Every law firm owner who buys cases has had the same argument, sometimes with a partner, sometimes with themselves at midnight. Leads are cheaper. Retainers are easier. Both statements are true, and neither one answers the only question that matters, which is what a signed case actually costs your firm once everything is counted.
This post is not going to settle that argument with a sales pitch. It is going to give you the arithmetic, with our own prices on the table, so you can run your firm’s numbers and see which side you land on. Some firms should buy leads. Some should buy MVA retainers. The math tells you which one you are.
The number everyone quotes, and why it misleads
Lead buying gets compared on cost per lead, because that is the number on the invoice. Our qualified exclusive leads run from $250 to $700 each, depending on the state and the criteria. Say you pay $400, right in the middle of that range. Four hundred dollars sounds cheap next to $1,950 for a signed retainer, and on a per unit basis it is. But you do not bank leads. You bank signed cases, and between the lead and the signed case sits your close rate, which is where the honest comparison has to start.
If your intake team signs one lead in ten, which is a respectable rate that plenty of good firms would take, then ten leads at $400 is $4,000 of lead spend for every signed case. At a stronger one in five, it is $2,000 of lead spend per signed case. Neither figure includes a single hour of anyone’s time yet.
The break even sign rate, in plain English
There is a shortcut that tells you whether the leads route can beat $1,950 before labor enters the picture. Divide your lead cost by $1,950. The result is the lowest sign rate you need just for lead spend alone to stay under the retainer price.
At $250 per lead, the math is $250 divided by $1,950, or about 13 percent. You need to sign a little better than 1 in 8 leads before labor is counted. At $400 per lead, you need about 21 percent, a little better than 1 in 5. At $700 per lead, you need about 36 percent, close to 1 in 3.
Read the result the right way. If your actual sign rate is below that line, the argument is already over: your lead spend per signed case is higher than a signed retainer before anyone picks up a phone. If your sign rate is above the line, leads may still win, but only after the labor math in the next sections. The break even line is not the finish line. It is the first filter.
The cost nobody puts on the spreadsheet
Now add the labor, because the leads do not work themselves. Somebody calls back inside five minutes, or tries to. Somebody runs the second, third, and fourth follow up attempts. Somebody asks the qualification questions, checks the basics, and books the sign up.
That time comes from intake staff you pay by the hour, or from attorneys whose hours are worth far more than intake wages. A lot of firms have never priced it. They know their lead spend to the dollar and their cost per signed case not at all. When you load even a modest amount of staff time onto the $4,000 or $2,000 figures above, the gap between leads and retainers narrows fast, and for some firms it closes completely.
There is a quieter cost too. While your team is chasing cold leads, the good ones wait, and waiting clients sign with whoever calls them properly first. Slow follow up does not just waste money on the leads that die. It loses cases you already paid for.
The hidden costs to count before you decide
Use this checklist with your last batch of leads, not with a guess. Mark the time honestly, even if the number is uncomfortable.
- Coverage: who watches for new leads during lunch, evenings, weekends, and staff absences?
- Speed: how many minutes pass between delivery and the first real attempt, and how many leads wait too long?
- Follow up: how many calls, texts, and emails does one signed case require across every lead worked?
- Dead ends: how much time goes to duplicates, wrong numbers, people already represented, and cases outside your criteria?
- Administration: who enters notes, uploads documents, schedules callbacks, and keeps the pipeline clean?
- Waste: how many paid leads were never worked, worked once, or allowed to go cold because the team was full?
- Management: how much attorney or supervisor time goes to reviewing intake, fixing missed steps, and retraining?
You do not need perfect time tracking to use the list. Pull a sample of 20 recent leads, reconstruct the touches from your system, and price the total minutes at the loaded hourly cost of the people who did the work. A rough honest number beats a precise looking guess.
What the retainer number actually buys
A signed retainer from us starts at $1,950, flat. That figure gets compared with $400 for a lead all the time, and it is the wrong comparison, because the two products are not the same unit. The lead is a person who raised their hand. The retainer is a client who has already been qualified against set criteria, accident within the last year, not at fault, injuries confirmed, treatment started or scheduled, insurance verified, no prior attorney, and who has signed your firm’s own retainer agreement.
