Five minutes. Not because a study says so, though several do, but because that is the window in which the injured person who filled in your form is still holding their phone, still on your page, and still hoping someone will ring. After five minutes they have sent the same form to two more firms and one of those firms has called. The enquiries left for a firm that rings back after lunch are the ones nobody else wanted.
We run advertising for personal injury firms from a two-partner workers compensation practice to a national firm with a ten-person new enquiry team, and every one of them has the same lead trackers. The trackers show the same thing at every size: response time predicts the answer rate, the answer rate predicts the signed rate, and the firms that treat five minutes as a rule rather than an aspiration sign the cases the others are paying to generate. This article is the evidence and the operating numbers. The process after the first call, the screening script and the 48-hour cadence are in how personal injury firms improve intake; this piece is about the first five minutes.
Key Takeaways
- The best enquiries are gone in five minutes. Injury leads sort themselves into three buckets: spam and no-answers, the lukewarm, and the cream of the crop. Speed decides who gets the top bucket, because the top bucket answers the first firm that calls.
- A national injury firm runs five minutes as a KPI and hits it on about 70% of form leads, with everything else inside 30 minutes and every inbound call answered live. It signs about a third of all leads. That firm reduced its ad spend over three years and grew its client numbers by working on exactly this.
- Answer rates from the trackers: 74% for a one-person desk calling within the hour, evenings and weekends; about 50% for firms that leave weekends until Monday. Same ads, same leads, different hour.
- Weekends and evenings are where the Meta enquiries come from. The late-night scroller who sends a form at 10.30pm is a real claimant, and a firm that calls Monday will hear "I spoke to someone on the weekend".
- Speed is necessary and not sufficient. A Far North Queensland firm whose lawyers called three times, left voicemails and emailed still had no files from a campaign with the wrong targeting. Fix the ads and the speed together.
What the response time studies say, and what they miss
The published studies on lead response time agree with each other and they are not law-firm specific. Most agencies quote them and most firms ignore them for the same reason. The headline numbers are worth knowing, because they explain why the first five minutes behave differently from the next hour.
| Finding | Source | What it means for an injury firm |
|---|---|---|
| Firms that respond within five minutes are many times more likely to reach and qualify a lead than firms responding after 30 minutes, and the contact rate falls steeply after the first five minutes | Lead response studies going back to the original Lead Response Management research, repeated in every industry since | The lead is in a short window of attention. After it closes, you are competing with voicemail and with the next firm |
| The median law firm response to a web form was 13 minutes in 2024, down from 21 minutes the year before; only 28% of firms responded inside five minutes and 27% never responded at all | Hennessey Digital's law firm lead form response study | The bar is low and rising. A firm that reliably hits five minutes is faster than seven in ten of its competitors, and a quarter of the market is paying for leads it never calls |
| The first firm to respond wins the majority of the time | Repeated in sales research and in our own trackers | Injured people are not comparing. They are relieved someone called |
What the studies miss is what happens to the leads you do reach late. They are not a random sample of your enquiries. They are the ones nobody else wanted.
The three buckets, and who gets which one
Run enough injury campaigns and the enquiries fall into three groups, in roughly the same proportions each month.
The first group is spam and no-answers: wrong numbers, people who filled in a form by accident, people who will not pick up or reply to a text. The second is the lukewarm: a real injury, some engagement, no urgency, they will talk to you and then go quiet. The third is the cream of the crop: a real claim, a person who wants to act, who answers on the first ring and books on the call.
The third group is not evenly distributed by response time. They are the people who, having decided to act, act. They fill in a form and they keep the phone in their hand. If you call inside five minutes you reach them. If you call inside thirty, you reach them after another firm has, and you are now the second opinion. If you call tomorrow, they have signed a cost agreement and your call is a voicemail that goes unreturned. What is left for the slow firm is the first two buckets, and a firm that only ever sees the first two buckets concludes that the leads are poor.
Key Point
The leads are not poor. They have been sorted, and the sorting happened in the five minutes before you called.
