What's the Real Difference Between a $200 Lead and a $50 Lead?

The Question Every Law Firm Gets Wrong

We've watched firms spend $15,000 a month on "cheap" leads and end up with three signed cases. We've also seen firms spend $8,000 on "expensive" leads and sign twelve. The firms chasing cheap leads almost always think they're being smart with their money. They're not.

Since 2016, we've worked with over 1,400 law firms and helped generate more than 25,000 signed cases. If there's one lesson that comes up again and again, it's this: the cost of a lead tells you almost nothing about whether it's worth buying.

Lead Cost Without Conversion Context Is Just a Number

Here's a conversation we have at least once a week. A firm owner calls us frustrated because they're paying $200 per lead from one source while a competitor brags about getting leads for $50. They want to know why they're "overpaying."

So we ask: how many of those $200 leads are you signing? They tell us about one in five converts to a paying client. Then we ask what they know about their competitor's conversion rate on those cheap leads. Usually, they don't know. When we dig in, it's often around one in twenty.

Let's do the math that actually matters. If you're paying $200 per lead and converting 20%, you're spending $1,000 to sign a case. If your competitor pays $50 per lead but only converts 5%, they're also spending $1,000 to sign a case. Identical cost per signed case, completely different lead prices.

But it gets worse for the cheap lead buyer. They had to work four times as many leads to get that one signed case. That means four times the intake calls, four times the follow-up, four times the staff hours. The "cheap" leads actually cost more when you account for the operational burden.

Why Expensive Leads Cost More

Lead vendors aren't running a charity. When they charge premium prices, they're usually delivering something that justifies the cost. Understanding what you're paying for helps you evaluate whether the premium makes sense for your practice.

Exclusivity matters enormously. A $200 lead that goes only to your firm is fundamentally different from a $50 lead that simultaneously goes to five other attorneys. When a potential client fills out a form and immediately gets four phone calls from different firms, you're not competing on the merits of your practice anymore. You're competing on who answers fastest and talks loudest. That race to the bottom rarely ends with quality clients.

Pre-qualification separates tire-kickers from genuine prospects. Better lead sources ask more questions, verify information, and filter out people who don't actually need an attorney or can't afford one. That filtering costs money to do properly, and it shows up in the lead price.

Intent signals tell you where someone is in their decision process. A person who searched "car accident lawyer near me" and clicked on your ad has higher intent than someone who filled out a "free case review" popup while reading a news article. The high-intent lead costs more because they're closer to hiring someone.

Why Cheap Leads Cost Less

Cheap leads are cheap for reasons that directly affect your ability to convert them.

Shared leads are the most common cost-cutting measure. When a lead vendor sells the same contact information to multiple firms, they can charge each firm less while making more money overall. Great for the vendor, terrible for you. By the time you call, the prospect has already talked to two other attorneys and is thoroughly confused about who called them and why.

Aged leads are another source of discount pricing. A lead that's three weeks old costs less than one that came in three minutes ago. But in those three weeks, the prospect may have already hired someone, resolved their issue another way, or simply moved on with their life. You're paying less because you're getting less.

Low-intent leads come from sources that cast wide nets. Free consultations advertised on social media, generic legal information websites, and mass-market advertising all generate high volumes of people who are vaguely curious but not ready to hire. The lead vendor can offer low prices because they're generating massive quantities with minimal effort.

The Hidden Costs Nobody Calculates

The sticker price of a lead is just the beginning. Cheap leads carry hidden costs that don't show up on your marketing invoice but absolutely show up in your business results.

Time is the most obvious hidden cost. Your intake team has limited hours. Every minute spent chasing a low-quality lead is a minute not spent nurturing a high-quality one. We've seen firms where intake staff spend 80% of their time on leads that never had real potential, leaving them rushing through conversations with prospects who were ready to hire.

Reputation damage happens slowly but matters immensely. When your firm calls people who never requested legal help, who already hired another attorney, or who feel harassed by multiple law firms calling them simultaneously, some of them will leave reviews. Some will tell friends. Some will remember your name for the wrong reasons. The cost of these interactions doesn't appear on any spreadsheet, but it's real.

Opportunity cost is the most insidious hidden expense. Every dollar spent on low-converting leads is a dollar not spent on better channels. Every hour your team spends working garbage leads is an hour they could spend building referral relationships or improving your intake process. Cheap leads don't just waste the resources you put into them—they steal resources from activities that would have produced better results.

When Cheap Leads Actually Make Sense

We're not saying cheap leads are always wrong. Context matters, and some situations favor volume over quality.

High-volume practice areas with straightforward cases can sometimes benefit from cheaper leads. If you're running a traffic ticket defense practice where the average case takes two hours and you can profitably handle any case that comes through the door, lead quality matters less than lead quantity. You're essentially running a numbers game, and cheaper leads help the math work.

Strong intake operations can extract value from leads that would be worthless to other firms. If you have dedicated intake specialists with proven scripts, immediate response times, and systematic follow-up sequences, you can convert leads that other firms would waste. Your operational excellence becomes a competitive advantage that lets you profit from lead sources others can't touch.

Brand-building campaigns sometimes prioritize reach over immediate conversion. If you're trying to establish name recognition in a new market, getting your name in front of more people has value even if those people don't hire you immediately. But this should be a deliberate strategy, not an accident.

How Different Lead Sources Actually Perform

Google Ads typically produce leads in the $150-400 range for competitive practice areas, with conversion rates that vary wildly based on how well your campaigns are built and how fast you respond. We've seen firms convert 25% of their Google leads and firms convert 3% from the same market, with the difference coming down to response time and intake quality.

Local Services Ads generally cost less per lead than traditional Google Ads, often in the $50-150 range. They also tend to attract people who are further along in their decision process since they're specifically looking for local service providers. The Google Guaranteed badge adds credibility that improves conversion rates for most firms.

Lead aggregators and referral networks span the entire price spectrum. Some charge premium rates for exclusive, verified leads. Others sell the same lead to eight different firms. Knowing which model a vendor uses matters more than knowing their price.

Referrals from past clients technically have a cost—the time and money spent delivering great service and staying in touch—but that cost is usually far lower per signed case than any paid advertising. A firm that signs 40% of referral leads at an effective cost of $30 each is operating in a completely different economic reality than a firm buying leads at any price.

The Only Metric That Actually Matters

Stop tracking cost per lead. Start tracking cost per signed case.

This single shift in perspective changes everything about how you evaluate marketing spend. It forces you to connect your advertising costs to your actual business results. It reveals which lead sources are genuinely profitable and which ones just feel cheap.

When we work with firms, this is the number we obsess over. Not impressions, not clicks, not leads, not even consultations. Signed cases. Revenue. Growth you can actually measure against the money you spent to generate it.

A $200 lead that signs 20% of the time costs you $1,000 per case. A $50 lead that signs 5% of the time also costs $1,000 per case, plus four times the operational burden. And a $300 lead that signs 30% of the time costs you $1,000 per case with the least amount of wasted effort.

The lead price is just the price of admission. What happens after that call comes in determines whether you made a good investment or a bad one. Focus there.