The sign rate disappears from the equation entirely. You are not buying ten chances at a case. You are buying the case, delivered exclusively to your firm, from anywhere in the country, with no contract tying you to keep buying. If a delivered case fails the agreed criteria, or the client turns out to be unreachable, 14-day replacement protection covers it. What you are really paying for is the removal of intake risk, and whether that is worth $1,950 depends entirely on what your current cost per signed case actually is.
Set it against the fee side for a moment. On a $25,000 policy, a one-third contingency fee is about $8,300, so a $1,950 case costs roughly a quarter of that fee. Against a $15,000 average fee, it is about an eighth.
Run your own numbers, in five minutes
Here is the worksheet, in plain form.
First, what is your average fee per settled MVA case? Not your best case, your average. Second, what does a qualified lead cost you, and what share of those leads does your team actually sign? Divide the lead cost by the sign rate and you have your lead spend per signed case. Third, how many intake hours go into producing one signed case, across every lead worked, signed or not, and what do those hours cost loaded with wages and overhead? Add that to the lead spend. Fourth, what share of your average fee are you willing to spend to acquire a case?
Now hold your total from step three up against $1,950, and against your answer to step four. If your real cost per signed case from leads is well under $1,950, leads are your product and you should keep buying them with confidence. If it is at or above $1,950 once the hours are counted, you are already paying retainer money. You are just paying it in staff time and lost cases instead of on an invoice, and getting the intake headache for free.
A copy and run worksheet
Copy these lines into a note and fill in your own figures.
Average fee per settled MVA case: $____
Cost per qualified lead: $____
Leads purchased in the test period: ____
Signed cases from those leads: ____
Sign rate: signed cases divided by leads purchased = ____
Lead spend per signed case: lead cost divided by sign rate = $____
Total intake minutes spent on all leads in the test period: ____
Loaded cost per intake hour: $____
Labor per signed case: total intake minutes divided by 60, multiplied by loaded hourly cost, divided by signed cases = $____
True cost per signed case from leads: lead spend per signed case plus labor per signed case = $____
Compare the last line with $1,950, then compare it with the share of your average fee you are willing to spend. Run it separately for each state and lead type if your prices or close rates differ. A blended average can hide one market that works and another that quietly loses money.
So which firms should buy which?
Leads win for firms with a strong intake team, and it is not close. If you have trained people who call back in minutes, work a real follow up sequence, and close at one in five or better, your cost per signed case will beat any retainer price, ours included. Buy MVA leads, feed that team, and let your machine do what it is built to do.
Retainers win when intake is the bottleneck. If follow up is slow because the team is thin, if attorneys are spending their week qualifying instead of working files, if good cases keep dying between the first call and the signature, then the bottleneck is not lead supply. It is conversion capacity, and buying more leads pours more water into a leaking bucket. That is the situation signed retainers exist for.
Plenty of firms land in the middle and run both, leads for the intake team to work and retainers to keep attorneys fed while the pipeline builds.
A simple capacity rule
If you are still torn, decide from capacity before you decide from price. Look at the last two weeks of lead flow. If every lead got a fast first attempt, the follow up sequence was finished, and no qualified lead sat untouched because the team was busy, your firm has the capacity to make leads work. Buy leads and protect that system.
If leads regularly waited, follow up stopped early, or attorneys were pulled into basic qualification, capacity is the constraint. In that case, more leads do not fix the problem. Start with signed retainers, or split the budget: retainers for the cases the firm needs now, and a smaller lead flow the team can work properly. Re-run the worksheet after any change in staffing, hours, or lead volume. The right answer can flip when one intake hire leaves or one new market opens.
The bottom line
Do not let anyone, including us, settle this for you with a price per lead or a price per case quoted in isolation. Run the five minute worksheet with your average fee, your real close rate, and your intake hours counted honestly. The answer it gives you is the right buying decision for your firm, whether it points to leads or to signed MVA cases delivered ready to work.
If your numbers point to retainers, or you just want to test a small batch against your lead results, get current pricing for your state and we will tell you straight what we can deliver in it.
