Case study: 6.1% → 14.2% signed-case rate, same lead supply
A 1,200-call field test with a four-attorney Tampa personal injury firm buying exclusive MVA leads — what changed, what it cost, and the week-by-week numbers.
By Tarun Kapoor, Founder · Published 2026-07-13 · Firm name withheld under client confidentiality at their request.
Headline numbers
| Metric | Before | After (11 weeks) |
|---|---|---|
| Signed-case rate | 6.1% | 14.2% |
| Cost per signed case (at $350 CPL) | $5,740 | $2,470 |
| Lead supply, volume, case mix | Unchanged — exclusive MVA leads, same provider, ~100–110 calls/week | |
| Test size | 1,200 intake calls, July–September (11 weeks) | |
The setup
The firm was disciplined by any normal standard: dedicated intake on three lines, 8am–7pm coverage, every lead called within two minutes of webhook delivery. The problem wasn’t effort — it was that the first eight seconds of every call sounded like a call center, the qualification questions came before any trust was built, and 22% of prospects preferred Spanish while only a third of those calls could be taken live in Spanish.
The intervention
We rebuilt the first 90 seconds of the intake call around three principles — lead with the human, acknowledge the accident before qualifying it, and ask for a soft next-step commitment early — and moved qualification to the second half of the call. The firm added a second bilingual intake specialist in week five. The full script, line by line with annotations, is published in Field Notes No. 03.
Week-by-week trajectory
Week 1 baseline: 6.1%. Weeks 2–4 (script rollout, two specialists, then full team): 8.6% → 9.8%. Weeks 5–6 (bilingual specialist added): 11.4%. Weeks 7–8 (email-first paperwork flow live): 12.9%. Weeks 9–11: stable at 14.2%— the new baseline. Notably, 51% of prospects who chose “email me the paperwork first” signed within 48 hours.
We stopped sounding like the insurance company calling them. That’s all it was.
The takeaway for lead buyers
If your signed-case rate on exclusive MVA leads is stuck in the single digits, the constraint is usually the first 90 seconds of the phone call, not the supply. Exclusive leads at $250–$400 only produce a sub-$3,000 cost per signed case when intake converts at 10%+ — the supply and the intake desk are one system. Benchmarks for what those numbers should look like are in the MVA Lead Cost Report 2026.
Provenance
Data reflects a four-attorney personal injury firm in Tampa, Florida running exclusive MVA supply via Mass Tort Marketing Agencyin Q3 of the test year. Trajectory numbers are those shared with the firm’s managing partner in weekly reports. Firm name withheld at the client’s request; the full narrative version of this study is Field Notes No. 03.