Three reasons personal injury firms stall, and none of them is ad spend.

Four areas and a plan. Intake performance, measured through your real channels rather than reported by your team; case mix economics, meaning fee revenue, acquisition cost, cycle time and attorney load by case type and source; referral and reputation, including the sources no ad account reports; and capacity, so the growth target matches what the firm can carry. The output is a written plan with owners, a marketing brief your vendors can be held to, and a monthly scorecard.

An agency is paid to buy media and produce leads. This engagement is paid to find out where the firm actually loses cases, and in personal injury that is usually intake, mix or capacity rather than reach. Because we take no execution work inside the engagement, the plan can conclude that you should spend less and staff intake properly. If you want execution afterwards it is scoped separately, and the marketing brief is written so any agency, including your current one, can deliver against it.

Rarely to stop, often to redirect. The common finding is that spend is pointed at case types the firm converts poorly or resolves slowly, while the categories that pay for the firm are underfunded. The other common finding is leakage: 39% of law firms take more than two hours to respond to an online lead or never respond at all, so the first return usually comes from converting contacts you are already paying for.

Mostly from data you already hold, plus a controlled response test through your public channels. We review call and form records, recorded calls where your policy permits, and case management data, then place a small set of test contacts across different hours and days. Timing matters more than most firms expect: in a 1,000-call study, Friday had the lowest answer rate of any day at 45%. Nothing interferes with a live client matter.

A fixed fee quoted after a scoping call, with deliverables and dates written down before you commit. It varies with the number of offices, how many case types are in scope and the state of the case management data, so publishing a rate would mislead most readers. For budget context, The CMO Survey puts marketing at an average 9.0% of company revenue, with 33.6% of digital activity run by outside agencies. Book a meeting for a scope and a number.

No. We are marketing advisors, not lawyers, and we do not interpret your state bar's rules on advertising, solicitation, referral fees or fee sharing. What we do is flag every recommendation that touches those rules so your firm or your ethics counsel can review it before anything is implemented. Firms operating across several states get the flags marked by jurisdiction, because the rules are not uniform.

It depends on volume, hours and how well your current arrangement performs, which we measure rather than assume. Outsourced intake works when it is held to standards and audited; it fails when it is a voicemail with a company name. Among firms advertising 24-hour availability, 29.2% did not answer an after-hours call, and only 2.9% of sampled firms had any AI answering system in place. The plan sets the standard first and the staffing model second.

We provide the economics and the partners make the call, which is the correct division of responsibility. The analysis shows fee revenue, acquisition cost, cycle time and attorney hours by category, so a decision to decline a case type is made on numbers rather than instinct. Firms often keep a category that looks weak because it feeds referrals or serves the community they practise in, and that is a legitimate reason once it is visible.

No, and fixing it is usually part of the value. We work with what exists, reconcile against financial records, and state plainly which findings are solid and which are directional. Only 41% of organizations have a dedicated data governance owner, so this is the norm rather than an embarrassment. The plan includes the small set of field and process changes that make next year's analysis reliable, or marketing operations consulting if the rebuild is larger.

The managing partner or whoever can decide on case mix, the intake lead, a case manager who knows the files, whoever owns marketing, and the person who handles the firm's numbers. Expect a kickoff, a data pull, several short interviews, one decision session with the partners and a final review. We work around court schedules and take read-only access through your own accounts.

The same method, run per market and then compared, because performance differs sharply by location. Answer rates, case mix, cycle time and cost per signed case are cut by office, which usually shows one location running a model worth copying and another with a fixable intake or staffing problem. Where advertising and solicitation rules differ by state, recommendations are flagged by jurisdiction for your counsel.

Intake changes show within weeks because answer rate and speed to contact move immediately, and signed cases follow soon after. Case mix and referral work take one to three quarters, and fee revenue lags further because resolution does. That is why the scorecard tracks leading indicators such as answer rate, signed cases by source and cost per signed case, rather than fee revenue, which reports on a delay long after the decision was made.

Yes, though the diagnosis changes shape. Contingency practices live or die on intake speed and case mix, while hourly and flat-fee practices turn on utilisation, realisation and matter mix. The engagement structure is the same and the parent version is growth advisory. Tell us the practice area at the scoping call and we will say honestly whether the industrial-strength intake analysis is worth paying for.

A marketing audit examines what is currently running and what it returns. This engagement is wider: it covers intake, case mix, referral relationships and capacity, which is where personal injury growth is usually decided, and it ends in a plan rather than findings. Firms that want positioning and brand work rather than commercial mechanics should look at marketing strategy consulting instead.

Your firm runs it, and every workstream in the plan has a named owner on your side. Many firms book a review at ninety days to re-measure intake and check signed cases by source, which takes half a day and is optional. Where you want ongoing marketing leadership rather than a project, a fractional CMO or scorecard advisory is the next engagement, quoted separately.