This post defines the marketing metrics law firms need to evaluate the performance and profitability of their marketing campaigns and client intake processes. It covers key performance indicators, including conversion rate, cost per conversion, and revenue per case. Understanding these metrics helps determine which channels and campaigns are driving qualified cases and which are wasting budget.
In order to understand whether or not your marketing efforts and intake processes are effective and profitable, you need to understand the law firm marketing metrics used to measure and report on performance. All of these metrics can be segmented multiple ways to identify which touch points and traffic sources are benefiting your practice—and which aren’t.
Whether you’re a managing partner reviewing marketing spend, a firm administrator overseeing intake, or a legal marketer reporting on results, Better Cases’ glossary of law firm marketing metrics provides foundational vocabulary for interpreting performance data and making informed decisions.
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Click Through Rate (CTR)
Click through rate, almost always referred to in reporting as CTR, measures how many people who saw your business’s online ad or organic search result clicked on it, ended up on your website. This is a measure of how compelling and relevant your marketing is.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate measures the percentage of people who complete a valuable action. This metric can be applied to multiple steps in your marketing and intake funnel, including:
- The percentage of website visitors who contact your firm, which measures digital marketing and website effectiveness.
- The percentage of leads that become qualified leads, which is a measure of marketing effectiveness.
- The percentage of qualified leads that become clients, which is a measure of intake effectiveness.
- Some firms also track the conversion rate of other steps in the client journey, such as the percentage of potential clients who schedule or show up for a meeting.
Cost per Conversion
Cost per conversion measures how much it costs to capture a valuable action. Like conversion rate, cost per conversion can be used with multiple types of valuable actions, including a new lead, qualified lead, or signed client. In the case of a signed client, this metric may be referred to as client acquisition cost. Cost per conversion or acquisition helps ensure your marketing and other costs associated with onboarding a new client are profitable; the cost per conversion cannot exceed expected revenue per client.
Email Open Rate
Open rate measures how many people in your email audience opened your emails and can indicate brand recognition, email relevancy, and subject line effectiveness.
Email Unsubscribe Rate
Unsubscribe rate measures how many people in your email audience have unsubscribed themselves. A high unsubscribe rate may indicate your emails are irrelevant to your audience or are sent too frequently.
Return on Investment (ROI)
Return on investment is a common law firm KPI that measures how much profit can be attributed to spending on marketing, operations, or other investments, as compared to how much that investment costs. ROI is expressed as a percentage or multiplier.
In advertising, this may be referred to as return on ad spend (ROAS).
Revenue per Case
Revenue per case measures how much your firm makes from a new client, on average. This is similar to client lifetime value, which measures how much your firm will make from serving a client’s legal needs throughout the time they remain a client. Revenue per case is an essential law firm KPI and should be used to ensure marketing and operations are profitable.
These metrics, and whether they are the same, depend on your practice area. For disability lawyers, a client may only need your services once. Therefore, revenue per case is identical to the client’s lifetime value. For lawyers who serve the same clients repeatedly, lifetime value is much higher than revenue per case.
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Chris Reilley – Founder
Chris founded Better Cases after years of helping attorneys adapt their marketing to a changing landscape at his first digital marketing agency, Parkway Digital. His experience showed what worked, what didn’t, and what firms actually needed. His approach prioritizes strategy, efficiency, and results that help law firms.