Signed-case reporting: what each case cost, every Monday

Signed-case reporting is the Monday report: what each signed case cost, by channel and by language, checked against your own records, with any gap printed. It is included in every Probative plan, because it is the one number everything else is judged on.

Why a report built on signed cases

Most marketing reports count what the platforms count. That’s why they disagree with the partners’ sense of what’s working.

• Only 37% of law firms have a system to track what their marketing returns (Best Law Firms), and 61% have less than moderate confidence measuring it across channels (Martindale-Avvo).
• Only 22% of firms use call tracking (CallRail), though most legal leads are calls.
• In one review of 50 public law-firm marketing case studies, 6% disclosed a cost per signed case (review).
• One Florida injury firm’s marketing director found about 570 of an agency’s 600 reported monthly calls lasted under two seconds (podcast).

A signed case is the number a managing partner already trusts, because it lives in the firm’s own records. So that’s what we count.

What’s in the report

The report has eight parts. The one-page summary pulls from all of them; the live dashboard, in your firm’s own Google account, holds the detail.

1. Data health. Eight checks that say whether this week’s numbers are complete enough to trust: how many paid leads carry a click or call ID, how many signed cases have a known source, whether our count matches your CRM, whether required fields are filled, whether uploads ran, and whether every outage and consent log is recorded. If a check fails, the report still publishes, but every number below the account level is greyed out and labeled, and the fix plan leads the week.
2. Headline numbers, each with a 13-week trend: signed cases, cost per signed case, spend, leads, the share of leads that sign, days to sign, and open leads by value band.
3. Channel by practice area, with AI assistants on their own line.
4. Keyword groups, including a line for spend Google doesn’t itemize.
5. County and ZIP code.
6. English and Spanish, side by side.
7. Cohorts: of the leads that came in each week, how many signed by week 1, 2, 4 and 8. This is how you see whether a change is working before every case has signed.
8. Decisions: what we changed, what we decided, and what we need from you.

See the format in the ILLUSTRATIVE sample report.

The rules behind every number

The definitions are public in The Probative Standard. The short version:

• A lead is a real conversation: a call with at least 30 seconds of connected talk, a form or chat with working contact details, or a Local Services lead Google records as a call or message. Spam, silent calls, wrong numbers, job seekers, vendors, existing clients and tests never count.
• A signed case is a client who signed your engagement agreement, as recorded in your CRM, counted once, on the date it was signed. For practices that don’t work on contingency, it means a retained client.
• Credit goes to the last paid touch. A signed case is credited to the last paid click or tracked paid call in the 30 days before the person first contacted you, the same window Google uses by default (Google). The first touch and what the client said sit beside it, never blended in.
• Two views of cost. The signing-date view counts cases signed this period, the way your CRM does; we use it to match your records. The cohort view ties each case to the month its lead came in; budget decisions use it, once a cohort is mature.
• Small numbers stay small. No cost per signed case is shown for any line with fewer than 5 signed cases. That line shows its spend and counts instead.
• Credit isn’t cause. Every channel’s cost carries its test status, or the words “no test yet,” because getting credit for a case isn’t the same as causing it.

How we match your records

• Every week, our signed count and your CRM’s are compared on the signing-date view. They must agree within 2%, or within one case when fewer than 50 signed.
• The gap is printed, with the platform-reported conversions beside both counts, so you can see how far each number drifts from the truth.
• The monthly close, by business day 5, restates the last 12 weeks as late signings arrive. A restated number isn’t a correction; it’s new information, and it’s labeled as such.
• Unknown sources stay unknown. A signed case we can’t trace sits on its own “source unknown” line. It is never spread across channels to make them look better.

Your data, and your right to check it

• Row-level access. You can read the rows behind any number: one row per lead, keyed by your CRM’s record ID, with no names, plus the upload logs, the change log and every version of the value table.
• Traced in 2 business days. Ask us to trace any number in any report to its rows, and we will, within 2 business days.
• Errors disclosed. A material error, one that changes a signed-case count, moves a cost per signed case by 5% or more, or touches a decision we recommended, is disclosed to you in writing within 2 business days, with a corrected report. Errors in our favor are handled exactly like errors against us.
• Nothing sensitive leaves your CRM. No names, phone numbers, injuries, charges, immigration status or case facts appear in any report or upload.

What we need to start

• Four fields in your CRM, if they aren’t there already: source, language, case type and stage dates. About an hour of your CRM administrator’s time.
• An export or read-only connection to your CRM, call tracking and ad accounts. Google’s Data Manager reads common sources such as Sheets, BigQuery and some CRMs (Google); no legal CRM is a native source, so we keep a clean ledger in between.
• Your intake criteria in writing, so “qualified” means what your firm means.
• Intake staff who fill in the fields on every call. This is the single biggest factor in report quality.

Timeline

How it changes by practice

• Personal injury: case-type values and long signing times make cohorts essential.
• Criminal defense: a signed case is a retained client, often within a day; the report moves fast.
• Family law: retained clients on hourly or flat fees; values reflect expected fees, not settlements.
• Estate planning: signed plans by package, plus seminar sign-ups as their own stage.
• Employment law: heavy screening means many leads and few signings; qualified-lead cost matters as much as signed-case cost.
• Lemon law: signed cases by make and model, where the volume allows.
• Immigration: retained matters by type, with language on every line.

If you keep your current agency, the same report can measure it: see independent measurement. The method we will use to report our own results is on how we report.