Legal leads for law firms: MVA and personal injury

A legal lead is a request from a person who needs a lawyer and agreed to be contacted by a law firm. The person fills in a form describing what happened, when and where, and the lead is delivered to a firm that takes that kind of case.

A legal lead is not a signed client. The firm still has to reach the person, check the facts, run a conflict check and decide whether to take the case. Leads are the start of intake, so the value of a legal lead depends as much on how fast and how well the firm’s intake team works as on the lead itself.

Legal leads are different from a lawyer referral service, where a service recommends a specific lawyer to a person, and from a directory listing, where the person chooses a firm from a list. With a lead, the firm receives the person’s request and makes the first contact.

Lawyer leads, attorney leads and law firm leads mean the same thing: requests from people who want legal help, sold to firms. Sellers use whichever term their buyers search for. What changes between sellers is not the name but the practice area, the source of the leads, and the terms.

Rules on advertising and on paying for leads and referrals are set by each state’s rules of professional conduct for lawyers. This page does not give legal advice. Law firm lead generation lists the rules a firm should check, and your state bar or your own counsel can tell you how they apply to you.

Whatever practice area you buy, ask a source these questions before you send a test order:

• Which practice areas and case types does it sell, and does it produce them itself or buy them from others?
• What does the consent language say, and does it cover a law firm contacting the person?
• Can it produce the consent record for any lead you name?
• Is each lead exclusive to one firm, or shared? Is that in writing?
• Is the lead a web form, a call or a transfer? Each needs a different intake process.
• Which fields are on the form, and which ones are checked?
• What can be returned, within what window, and how are returns reviewed?
• Who reviews the ads that produce the leads?

Summit reviews publisher ad creative before launch, and TCPA consent is captured on every lead, with consent certificates. The full supplier checklist is in how to evaluate lead suppliers.

Legal leads are bought by several kinds of buyers:

• Single-office personal injury firms that want cases in the counties they serve.
• Multi-state firms that take cases in several states and route leads to the office or attorney for each one.
• Firms that co-counsel or refer cases to other firms, where the rules of professional conduct in their state allow it.
• Legal marketing companies and buying desks that buy leads and place them with their own law firm clients.

Each buyer sets its own accident types, states and caps. A firm that only takes truck cases in two states sets narrow filters; a buying desk may take all accident types across many states.

Track every lead through intake so you can judge a source on cases, not lead counts:

• Contact rate. How many leads your intake team reached.
• Qualified rate. How many met your case criteria after the first conversation.
• Signed cases. How many became clients.
• Cost per signed case. Total lead cost divided by signed cases.
• Returns. How many leads you returned, and why, so the source can fix the cause.

Track by accident type and by state. A source can work well for car accident cases in one state and poorly for another case type elsewhere.

Buying legal leads gives a firm cases to evaluate without running its own campaigns. Marketing the firm directly through search, local listings, referrals and content builds its own name, but takes longer and needs a budget before it produces cases. Many firms do both. Law firm lead generation covers the in-house side, and personal injury law firm marketing covers marketing for injury firms.