Cost Per Signed Case Calculator.
Cost per lead is a vanity metric. The number that pays your associates and partners is cost per signed case, CPL run through your actual intake and signing rate. See where the funnel is really leaking.
Pull from Google Ads. Typical range $50-$250+ for high-value practice areas like PI.
Clicks that become a lead (form fill or call). Default reflects roughly 1-in-15, a common legal benchmark.
Leads that turn into a signed, retained case, consult and signing combined.
Fees to the firm per signed case, not gross settlement value.
Well above the typical 3-4x floor firms target on signed-case ROI. There's room to spend more at this efficiency.
How to read your number
Cost per signed case = average CPC ÷ click-to-lead rate ÷ lead-to-signed rate. Most agencies report cost per lead (CPL) and stop there, but CPL hides the number that actually determines whether the campaign is profitable: how many of those leads turn into a retained, signed case.
A firm paying $250 per click at a 1-in-15 click-to-lead rate and a 33% lead-to-signed rate is paying roughly $11,300 to sign a case, profitable on a $50K average case value, underwater on a $10K one. Two firms with identical CPL can have wildly different economics once signing rate is factored in.
The weakest link is usually intake, not ad spend. A firm with a mediocre click-to-lead rate but a strong, fast-responding intake team routinely beats a firm with cheaper clicks and a slow follow-up process. Before cutting budget, check how fast your team calls back a new lead, same-hour response is the single biggest lever most firms haven't pulled.
See how this plays against Local Services Ads in LSA vs Google Ads for lawyers, or size the budget behind it with the PPC budget calculator.
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