Personal Injury Firms

Law firm intake statistics, 2026

Short answer

Across the best public data, a quarter to a half of US law firms never respond to a new enquiry at all. Clio's 2024 secret shop of 500 firms found 48% answered neither a call nor an email; Hennessey's 2025 study of 1,333 firms found 26% never answered a web form. Spanish-language after-hours intake is rarer still.

Last updated 15 September 2026By Juan Camilo30 statistics, 15 sources

Every number below carries the publisher, the year, a primary or vendor-published flag, and a link we opened ourselves on 14 or 15 September 2026. Anything we could not open is in claims we could not verify rather than in a table. The last section is new primary data of our own: the 9pm Test, run on 308 personal injury firm websites in Los Angeles and Houston on 15 September 2026.

How to read the flags. Primary means the publisher ran the study and published the method. Vendor means a company that sells into this market published it; the number may still be sound, but it was not independently audited. Ours means we measured it, and the method is on the 9pm Test method page.

How fast do law firms respond to a new enquiry?

The legal-specific answer comes from one vendor study that repeats every year, and the underlying behavioural research comes from two non-legal studies from 2007 and 2011 that every vendor page cites and almost none link. Both originals are below, and both are readable.

#NumberWhat it measuresPublisherYearTypeSource
113 minutesMedian time for a US law firm to respond to an online lead form (1,333 firms; forms submitted 10am to noon local, seven day cutoff)Hennessey Digital2025VendorLead Form Response Time Study
225%Share of firms replying in under 5 minutes, up from 13% in 2021Hennessey Digital2025VendorPress release
333% / 56%Respond in 10 minutes or less, and within the hourHennessey Digital2025VendorStudy
439%Take more than 2 hours to respond, or never respond at allHennessey Digital2025VendorStudy
526%"still fail to respond at all to online leads"Hennessey Digital2025VendorPress release
60 to 121 minRange of city median response times, fastest (Louisville, KY) to slowest (Tallahassee, FL)Hennessey Digital2025VendorStudy
7100x and 21x"The odds of contacting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times. The odds of qualifying a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 21 times." Three years of data across six companies, over fifteen thousand leads and over one hundred thousand call attempts. Not law firms.InsideSales.com with Dr James Oldroyd, MIT Sloan2007PrimaryLead Response Management report (PDF)
842 hours"We audited 2,241 U.S. companies... 23% of the companies never responded at all. The average response time, among companies that responded within 30 days, was 42 hours." Not law firms.Harvard Business Review (Oldroyd, McElheran, Elkington)2011PrimaryThe Short Life of Online Sales Leads (PDF reprint)
97x and 60xFirms contacting within an hour were "nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead" as those trying an hour later, and "more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer" (1.25 million leads, 29 B2C and 13 B2B companies)Harvard Business Review2011PrimaryPDF reprint

Rows 1 to 6 measure business hours only. Rows 7 to 9 are the original non-legal research that the legal vendor pages quote secondhand.

How many law firms never answer at all?

This is the secret shopper question, and only two studies have ever answered it with a stated method. Both are Clio's, and both were run by a third party. The 2024 shop was conducted by the research agency Lux between 20 June and 5 July 2024 across 500 US firms, which Clio states on its own blog.

#NumberWhat it measuresPublisherYearTypeSource
1040%"Only 40% of firms answered the phone calls (down from 56% in 2019)" in a secret shop of 500 US firmsClio, via the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism2024Vendor2Civility write-up
1133%"Just 33% of firms responded to the emails (down from 40% in 2019)"Clio, via 2Civility2024Vendor2Civility write-up
1248%"In total, 52% of firms either answered our phone calls or phoned us back, meaning 48% were essentially unreachable by phone"Clio (blog)2024VendorClio blog (archived)
1312%"only a small percentage (12%) said they were likely to recommend the firms they contacted to friends or family" (secret shopper feedback)Clio, via 2Civility2024Vendor2Civility write-up
1439% and 57%"39% of our calls went to voicemail, of which 57% didn't return our call within 72 hours" (1,000 firms emailed, 500 phoned)Clio2019Vendor2019 Legal Trends Report (archived)
1564%"64% indicated they contacted a law firm that never responded, either through phone or email" (2,000 consumers surveyed)Clio2019Vendor2019 report (archived)
1689%"89% of legal professionals we surveyed said that they respond to phone and email inquiries within 24 hours." Read this against rows 10 to 15: it is the self-report gap.Clio2019Vendor2019 report (archived)

clio.com returns HTTP 403 to direct requests, so rows 12, 14, 15 and 16 are quoted from Internet Archive captures, and rows 10, 11 and 13 from a bar-body write-up. Both are linked above.

