How Does Your PI Firm's Marketing Performance Compare to Firms Your Size?

Most PI marketing benchmarks are nearly useless for comparison purposes. Not because the data is wrong — but because they lump a $130K/month firm alongside a $580K/month firm and call it “industry average.” Those two operations are not competing in the same market, buying from the same vendors, or running the same intake process.

The benchmarks that actually help are segmented by spend tier. A firm investing $175K/month faces different vendor economics, different market saturation, and different intake constraints than one spending $475K/month. Cost structures reflect that gap.

Below are benchmark ranges segmented by monthly marketing spend — so you can compare your firm against the right peer group, not just a blurred industry average.

Why Spend Tier Matters More Than Firm Size

Two firms with 25 attorneys can look nothing alike on the marketing side. One spends $130K/month across three vendors. The other spends $460K/month across nine. Attorney headcount tells you about the firm. Monthly marketing spend tells you about the marketing operation.

Spend tier shapes every downstream metric. Higher-spend firms manage more vendors — more complexity, more overhead. They operate in more competitive markets, which pushes cost per lead higher. But they carry more negotiating leverage and have more data to optimize against. These tradeoffs are predictable once you benchmark within the right tier.

The benchmarks below reflect direct marketing spend (lead generation costs) divided by outcomes. They cover auto accident and general PI — firms focused on catastrophic injury or mass tort will see different numbers.

Performance Benchmarks by Spend Tier

Tier 1: $100K–$250K/Month

Firms in this tier typically run two to four paid lead sources alongside organic and referral. The standard setup: Google Ads, one or two lead aggregators, and some local SEO or LSA presence.

Lead volume per dollar is highest at this tier because firms are buying their most efficient channels first. A firm spending $180K/month should expect roughly 500 to 720 leads per month — and 30 to 65 signed cases, depending on intake performance and case criteria.

Cost per case above $3,500 at this tier usually has one of two causes: intake conversion below 5%, or heavy reliance on shared aggregator leads. Break cost per case down by source — the outlier almost always surfaces immediately.

Tier 2: $250K–$500K/Month

This is where marketing operations get meaningfully more complex. Firms manage five to eight lead sources — often TV or radio alongside digital channels. Vendor management stops being a side task and becomes a dedicated function.

Lead efficiency (leads per dollar) dips as firms enter this tier, because they add higher-cost channels to sustain volume growth. Intake conversion often improves to compensate — dedicated intake teams with clearer processes are more common here.

A firm spending $375K/month should expect 825 to 1,275 leads per month and 60 to 130 signed cases. If you're hitting lead volume targets but signing fewer than 60 cases, intake is the bottleneck — not your lead sources.

Tier 3: $500K+/Month

Firms at $500K or more are running enterprise-level marketing operations — even if the firm itself has 20 attorneys. You're typically managing eight to fifteen sources across digital, broadcast, out-of-home, and direct mail.

Cost per lead and cost per case both climb at this tier because incremental channels are more expensive. You can't scale from $250K to $750K by buying more Google Ads — you add channels with different cost structures. That's not a red flag; it's a predictable feature of the tier.

The metric that matters most here is not cost per case in isolation — it's case acquisition ROI. A $5,000 cost per case producing $350K average settlements is a far stronger investment than a $2,500 cost per case producing $80K average settlements. Track both sides of the equation.

How to Position Your Firm Within These Ranges

Where you land within a range — upper, middle, or lower half — comes down to three controllable factors:

• Vendor mix quality.Firms that review vendor performance monthly and reallocate budget toward top performers consistently sit in the lower half of cost per case ranges. Firms that set vendor budgets once and leave them drift toward the upper half.
• Intake conversion rate.A 2-point improvement in lead-to-sign rate reduces cost per case by 20–30% without touching a single marketing dollar. This is almost always the highest-leverage fix available.
• Case criteria clarity.Firms with clearly defined intake criteria applied consistently sign fewer unqualified cases — and waste fewer qualified leads to vague rejection calls.

The Missing Piece: Your Own Data Comes First

Industry benchmarks give you orientation — they don't replace firm-specific tracking. To know whether your $3,200 cost per case is strong or weak, you need cost per case by source, intake conversion rate by source, and average case value by source.

Without that granularity, benchmarks are interesting but not actionable. With it, they become a diagnostic — a way to pinpoint where your firm has the most room to move.

RevenueScale's marketing ROI dashboard calculates cost per case by vendor automatically — so you can benchmark against your own trend data, not just industry averages that may or may not reflect your market.