How Law Firms Should Define Intake Dispositions for Wanted Cases

One catch-all label can hide several different decisions.

A personal injury firm may receive 200 inquiries and sign 40 matters. If the other 160 records are grouped as bad leads or not signed, leadership still does not know what happened. Some may be duplicates. Some may fall outside the firm’s approved criteria. Some people may never have been reached. Others may be matters the firm wanted but lost before the engagement was completed.

Those are not interchangeable outcomes. They point toward different decisions about campaign targeting, intake coverage, attorney review, follow-up, and budget. A useful disposition system makes those differences visible without asking intake staff to make legal judgments they do not own.

The goal is not to create a longer dropdown menu. It is to create a small set of mutually understandable outcomes that reliably tells leadership whether the constraint is case fit, incomplete evaluation, process execution, or the final decision to engage the firm.

Separate case fit from what happened operationally.

Start with two layers. The first describes whether the matter fits the firm’s approved acceptance priorities. The second describes what happened to the inquiry in the workflow. Keeping these layers separate prevents a person who was never reached from being treated as an unsuitable case and prevents a wanted case lost to delay from being reported as a marketing-quality problem.

Attorney leadership should define the legal and business criteria. Intake leadership should translate the approved criteria into questions, routing rules, and operating statuses. Marketing should explain which distinctions are needed to evaluate sources and messages. The CRM owner should make the final fields practical to use and preserve the history when a status changes.

A disposition is a recorded operating outcome, not an informal opinion about the value of a person’s claim. The firm should have its lawyers approve the criteria, language, escalation path, and any decline or referral process that applies in its jurisdictions.

The firm should adapt ownership to its structure while keeping legal acceptance decisions with lawyers.

Connect the responsibilities to law-firm intake consulting.

Build a disposition taxonomy around decisions, not departments.

Use the fewest categories that still change an action. A practical starting structure can distinguish invalid records, incomplete evaluation, matters outside approved criteria, wanted matters still in process, wanted matters lost before signing, and completed engagements. Sub-reasons can add detail without turning the primary report into dozens of inconsistent labels.

For example, outside criteria may include practice, geography, timing, conflict, or another attorney-approved reason. Wanted but lost may include no completed consultation, chose another firm, unanswered question, agreement not completed, or another documented reason. The primary category answers what kind of decision is needed; the sub-reason helps identify the correction.

Do not let not qualified become the default whenever information is missing. If the team could not complete the evaluation, record that explicitly. Otherwise marketing may be blamed for case quality when the firm never established whether the matter fit.

• Invalid or duplicate: not a unique decision-ready inquiry.
• Evaluation incomplete: the firm lacks enough information or successful contact.
• Outside approved criteria: legal or business fit was evaluated and declined under the firm’s rules.
• Wanted and active: the matter fits and has a visible next action or attorney review.
• Wanted but lost: the firm wanted the matter, but the engagement did not complete.
• Signed and handed off: the engagement milestone and onboarding handoff are both recorded.

Test the definitions against real records before rollout.

Select a representative sample across sources, shifts, offices, languages, intake team members, and outcomes. Ask two trained reviewers to classify the same records independently. When they disagree, inspect whether the definition, the available evidence, or the system field caused the difference.

A category that cannot be applied consistently is not ready for reporting. Rewrite it, combine it with another category, or add a clear escalation rule. The test should also expose whether required information is captured early enough for the firm to make the decision.

Then define when each status can be selected, who may change it, which sub-reasons are required, and which statuses need attorney review. Preserve timestamps. A final disposition without the path and timing behind it cannot explain where a wanted matter stalled.

• Review at least signed, lost wanted, unsuitable, unreachable, duplicate, and still-open records.
• Check agreement between reviewers before using the categories for vendor or staff accountability.
• Require a next action and owner for every wanted matter that remains open.
• Create an exception queue for missing, conflicting, or overdue dispositions.

Use the intake follow-up audit guide to select records and inspect ownership.

Reconcile the report before it reaches the budget meeting.

Consider a clearly labeled hypothetical cohort of 200 unique PI inquiries. Twenty-five are invalid or duplicate, 55 are outside approved criteria, 35 cannot yet be evaluated, 15 await legal review, 20 are wanted matters lost before signing, 10 have incomplete agreements, and 40 are signed and handed off. These figures are illustrative, not a client result or an industry benchmark.

That distribution gives leadership several different questions. Marketing can examine the 55 unsuitable matters by source and message. Intake can examine why 35 evaluations remain incomplete. Attorney leadership can address the review queue. The firm can study the 30 wanted matters lost or stalled after fit was established. A single 20% inquiry-to-signed rate would not identify any of those actions.

Reconcile the disposition totals to the cohort total and show counts beside percentages. Keep open matters separate from final outcomes. Show how many records are missing a disposition, how many were changed after review, and whether one person, shift, or source is overusing a catch-all category.

Compare the categories inside the sample intake findings.

Send useful case-quality signals back to marketing.

Advertising platforms can optimize toward later-stage business events only when the firm defines and records those events reliably. Google Ads, for example, distinguishes qualified-lead and converted-lead goals based on information established outside the ad platform. The label sent back should represent a real, approved firm event rather than a convenient proxy.

Do not export every internal nuance to a platform or vendor. Decide which event is stable enough to guide optimization, which fields must remain inside the firm, and what minimum data quality is required. A noisy qualification label can train campaigns toward inconsistent staff behavior instead of the cases the firm actually wants.

Use disposition reporting to ask focused questions: Which sources produce the highest share of evaluated wanted matters? Which campaigns create repeated outside-criteria patterns? Where do wanted cases stall after qualification? Is the loss concentrated after hours, during attorney review, or at agreement completion?

Source: Google Ads: About qualified leads and converted leads

Source: Google Ads: About offline conversion imports

Carry the same distinctions into where wanted cases get lost in intake.

Treat disposition definitions as an operating standard.

Publish a short data dictionary with the category, decision rule, allowed sub-reasons, responsible role, and examples. Train the people who use it, then review adoption with record samples rather than assuming the new fields solved the problem.

Changes need version control. If the firm expands geography, changes practice priorities, or revises acceptance criteria, record the effective date. Historical reporting should not silently apply today’s definition to an older cohort.

Once the definitions hold up, use them in the monthly marketing review. Leadership can then decide whether to correct targeting, strengthen coverage, accelerate legal review, improve the engagement handoff, or invest in more demand. The disposition system has done its job when the report leads to the right owner and a specific next decision.