The Friday-night caller who got a Monday-morning call

A 62-lawyer plaintiff and personal injury firm runs four offices and roughly 1,100 open files, spending about $180,000 a month on advertising to generate new business. It ran on Filevine for case management, with advanced case costs tracked in a shared spreadsheet two people maintained by two different sets of rules.

• A man in an ER waiting room called, filled in the web form, and opened the chat window within 11 minutes, creating three unconnected records for one person
• Nobody worked the lead queue until 9:15 Monday, so he signed with the firm that answered its phone at 8:02 on Friday night
• About one in nine inbound contacts was already in the system on another channel, counted and paid for twice
• A hospital records request could sit 74 days before anyone learned two providers had never received it
• Several million dollars of advanced case costs sat in a shared spreadsheet the firm borrowed against but could not fully defend

We rebuilt the path a case takes from first phone call to settlement check, sequenced so the leaking revenue got plugged before we touched anything downstream. Each phase delivered value on its own, so leadership saw the return building well before the full system was in place.

Unified intake

Phone, web form, and chat merge into one lead record, so three contacts in 11 minutes become one person with three touchpoints instead of three competing leads.

A clock on every lead

Unclaimed after five minutes, a lead escalates. Beyond that it pages a named attorney, weekends included.

Case opening and conflict checks

The signed retainer opens the file, with parties pulled from the document and checked against adverse drivers, carriers, and experts, not just client names.

Records request tracking

Requests became tracked items with a chase-and-escalation schedule that runs on its own, plus an aging view by hospital.

Advanced case cost ledger

Costs moved off the shared spreadsheet into a ledger tied to each case, refreshed nightly and reconciled to the books, with settlement statements generated from it: costs, liens, referral split, and fee.

Marketing and case economics

Cost per signed case is measured by channel so ad spend can move toward what converts, and case types whose advanced costs outrun any realistic recovery surface as a number rather than a hunch.