Intake requirements before you buy MVA leads
Purchased supply does not create cases. It creates opportunities with a shelf life measured in minutes. This is the operational checklist that decides whether the leads you buy convert — and the volume ceiling nobody warns you about.
By Tarun Kapoor, Founder · Published 2026-07-30
We would rather lose a sale than supply a firm that cannot answer the phone. Not out of virtue — a firm converting at 4% churns inside two months and tells everyone the leads were bad. The leads were fine. The first ninety seconds were not.
The seven-point checklist
First call inside five minutes
Not five minutes during business hours — five minutes from webhook delivery. Contact rate falls sharply after the first few minutes and keeps falling. This single metric explains more variance in signed-case rate than lead source, price, or filter settings combined.
Minimum bar: Automated alert to a phone that is answered, not an email to a shared inbox.
Coverage across your delivery window
Accidents do not cluster in business hours and neither do inquiries. Evenings and weekends carry a meaningful share of MVA volume and face the least competition for the claimant's attention. If you cannot staff it, pause delivery outside covered hours rather than letting leads age overnight.
Minimum bar: Either staffed coverage or delivery scheduling that matches your hours.
Six or more contact attempts across three days
Most firms stop at two. A structured cadence — three attempts day one at spaced intervals, two on day two, one on day three, mixing call, SMS, and email — routinely recovers a third of the leads a two-attempt process writes off. Persistence should stay professional; log every attempt.
Minimum bar: A written cadence enforced by the CRM, not left to individual discretion.
E-signature paperwork ready on the first call
The gap between agreement and signature is where cases are lost to a competitor or to second thoughts. Send while the claimant is still on the phone. In our Tampa field test, 51% of prospects who chose 'email me the paperwork first' signed within 48 hours.
Minimum bar: A templated retainer pack that can be sent in under 60 seconds.
Bilingual capability in bilingual markets
In California, Texas, Florida, Arizona, and Nevada a substantial share of MVA claimants prefer Spanish. Taking those calls in English through a reluctant translator converts badly. This is a supply-side filter as much as an intake one — you can restrict delivery to English-preference leads, but you will pay for the volume you give up.
Minimum bar: Live Spanish capability, or an explicit language filter on delivery.
Rejection reasons logged as structured data
'Didn't qualify' is not a reason. Categorise every non-signed lead — no injury, at fault, already represented, outside state, unreachable, declined — as a required field. This is what turns a quality dispute into an evidenced credit claim, and what tells you whether to tighten a filter or fix a script.
Minimum bar: A required picklist field on every lead record.
Closed-loop attribution back to the source
The lead ID must persist into your case management system and outcomes must flow back. Without it you cannot separate a supply problem from an intake problem, and every vendor conversation becomes an argument about anecdotes.
Minimum bar: Source and lead ID stored on the matter record; monthly outcome reporting.
The volume ceiling: intake capacity
Intake capacity, not budget, is the real ceiling on lead volume. A single full-time intake specialist can work roughly 150–250 exclusive MVA leads per month at the response speed the supply requires. Buying past that ceiling lowers your signed-case rate on every lead you already had, which raises cost per signed case even as cost per lead stays flat.
This produces a counter-intuitive result that catches growing firms out. Adding budget past your capacity ceiling does not add cases proportionally — it lowers the sign rate on the leads you were already converting, because response times slip across the whole queue. Cost per lead stays flat while cost per signed case rises. The fix is a hiring decision, not a media decision.
| Intake staffing | Sustainable exclusive lead volume | Approx. monthly spend at $585 CPL |
|---|---|---|
| Attorney or paralegal answering between other work | Up to ~40/month | ~$23,400 |
| One dedicated intake specialist | 150–250/month | $87,750–$146,250 |
| Two specialists with extended-hours coverage | 300–500/month | $175,500–$292,500 |
Ranges assume exclusive supply requiring a five-minute first response and a six-attempt cadence. Shared-lead operations need materially more staffing per lead because the race is faster and the contact rate lower.
What is an MVA campaign script?
An MVA campaign script is the fixed sequence of qualifying questions an intake agent works through on a motor vehicle accident call, ordered so the cheapest disqualifier comes first: injury, fault, existing representation, medical treatment, then accident date. Ordering by disqualification speed rather than by form-field order is what cuts agent minutes per signed case.
- The order is the design. Injury, then fault, then existing representation, then treatment, then accident date. Each question is cheaper to ask than the one after it and disqualifies a larger share of calls.
- Ask the disqualifiers before the paperwork. Capturing a full contact record on a caller who is already represented spends agent minutes on a lead that can never sign — and inflates cost per signed case without touching CPL.
- One script across every desk. In-house and outsourced agents need the same question order and the same rejection-reason taxonomy, or the reject data cannot be compared between them.
The eleven-week test of exactly this sequence is written up in the intake script that moved signed-case rate from 6% to 14%.
In-house vs. outsourced intake
Outsourced intake buys 24/7 coverage cheaply and is usually the right first move for a solo or two-attorney firm — it converts a hiring decision into a variable cost. The trade is depth: an external desk screens and books, but rarely builds the rapport that signs a hesitant claimant. The common middle path is outsourced for after-hours and overflow, in-house for the primary window, with the same script and the same rejection-reason taxonomy across both.
Whichever you run, the cheapest staffing model is not the cheapest model — a $20/hour desk that loses a $420 lead has cost more than the hour saved.
What to say on the first call
The first call to a purchased MVA lead should open by naming where the inquiry came from, confirming the person is safe and treated, and only then qualifying. Leading with the form submission removes the 'how did you get my number' objection that kills contact rates; leading with qualification makes the firm sound like the insurance adjuster the claimant is already avoiding. Ask about injury and treatment before fault, and never open with fee terms.
How many attempts, and over how long
Purchased MVA leads need six to eight contact attempts across the first 72 hours, not two. The first attempt goes out inside five minutes, followed by a second within the hour, then alternating calls and texts across three days at varied times of day. Most firms mark a lead dead after two unanswered calls and write off supply that a disciplined cadence would have converted.
Why your contact rate is low
A contact rate below 50% on supposedly exclusive supply has four likely causes, in order: speed to first call is over five minutes, the cadence stops before six attempts, calls originate from an unfamiliar area code, or the leads are being resold. Test them in that order — three of the four are yours to fix, and firms usually blame the fourth first.
What your CRM actually has to do
A small personal injury firm buying leads needs three capabilities, not a specific product: webhook intake that creates a record without manual entry, per-source attribution through to signed retainer, and e-signature on the first call. Litify, Filevine, Lawmatics and CASEpeer all provide these. The product matters far less than whether every lead source is tagged — without attribution you cannot tell which supply is profitable.
What fixing intake is actually worth
We ran an eleven-week controlled test on exactly this. Same provider, same $350 exclusive CPL, same volume and case mix — only the first 90 seconds of the intake call changed.
If your firm genuinely cannot staff to this standard, that is a real answer rather than a failure — if your intake can’t sign, retainers may be the honest answer, and the premium is worth paying rather than buying leads into a phone nobody answers.