Seven Questions Every Personal Injury Firm Should Be Able to Answer

Ask a managing partner how the firm is doing and you will get a confident answer. Ask them how many leads converted to signed cases last month, or how long a file can sit untouched before anyone notices, and the confidence usually drops.

That is not a knock on anyone. Most firms run intake and case management the way they always have — through people who are good at their jobs, doing their best with the tools they have. But "the tools we have" rarely produce clean numbers, and estimates are where the money leaks.

Here are seven questions worth asking about your own firm before you assume the answer.

1. How many new enquiries did you receive last month, and how many became signed cases?

If the honest answer is "roughly," you do not have a conversion rate — you have a guess. A real number requires every enquiry to be logged consistently, which is rarer than it sounds.

2. What happens to a lead that arrives at 7pm on a Friday?

This is the single biggest predictor of intake performance we see. Firms that answer it with "someone calls Monday" are losing cases to whichever firm called back first.

3. How fast is someone calling a new lead back, on average?

Not the target. The actual average, measured. Most firms have never pulled this number, because pulling it requires timestamps that live in three different systems.

4. How long does it take from signed case to demand sent?

This is the number that determines cash flow more than almost anything else. It is also the number firms are least likely to have measured, because it spans intake, records, and the attorney's desk — three different owners, no single dashboard.

5. Would you know today if a file had not been touched in three weeks?

Most firms find out when the client calls asking why nothing has happened. By then the file has usually been stalled for longer than three weeks.

6. Who is watching for treatment gaps, and how do they catch them?

If the answer is "the case manager remembers to check," that is not a system — that is a person's memory standing between the firm and a weakened case.

7. How much of your case managers' day goes on updating the system rather than moving cases forward?

Ask a case manager this directly. The number is usually higher than anyone in the front office expects.

Why This Matters More Than It Looks Like It Does

None of these questions are exotic. They are the basic operating metrics of a lead-to-settlement pipeline. The problem is that most case management systems were built to store case data, not to answer operational questions about the pipeline itself — so getting a real answer means pulling data from three or four places and doing it by hand, which nobody has time to do regularly.

That is exactly the gap a Case Operations Audit is built to close: a two-week diagnostic that produces real, measured baselines for questions like these, using your actual case data rather than a survey. If several of the seven above are estimates rather than numbers, that is where to start.