Two vendors. One charges $1,200 per signed case, the other $1,000. On paper, Vendor B wins. In practice, Vendor A's cases settle for nearly $23,000 more on average — because their case mix skews toward surgical and catastrophic injuries while Vendor B floods your intake with minor soft-tissue fender-benders. Cost per case didn't tell you that. Severity distribution does.
Severity distribution is the lens that corrects cost-per-case's blind spot. It shows not just how efficiently a vendor produces signed cases, but what those cases are actually worth. Layer it on top of your CPC data and your budget decisions become dramatically more accurate.
Related guide: See our complete guide to evaluating PI lead vendors — the 7 metrics that define vendor quality and how to build a vendor scorecard.
What Severity Distribution Is and Why It Matters
Severity distribution is the breakdown of signed cases from a given vendor by injury category. Your firm's specific tiers may vary, but a standard PI framework looks like this:
- High severity: Catastrophic injuries, TBI, spinal cord injury, surgical cases, wrongful death
- Mid severity: Surgically recommended (not yet operated), significant soft tissue with documented treatment, herniated disc cases
- Low severity: Minor soft tissue, disputed liability, cases with gap-in-treatment issues
Why it matters: in most PI practices, high-severity cases settle for 3 to 10 times more than low-severity ones. A vendor at $1,400 per case with 60% high-severity cases is generating far more revenue per marketing dollar than a vendor at $1,000 per case with only 20% high-severity. Cost per case treats those two vendors as nearly equal. They are not.
How to Pull Severity Distribution Data
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Severity distribution requires your case management system to categorize cases by injury type or severity at or near the time of signing. The field name varies by platform — in LeadDocket it's typically the case type or injury type field; in Filevine or Clio it's often a custom case category field.
Two things must be true for this to work: cases must be tagged consistently, and each tag must link back to the originating lead source. Without that lead-source-to-case-type linkage, vendor-level severity analysis is impossible.
If your data is clean, the report itself is simple: for each vendor, show the percentage of signed cases in each severity tier over the last 90 to 180 days.
Calculating a Severity-Adjusted Value per Case
With severity distribution in hand, you can build a severity-adjusted case value estimate for each vendor. You don't need settlement data — just your firm's historical average settlement by tier, which most marketing directors already know intuitively even if they've never written it down.
Start by assigning expected settlement values to each tier based on your firm's history. A typical set of numbers:
- High severity: $120,000 average settlement
- Mid severity: $40,000 average settlement
- Low severity: $12,000 average settlement
Use your actual numbers. Then apply them to each vendor's severity mix.
Vendor A: 35% high / 45% mid / 20% low.
(0.35 × $120,000) + (0.45 × $40,000) + (0.20 × $12,000) = $42,000 + $18,000 + $2,400 = $62,400 expected case value.
Vendor B: 15% high / 40% mid / 45% low.
(0.15 × $120,000) + (0.40 × $40,000) + (0.45 × $12,000) = $18,000 + $16,000 + $5,400 = $39,400 expected case value.
Now divide each vendor's cost per signed case by their expected case value to produce a marketing cost ratio:
- Vendor A: $1,200 ÷ $62,400 = 1.9% marketing cost ratio
- Vendor B: $1,000 ÷ $39,400 = 2.5% marketing cost ratio
Vendor A costs more per case, but claims a smaller share of expected settlement revenue. Vendor B looks cheaper — until you account for what those cases are worth. Severity distribution flipped the ranking.
| Metric | Vendor A | Vendor B | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost Per Case | $1,200 | $1,000 | |
| High Severity % | 35% | 15% | |
| Mid Severity % | 45% | 40% | |
| Low Severity % | 20% | 45% | |
| Expected Case Value | $62,400 | $39,400 | |
| Marketing Cost Ratio | 1.9% | 2.5% |
Using Severity Distribution in Budget Decisions
Severity distribution corrects two common budget mistakes.
Mistake 1: Cutting a vendor because their CPC looks high. A vendor running 20% above your average CPC but delivering a high-severity case mix can still be your best ROI investment. Their cost per dollar of expected settlement revenue may be lower than any other vendor on your list. Severity data makes that visible before you pull their budget.
Mistake 2: Rewarding a vendor because their CPC looks low. A vendor at 85% of your average CPC but with 70% low-severity cases is not cheap. They're burning intake capacity, attorney time, and case overhead on cases that will generate below-average revenue. The invoice looks attractive. The economics are not.
Map each vendor to one of four budget postures:
- Increase budget — high-severity distribution, competitive CPC. These are your highest-ROI investments. Scale them.
- Maintain or reduce — high-severity distribution, CPC well above average. Good cases, but the math needs to improve. Have a direct conversation about pricing or lead quality before adding spend.
- Reduce or exit — low-severity distribution, above-average CPC. Worst-performing quadrant regardless of invoice size. Cut first.
- Monitor — low-severity distribution, below-average CPC. May work for volume, but cap their share of total budget if your firm is prioritizing higher-value case types.
The Conversation With Your Managing Partner
Severity-adjusted data is one of the strongest things you can bring into a partner budget conversation — because it connects marketing spend directly to settlement revenue, which is what partners actually care about.
Instead of “Vendor A costs more but produces better cases,” you can say: “Vendor A's cases project at $62,400 average settlement value. Vendor B projects at $39,400. At the same total spend, reallocating budget toward Vendor A increases expected firm revenue by approximately $X over the next case cycle.” That's not an opinion. That's a business case.
It also gives the managing partner a concrete framework for holding marketing accountable — not to lead volume or cost per case in isolation, but to the revenue quality those leads ultimately produce.
The Data Requirements to Make This Work
This framework is only as good as the data underneath it. Two things need to be true before you trust a severity distribution analysis:
Consistent case categorization. If severity tags are missing on 30% of your cases, or if intake specialists apply the criteria differently, your distribution numbers are wrong. Audit your tagging practices before you run the analysis — not after.
Complete lead source attribution.Vendor-level severity analysis requires knowing which vendor produced each signed case. Cases with a blank or “unknown” lead source field drop out of the analysis entirely — and they don't drop out randomly. Fix attribution gaps before relying on this data for budget decisions.
A severity distribution built on 60% of your cases tells a fundamentally different story than one built on 95%. The right first move — if your data isn't there — is cleaning up data capture before adding another layer of analysis on top of incomplete records.
Related guide: See our complete guide to PI lead generation by case type — how marketing economics change by practice area, with CPC benchmarks and channel strategies for each case type.
Related guide:For the full category guide that frames every cost-per-case decision, seeCost Per Case for PI Law Firms: The Complete Guide — the metric definition, the formula, and the playbook for cutting underperforming vendors.