How Fast Do I Actually Need to Respond to Leads?

The Five-Minute Window That Makes or Breaks Your Pipeline

We have tracked intake performance across more than 1,400 law firms over the past several years, and one pattern shows up again and again: the firms that respond fastest win the case. Not sometimes. Not usually. Almost always.

Here is the number that should keep you up at night if you are still letting leads sit in your inbox: 79% of potential clients sign with the first firm that actually picks up the phone or responds to their inquiry. Not the best firm. Not the cheapest firm. The first one to show up.

When someone fills out your contact form at 9:47 PM after getting rear-ended on their commute home, they are not comparison shopping. They are scared, frustrated, and looking for someone who can help them right now. The firm that responds in three minutes gets the case. The firm that waits until 9 AM the next morning gets nothing.

What the Research Actually Shows

The data on speed to lead is not subtle. A study by Lead Response Management found that contacting a lead within five minutes makes you 21 times more likely to qualify that lead compared to waiting 30 minutes. Twenty-one times. That is not a marginal improvement—that is the difference between a thriving practice and one that cannot figure out why their marketing is not working.

The numbers get even more dramatic when you compress the timeline further. Firms that manage to respond within 60 seconds see a 391% boost in conversion rates compared to those responding at the 30-minute mark. We realize that sounds almost too dramatic to be true, but we have watched it play out with our member firms repeatedly.

The psychological mechanism here is straightforward. When someone reaches out for legal help, they are in a heightened emotional state. They have finally worked up the motivation to take action. That motivation has a half-life measured in minutes, not hours. Every minute that passes, they are either calming down, getting distracted, or—more likely—filling out another firm's contact form.

The After-Hours Problem Nobody Wants to Solve

Here is where most firms completely fumble the bag. They invest thousands of dollars per month in marketing, optimize their Google Ads, build beautiful websites, and then let 35 to 40 percent of their leads go straight to voicemail because those leads come in outside of 9-to-5 business hours.

Think about that for a second. If you are spending $10,000 a month on lead generation, you are effectively lighting $3,500 to $4,000 of that on fire every single month by not having after-hours coverage.

We pulled data from personal injury firms in our network last year, and the pattern was consistent across markets: more than a third of all leads come in during evenings, weekends, and holidays. These are not lower-quality leads either. Someone filling out a contact form at 11 PM on a Saturday night after a car accident is often a better prospect than someone casually browsing during their lunch break.

Running the Numbers on 24/7 Coverage

Let us walk through what this actually looks like for a typical personal injury firm. Say you are generating about 100 leads per month, which means roughly 38 of those are coming in after hours. With no real after-hours coverage—maybe a voicemail or an answering service that just takes messages—you are probably converting about 8% of those leads. That gives you around three cases per month from after-hours inquiries, worth maybe $12,000 in revenue assuming a $4,000 average case value.

Now imagine you implement proper 24/7 coverage where someone is actually engaging with those leads immediately, qualifying them, and scheduling consultations. A realistic conversion bump takes you from 8% to 20%. Now those same 38 after-hours leads are producing seven or eight cases per month, worth over $30,000.

That is $18,000 in additional monthly revenue. If your 24/7 coverage costs you $2,500 per month, you are looking at a return of more than 600%. We have seen firms achieve returns north of 1,000% when they get this right.

The math is so obviously favorable that we genuinely do not understand why more firms resist it. The only explanation we can come up with is that lawyers tend to undervalue intake operations compared to other parts of their practice.

Your Actual Options for Coverage

The market for legal answering and intake services has matured significantly over the past few years, and you have real choices depending on your budget and needs.

Basic answering services run between $200 and $800 per month. These are your traditional call centers that will answer the phone with your firm name, take down contact information, and send you a message. They are better than voicemail, but barely. The people answering have no legal training, cannot qualify leads, and definitely cannot schedule consultations or discuss case details. If you are spending good money on marketing, this level of service is probably leaving significant money on the table.

Legal-specialized services like Smith.ai, Ruby, and LEX Reception cost between $1,500 and $3,000 per month. These services train their receptionists on legal intake, can perform basic qualification, and often integrate directly with your practice management software. The people answering understand terms like "statute of limitations" and know not to give legal advice. For most firms serious about growth, this is the sweet spot.

Hybrid AI-plus-human solutions have emerged as a middle ground, typically running $500 to $2,000 per month. An AI chatbot handles the initial engagement and basic qualification, then routes promising leads to a human for follow-up. The technology has gotten good enough that many leads cannot tell they are initially talking to a bot, and the cost savings are substantial.

True in-house 24/7 coverage—meaning you actually employ people to work nights and weekends—costs between $8,000 and $15,000 per month when you account for salaries, benefits, training, and management overhead. This only makes sense for very high-volume firms, usually those spending $50,000 or more per month on marketing.

What We Actually Recommend

Based on everything we have seen across our network, here is our straightforward advice.

If you are spending less than $5,000 per month on marketing, start with a legal-specialized answering service and make sure they can at least schedule consultations directly on your calendar. The cost will pay for itself within the first month.

If you are spending between $5,000 and $20,000 per month, you need dedicated intake staff during business hours plus a quality after-hours service. The volume justifies the investment, and the opportunity cost of lost leads is too high to accept.

If you are spending more than $20,000 per month, you should be thinking about building a true intake department with coverage across all hours. At that spend level, even small improvements in conversion rate translate to massive revenue differences.

Regardless of your budget, the single most important metric to track is time to first contact. Measure it obsessively. Set up alerts when it exceeds five minutes. Make it a key performance indicator that your entire team knows about.

The Firms That Get This Right

The highest-performing firms in our network treat intake like the revenue-critical function it is. They have systems that route leads immediately to available staff. They use automation to send instant text responses while a human follows up. They track conversion rates by response time and optimize constantly.

These firms also understand something that slower-moving competitors miss: speed signals competence. When a potential client reaches out and gets an immediate, professional response, they assume the rest of their experience will be similarly buttoned-up. When they leave a voicemail and hear back the next day, they assume the firm is disorganized or does not really want their business.

Your response time is not just an operational metric. It is the first impression you make on every single lead your marketing generates. Make it count.