What is a law firm's intake conversion rate?

Four figures are in circulation for what share of a law firm's inbound enquiries become clients, and they do not agree. Set side by side they look like a range with a wide spread, which invites a reader to take something near the middle and treat it as typical. That reading is wrong, and the reason is visible only once each figure is put next to what it actually measured.

The largest problem is the denominator. An inquiry is every contact that reaches the firm. A lead is what survives an initial filter. A qualified lead is what survives a second one. Each filter removes the enquiries least likely to convert, so a conversion rate calculated further down the funnel is arithmetically higher without anybody performing better. Two of the four figures here appear to be measured at different points on that funnel, and neither says which.

The second problem is population. One figure describes the sector; another describes firms characterised as top-tier, with no statement of how that group was selected. A rate measured on self-selected high performers is not a benchmark, because the selection is doing the work. It tells a reader what is achievable, which is useful, but it cannot tell them whether they are behind.

None of the four states a sample size, a measurement window or a method, and every one of them is published by a business that sells intake or marketing services into the legal market or reports on it. That is a structural observation rather than an accusation: a vendor has no obligation to publish methodology and every incentive to publish a figure. Under the evidence model this site uses, three of the four are graded as not evidence at all and the fourth is an onward attribution, which is why none of them appears in the sourced-data appendix and why the table above is an audit rather than a benchmark.

The useful conclusion is not a number. It is that a firm asking what a good conversion rate looks like is asking a question the published literature cannot answer, and that measuring their own rate for one quarter would produce something more decision-relevant than any figure they could cite. That measurement requires defining the denominator once and counting consistently, which is the part every source above skipped.