What happens to the enquiries that arrive after hours?

This is the thinnest part of the public record, and it is the part that matters most for injury work, because crashes do not keep office hours. There is exactly one published after-hours firm count, it is seven years old, and the audit behind it has been deleted. The crash timing data, by contrast, is solid and annual.

#NumberWhat it measuresPublisherYearTypeSource
1773 of 100"A recent FindLaw audit of 100 firms found that 73 of them didn't have any way to answer the phone after business hours." The only published after-hours firm count anywhere. The underlying audit page now returns 404; the blog page shows only "Last Updated: March 21, 2019".FindLaw (Thomson Reuters) Strategist blog2019VendorShould you go secret shopping at your own law firm?
1834.22% and 28.54%Of after-hours legal calls, "34.22% of the calls occurred between 5:00 p.m and 6:00 p.m., and 28.54% occurred between 8:00 and 9:00 a.m." (30,000 calls from the agency's own legal clients over six months, via CallRail)Market My Market2022VendorWhat does your firm lose by being 9 to 5?
192.57%"only 2.57% of the 30,000 calls occurred on the weekends", in the same dataset. Weekend cover is cheaper than it looks; the expensive gap is weekday evenings.Market My Market2022VendorSame article
2048%"In 2024, about half (48%) of crash deaths occurred on Friday, Saturday or Sunday" (39,254 US motor vehicle crash deaths)Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, from NHTSA FARS2024 dataPrimaryFatality Facts: yearly snapshot
2116% and 53%6,131 of 39,254 crash deaths (16%) fell between 9 p.m. and midnight. Summing the published rows outside 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. gives 20,971 of 39,254, or 53%. The sum is our arithmetic on the IIHS table; the row values are theirs.IIHS (our sum of their table)2024 dataPrimaryDeaths by time of day table

Rows 20 and 21 are fatal crashes, which are not the same population as injury claims. They are the best public proxy for when the event that starts a case happens; treat them as timing, not volume.

What turns an enquiry into a signed case?

There is no public primary statistic for the enquiry to signed retainer rate at US personal injury firms. Nobody has published one with a method, and we are not going to invent one. What does exist is evidence about the decision itself: how fast the claimant decides, how they make contact, and what makes them stop calling you and call someone else.

#NumberWhat it measuresPublisherYearTypeSource
22Nearly two-thirds"Nearly two-thirds of claimants who contacted an attorney in relation to an auto injury claim did so at the very beginning of the claim, within one week of the accident" (27,126 interviews)Insurance Research Council2016IndustryWhy do claimants hire attorneys?
237 in 10 / 50%"More than 7 in 10 consumers reach out via phone when initially contacting an attorney"; "50% expect a response on the same day they reach out"FindLaw / Thomson Reuters, US Consumer Legal Needs Survey (12th annual; n not stated)2023VendorKey takeaways
24Nearly 50%"Nearly 50% of survey respondents cited not being able to reach an attorney on the first try or not hearing back quickly enough as reasons for why they contacted more than one attorney"FindLaw / Thomson Reuters2023VendorSame article
2547.6%"47.6% percent listed responsiveness as a critical factor in choosing an attorney (followed by cost and a free consultation)"Martindale-Avvo, Understanding the Legal Consumer2022VendorSpeed is key when responding to inquiries
263x and 8xShoppers who spoke to someone on the phone were "over three times higher than the average across all channels" to recommend the firm, and "nearly eight times more than those who only received a follow-up via voicemail"Clio, via 2Civility2024Vendor2Civility write-up

How much Spanish-language demand is there in the biggest injury metros?

This is the one theme where the primary data is excellent and free. The US Census Bureau publishes language spoken at home by metropolitan area every year in table S1601 of the American Community Survey, including how many of those speakers report speaking English less than "very well". We pulled it on 14 September 2026 through the data.census.gov table endpoint; the query URL is in the sources.