What the national firm does
The largest injury firm we work with, headquartered in Sydney with operators in every state it practises in, runs intake the way a sales organisation does, and its numbers set the bar for everyone else in this article.
| Element | How it runs |
|---|---|
| Inbound calls | About half of all enquiries arrive as calls. Every one is answered live by a new enquiry team of around ten operators. No messages are taken |
| Routing | Calls cascade through the team and are routed by state, so a Victorian enquiry reaches a Victorian operator who knows that scheme |
| Form submissions | Go straight into the CRM lead queue |
| The KPI | Every lead in the queue called within five minutes. About 70% hit it; the rest are reached within 30 minutes, with lunch periods the usual gap |
| Lawyer review | The completed enquiry form is reviewed by a solicitor within 24 hours, with a four-hour target, then the prospect is booked for a conference and taken through the cost agreement |
| What it produces | Roughly a third of all leads become signed clients. The firm's CEO calls time-to-call one of the biggest metrics for conversion to clients, and the firm reduced its ad spend over three years while its client numbers rose by working on this end of the funnel |
Two things from that table apply to a firm a tenth of the size. The first is that 70% is the real-world number for a firm that has built everything around five minutes; a firm that hits it half the time is doing well, and a firm that hits it on a quarter of leads has a process. The second is that the CEO's constraint is not leads. He has said he could double his lead volume tomorrow and chooses not to, because the sales team is the bottleneck. A firm paying to generate enquiries it cannot reach has the same bottleneck without knowing it.
Answer rates from the trackers
Every account we run has a lead tracker that records each enquiry, when it arrived, when it was first attempted, whether it was reached, whether it was quotable and whether it signed. The engagement rate, meaning the share of enquiries the firm actually spoke to, is the number that moves first when a firm changes its response time.
Share of injury enquiries reached, by response practice (our lead trackers, 2025 to 2026)
Engagement rate is the share of enquiries the firm spoke to. The quotable share and the signed share follow it.
The 74% belongs to a Queensland workers compensation firm with one person on intake. She calls within the hour, works the phone until eight or nine in the evening, takes weekend enquiries during the day on the weekend, and runs a fixed cadence: call and voicemail on day one, again the next day, again later that week, then a no-contact email. No call centre, no CRM automation, one person and a rule. The firms on our books that reach about half of their enquiries are not worse at the phone. They are the ones that leave Friday night and Saturday until Monday morning.
The 71% is an Adelaide motor accident campaign on Meta: $1,600 of spend produced 17 enquiries, 12 of them reached, six quotable and four signed clients, at about $400 per client. The ads were image ads with six qualifying questions and SMS verification of the number. The campaign worked because the firm called, not because the ads were clever.
Why weekends and evenings decide the month
Google enquiries arrive in business hours, because people search when they are at a desk. Meta enquiries arrive when people are on their phones, which is evenings and weekends. A Melbourne transport accident firm we work with described them as the late-night scrollers at ten or ten-thirty, and asked the right question: what do you do with them?
What the trackers say is that the Monday-morning queue is where the engagement rate falls. The same firm had an enquirer tell them "I spoke to you on the weekend". They had not spoken to anyone at the firm. A competitor had called on the Saturday and the enquirer could no longer tell the firms apart. Our largest client staffs its new enquiry team around the clock for this reason; a boutique firm does not need that, but it needs something.
| Hour the enquiry arrives | What the firm with no cover does | What the firm that signs it does |
|---|---|---|
| Business hours | Calls when the intake person is free | Calls inside five minutes, from the lead alert, before anything else |
| 5pm to 9pm weekdays | Calls next morning | One person on a rota, calling until 8 or 9pm, or an offshore operator working Australian evenings |
| Saturday and Sunday daytime | Calls Monday | The weekend rota calls during the day; a text goes out within minutes promising the call |
| Late night | Calls Monday | An automatic text within a minute ("Thanks, [name] from [firm] will call you at 8am"), then the 8am call happens |
The text matters more than it looks. A reply to a text is a sign of life, and some enquirers who will not answer an unknown number will answer a text and then take the call. The Melbourne firm's principal found that out running intake herself: repetition and persistence got the clients, and texting reached people a phone call did not.
