Schedule rate, show-up rate and close rate

Schedule rate, show-up rate and close rate are intake funnel measures, each attached to one stage boundary on a firm's path from inbound inquiry to signed client. In the whole of the practitioner evidence captured here those three exact terms appear once, together, in a single sentence from a single small-firm owner, and no source captured here defines what any of them counts.

A wider search finds near-variants rather than nothing. One practitioner names a "show rate" in a list of measures a firm should keep separate, and another discusses "closing rates" at two values. Neither defines its term either, and nothing captured here establishes that a show rate and a show-up rate, or a closing rate and a close rate, name the same measure. That is not a quibble about wording: it is the whole difficulty this page is about, and it is why the count above is stated as the three exact terms rather than as the ideas behind them.

That is the honest answer, and it is worth more than a confident definition would be. Anyone can write a plausible one. What follows is what is actually on the record.

Where the terms come from

A small-firm owner posting in a law firm forum lists five measures their firm tracks: total leads, qualified leads, schedule rate, show-up rate and close rate, and states that clearly defining the stages makes the holes easier to identify. No values accompany the list. The comment names the measures and stops.

The same commenter separately describes the stage structure those measures sit on. A prospective client calls and reaches a receptionist, the receptionist identifies them as a prospective client and connects them to intake, intake screens for whether the firm can help, and if the person is qualified an appointment is booked with a salesperson, who then sells.

Read together, those two comments are as close as this evidence gets to a definition, and they stop short of one. The structure names a qualification step and a booked appointment. It does not say what the denominator of a schedule rate is, whether a show-up rate is computed over appointments booked or over qualified leads, or what event counts as closed. The measure names invite you to fill those in. The source does not.

Note the vocabulary as well as the structure. Salesperson and close rate are sales words, and they arrive together, in one firm's account of how it has organised itself. Nothing here establishes how common that arrangement is.

Practitioners do not share the vocabulary either

A second practitioner uses a different name for what looks like adjacent territory. Advising a firm owner to document the existing process before hiring anyone, they ask how many calls a day, how much time per call, and what the sign-up rate is for the cases the firm actually wants. Sign-up rate, not close rate, and nothing in the captured material establishes that the two name the same thing.

A third states that cost per signed client is the only acquisition number worth tracking, and dismisses impressions, clicks and calls as meaningless beside it. A fourth, a paralegal handling all intake for a firm, tracks no rate at all: the spreadsheet records date, source of case, source details, case name, case type, whether the matter was referred out, and whether it was accepted, rejected or pending.

Four accounts, four different answers about what to count, and none of them wrong. What none of them supplies is a shared definition, which is exactly what a reader looking up close rate is usually after.

The two values on the record, and why they cannot be compared

One practitioner reports a number, and it is the same practitioner who advises measuring a sign-up rate in the first place. Having finished a purchased-lead campaign with a named legal directory provider, they report a case sign-up rate of 3% and call it abysmal. Captured 2026-08-17. The comment does not state the denominator, so it is not clear whether the 3% is computed over leads delivered, leads contacted, or consultations held. It is a self-reported result for one campaign at one practice, not a rate for that firm's intake as a whole.

One vendor reports a number. MyCase states that in 2023, MyCase customers captured 58,395 leads through customized intake forms and that 10,286 of those leads converted into clients, averaging a conversion rate of 17.6%, attributing the figures to its 2024 Legal Industry Trends Report. Captured 2026-08-18. That is a ratio computed by a software vendor over the leads its own customers captured through its own forms in one year. It is not an industry rate and it is not a benchmark. The report it is attributed to sits behind a lead-capture form, so the counts cannot be checked against the document said to contain them, and converted into clients is nowhere defined.

Those two figures must not be set beside each other. One is a single campaign at one firm with an unstated denominator. The other is one software vendor's customer base across a calendar year, with intake-form submissions in the denominator by construction. They count different populations over different periods with different things underneath the line, and no arithmetic joins them. This page computes nothing from either.

One publisher does name a benchmark, and names no source for it

The sources above name measures and report results. None of them offers a target to measure against. One captured page does, for a measure it defines itself, and it is worth reading closely for what it gets right as much as for what it leaves out.

A staffing provider's intake metrics page, captured 2026-08-17, states a benchmark of 30 to 50% for most practice areas, and names no source for it. Unusually for this material, it does say what the figure counts: the measure it attaches the benchmark to is defined on the same page as the percentage of potential clients who contact your firm and sign a retainer. That is a stated denominator, which is more than any practitioner source above supplies, and it is why the figure is worth quoting at all.

It is also not a benchmark for any of the three measures this page is about. Contact to signed retainer spans the whole funnel, from the first inbound approach to a signature. Close rate, as the practitioner above uses it, sits on one stage boundary near the end of that span, after a qualified lead has been booked and has shown up. Nothing captured here establishes that the two name the same thing, and a firm that measured itself against 30 to 50% while counting only its late-stage conversions would be comparing a narrow numerator against a wide one.

Two further things about that page belong next to the figure. It names no source for the benchmark, so there is nothing to follow. And the sentence immediately beneath the figure tells a firm scoring below it that the cause is usually a process problem rather than lead quality, and points to the publisher's own remote intake staffing service. That is a target published by a party that sells the remedy for missing it, which does not make the number wrong and does mean it arrives with an interest attached.

The same page carries a second unsourced figure, that 67% of potential clients choose the first law firm that calls them back. That proposition, at three different values and from three different publishers, none of them naming a source, is traced on the cost of a missed call page. The publisher above is one of those three, and this is its second captured page carrying its own version of the figure. Note that the two are not quite the same statement: this page says the first firm to call back, and the page traced elsewhere says the first attorney to answer their call. Calling back and answering are different events, and no source captured here reconciles them.

Close rate has an older usage, and it is a trap

The phrase turns up in one other captured document, and its appearance there is a warning rather than a definition. The 2007 lead response study that most five-minute-rule claims trace back to states in its own methodology that it was designed to identify optimal timing for contact and qualification rates, and that it did not address close ratios. That is a business to business sales study, and nothing in this research establishes that its close ratios and a law firm's close rate name the same measure.

It matters because a ranked legal marketing article states that a landmark MIT and InsideSales.com study found firms contacting a lead within 5 minutes are 21 times more likely to sign that client than firms that wait 30 minutes. In the study document itself, the 21 times figure describes the odds of qualifying a lead, and the same document says close ratios were not addressed. A qualification figure moved one column across into signing. Any close-rate argument built on that number is built on the one outcome its source says it did not measure. The full trace is on the lead response time page.

What to do instead

The consistent advice in the captured practitioner material is to define your own stages and measure across them before comparing yourself to anything. Define the stages so the gaps become visible. Document the existing process in detail before hiring or buying, because otherwise there is no way to judge whether the hire or the purchase worked.

Then state the denominator every single time. Almost every problem on this page is a denominator problem: a 3% with no denominator at all, a 17.6% whose denominator is one vendor's own forms, and a 21 times that belongs to qualification and gets quoted about signing. A rate without a stated denominator is not a measurement, it is a number. A stated denominator is necessary and it is not sufficient: the 30 to 50% benchmark above states what it counts and still names no source for the number, so there is nothing to check it against.

And there is a reason many firms can do none of this. One firm part-owner reports that all intake knowledge and lead data sit with a single paralegal, and that no metrics exist because she is the only person who would know them. Measurement absence and continuity risk are one problem there, not two.

Related: what firms record about their own intake feeds the legal intake software comparison. The standards this page is held to are at methodology.