously between firms doing apparently identical work.
The question that does have an answer is the ratio. Work out what a signed case is worth to you in expected terms, then decide what multiple of acquisition cost you need it to cover. That number is yours and it is defensible, which is more than any published average will be.
Our sign rate looks terrible. Is that the marketing?
Sometimes, and less often than firms assume. Split the funnel first. If leads are arriving and never reaching a consultation, that is intake rather than targeting, and no change to the campaign will fix it.
If they are reaching a consultation and not signing, look at how long they waited for it and who conducted it. A good case that waited nine days for a callback has usually already retained somebody else.
We do both contingency and flat-fee work. One number or two?
Two, always, and separate budgets behind them. The affordable acquisition cost for a flat-fee matter collected up front is a completely different figure from one for a contingency case that might pay in two years and might not pay at all.
Blended reporting in a mixed practice hides the fact that one side is usually subsidizing the other. Splitting it is a day of work and it frequently changes where the next dollar goes.
How far back should we look?
Twelve months for conversion rates, and longer for contingency values because the cases that produced nothing take a while to declare themselves. Three years is better for the expected-value haircut if your records support it.
The failure mode is measuring a quarter and concluding something. In a practice signing a modest number of matters a month, a quarter is noise, and reacting to it is how firms end up switching channels every six months and never learning anything.
Next step
Thirty minutes.
No pitch deck.
We'll work out what a signed case actually costs you, split by practice area, and what that says about where the next dollar should go. More on the method at law firm marketing.
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