Who should make the call
Four models work. One does not.
| Model | Who calls | Where it works | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| The principal | The lawyer who will run the matter | Boutique firms, regional firms whose selling point is that the lawyer calls straight away | Does not scale, and the principal's day is the firm's capacity |
| A trained intake person with a script | A paralegal or assistant with a 60-second screening script and a flowchart | Most firms between two and twenty lawyers | The person has to be protected from other work when a lead lands, or five minutes becomes an hour |
| Offshore evening cover | A trained operator in a time zone that makes Australian evenings their working day | Firms that want evening and weekend cover without a local rota | Script and supervision have to be tight; the operator books, the lawyer qualifies |
| A new enquiry team | A dedicated team with routing by state and a CRM queue | National firms | A cost structure that only makes sense at volume |
| Whoever is free | Nobody in particular | Nowhere | "Whoever is free" is a system for calling back after lunch |
A partner at the Melbourne firm put the design principle well: he does not want the solicitors spending their time doing sales. The principal of a regional firm would say the opposite, that the lawyer calling in the first five minutes is the firm's whole pitch. Both are right about their own firm. What neither does is leave the first call to chance.
Two details from the trackers for whoever makes the call. Calling from a local-area number lifts the pick-up rate in regional New South Wales and in Western Australia, where an interstate number reads as a telemarketer. And three attempts is the minimum before an enquiry is marked unreached; in our own experience it can take up to seven, and a lead vendor's recommended cadence of fourteen attempts across three days is unworkable for anyone without a call centre, so three to seven with a text between them is the realistic range.
The sixty-second script, so the fast call is also a good one
The point of calling in five minutes is to be the first firm the enquirer speaks to. The point of the first sixty seconds is to be the only one they need to. The script is short, it comes before any legal discussion, and its job is to sort the enquiry into the right bucket and book the consult.
The full script by claim type (motor accident, workers compensation, TPD, public liability) is in the intake article. For personal injury firms in Queensland the questions are the same and the advertising around them is not; the Queensland rules shape what the ad can say, and the call has to carry the rest.
When speed does not save you
Speed is the first thing to fix and it is not the only thing. A Far North Queensland firm we worked with had its lawyers calling every enquiry three times, leaving voicemails and sending emails, at various times of day. Four months into a Meta campaign it had no new files from it. The follow-up was faultless; the targeting was reaching people who were not injured claimants, and no amount of speed turns a wrong audience into a right one.
The reverse failure is more common. The ads produce the right people and the firm cannot reach them, and the campaign is paused for "lead quality". The Victorian firm that nearly paused its campaign at the three-month mark, described in the intake article, had 470 enquiries in 90 days and a part-time intake person. The tracker showed that the enquiries reached quickly were signing; the principal took the calls back, and signed nine clients in the quarter. The diagnosis in both cases came from the same place: a tracker that records response time against outcome, so the firm can tell a targeting problem from an intake one. That is the difference between marketing that is working and marketing that is being blamed.
The numbers to put on the wall
Four figures, updated weekly from the tracker, and the firm knows more about its intake than most agencies will tell it.
| Number | How to calculate it | Where a healthy injury firm sits |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first attempt | Minutes from the enquiry landing to the first call, median and share inside five minutes | Median under five minutes in business hours; share inside five minutes above 50%, with 70% the best we have seen |
| Engagement rate | Enquiries spoken to, divided by enquiries received | 70% and above with evening and weekend cover; about 50% without it |
| Quotable rate | Enquiries with a viable claim, divided by enquiries received | 10% to 40% depending on the claim type and the screening in the ad; above 50% on tightly qualified campaigns |
| Signed rate | Signed clients divided by enquiries received | One in ten to one in fifty in our injury accounts, depending on claim type and how hard the form screens; a third of all leads at the national firm with a full intake team |
If the first number is wrong, the next three cannot be right, and the campaign cannot be judged. If the first number is right and the signed rate is still low, the problem is in the ads or the script, and the piece on why your law firm's Google Ads leads are junk has the order to work through it. What a personal injury client costs once the intake is working, by claim type and state, is in personal injury marketing by claim type, and the full funnel from ad to signed matter is in how to build a marketing funnel for a personal injury firm.
The rule is five minutes. The firms that hit it most of the time are the ones that decided it was a rule, put a person and a text message behind it, and measured it every week. Everything else in personal injury marketing is more expensive than that.
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