How we cut signed-case cost 42% for a New York personal injury firm

The challenge

The firm is a mid-sized NYC personal injury practice, 11 attorneys, dedicated intake team of 4, ~$24M annual gross revenue. They had been spending $84,000/month on Google Ads with a vertical-specialist agency. Lead volume was strong (~410 leads/month). Signed-case math was weak.

The agency reported a cost per signed case of $7,200, which the firm's COO believed was generous to the agency. Internal records showed something closer to $7,800, the gap was leads the agency counted that the intake team couldn't reach within their internal SLA. The firm wanted to scale spend but the unit economics didn't support it.

What we found

A 10-day audit identified four compounding problems:

• Landing pages were generic. One landing page per practice area; no nuance on auto vs slip-and-fall vs construction. Mobile load time over 5 seconds.
• Intake response time was inconsistent. The intake team's median speed-to-call was 27 minutes. The signed-case rate on calls reached inside 5 minutes was 31%; the rate on calls reached after 15 minutes was 8%.
• Bar advertising compliance was loose. Their landing pages used "specialists" and "best" without proper disclaimers, flagged but not yet acted on by the New York state bar.
• Campaign structure was uniform. All four practice areas (auto, slip-and-fall, medical malpractice, construction) ran the same campaign structure despite radically different intent and case values.

Approach

We sequenced the engagement around the intake bottleneck first, there was no point adding leads we couldn't reach. Then we rebuilt the landing-page system and only then adjusted the campaign structure.

Week 1-2

Intake SLA + dashboard

Installed CallRail tracking + a Looker Studio dashboard the COO could see in real-time. Locked a 5-minute response SLA for all leads before any other change. Hired-up the intake team by 2 within 6 weeks to support it.

Week 3-5

Landing page rebuild, 8 pages, compliance-reviewed

Built 8 landing pages: two per practice area (auto: rideshare + collision; slip-and-fall: residential + commercial; etc.) and ran them past the firm's compliance counsel before launch.

Week 6-8

Campaign restructure + bid strategy

Split each practice area into 3 ad groups by sub-intent. Different bid strategies, Max Conversion Value for medical malpractice, Target CPA for auto. Killed 8 underperforming campaigns the prior agency had kept live.

Week 9-12

Intake script + qualification questions

Wrote a new intake script with 4 qualification questions designed to filter sub-$5K cases earlier without alienating the caller. Trained intake team and reviewed call recordings weekly.

Week 13-26

Scale + tighten

Spend lifted from $84K to $112K/month while cost per signed case dropped to $4,180. Added video assets to landing pages for two practice areas based on early heatmap data.

Execution

The intake SLA was the breakthrough. Cutting median response time from 27 minutes to 2:30 lifted the lead-to-signed rate from 9% to 18% before we changed a single ad. We pulled three weeks of historical call data to map signed-case conversion against response time and found the curve was steeper than the prior agency had modeled, every minute past 5 cost about 1.4 percentage points of close rate.

The landing-page rebuild was the second-largest lever. Eight pages, compliance-reviewed by the firm's outside counsel and a NY bar advertising specialist before launch. The page that surprised us was the rideshare-specific auto accident page, it converted 2.1× the generic auto page in the first 30 days because rideshare accident liability is meaningfully different (TNC insurance kicks in, fault assignment is complex) and the page met the searcher with that specificity.

Results

(See the full headline-results grid at the top of this page.)

What we learned

For PI firms, the marketing program is mostly an intake program with a Google Ads tab. The biggest cost-per-signed-case lever lives in the intake operation, not the ad account. Most agencies don't push on it because it's operationally hard, it requires building the dashboard, holding the SLA, and helping the firm hire, and most firms don't push on it because they treat intake as administrative rather than as the primary acquisition surface.

We also revisited the bar advertising compliance assumption. The prior agency had been operating on "no one's noticed", which is a perfectly fine strategy until it isn't. Fixing it during the rebuild added 2 weeks of legal review and zero ongoing cost. The firm's name didn't appear in any 2026 bar advertising-discipline reports.