Personal injury intake is a funding decision: what a contingency firm commits when it says yes

This page is not about how to run an intake process. That is a separate question and the workflow, its six steps, its owners and its failure modes are set out in the intake software directory. This page is about the decision the process exists to serve: in a contingency practice, saying yes to a matter commits the firm's own money for years, and almost nothing published about personal injury intake treats it that way.

21 claim records·8 sections·every figure attributed to a dated capture·no first-party testing

Search for personal injury intake and you get process advice. Screen the caller, collect the facts, respond quickly, refer out what does not fit. That advice is not wrong. It is just answering a different question from the one a contingency firm is actually asking, which is whether this matter is worth funding.

What the ranked set covers, and the one thing it does not

Nine results were returned for this query in our dated capture. Five of them are now held here as fetched page captures: the agency page ranked first, the two vendor articles ranked second and third, the vendor guide ranked fifth and the vendor article ranked sixth. The discussion thread ranked fourth is also held, as a browser transcript rather than a fetch. Two of the five fetched pages were previously recorded here as failed fetches. They were not. Both had been requested at addresses that differ from the ranked ones, and taking each address from the capture's own text returned the article.

Screening, qualification, triage, declining and referring out are all present across those five pages. Anyone who tells you the field ignores saying no is wrong, and an earlier version of our own research notes said exactly that before it was corrected.

What is absent is the money. Across those five pages the vocabulary of cost, expense, investment, funding, capital, overhead, budget, profit and revenue appears in single-digit counts, and several of those occurrences are navigation links rather than article text. The single occurrence of the word contingency in the whole set instructs firms to explain contingency percentages and any filing costs to the potential client. That is fee disclosure to the claimant. It is not the firm working out what the matter will cost it.

That is a finding about five captured pages on one dated capture. It says nothing about pages we did not capture, and nothing about what these publishers held before or hold now.

What acceptance commits

The clearest statement of the funding frame in our evidence comes from one practising personal injury attorney writing for his peers in a bar-association publication. He is a single source and a single California practice, and everything in this section is his account.

He puts the leverage at the start: counsel has no greater power or control over a case than at initial intake, and whether to add the case to the inventory may be the single most important decision in it. What follows acceptance he names in the same paragraph: once the decision is made, the responsibilities attach, and they are the commitment of time, money, liability and reputation.

The horizon is what turns that commitment into capital rather than effort. He writes that most cases take two to five years, or more, to resolve, and names the pressure that follows: the drive to sign up as many cases as possible, which he says may result in taking on cases without full vetting. That is a practitioner's stated range and his own causal assertion. It is not a measured distribution of case durations, and nothing we hold tests whether the pressure produces the outcome he describes.

He also states the mechanism that connects the two: valuation dictates the amount of time, effort and litigation costs counsel can reasonably invest in a case. His illustration is an auto policy limit of fifteen thousand dollars constraining what can be spent on the matter. That figure is an example he offers, not a market rate.

A second practitioner publication frames the same decision more briefly, describing intake as the case-selection decision rather than a data-collection step.

The cost side, and how little of it anybody publishes

If intake is a funding decision, the obvious next question is what the funding actually is. Our evidence holds very little, and what it holds is worth being precise about.

One figure connects case value to case cost, and it is offered as a rule of thumb by the attorney above: expect to spend 10 percent of the case value on litigation costs. He presents it as a rule of thumb and gives no sample, no dataset and no method. It is the only figure in our research linking what a case is worth to what prosecuting it costs, and it is a heuristic. It is not an average and it is not an industry figure.

One cost input is published by a party with nothing to sell. A US state publishes a dated schedule of maximum medical-record retrieval charges, effective 1 July 2026, of up to $25.88 for search and retrieval, up to $9.70 per record for certification, and per-page copying of $0.97 for pages 1 to 20, $0.83 for pages 21 to 100 and $0.66 for pages over 100. Those are one state's published rates on one date, adjusted annually against the medical component of the consumer price index. Nothing here says what any other state publishes, what any firm pays, who may request records, or when a charge applies. Those are questions for your own counsel and this page does not answer them.

The rest of the money evidence is what practitioners say about acquisition. It comes from six reports by five distinct accounts, and one of the six carries no figure at all. We name the count because two of the reports come from the same person.

Every one of those is a pseudonymous account of a single firm, several of them without a stated period or market. Together they do not make a cost per case for personal injury, and no page should present them as one. What they do establish is that the people doing this work talk about intake in terms of acquisition cost and signature cost, which is the vocabulary the ranked pages do not use.

What one practitioner screens on, before anyone spends anything

If the meeting is the expensive item, the screen in front of it is where the money is protected. Our evidence holds one concrete criteria set, from one personal injury practitioner. He describes qualifying every lead by phone before granting a meeting, and names what he asks about: the injuries, whether the person went to hospital, how the accident happened, and which motorist the police ticketed. Unsuitable leads are declined on the call and receive a standard declination email.

Those four questions are one practitioner's liability and damages screen. He is the same person who reports the hundred-dollar click, which is worth holding in mind: the screen and the acquisition cost come from one practice, and that consistency is one account rather than two.

The ten-factor checklist published by the attorney quoted earlier is the longest such list we hold, and it is a published article rather than a firm's internal document. Nothing in our evidence contains a firm's actual criteria document, states who wrote one, or connects any criterion to eventual case value. That last one is the question a contingency firm most needs answered and nothing we hold answers it.

One further account places the screening work rather than defining it. A retired intake paralegal reports having criteria to follow covering the limitation period and the prospect's injuries and damages. That is where one firm put the work. The speaker does not say whether the criteria were written down or taught verbally, and states no practice area. This page records where that firm placed the work and reaches no conclusion about who may perform or delegate any part of it. That question is for qualified counsel.

The clock runs against the screen

The screen costs time, and the time is not free either. One practitioner reports that clients hire the first or second lawyer they reach once they see that fee terms are similar between firms. A practitioner publication states that answering unscheduled intake calls disrupts high-priority work, and recommends trained team members or virtual receptionists pre-screen callers.

Those two pull in opposite directions and both are in our evidence. A longer screen protects the firm's money and costs it speed. Nothing we hold measures the trade, and no source connects screening depth to signed cases or to case value.

What the products do at this step

Three of the verified products in our research say something about selection rather than collection, and all three statements are the vendors' own.

One product's official page states that strong fits are sent to the firm's calendar, weak fits receive a decline, referrals are redirected, and the routing rules belong to the customer. That is the closest thing in our research to a product treating declining as a designed outcome. One product is scoped to personal injury alone, from intake through settlement. One places its intake portal in its highest published tier, on published per-user pricing.

These are capability statements by the companies selling the products, captured on dated snapshots. Nothing in our research measures what any of them does to a firm's selection, its decline rate, or its case values. The full comparison, with what each vendor publishes and what it does not, is in the intake software directory.

What this page does not establish