Methodology
How sources are captured, what counts as evidence here, and what is deliberately withheld.
Independent research, updated 2026-08-21
Law firm intake, checked against the evidence.
Independent research for US consumer law firms choosing intake software, staffing the intake seat and building follow-up. Every published figure traces to a source captured on a stated date, and where the evidence stops, the stop is printed.
Claim in circulation
Respond within five minutes.
Source trail
- A survey drew 495 responses and reported finding no statistically significant answer on timing, beyond generally faster and more efficiently.the authors' own negative result
- So a second study analysed three years of call data from six companies.over fifteen thousand leads, on the publisher's own system
- It measured the odds of contacting a lead, and separately of qualifying one.this is where the 100x and the 21x live
- The authors state it did not address close ratios.so nothing here measures a signed law-firm client
AttributedRead the source trace
10 resourcespublished, each with its sources
6 starting pointseach one an existing resource
Dated captureswhat each source said, and when. Not a test of whether it is true
Boundaries publishedwhat could not be collected is named on the page, not left out
Start with your problem
6 problems, 6 existing resources
Response
Respond faster
The five-minute rule is quoted everywhere. Its source measured contact and qualification at six companies, and states it did not measure signings.
Law firm lead response time
Read the source traceCoverage
Stop losing calls
The cost figure in circulation is three assumptions multiplied together. One of the three is an input your firm can actually measure.
What missed calls cost a law firm
See the arithmeticFollow-up
Follow up more than once
Four pages give four different numbers of attempts. Three are ranked, the fourth is reached by following a publisher off the results page, and two of the four rest on one business-to-business sales statistic.
How many times should a law firm follow up?
Follow the citationsAfter hours
Cover the hours you are closed
Six exercises measured how firms answer a new inquiry. Four state their hours, and three of those four ran during business hours.
After-hours intake for law firms
Read what was measuredMeasurement
Measure your own intake
Both of the ranked pages that link a source for an intake benchmark lead somewhere that does not contain the figure.
Law firm intake metrics
Read the benchmark auditStaffing
Staff the intake seat
An intake hire, a call centre and an answering service. Only the answering-service rates convert to a common unit, and the page says so.
Who should sit your intake seat
Compare what each one costsFeatured investigation
Law firm lead response time
Five pages competing for this search were captured and read in full. Every one carries a multiplier or an uplift figure, and no two are the same number. Two of them name the same 2007 study.
Reading it moves one of those figures back a column: the page claiming 21 times more likely to sign has taken a number its own source records as qualification.
Captured2026-08-17 to 2026-08-18ยท5 of 5 rows
Five pages, five figuresand at least three different things being counted
| Figure | Who published it | Counted |
|---|---|---|
| 21x | agency page, restated as signing a client | signing qualification |
| 100x | intake vendor, 5 minutes against 30 | connecting |
| fourfold | answering service, 5 minutes against 10 | connecting |
| up to 300% | intake platform, no comparison stated | conversion |
| 8x | legal software page, which calls it directional | conversion |
DisputedThe full conflict table, with sources, is on the investigation.
The rest of the library
Legal intake softwareA decision aid for shortlisting intake products, built only from what each vendor publishes on its own site.Should lawyers do their own intake calls?Two identified sources take opposite positions and neither has measured anything. They are answering different questions.Personal injury intake is a funding decisionFive captured pages cover screening and declining. None covers what accepting a case costs the firm, over the two to five years it takes to resolve.Clio Grow vs LawmaticsNeither vendor publishes what an intake-capable configuration costs, and they answer the handoff question differently. What each one states, on dated captures, and where it stops.
How the research is produced
Capture
The page a figure comes from is stored and dated before the figure is written, and the sentence containing it has to match that capture word for word.
Trace
Where a page cites a study, the study is fetched and read against its own methodology section rather than against the pages quoting it.
Publish the boundary
A gap in the evidence is written up as a gap. Reddit refuses the collection stack used here, so that refusal is on the page below rather than quietly absent from it.
Known boundary
Reddit is not reachable by the collection stack used here. Every supported route returns a refusal, and Reddit appears in the majority of the search result sets captured for this subject, so this is a material gap rather than a footnote. Several other large discussion platforms refuse the same way.
The methodology page lists the rest of them.
Art Nikashin
Writes and maintains the Legal Intake Lab
He is not a lawyer and has not run intake inside a firm. The work here is capturing sources, tracing figures to whatever published them first, and modelling costs from inputs a firm can state. What that is worth, and what it is not, is set out on About.
The Legal Intake Lab is published by The Crow's Signal, which works with firms on intake systems. The research is published openly and is not gated behind that work.
Reference
About
Who writes this, and what he is not.