Legal is the most expensive lead category in digital advertising, and the reason is simple: a single signed case can be worth more than a year of leads in most other verticals. That economics cuts both ways. Cost per lead figures that would be catastrophic elsewhere are perfectly workable here, but so is the waste — a firm paying premium rates for shared leads is funding its competitors’ intake departments as well as its own.

Case qualification carries more weight here than in any other category we work in. Practice area, jurisdiction, date of incident, whether the prospect has already retained counsel, whether a statute of limitations has run — any one of these can make an otherwise perfect enquiry worthless. Capturing them at the lead level, rather than burning paralegal hours discovering them on intake calls, is where most of the value in a legal lead actually sits.

Speed to contact matters more here than almost anywhere. Someone searching for representation is usually in the middle of a difficult situation and will speak to whoever responds first. Firms that answer within minutes sign materially more cases than firms that call back the same afternoon, which is why leads post to your system in real time rather than arriving in a batch.