Fit-matched consumers follow through.

The structural problem with leads

A purchased lead is not a decision — it's a form.

Industry-reported retainer conversion on cold-purchased personal-injury leads tends to land somewhere between the single digits and the mid teens — depending on case type, exclusivity, and how fast the firm calls. The variance is real, but the ceiling is low for a reason that is more structural than operational.

A purchased lead begins as a consumer filling in a form on a landing page they reached through a paid ad. The form is sold — often non-exclusively — to two or three firms. The first firm to call wins the conversation. The consumer, who did not choose any of these firms and frequently is not entirely sure which company is on the phone, is asked to commit to a representation decision inside a forty-five-minute window. Most don't. The ones who do often do so for reasons that have very little to do with fit.

The inquiry, in other words, is not the artifact of a decision the consumer made. It is the artifact of a click the consumer made — and the firm on the other end is buying the click, not the decision.

Why fit changes the dynamic

An inquiry that started as a choice is a different artifact.

A consumer who reaches your firm through tortlconnect arrives by a sequence that looks nothing like a purchased lead. They initiated the search themselves, inside an app they installed to organize their claim. They were shown a ranked list of attorneys — with the algorithm's reasons surfaced for each match. They read the reasons, scrolled the list, and chose your firm specifically from the attorneys the engine returned. Then they wrote and pressed send on an inquiry that they composed.

An inquiry that started as a choice is a different artifact than one that started as a click.

Every step in that sequence is a commitment. The consumer chose to sign in. They chose to enter case detail. They chose your name from a ranked set. They chose to send a message. By the time the inquiry arrives in your inbox, four discrete acts of intention have stacked on top of one another — and the consumer knows, unambiguously, which firm they reached out to and why.

The economic word for this is selection. A purchased lead is a wide funnel narrowing into noise. A tortlconnect inquiry is a narrow funnel of consumers who already self-selected into your practice before the inquiry was sent.

The numbers that should matter to you

Stop measuring leads per month. Start measuring signed retainers per dollar.

Most attorneys evaluating an acquisition channel start by counting the inquiries it produces. That number — leads per month — is the wrong one. It is the metric a broker wants you to use because it scales with what they sell. The metric that matters to your firm is downstream: signed retainers per month, acquisition cost per signed retainer, and time from first inquiry to executed engagement letter.

The framing below is structural, not measured. Use it as a way of evaluating any channel — including this one. The conversion rates named here are illustrative ranges drawn from how each model produces its inquiries; tortlconnect is still in its early cohort and the only honest answer about a measured tortlconnect conversion rate is "we are still collecting the data." The argument on this page is about the structure that produces the rate, not a promise about the rate itself.

Lead-broker row: 100 leads × $200 = $20,000; at 8% conversion, 8 signed retainers; $20,000 ÷ 8 = $2,500 per signed retainer. tortlconnect row: $149 / mo flat subscription, divided across an illustrative 20 inquiries ≈ $7.45 per inquiry; at 30% conversion, 6 signed retainers; $149 ÷ 6 ≈ $24.83 per signed retainer. The 8% and 30% conversion figures are illustrative of the structural difference between a purchased click and a chosen inquiry — not measured tortl conversion data, which is still being collected in the founding cohort.

Even if you halve the tortlconnect conversion assumption, double the cost per inquiry, and quarter the broker conversion in the other direction, the answer doesn't change shape. A flat-fee channel that produces selected inquiries beats a per-lead channel that produces cold ones on the only metric that pays the firm's bills.

Why the algorithm produces follow-through

Every preserved conversion is a mismatch the engine refused to make.

Conversion is preserved by the matches the engine does not surface as much as by the ones it does. The features that determine ranking — intakeCompleteness, recoveryProbability, liabilityAppetite, specialty depth, response-time fit, jurisdiction — exist specifically to prevent the kind of mismatches that destroy conversion on purchased leads. Each one is worth naming.

Jurisdiction hard filter. A consumer cannot waste an inquiry on an attorney who is not licensed where the case happened. The first cause of dead leads in a broker funnel — a consumer in one state being sold to a firm in another — does not exist in this pipeline. The match is removed before it is ranked.

Specialty depth penalty. An attorney who lists a practice area but does not focus there is dampened, not excluded. The consumer is not matched to a firm that technically handles their case type but really does something else. The inquiry that reaches you is from a consumer your firm actually wants.

Response-time penalty on urgent cases. When the case is time-sensitive, a slow attorney is multiplicatively downranked. The consumer is not routed to a firm whose intake will miss the window. That preserves both the consumer's claim and the sending firm's conversion — a slow response on an urgent case is the most common reason an otherwise-good lead does not sign.

Recovery probability gate. When the case itself will not pay — bad liability, expired statute runway, unverified facts — the inquiry does not reach you. You are not being asked to evaluate a case nobody can win. The cases you do see are the ones the model believes are actually worth your time, by the same probability signal it uses on the consumer's side.

Every prevented mismatch is preserved conversion. The reason tortlconnect's inquiries close at a higher rate is that the inquiries you would have closed at zero never arrive in the first place.

Read the full algorithm →

What you should not expect

tortlconnect will not produce a hundred inquiries a month.

Honesty matters here. tortlconnect is not optimized for volume. A founding attorney in a healthy state with a focused practice should expect somewhere in the range of five to thirty inquiries per month, depending on the state's population, the depth of declared practice areas, and the case-type fit. Some months will skew lower. Few will skew much higher. That is the design.

If you measure this channel by lead-broker volume metrics, it will look quiet. If you measure it by signed retainers per dollar of acquisition spend — which is the metric your bookkeeper actually uses — it will look loud. The numbers in the previous section show why that contrast exists; the design choices in the algorithm show why we built it that way.

A directory that ranked by fit and then aimed for high volume would be lying about one of those two things. We chose fit.