You just started as a marketing director at a personal injury firm. Maybe you came from a different legal vertical. Maybe you came from outside law entirely. Either way, within your first week you probably discovered the same thing most new PI marketing leaders discover: there is a lot of spending happening and very little systematic tracking of whether it is working.
Eighty percent of PI firms still manage marketing ROI in spreadsheets — or not at all. Vendor invoices come in. Checks go out. Leads get logged somewhere. And somewhere between the first call and the case settlement 18 months later, the connection between dollars spent and cases won disappears.
Your first 90 days are not about fixing everything. They are about understanding what you have, building a baseline you can actually measure against, and producing your first data-backed report for the managing partner. Here is how to do it.
What You Are Most Likely Inheriting
Before covering the 90-day plan, it helps to name what most new PI marketing directors walk into. The specifics vary, but the pattern is consistent:
- Five to eight active lead vendors — each with a separate invoice, a separate rep, and a separate spreadsheet or portal report. None of those reports use the same metrics.
- Cost per lead as the primary tracking metric. Maybe cost per signed case gets calculated occasionally, usually at the end of a quarter, usually imprecisely.
- No settlement attribution. The firm knows what vendors charge. It does not know which vendors produce cases that actually settle — and at what value.
- 10 to 20 hours a week of manual reporting. Someone on your team (or you, soon enough) is pulling data from vendor portals, reconciling with the case management system, and building spreadsheet summaries for partner meetings.
- A managing partner who wants ROI answers you do not yet have the data infrastructure to provide.
This is not a failure state. It is the baseline state for the vast majority of PI firms. Your job in the first 90 days is to move it.
Days 1–30: Audit the Current State
Do not change anything yet. Understand everything first. The most expensive mistake a new PI marketing director can make is arriving with a playbook from a previous role and applying it before understanding what is already in place.
Map Every Active Vendor
Build a complete vendor inventory. For each active lead source, document:
- Monthly spend amount and contract terms
- How leads are delivered (portal, email, direct call, etc.)
- How leads are logged in the case management system
- What lead source data is captured at intake
- Who manages the vendor relationship and reviews the account
- The last time anyone reviewed performance data on this vendor
You are almost certainly going to find gaps in lead source tagging. Some vendors will have inconsistent naming in the CRM. Some will not be tagged at all — their leads come in as “other” or “unknown.” This is normal. Documenting the gaps is the point.
Assess the Tracking Infrastructure
Pull your case management system and answer four questions:
- Is lead source captured at intake for every lead? Not just some leads — every lead. If the answer is no, that is your most urgent fix.
- Does source data carry through from lead to signed case? When a lead becomes a client, does the case file retain the lead source? Or does that data get dropped at handoff?
- Can you pull a report of signed cases by lead source for the last 90 days? If not, ask why. The answer will tell you a lot about where the gaps are.
- Is settlement data connected to lead source anywhere? For most firms you walk into, the answer will be no. That is fine. It takes time to build. But knowing that it does not exist yet is important.
By day 30, you should have a clear picture of the current state — what data exists, what does not, and what the most critical gaps are. You are not fixing them yet. You are documenting them.
Days 31–60: Build the Measurement Baseline
Month two is when you move from understanding to building. The goal is a functional performance baseline — a set of numbers you can track over time and use for decisions.
Fix Lead Source Tagging at Intake
If leads are not tagged consistently at intake, everything downstream is unreliable. Work with your intake team to establish a standard source taxonomy and make it a required field. Standardize vendor names so the same vendor is not logged as 'Vendor A', 'vendor a', and 'VendorA' in different records.
Calculate Cost Per Lead by Vendor
Pull the last 90 days of invoices and lead volumes. Divide total spend by total leads for each vendor. This is your starting cost-per-lead benchmark. Note: this number is not sufficient for decision-making, but it is the starting data point you need to track against.
Calculate Cost Per Signed Case by Vendor
This is the number that matters. Divide each vendor's 90-day spend by the number of signed cases attributed to that vendor in the same window. For vendors where attribution is incomplete, flag them — the gap tells you exactly where your tracking needs to improve.
Establish Intake Metrics by Source
Track contact rate, rejection rate, and conversion rate for each vendor. A vendor converting at 8% versus 3% at the same cost per lead has a completely different cost per case — even though both vendors look identical on the invoice.
Set Your First Baseline Targets
Work with the managing partner to establish a target cost per case by case type. Auto accident targets will differ from premises liability and mass tort. These targets become the benchmarks every vendor gets measured against.
The Metrics That Matter vs. the Metrics That Do Not
One of the most important perspective shifts for a new PI marketing director is understanding which metrics are worth tracking and which are just noise that vendors use to justify their invoices.
