For most law firms, marketing channel success is still measured by one embarrassingly outdated metric.
Volume.
How many calls came in?
How many form fills did we get?
How many chat leads hit the CRM?
Many law firms simplistically view the primary drag on their growth to be the sheer volume of leads. If you’re still evaluating your marketing on total leads — instead of qualified opportunities — you’re not doing marketing, you’re doing vanity reporting. In a legal market increasingly influenced by AI and consumer behavior data, the winners won’t be the firms generating the most leads. The winners are firms that rapidly evaluate leads, prioritize the right leads and respond to their most valuable leads differently than all the rest. Doing so dramatically improves the economic effectiveness of the marketing spend – dramatically improving Return on On Ad Spend (ROAS) within the same budget..
You Don’t (Necessarily) Need More Leads…
Personal injury firms have been indoctrinated to think that marketing success = more leads.
Marketing agencies like showing up and to the right graphs – especially when it comes to leads. And they are prone to count every Form Fill, Chat, Text or Call as a “Lead.” From our own data of tens of thousands of leads, we know that just 22% of those “Leads” turn into consultations.
The focus on this article is the very important prioritization of that 22% of Leads – those qualified, “I might hire you, let’s talk” pool. Those consultations typically get broken down into binary categories – business we want and business we don’t want. And that is the primary mistake. I’d argue instead that those consultations should break down into four different categories:
Business We Do Want
This bucket is our bread and butter business. The stuff that keeps the lights on. And sometimes, just to ensure nothing falls through the cracks, some opportunities (especially in PI) get moved into here, and then once more investigation is done, are kicked back to “Don’t Want.” Smart firms figure out how to shorten the cycle from “Lead” to signed client once they’ve been placed in this bucket.
Business We Don’t Want
From decades of Mockingbird’s Leads data – across our firms this number bounces around 21%. This is highly variable per Practice Area – our largest employment law firm, for example, deliberately tries to keep this number at 95% (because most people who think they have a lawyer-solveable employment matter, actually don’t) – same with IP lawyers. Smart firms build relationships by referring these cases out to build either goodwill partnerships and/or generate referral revenue.
Business We Aren’t Sure if We Want
This happens all too often – there’s simply not enough information to make a quick decision and move that prospect further down the purchase path…. Which increases the likelihood that that prospective client continues her lawyer shopping journey. Prospects who come in via form fill frequently default to this category, as online form fills are designed with minimal data collection to maximize conversion. (i.e. no one wants to fill out a huge, detailed form when making an inquiry). Prospects who fall into this category need fast and efficient followup.
Business That Will Pay Off the Lakehouse
These are the big matters. Complex. Lots of revenue. Not “ideal client profile”, but “dream client profile”. This is the Amazon truck accident or the twenty million dollar highly contested divorce. Some firms live entirely in this world, but for many these opportunities serendipitously pop up. The key factor here: intake needs to be able to identify them and then escalate for white glove follow up. Yes – run down the hall to break up the partner meeting to interrupt Jeff to assist in landing the whale.
Lead Scoring
That’s Lead Scoring in a nutshell and those firms that take a systemic approach to designing their intake for Lead Scoring have an immediate advantage. A systemic approach will ensure that everyone in intake (be it the new hire or an outsourced service like LexReception) can not only identify a Hot Lead, but is also proactively listening for one. Second step is to provide an immediate, proactive, white glove experience for that lead. One of the ways firms bungle this is assigning this role to the managing partner (or some other charismatic leader) by default – instead firms should know, mathematically who converts best (be it intake, lawyer, or someone in between) and assign the higher value opportunities to those who covert better.
Lead Scoring and Artificial Intelligence
For all of the promise of AI, Lead Scoring is one of the most obvious use cases. Simply put, a computer can easily synthesize a conversation, evaluate that conversation on certain elements and then assess those elements on a predetermined scale.
Filevine/Lead Docket
The first in the legal-specific lead scoring business – Filevine’s Leads AI summarizes calls through AI and then uses predictive analytics to estimate the value of a case, based on real MVA data they’ve collected over time.
Lawmatics
Lawmatics’ highly customizable lead scoring system funnels prospects into different buckets and workflows to mazimize conversions of the highest value opportunities. The product, QualifyAI, includes a “confidence score” – essentially evaluating the amount and quality of information from which the tool is assigning prospects to bucket. By default, prospects are bucketed into “Chase” or “Chase Hard”. Further, If the model lacks information to make this evaluation – it automates the process of collecting that data directly from the end prospect… “please text us back with the name of the other driver’s insurance carrier.”
Clio
Clio’s AI driving lead scoring, GrowAI was announced at the latest ClioCon and is incorporated into their Intelligent Legal Work Platform and includes conflict checks, prioritizes high potential leads for consultations and uses automation to book those consults. Unlike Filevine, which grounds data across their entire dataset, Clio is built on the firm’s unique client information.
Speed.AI
Speed AI was launched by digital marketing agency, Drive. The product is primarily designed to identify (and recapture) dropped opportunities… those prospects that fall through the cracks due to poor intake. The crux of the product identifies solid prospects and then evaluates the information gathered, provides a score of each call and notifies the law firm of high value options with unclear followup.
In short, the firms that win in an AI-accelerated legal market aren’t the ones just chasing more leads, they’re the ones using AI to separate the signal from the noise. rigorously separating noise from opportunity. Law firms win by adopting structured lead-scoring frameworks, investing in tools that surface high-value cases, and redesigning intake so every team member can identify and escalate opportunities. With products from Filevine, Lawmatics, Clio, and Speed.AI now making predictive, data-driven triage accessible, the competitive advantage goes to firms that operationalize fast evaluation, tailored follow-up, and white-glove treatment for their highest-value prospects.