#NumberWhat it measuresPublisherYearTypeSource
2744,867,699People aged 5 and over who speak Spanish at home in the United States, 13.9% of that population. 18,432,221 of them, 41.1%, speak English less than "very well".US Census Bureau, ACS 2024 1-year, table S16012024PrimaryTable S1601
2843.9% to 10.3%Range of the Spanish-at-home share across the eleven largest US motor vehicle accident metros, from Miami at the top to Atlanta at the bottom. Full metro table below.US Census Bureau, ACS 2024 1-year, table S16012024PrimaryTable S1601
2975%"75% say they are able to carry on a conversation in Spanish pretty well or very well" (n = 3,029 US Hispanic adults). Demand for Spanish intake is not the same as inability to speak English; it is a preference measured at the moment of stress.Pew Research Center2023PrimaryLatinos' views of and experiences with the Spanish language
3035%"35% of law firm websites feature Spanish or multi-language translation options" (about 1,400 mostly personal injury firm sites). Note what this counts: a translation option, not a page written in Spanish and not a person who answers in Spanish.Hennessey Digital2024Vendor2024 release

Spanish spoken at home in the eleven largest MVA metros

Metro areaPopulation 5+Speak Spanish at homeShareOf those, speak English less than "very well"Share of Spanish speakers
Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL6,120,0512,686,23943.9%1,300,94648.4%
Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA4,468,0751,622,96436.3%554,36734.2%
Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA12,297,8524,236,04634.4%1,753,01041.4%
Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX7,292,9592,205,01130.2%995,64445.2%
San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX2,594,758767,40829.6%239,31531.2%
Las Vegas-Henderson-North Las Vegas, NV2,270,744519,44722.9%212,37140.9%
Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX7,819,4051,704,24421.8%687,43940.3%
New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ18,844,5843,859,77520.5%1,845,90547.8%
Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ4,904,552929,90119.0%321,95634.6%
Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN8,918,3091,612,93818.1%637,31639.5%
Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA6,054,114622,73810.3%260,28241.8%
United States321,745,94344,867,69913.9%18,432,22141.1%

US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2024 1-year estimates, table S1601, pulled 14 September 2026. Primary

New data, 2026: the 9pm Test

Every statistic above is somebody else's. This section is ours, and as far as we can find it is the first published count of Spanish-language, after-hours intake signals at US personal injury firms.

The 9pm Test is a dated, reproducible check of what a person looking for help at 9pm actually finds on a business's public pages. It scores seven signals, pass or fail, each with the line of evidence and the date it was checked. Nothing is called and nothing is submitted. The full method, including how to run it on your own firm in fifteen minutes, is on the 9pm Test method page.

Method, in one paragraph. On 15 September 2026 we read the public websites of 308 personal injury law firms, 160 in Los Angeles, CA and 148 in Houston, TX, with ordinary GET requests, a browser user agent and a twelve second timeout. 281 sites were readable; 27 returned DNS failures, 403s, 500s, or a captcha or bot wall instead of the page, and are counted as unreachable, never as failures. Nothing was called, no form was submitted, no message was sent and no account was used anywhere. Each signal records the line of evidence and the date it was read. Our data

What a Spanish-speaking caller meets at 9pm

SignalLos Angeles, CAHouston, TXBoth metros
A page actually written in Spanish16 of 139 (12%)23 of 142 (16%)39 of 281 (14%)
A machine-translated Spanish page444387
A translation widget and nothing else182139
No Spanish page at all61 of 139 (44%)55 of 142 (39%)116 of 281 (41%)
Claims after-hours availability and names a Spanish speaker47 of 139 (34%)38 of 142 (27%)85 of 281 (30%)
A tappable phone number where a Spanish speaker lands132 of 139 (95%)132 of 142 (93%)264 of 281 (94%)
A form that says what happens after you send it9 of 110 forms (8%)9 of 107 forms (8%)18 of 217 (8%)
A form that asks a single qualifying question10 of 110 forms (9%)10 of 107 forms (9%)20 of 217 (9%)
Paid-acquisition markers in the page source57 of 99 (58%)68 of 112 (61%)125 of 211 (59%)

The 9pm Test, crawled 15 September 2026. Denominators differ by signal: form signals only count sites where a form could be evaluated, and the paid-acquisition row only counts sites whose scripts were readable. Our data

How many of the seven signals each firm passed

Signals passedLos Angeles (139 readable)Houston (142 readable)Both (281)
0 of 75813
1 of 7484189
2 of 74952101
3 of 7253156
4 of 710818
5 of 7224
6 or 7 of 7000
Median2 of 72 of 72 of 7

Signal 5, the Facebook Page reply badge, returned unknown for all 308 because Facebook does not put the badge in a Page's static HTML, so the practical maximum from public pages is 6 and nobody reached it. Our data

Four firms scored 5 of 7. Two in Los Angeles and two in Houston, each passing every site signal but one. A firm is named only when it reaches 6 or 7, and none did on this run; the whole distribution is reported as counts, never as a list of names.

