Every call and form your marketing produces cost you money before anyone picks up. I find where qualified leads are lost between the first contact and the signed engagement, then train your intake and sales team to sign more of them.
I'm Joshua David Little. I've run my own consulting firm since 2004, I've helped attorneys prepare complex cases for trial, and I ran the first family-law ad on ChatGPT, before the platform allowed legal-services ads. I track leads to the consultation and the signed client, and that's how I see where firms lose the ones they've paid for.
In a 2024 secret-shopper study of 500 US law firms, only 40% picked up the phone.¹ In another survey, 72% of people looking for legal help said they won't wait more than 24 hours for a call back.²
People call when the problem hits, and that isn't always during office hours. If nobody has decided how those calls are handled and how fast the first call-back goes out the next morning, the caller finds a firm that picks up.
Without written criteria, each person at the front desk decides for themselves what a good case looks like. Good cases get turned away, calls that aren't cases eat the day, and the consultation calendar fills with people the firm can't help.
When intake leaks, the usual answer is more marketing. But if plenty of leads are coming in and too many of them aren't what you want, the source may not be the problem. Every person who called and didn't reach anyone, or got a call back the next afternoon, was someone you already paid to reach. That's why I look at intake before I recommend spending another dollar on ads.
Your team fills in the intake leak check, a short scorecard, and I read your intake records against your marketing numbers: how many people called or filled in a form, how many reached a person, how fast, how many booked, and how many signed. That shows where qualified leads are falling out.
How fast a caller needs a person depends on what they're facing. Someone injured in a wreck is often calling other firms the same hour. A business owner with a deal on the table wants an answer today. A family planning an estate may be fine with a meeting sometime this month. We set the call-back standard for each of your practices.
What your intake team asks, what makes a good case for your firm, and where each call goes next, including which office and lawyer has room for it.
The people who take your calls and the people who run your consultations are trained on the scripts, the criteria, and the call-back standard, so more of the qualified leads that come in sign with you.
A caller you turn away can still send you the next case, and so can the professional who referred them. We write a decline that leaves them with somewhere to go.
Answer rate, time to a call back, consultations booked, and clients signed, by source, every month.
Leads are down, or signings are, so the firm raises the ad budget or signs with another lead seller. The new leads land in the same intake that lost the last ones.
Before another dollar goes into ads, we find where the people you've already paid for are falling out and train your team to close the gap. As your Fractional CMO, I answer for the whole path, from the click to the signed client.
Access to your intake records and your phone system's reports. Time from your intake staff and your consulting lawyers for training. And your sign-off on the scripts and the decline.
Growing firms with several offices often route calls by hand, and the consultation calendar fills with people the firm can't help. We set the criteria and the routing rules, so calls reach the office with room, and train the people running consultations to sign the ones who are a fit.
Speed often decides who signs the case. A call-back standard measured in minutes, and a screen for calls that aren't cases.
Most callers have to be turned away. Clear pre-screen questions save your team's day, and a decline that gives the family somewhere to go keeps the referrer's trust.
A slow answer can lose a claimant to the next firm on the screen. Your tort intake team is trained and measured to respond at once.
Buyers here move more slowly, but a business owner still wants an answer quickly, and a strong month of leads can bring more than a small intake team is ready for.
Every result below was followed lead by lead to the consultation or the signed engagement. That same tracking is what shows where your intake is losing qualified leads.
New clients at about $200 each, leads at about $21, and about $135,000 in estimated case value.³
Leads at about $44, booked consultations at $234 each, and about $75,000 in estimated case value from $6,547 in ads, from a campaign built on the Client Magnet System, tracked to the booked consultation.³
| More ads | Fix intake first | |
|---|---|---|
| What it costs | More spend every month | A diagnosis and training for the team you already have |
| Who it reaches | New people, landing in the same intake | The people you've already paid to reach |
| What it shows you | More leads | Where leads are lost, and what each fix recovers |
| How it's judged | Leads and clicks | Answer rate, call-back time, and signed clients |
Your own team, trained to sign more of them. I diagnose where leads are lost, set the standards, train your intake staff and the people who run your consultations, and measure the results every month.
It depends on the practice. An injury caller may be gone in minutes. A family planning an estate may be fine with a meeting sometime this month. We set the standard for each of your practices and report against it every month.
Tell the person plainly, quickly, and kindly, and give them somewhere to go next. We write the decline with you.
Yes. The scripts, the criteria, and the call-back standard are built to be taught, and the monthly report shows whether they're holding.
Every month you'll see the answer rate, how fast calls reached a person, how many consultations were booked, and how many clients signed, by source.
¹ Clio, a legal-software company, 2024 Legal Trends Report, secret-shopper study: "only 40% picked up when called." Clio
² An injury-law marketing agency's published data (2025), a survey of 3,000 people looking for legal help: 72% will move on if they don't hear back within 24 hours.
³ Case value estimated from average case value.
A 45-minute to one-hour video call with me. We map your firm's marketing together on a whiteboard, from the first call to the signed engagement, and you keep the map whether or not we work together.
Currently accepting a limited number of Fractional CMO relationships.