Intake & attribution diagnostic
More keywords. More content. More spend. Meanwhile your case volume is flat, your costs keep climbing, and nobody can quite explain why the math doesn't compound.
Here's the part your vendors won't say out loud: you don't have a marketing problem.
The leak they can see is the top of the funnel. Rankings. Click-through. Form fills. Phone calls produced. That's the part their report tracks because that's the part they're paid to influence.
What they're not paid to track — and structurally cannot see from where they sit — is what happens to those leads after they arrive at your firm.
Industry data: the median PI firm in this country signs 11 to 18% of qualified leads. The top decile signs 38%+.
The gap between those two numbers has almost nothing to do with SEO.
It's the 47-hour median callback time on web-form leads. The 28 to 42% of new-client calls that hit voicemail during business hours. The five-day gap between first contact and substantive conversation that pushes a hesitating client onto the next firm's calendar.
It's also the four contradictory reports — one from your SEO firm, one from Google Ads, one from LSAs, one from your intake spreadsheet — that all claim credit for the same nine signed cases and none of which can tell you which keyword produced which case.
Your marketing vendor isn't lying when they say they produced leads. Your operation is failing to convert them. The two things look identical from the outside, which is why so many firms keep buying more leads to compensate for the ones they're already losing.
There are five places marketing dollars leak inside a Seattle law firm. Your current vendor is responsible for one of them and can only see two. The other three are invisible to every report you currently receive.
Tuesday at 9:47 a.m. a woman whose husband had been rear-ended on I-5 the previous Friday calls your firm. Your intake coordinator is in the team meeting. The call goes to voicemail. By the time she calls back at 11:20, she's already signed with the firm on the next billboard. That case was worth somewhere between $35K and $90K in fees, and it isn't in your data anywhere — because the call that produced it never appeared in your CRM. The SEO report for that month still counts +1 lead.
This isn't a hypothetical. The industry median for missed calls during business hours is 28 to 42%, and almost no firm tracks it because the data lives in three different systems that don't talk to each other.
A web-form lead arrives at 11:14 a.m. Your intake coordinator sees it at 4:30 p.m. when she clears her inbox. She calls back the next morning. The lead has gone cold.
The data on this is unambiguous: signed-case probability drops about 70% after the first hour of a web-form lead going unattended. The median callback time on legal web-form leads is 47 hours. The math is brutal — most firms are losing the majority of their highest-intent leads to a clock they aren't watching.
A client signs the engagement letter. Five days pass before anyone substantive contacts them. By day seven they're texting their cousin asking if they should switch firms.
Clients who experience a 5+ day onboarding gap churn at roughly 2.3x the rate of those who don't — and the churn happens early enough that you've often already paid the acquisition cost without recovering it. This isn't marketing waste. It's worse — it's marketing waste that looks like a signed case in your system until it isn't.
Your Google Ads guy reports 47 leads. Your LSA dashboard claims 31. Your SEO agency's report has another number. Your intake spreadsheet has a fourth. You signed nine cases.
Quick question — which keyword produced which case?
If you can't answer that in 30 seconds, you don't have an attribution problem. You have an absence of attribution problem, and the difference is the 30 to 60% of marketing budget that disappears in the gap between cost-per-lead and cost-per-signed-case for the average mid-size firm. That money isn't being wasted at the top of the funnel. It's being lost in the dark space between the channels nobody is paid to reconcile.
Every report you currently receive is produced by the vendor being measured by that report. Your SEO firm reports SEO. Your Google Ads guy reports Google Ads. Your LSA rep reports LSAs. Your intake software reports intake.
Every one of them has a structural incentive to make their own numbers look good. None of them has an incentive — or the data — to tell you what's leaking between their reports.
You are the only person in the room with no incentive to fudge the numbers, and you're also the only person without the data to check them. That asymmetry is by design.
Sample funnel-leakage diagnostic for a mid-size Seattle PI firm. Dollar exposure is the modeled cost of each leak per month, based on the firm's own call/web/CRM data joined to comparative benchmarks.
We sit underneath the marketing layer, not inside it. That position is what lets us see what your vendors structurally cannot.
Every inbound call, tagged to source, tracked to outcome. Which keyword, which ad, which landing page, which time of day, which intake person answered, which call became a signed case. CallRail or equivalent into a warehouse you own, joined to your CRM by a deterministic match key — not the lossy attribution most call-tracking products ship with.
Speed-to-lead, measured per intake person, per shift, per channel. Median callback time. P90 callback time. Percentage answered in under three minutes. Where the dropoff happens, by hour. The data is in your phone system already. Almost no firm joins it to outcomes.
The full chain from click to signed case. Cost-per-click. Cost-per-lead. Cost-per-qualified-lead. Cost-per-signed-case. By source. By keyword. By practice area. The number that actually matters — cost-per-signed-case by channel — is what determines whether your marketing is working, and it's the number almost nobody is producing.
Reconciliation of every vendor's report against the underlying data. When your SEO firm claims 31 leads and your CRM shows 19, we can tell you which 12 didn't make the handoff and why. When your Google Ads guy claims credit for the trucking case, we can tell you whether the case actually came from the keyword he's claiming or from the organic blog post that ranked for the same intent eighteen months ago.
All of it lives in your Google Cloud Project. Under your service accounts. You own the infrastructure. If you fire us tomorrow, the pipelines, dashboards, and reconciled data stay with you. That's the policy, not a marketing claim — every other vendor in your stack owns their reporting layer, which is exactly the asymmetry that produces the problem in the first place.
Because most "marketing problems" are operations problems wearing a marketing costume, and fixing the wrong thing is more expensive than the original problem.
Because the firm that wins this decade is the firm that closes the gap between cost-per-lead and cost-per-signed-case — not the firm with the prettiest backlink report.
Because every other vendor in your stack is the one being measured by their own reports, which is a structural conflict of interest the industry has agreed to not name.
Because the 4.16 billion data points we collect each month — across 2,760 attorneys in greater Seattle, every practice area, every firm size — give us the comparative baseline to tell you whether your firm's intake conversion is "fine" or "23% below market for your DMA and practice area." Without that baseline, every audit is just opinion.
Because somebody has to sit on the side of the table that has no incentive to lie, and most firms don't currently have anyone in that seat.
If your intake already runs at a 35%+ signed-case rate, your callbacks are inside the first hour, and your attribution is already reconciled to your CRM by source — this audit will confirm what you already know, and the time is better spent elsewhere.
If you don't know those numbers off the top of your head, the audit will be uncomfortable. It usually is. Most firms discover they're losing more in leaks than they're spending on the marketing producing the leaks in the first place — which is the unpleasant math that turns the conversation from defensive into strategic.
We don't run this for every firm that asks. The work is heavy and the findings are useless if the firm isn't prepared to act on them.
A 30-minute discovery conversation. We'll walk through where the leaks typically sit for firms in your practice area and scale, look at your current stack, and identify which of the five leaks is most likely costing you the most.
If the data shows your operation is already tight, you'll know — and we'll say so. If it shows specific dollar exposure, you'll see it named, with a clear next step and no obligation to take it.
We don't make changes to anything during the call. We don't pitch a contract on the call. The call is the diagnosis.
Or send a one-sentence description of which leak you suspect is biggest to douglas@legalrankings.com, and we'll come to the call with a hypothesis already framed.