What we think the data says. The Spanish gap is not a phone problem, it is a page problem followed by a person problem. Nine in ten of these sites make the number tappable, so the click works. One in eight has a page actually written in Spanish, and one in four claims both after-hours cover and a Spanish speaker. Meanwhile 56% of the sites we could read carry paid-acquisition markers, which means the majority are buying clicks into a funnel that thins out at exactly the hour and in exactly the language the Census says the market is in. The full Los Angeles and Houston write-ups, with the charts, the breakdowns by signal and a downloadable aggregate CSV, are published at wealthmarketing.ai/research/9pm-test-los-angeles and wealthmarketing.ai/research/9pm-test-houston.

Which claims could we not verify?

Most intake roundups repeat numbers with no reachable source. These are the ones we chased and did not use, and why. If you have seen any of them quoted, this is the list to check them against.

Sources and method

How the tables were built. Each figure was fetched directly on 14 or 15 September 2026, with a browser user agent, and the quoted wording was read out of the fetched document rather than out of a search snippet. Where the publisher blocks direct requests, an Internet Archive capture was used and is linked as such. Where a figure is arithmetic we did on somebody else's published table, the row says so. Nothing on this page is a rounded, restated or remembered number.

Run the 9pm Test on your own firm first

It takes fifteen minutes and costs nothing. The method page walks through all seven signals in order, with what counts as a pass. If your score is under 4, the leak is bigger than your ad budget.

Read the method

Or see what a Spanish-first intake system looks like when it is built and run for you. One personal injury firm per metro.

Frequently asked questions

How many law firms fail to respond to a new enquiry?

Between a quarter and a half, depending on the channel. Clio's 2024 Legal Trends Report had a third-party firm secret shop 500 US law firms between 20 June and 5 July 2024: 40% answered the phone, 33% answered the email, and 48% did neither. Hennessey Digital's 2025 study of 1,333 firms found 26% never responded to an online lead form.

What is the median law firm response time to a web lead in 2026?

13 minutes, measured by Hennessey Digital across 1,333 US law firms for its 2025 Lead Form Response Time Study. That study submits forms between 10am and noon local time, so it measures business-hours response only. City medians ranged from 0 minutes in Louisville to 121 minutes in Tallahassee.

How fast does a law firm actually need to answer?

Within five minutes. The 2007 InsideSales and MIT Sloan study of six companies, over fifteen thousand leads and over one hundred thousand call attempts, found the odds of contacting a lead drop 100 times and the odds of qualifying one drop 21 times between a five minute and a thirty minute call back. Harvard Business Review's 2011 audit of 2,241 companies found firms that responded within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead.

How many law firms can be reached after hours?

The only published count is old: a FindLaw audit of 100 firms found 73 had no way to answer the phone after business hours, reported on a blog page last updated 21 March 2019, and the audit page itself is now gone. Our own 2026 crawl found 85 of 281 readable personal injury firm sites in Los Angeles and Houston both claim after-hours availability and name a Spanish speaker.

What is the 9pm Test?

The 9pm Test is a dated, reproducible check of what a person looking for help at 9pm actually finds on a business's public pages. It scores seven signals, pass or fail, each with the line of evidence and the date it was checked. Nothing is called and nothing is submitted. Created by Juan Camilo at Wealth Marketing AI in 2026.

How many personal injury law firms have a real Spanish page?

39 of 281, or 14%, in our 15 September 2026 crawl of personal injury firm websites in Los Angeles and Houston. A further 87 had a machine-translated page and 39 had a translation widget and nothing else. 116 had no Spanish page at all. Hennessey Digital counted 35% of about 1,400 law firm sites as having a translation option in 2024, which counts the widget.

How much Spanish-language demand is there in the biggest injury metros?

US Census ACS 2024 one-year estimates, table S1601: 44,867,699 people aged 5 and over speak Spanish at home, 13.9% of the country, and 18,432,221 of them speak English less than very well. By metro the share runs from 43.9% in Miami and 36.3% in Riverside to 34.4% in Los Angeles, 30.2% in Houston and 10.3% in Atlanta.

Why does this page list claims it could not verify?

Because most intake statistics roundups repeat numbers with no reachable source. Every figure in the tables here carries a publisher, a year and a link we opened on 14 or 15 September 2026. Figures we could not open, such as the widely repeated 78% hire the first firm that answers and responding within five minutes lifts conversion by about 400%, are listed separately and are not used.

Related: why web leads die overnight  ·  what a signed case really costs on Google Ads  ·  Spanish-speaking personal injury leads

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