Why quality has to be scored, not felt
Intake teams know within a week whether a new inquiry source is good. Managing partners usually find out a quarter later, when the signed cases do not reconcile with the spend. A written scorecard closes that gap: it forces the questions to be asked before the money moves, and it gives the monthly review a structure that survives a change of vendor or a change of intake lead.
The ten criteria
| Criterion | What good looks like | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Consent provenance | The family gave express consent to be contacted by your firm, on a page that disclosed the commercial relationship, with the consent text, version, timestamp and source page delivered with the inquiry. | 15 |
| 2. Exclusivity | The inquiry was delivered to your firm alone. Shared leads produce a race to dial, not a consultation. | 12 |
| 3. Intent origin | You can see the query, ad or page that produced the inquiry, and it was a legal-process or attorney-selection intent, not a medical-information search dressed up as a lead. | 12 |
| 4. Screening data | State, approximate timing, the general nature of the outcome and the family's own description arrive with the inquiry, in their words, so the first call starts informed. | 10 |
| 5. Jurisdiction match | The events occurred where you are licensed or have a documented co-counsel arrangement. Out-of-state inquiries are returnable or never sent. | 10 |
| 6. Timeliness | The inquiry reaches your intake within minutes of submission, around the clock, not in a daily batch. | 10 |
| 7. Reachability | Contact rate from the source over a trailing quarter, measured from your CRM. Unreachable inquiries are the most expensive kind. | 10 |
| 8. Duplicate rate | Share of inquiries already in your CRM, or submitted to several firms. Low, and credited back when it happens. | 6 |
| 9. Disclosure compliance | The pages and ads that produced the inquiry carried accurate attorney-advertising disclosures, made no presumptive claims about the child's injury, and promised nothing about compensation. | 10 |
| 10. Outcome feedback | You report stage outcomes back (contacted, screened, signed) and the source uses them to improve, rather than optimizing to form fills. | 5 |
Score each criterion as a fraction of its weight. A source under 60 is costing you more than its price. A source over 85 is rare, and when you find one you should protect it with exclusivity and feedback rather than squeeze it on price.
Questions that expose the answer
- "Show me the page the family submitted on, and the consent text they saw." A vendor who cannot is selling something they should not be.
- "How many firms receive this inquiry?" The honest answer is one, and it is in the contract.
- "What search terms or creative produced last month's inquiries?" If the answer is a category rather than a list, intent is not being managed.
- "What is your contact rate and how do you know?" The only acceptable source is a CRM with timestamps.
- "What happens when we mark an inquiry out of jurisdiction, duplicate or unreachable?" Credit terms belong in writing.
- "Do you pass any health or case details to advertising platforms?" The answer must be no, and you should be able to inspect the conversion payloads.
Red flags
- Pricing per signed case or as a share of fees. Beyond the obvious professional-conduct questions, it means the vendor controls your intake.
- Promises of fixed monthly volumes. Birth injury does not produce a fixed volume of anything.
- Creative that tells families their child's condition was caused by a mistake. It violates platform rules, bar rules and basic decency, and it fills your intake with people who were promised something.
- Inquiries that arrive with diagnoses but no consent record. Sensitive information without provenance is a liability, not an asset.
Using the scorecard on your own campaigns
The criteria apply equally to inquiries you generate yourself. Score your search and social campaigns as if they were vendors: can you trace intent origin, are disclosures on every landing page, does contact happen in minutes, does the CRM feed outcomes back to bidding? The campaigns we build are designed to score above 90 on this scale because every criterion is built in rather than inspected afterwards.