Trendi Marketing · Personal injury firm resources
A low cost per lead does not tell you whether a personal injury marketing program is profitable. This calculator connects campaign spending with qualified inquiries, signed cases, and an explicit assumption about collected fees and case costs. Use it to compare scenarios and identify which figures your team still needs to measure.
Start with one acquisition cohort: for example, inquiries generated by one campaign during one quarter. Follow those inquiries through signing and, eventually, fee collection. Do not compare this month's advertising spend with fees collected from unrelated cases acquired years earlier.
Calculate acquisition costs and a contribution scenario
Enter your figures or load the fictional example. Values entered here are used by this calculator in your browser; submitting this calculator does not create a contact inquiry. Avoid client names or case details.
Your results will appear here after you calculate.
What the results mean
- Cost per inquiry: acquisition spending ÷ unique inquiries.
- Cost per qualified inquiry: acquisition spending ÷ qualified inquiries.
- Cost per signed case: acquisition spending ÷ signed cases.
- Qualified-to-signed rate: signed cases ÷ qualified inquiries × 100.
- Expected fee revenue: signed cases × expected average collected fee.
- Expected contribution after acquisition: expected fee revenue − expected direct case costs − acquisition spending.
- Contribution return on acquisition spend: expected contribution after acquisition ÷ acquisition spending × 100.
The last figure is a planning measure, not audited firm profit. It excludes general overhead, taxes, financing, and the time value of money unless you separately account for them. A signed case is not a collected fee. If you do not have a defensible fee assumption, enter zero and use only the acquisition metrics until you have better data.
A fictional example, worked through
Assume $20,000 in acquisition spending produces 200 unique inquiries, 80 qualified inquiries, and 20 signed cases. Cost per inquiry is $100, cost per qualified inquiry is $250, and cost per signed case is $1,000. The qualified-to-signed rate is 25%.
If the expected average collected fee is $5,000 per signed case and the expected direct cost is $2,000, expected fee revenue is $100,000. Subtract $40,000 in direct case costs and $20,000 in acquisition spending to get $40,000 in expected contribution. The contribution return on acquisition spend is 200%. These numbers are invented to explain the math; they are neither a client result nor an industry benchmark.
How to use this in a marketing review
- Choose a campaign, market, and acquisition period. Record the cohort and the date of your review.
- Agree on what counts as an inquiry, qualified inquiry, and signed case. Make sure the counts form a consistent funnel.
- Reconcile spending with invoices. Include fees and implementation costs instead of counting media alone.
- Compare assumptions with actual outcomes as the cohort matures. Track collected fees separately from projections.
- Investigate the bottleneck before changing spend: poor qualification, missed follow-up, weak conversion, or expensive acquisition require different responses.
Copy this worksheet for your next meeting
| Record | Your notes |
|---|---|
| Campaign, geography, acquisition dates | ________________ |
| Spending included and excluded | ________________ |
| Qualification definition and data source | ________________ |
| Inquiry, qualified, and signed counts | ________________ |
| Actual collected fees or projected assumptions? | ________________ |
| Review date, owner, and next action | ________________ |
Why a campaign can look good before revenue arrives
A marketing cohort can produce signed cases long before the related fees are collected. That gap matters for cash planning. Keep a separate view of cash paid and cash received by date, and do not use this scenario calculator as a cash-flow forecast. When comparing two channels, use comparable cohorts and explain differences in maturity, case mix, and attribution.
If your firm uses several marketing channels, adopt a consistent attribution rule. Counting the same case in both paid search and organic search will overstate the combined result. Retain the underlying records so your team can reconcile the report.
Use our personal injury intake scorecard to assess how consistently your team handles the inquiries behind these numbers.
Created by Trendi Marketing. Meet Kirk A. Lee, whose 20 years in the personal injury industry include 11 years as an employee at Loncar & Associates and nine years working with Thompson Law through Trendi.
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