Personal Injury Lead Buying Guide for Solo & Small Law Firms

The right monthly budget

For solo and small PI firms, a reasonable monthly lead spend is 3–5% of your firm's target monthly revenue. If you want to sign cases worth $60K in fees monthly, spend $1,800–$3,000 on leads. Higher than that early-stage stretches your intake bandwidth. Lower than that means you can't gather enough data to see what's working.

Start with exclusive, not shared

Counterintuitive, but true for small firms: you should start with exclusive leads even though they cost more per lead. Why?

• You're a small firm without a call-center-sized intake team. You'll lose the speed race on shared leads to bigger competitors.
• Exclusive leads sign 2–4x more often, which means fewer wasted intake hours.
• Case values on exclusive leads tend to be higher because the consumer is only talking to one firm.

Start with one vertical, one geo

Don't spread $2,500/month across auto + slip-and-fall + workers' comp across five states. Concentrate. Pick your firm's strongest vertical (usually auto for most firms) and one geographic market where you're licensed. Get profitable there before you expand.

Intake for small firms

You probably don't have a dedicated intake team. Options in order of preference:

• Best: hire one full-time intake person who owns leads from delivery to signed case. This is a $45K–$65K/year investment that pays for itself if you're doing $500K+ in fees.
• Good: use a legal answering service (Ruby Receptionists, PATLive, Answer1) for after-hours coverage while an existing paralegal handles daytime intake.
• Adequate: the founding attorney does intake personally between hearings. Works for 5–8 cases/month but caps growth.

What to measure

At small scale, three metrics matter more than the rest:

• Sign rate per lead vertical/tier
• Cost per signed case
• Time from lead delivery to first outbound call

The takeaway

Small firms win at PI marketing by being disciplined about tier (exclusive), concentrated on one vertical/geo, and obsessive about intake speed. Skip the shared-lead high-volume trap. Book a 15-minute call — we'll walk through a starter plan sized to your firm.