Metrics That Are NOT Sufficient
- Cost per lead — tells you the price, not the value
- Total leads delivered — volume without conversion context is meaningless
- Vendor quality score — self-reported by the vendor
- Click-through rate — no connection to cases signed
- Lead-to-contact rate — only one step of the funnel
Metrics That Drive Real Decisions
- Cost per signed case — the only metric that connects spend to outcome
- Lead-to-case conversion rate — reveals lead quality at each source
- Rejection rate by vendor — flags leads outside your case criteria
- Intake contact rate — surfaces operations vs. quality issues
- Conversion trend (3-month direction) — separates dips from declines
Cost per lead is not useless — it matters for understanding a vendor's pricing model. But making budget decisions based on cost per lead is like evaluating a real estate investment based on asking price without looking at rental income. The purchase price is just an input. Return on investment is the output.
Days 61–90: Present Your First Real ROI Report
By day 60, you have enough data to produce something most PI marketing directors have never handed a managing partner: a cost-per-case report by vendor, with trend data and a recommendation. Not a spreadsheet full of leads. Not a vendor's self-reported dashboard. Your own data, from your own systems, showing what each vendor actually costs per signed case.
This report is how you build credibility in month three.
What the Managing Partner Report Should Include
Steve, the managing partner, approves the marketing budget. He does not care about impressions, click rates, or lead volume. He cares about one thing: is the marketing spend producing cases at a cost the firm can sustain? Build the report around that question.
- Total marketing spend last month vs. budget. Simple budget adherence. Every partner wants to know you are not overspending.
- Signed cases: actual vs. goal. How many cases did we sign? Were we on target?
- Cost per case by vendor — top five. Rank your vendors by cost per signed case. Highlight any that are significantly above your target threshold.
- One recommendation. Based on the data, what should change? A vendor worth increasing budget on. A vendor worth having a performance conversation with. One decision, backed by numbers.
The goal is not to produce a comprehensive analysis. It is to produce a credible, data-backed summary that answers Steve's most important question and demonstrates that you are managing the budget with rigor. That change in the conversation — from “here is what vendors are telling me” to “here is what our data shows” — is the most important shift you can make in your first 90 days.
What Your Baseline Numbers Should Look Like
By day 90, a PI firm with $200,000/month in marketing spend and a functioning measurement baseline should be able to answer these five questions in under five minutes:
Cost Per Signed Case
By Vendor
Rolling 90-day window, all active lead sources
Conversion Rate
By Source
Lead-to-case for each vendor, 90-day trend
Rejection Rate
By Source
Flagged vendors above 25% rejection threshold
How to Build Credibility With the Managing Partner Early
Credibility with a managing partner is built on one thing: delivering answers to questions before they are asked. The managing partner will always have the same underlying question — “is this marketing budget worth it?” Your job is to make the answer visible and documentable before he walks into the room.
Three tactics that work in the first 90 days:
- Show one vendor insight, not twenty. Do not overwhelm a first report with data. Find the one vendor that costs 40% more per case than the firm average and lead with that. A single, specific, actionable finding is more persuasive than a comprehensive audit no one will read.
- Quantify one cost savings opportunity. If one of your vendors is running at $6,200 per case against a firm average of $3,800, and they are receiving $45,000/month, you can calculate an approximate opportunity: if that spend were reallocated to a $3,800 vendor, the same budget would produce roughly 40% more cases. That framing — in dollar terms, not percentages — lands differently in a partner conversation.
- Show a trend, not just a snapshot. A single data point is easy to dismiss. A three-month trend is harder to ignore. Even if your tracking is imperfect at day 90, showing month-over-month cost per case by vendor demonstrates that the measurement system is operating. It also shows that you are comparing vendors on the same terms, consistently.
The Honest Challenge of the First 90 Days
Most new PI marketing directors underestimate how hard it is to get to clean cost-per-case data when starting from scratch. The challenge is not the math — it is the data quality. Inconsistent source tagging, leads logged under wrong vendor names, handoff gaps between intake and case management — these are the real obstacles. Budget three to four weeks of cleanup work just on data standardization before expecting reliable numbers.
The firms that get to accurate cost-per-case tracking fastest are the ones that start with a revenue intelligence platform connected to their case management system rather than building the baseline manually in spreadsheets. A platform like RevenueScale pulls spend, lead, and case data into one system and automates the attribution — eliminating the hours of manual reconciliation that otherwise consume most of month two.
Whether you build it manually first or go straight to a platform, the framework is the same: audit the current state, fix source tagging, get to cost per case by vendor, and build the report that shows the managing partner what is working and what is not. That is the 90-day job.
What Comes After Day 90
The first 90 days produce a baseline. Days 91 through 180 are when you use that baseline to make data-driven budget decisions — and start measuring whether those decisions are improving cost per case over time. That is when the role shifts from reactive (understanding what you inherited) to proactive (optimizing what you control).
The managing partner's monthly budget conversation changes when you walk in with cost-per-case data by vendor, a trend line, and a recommendation. You stop defending the budget and start steering it. That shift — from defending spend to optimizing it — is the most important career transition a PI marketing director can make.
If you are ready to accelerate the timeline, see how RevenueScale builds cost-per-case attribution automatically — so month two looks like month six. Or learn how other PI marketing leaders use RevenueScale to run the kind of firm that wins budget conversations.
Related guide: See our complete guide to revenue intelligence for PI firms — the four layers, the maturity model, and what RI replaces in your current stack.