How to Calculate Your Cost Per Signed Case for Personal Injury Leads

The formula

Cost per signed case is calculated as:

CPSC = Total lead spend ÷ Number of signed cases

Example: You spend $10,000 on 200 auto accident leads at $50 each. Your intake team signs 12 of them. CPSC = $10,000 ÷ 12 = $833.

Benchmarks by tier and vertical

Based on our client data across 2024–2026, here are the CPSC ranges we see:

• Shared auto accident leads: $700–$1,500 per signed case
• Semi-exclusive auto: $800–$1,600
• Exclusive auto: $900–$1,800
• Slip & fall (all tiers): $1,200–$2,400
• Wrongful death: $3,000–$8,000+

Firms with excellent intake operations sit at the low end. Firms with slow-to-call or under-trained intake sit at the high end — with the exact same lead source.

The four levers to lower your CPSC

1. Speed to first contact

Every additional minute between lead submission and first outbound call cuts your sign rate. Under 60 seconds is the gold standard. Firms who move from 15-minute callback to 60-second callback typically see 50–80% CPSC improvement.

2. Number of contact attempts

Industry data: firms averaging 6 attempts sign 2.5x more cases than firms averaging 2 attempts. Persistence works.

3. Script and objection handling

Intake teams that have practiced scripts for the top 10 objections close 30–50% more than teams winging it.

4. Lead source quality

All the intake tuning in the world can't fix bad source data. Aged, incentivized, or co-registered leads have a hard sign-rate ceiling.

How CPSC drives what you should buy

Once you know your CPSC by tier, buying decisions get easy. If your exclusive CPSC is $1,100 and your shared CPSC is $1,400, exclusive is more profitable per case even though the per-lead price is higher. If it's reversed, shared wins.

The bottom line

Track CPSC by lead source, by vertical, by tier, and by geo. It's the single most important number in your marketing dashboard. Book a call and we'll walk through what CPSC benchmarks look like for your specific market.