Lead response time
Lead response time is the elapsed time between a prospective client's inbound inquiry to a law firm and that firm's first personal reply to it. It names a clock rather than a standard, and the reading on that clock is uninterpretable unless four things are stated beside it.
The four parameters a figure needs
Any response-time figure comes from a study that had to answer four questions before it could measure anything. Two studies that answer them differently are not measuring the same quantity, whatever they both call it.
1. The channel and the start event. A web form submission and a phone call are different measures. The 2025 lead form study started its clock at the moment an inquiry was submitted through a law firm's own website form, between 10 a.m. and 12 p.m. in that firm's local time zone, using a fictitious alias and story. The 2019 Clio assessment emailed a random sample of 1,000 US firms and then phoned 500 of them. Nothing that measures a form measures a phone.
2. What counts as a reply. The 2025 study measures to the first personal outreach from the firm. Its captured methodology does not define whether an automated acknowledgement qualifies, so the boundary between a real reply and an autoresponder is not established for those figures.
3. The window before a non-response. This is the parameter most often dropped, and it changes what a non-response is. The 2025 lead form study counted a firm non-responsive if its first reply came after seven days. The 2019 Clio phone assessment counted a firm unreachable when it neither answered nor returned a voicemail within 72 hours. A firm that replies on day four is a responder in one study and a failure in the other.
4. The denominator. One study can contain both conventions. Clio reported that 60% of the 1,000 firms it emailed did not respond at all, and that of the firms that did respond, 82% did so within 24 hours. The first is computed over everyone contacted. The second is computed only over the firms that answered, so it describes the speed of responders and says nothing about the majority that stayed silent. Quoted alone, the 82% reads as a statement about law firms generally, which is close to the reverse of what the same study found.
What the published figures actually say
Each figure below is stated with the population and the year that produced it, because none of them can be moved to another population or blended with another study.
Hennessey Digital, a law firm marketing agency, reports a median response time to online leads of 13 minutes, measured across 1,333 US law firms contacted in the first quarter of 2025 and drawn from two published lists plus a list the agency curated itself, sampling personal injury firms, criminal defense firms and other practice areas. In the same study 26% of firms did not respond to online leads at all, and 39% took more than two hours to respond or did not respond. That frame deliberately re-contacts firms from earlier years to build a year-over-year series, which makes it a panel rather than a probability sample of US law firms, and the agency sells marketing services to the firms it measures.
Clio, which sells client intake and practice management software, hired a research company to approach 500 law firms by email and phone with a client inquiry. It reports that 33% of the firms emailed responded at all, and that 48% were unreachable by phone even after being given the chance to respond to messages. Those figures come from a different publisher, a different year, different channels and a different sample size than the lead form figures above, and the two sets must not be read as one picture.
Only one pair in this evidence comes close to comparable, and it is two editions of the same study: 1,377 US firms in the first quarter of 2024 against 1,333 in the first quarter of 2025, sampling the same stated practice-area mix. Where those two editions disagree with each other is set out in the lead response time research.
A national median is not a target
The same 2025 study publishes medians by city, listing Louisville, KY as the fastest-responding city at 0 minutes and Tallahassee, FL as the slowest at 121 minutes. The national median of 13 minutes sits somewhere inside that range, so it describes no particular market. A firm comparing itself to the national figure is comparing itself to an aggregate of markets it does not compete in.
The clock the prospective client is running
Response time measured on the firm's side is not the same quantity as the waiting tolerance measured on the consumer's side, and the two are frequently quoted as if they were.
Martindale-Avvo's 2023 consumer report asked roughly 1850 consumers, recruited from the publisher's own legal network sites Avvo, Lawyers.com, Nolo and Martindale, how long they would wait to hear back before contacting someone else. The answers were 1 to 8 hours 18.6%, 9 to 23 hours 21.8%, 24 to 48 hours 41.9%, 3 to 6 days 11.3%, and 1 week or more 6.4%. That is stated intention from a panel recruited from attorney comparison sites, not observed behaviour, and the largest single group named a day or two rather than minutes.
What lead response time does not measure
The multipliers attached to this term in circulation trace to a 2007 business to business study whose authors state that it was designed to identify optimal timing for contact and qualification rates and that it did not address close ratios. Contact is not signing. The full lineage of that number, and the five different multipliers in circulation on this topic, is traced in the lead response time research.
What this evidence does not establish
No source captured for this research links response time to a signed engagement, so no target response time is published here: not five minutes, not 13 minutes, not an hour. No figure above may be averaged with, blended into or placed in a series with a figure from a different study, the two editions of the lead form study being the only pairing this evidence supports reading against each other. Every measurement of law firm response behaviour held here was published by a party with a commercial interest in the finding, either a marketing agency selling to the firms it measured or a vendor selling intake software. And nothing here establishes that software changes the number, because the failure these studies measure most consistently is a reply that never arrived rather than one that arrived late.
Related
Lead response time research, which traces the five-minute rule to its source. Lead qualification, the step that follows the first reply. Methodology, for what counts as a source here and how figures are verified.
Nothing on this page is legal advice, and nothing here is a benchmark your firm should be held to.