The situation. An $18M personal injury law firm was spending $6.4M a year on marketing, 35% of revenue, with no view of which vendors produced signed cases. Eleven vendors. The books called them by nicknames the case system did not use. The owner’s question was simple: who do I double down on, and who do I cut?

What we did

We joined twelve months of QuickBooks marketing spend to signed cases by source in the firm’s case-management system, vendor by vendor. Then one number per vendor: cost per signed case. It needs no revenue assumption, so nobody can argue with it.

One grading rule for every vendor: double down at 5:1 or better, hold between 3:1 and 5:1, cut below 3:1. Anything still on estimated spend stayed marked preliminary, so no vendor was cut on a guess.

What we found

The best vendor signed a case for $1,000. The worst, $4,543. Same budget, 4.5x the difference.

• 1,425 signed cases on $6.4M of spend: $4,511 blended, about $2,250 inside the paid lead-gen engine
• Four vendors signing cases under $2,200: clear double-down tier
• Three vendors between $3,200 and $3,750: hold until actual spend and fees by source are in
• 246 referral cases at essentially zero cost, converting at 90%+: the most under-invested channel in the firm
• Lead-to-signed conversion ran 92 to 99% on nearly every source. Intake was never the problem; vendor cost was

What the owner could act on

1. Shift budget to the four vendors under $2,200 per signed case
2. Build a formal referral program, the only proven zero-cost channel
3. Hold the borderline vendors until real fees by source replace the firm-average fee, then grade them
4. Keep about $0.6M of headroom parked until the mapped vendors prove 5:1 on real revenue

The payoff of the method: every marketing dollar now has a cost-per-signed-case next to it. The next cut or raise is a number, not an argument.

Could your firm answer the same question?

If your marketing is more than 10% of revenue and you cannot name your cost per signed case by vendor, you are deciding seven figures on instinct. Take the three-minute Quick Score, or book a complimentary Financial X-Ray Review and we will run this on your numbers.

Figures are from the firm’s own books and case-management system over a trailing twelve months. Vendor and firm names withheld. Gui Albergaria is Founder & CEO of Veritas Management Group, a fractional CFO firm in Tulsa. He served as an in-house CFO before founding Veritas.

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