--- title: "How we calculate cost per signed case | Link & Impulse" description: "How we calculate cost per signed case for personal injury firms: how intake text gets a channel, what we leave blank, and the rules every number follows." url: "https://linkandimpulse.com/method" --- # How the numbers are made Last updated October 6, 2026 Written for the partner who gets asked “where did that number come from?” It starts with the tracking fix, which puts the source on every intake, and every figure we report follows the rules below. Contents 1. [What we join](https://linkandimpulse.com/method#sources) 2. [How a case gets its channel](https://linkandimpulse.com/method#channels) 3. [Cost per signed case](https://linkandimpulse.com/method#division) 4. [What we leave blank](https://linkandimpulse.com/method#blanks) 5. [Recent months](https://linkandimpulse.com/method#young) 6. [Estimated fees](https://linkandimpulse.com/method#fees) 7. [When something is off](https://linkandimpulse.com/method#caveats) 8. [How reports are written](https://linkandimpulse.com/method#writing) 9. [When we raise a flag](https://linkandimpulse.com/method#alerts) ## § 1 What we join We read from the systems you already pay for, every night. Each one holds part of the answer. - Advertising Your paid search account, plus any other ad and offline spend you record each month - Website and search Web analytics, search performance and your business listings - Phones CallRail - Email and content ActiveCampaign, Webflow - Cases Clio, Litify or Filevine If you don’t use one of these, that part of the report is left out. It isn’t estimated. ## § 2 How a case gets its channel Your intake team records where each client heard of you, usually as free text. We map that text onto a fixed list of channels, online and offline. Referrals stay split by type (attorney, medical, past client), because for a personal injury firm the type of referral is what matters. Exhibit A What intake typed, and where it lands | Typed at intake | Channel | | ------------------------- | ------------------------------ | | “google ppc” | Paid search | | “LSA” | Paid search | | “billboard on I‑95” | Out of home | | “saw you on TV” | TV | | “Dr. Alvarez” | Medical referral | | “co-counsel Smith & Park” | Attorney referral | | “past client” | Client referral | | (left empty) | Unknown | | “Bob’s list” | Unassigned, and listed for you | Paid terms are checked before organic ones, since “google ads” also contains “google”. An empty field is _Unknown_: nothing was recorded, and no mapping can fix that. Text that matches nothing is _Unassigned_ and shows up in your report, because that one can be fixed. After [the tracking fix](https://linkandimpulse.com/tracking), the field is a picklist that uses these same channel names, and web and phone intakes also carry the click ID and campaign that brought them in. The mapping then has much less to guess at. ## § 3 How cost per signed case is worked out Cost per signed case equals ad spend plus offline spend, divided by cases signed that month By channel and by month. Paid search spend is split by campaign type, so search campaigns count as Paid search and video gets its own row. Offline spend comes from the sheet you fill in. Both are shown next to the total, so if a partner asks what makes up a $4,100 cost per case, the answer is on the same row. Sign rate is counted differently, on purpose: of the inquiries that came in during a month, how many went on to sign. That keeps it from ever going above 100%. ## § 4 What we leave blank A channel with no recorded spend has no cost per case. We leave it blank. Showing $0 would make it look like the cheapest source of cases you have, when really it’s the one you haven’t measured. ## § 5 Recent months Some of last month’s inquiries haven’t signed yet, and some of last year’s cases haven’t settled. Recent months are marked as still maturing, so nobody mistakes an incomplete month for a bad one. Reports only ever cover complete months. ## § 6 Estimated fees Some case management systems record a case’s outcome but not the fee. When that happens we estimate the fee from your usual fee terms, and every figure that includes an estimate is labelled as one. ## § 7 When something is off Problems are written in plain English, in terms you can act on: > “Four matters sit in a stage we don’t recognise, so they’re missing from the signed count and every cost per signed case.” Not a failed test name, and not a silent gap in the chart. ## § 8 How reports are written AI doesn’t write your numbers. Every figure is computed from your data first, and the report text is built from those figures. A sentence can’t contain a number your data didn’t produce, and your figures are never sent to a third party to be written up. Reports describe what moved and by how much, never why. The data can’t separate the market, the season and the marketing, and we won’t claim it can. The one recommendation at the end of each report is written by a person. ## § 9 When we raise a flag Each night, the latest complete day is checked against the 28 days before it. A metric is flagged only if it moved at least 35% _and_ is at least 2.5 standard deviations from normal. It has to meet both. A new account needs 14 days of history before anything can be flagged. Cost per signed case is judged over a rolling 30 days instead, because at a firm’s case volume a single day tells you nothing. ## Start with a call. A short call about how your intakes arrive and where their source gets lost. If your tracking already holds, we start with the monthly report. If it doesn’t, we fix it first, because a report on intakes nobody can trace can’t tell you much. [Book a call](https://linkandimpulse.com/contact) [Security and privacy](https://linkandimpulse.com/security) If neither would pay for itself at your firm, we’ll say so on the call.