62% of Their Enquiries Never Got a Response Within 24 Hours

Gemma pulled the numbers on a Friday afternoon. She probably should've waited until Monday.

As practice manager at a personal injury firm in Leeds, she'd been asked by the managing partner to figure out why their Google Ads weren't "working anymore." The firm was spending £4,500 a month on ads and SEO. Enquiries were coming in. But new cases weren't keeping pace.

So she tracked every enquiry for 30 days. Manually. Website forms, phone calls, live chat messages, emails. She logged when each one came in and when someone from the firm first responded.

The average was 27 hours.

Twenty-seven hours. For people who'd just been injured in a car accident or a slip at work. People in pain, stressed, often scared about money. They filled in a form or left a voicemail, and the firm got back to them the next day. Sometimes two days later.

That wasn't even the worst part.

She cross-referenced the response times with outcome data. Of the enquiries where the firm responded within 4 hours, 38% converted to a booked consultation. Where they responded after 24 hours? Eight percent. And 62% of those slow-response prospects had already contacted at least one other firm by the time someone from the practice rang them back.

The partners didn't love hearing this. Nobody does.

"We're paying to fill a bucket with a hole in it," Gemma told them. She wasn't wrong.

It's tempting to blame people. Nobody was lazy. The firm had four solicitors, two paralegals, and support staff who genuinely cared about their clients. The problem was structural.

Website form submissions landed in a shared inbox. Three people had access. On a busy day, nobody checked it until late afternoon. On a quiet day, they might check at 10 AM, which is great unless the form came in at 5:15 PM the night before.

Phone enquiries were worse. If reception was on another call or handling a walk-in, it went to voicemail. The message got transcribed onto a sticky note. The sticky note sat on Gemma's desk until she had time to triage it. Gemma was also handling billing, regulatory compliance, file management, and whatever else needed doing.

Then there was the qualification problem. Not every enquiry is a viable case. Some are outside the limitation period. Some involve injuries too minor to pursue. Sorting this out required someone with enough legal knowledge to ask the right questions, but the solicitors were busy on active cases and didn't want to spend afternoons screening cold leads.

So the cycle repeated. Enquiries came in. They sat. Someone eventually responded. By then, the prospect had moved on.

Here's what makes this particularly painful for PI firms: the economics of first contact. Industry data consistently shows that the first firm to make meaningful contact with an injured person wins the instruction roughly 70% of the time. Not the best firm. Not the cheapest firm. The first one to actually respond with something helpful.

The firm wasn't losing cases because of their legal work. They were losing cases because of a shared inbox.

£4,500/month in marketing generated roughly 65 new enquiries per month. About £69 per enquiry. Of those 65, the firm was converting 8 into booked consultations. Cost per consultation: £562.

If they'd simply responded faster and hit even a modest 25% conversion rate, that's 16 consultations from the same spend. At 34%, which is where they ended up, it's 23. Same budget. Same ads. Same website. Nearly three times the consultations.

Average PI case value for this firm ran between £8,000 and £25,000 in fees. Losing 15 potential consultations per month to slow response was costing them somewhere between £180K and £300K annually. The partners had been discussing whether to increase the ad budget. What they actually needed was to answer faster.

Four components, all triggered the moment an enquiry arrives.

1. Instant response agent

Every website form submission triggers a personalised acknowledgment within 90 seconds. Not a generic "Thank you for your enquiry" autoresponder. The AI reads the form content, identifies the enquiry type (road traffic accident, workplace injury, clinical negligence, employer liability), and sends a response that shows the firm has actually read what the person wrote.

If someone mentions a car accident on the M62, the response references RTA claims specifically. If they describe a fall at a supermarket, it addresses occupier's liability. The message includes two or three qualifying questions relevant to their situation: When did the incident happen? Have you received medical treatment? Was the accident reported?

This runs through Claude API for language processing and Twilio for SMS delivery. Email responses go through the firm's Google Workspace so replies come from a real firm address, not a no-reply bot.

2. Qualification and scoring

As qualifying information comes back, the agent evaluates case viability against five factors: injury severity and type, liability indicators, time since incident, evidence availability, and estimated claim value bracket.

Each lead gets a score from 1-10. Above 7 gets flagged for immediate solicitor callback. Between 4 and 7 goes into a standard queue. Below 4, the agent sends a polite explanation that the firm may not be the best fit and suggests alternatives (Citizens Advice, the Official Injury Claim portal for lower-value RTA claims).

That last part matters. Turning away cases that won't be profitable isn't cold. It's honest. And it frees solicitors to focus on cases where they can genuinely help.

3. Smart routing

Qualified leads get routed to the right solicitor based on specialism and current capacity. The clinical negligence specialist doesn't get employer liability cases. The solicitor carrying 40 active files doesn't get the next five leads while a colleague with capacity sits waiting.

The agent sends the prospect a Calendly link for the appropriate solicitor. If the solicitor doesn't confirm or respond within 2 hours, the system escalates to the practice manager with a notification. No lead sits unattended.

Integration with Clio (their practice management system) means the agent can check current caseloads and pull the firm's specialism matrix without anyone maintaining a separate spreadsheet.

4. Nurture for non-ready leads

Not everyone is ready to proceed when they first enquire. They're still in hospital. Waiting for a medical report. Talking to family. Unsure if they even have a claim.

These prospects enter a nurture sequence that keeps the firm visible without being pushy:

Every touch is helpful, not salesy. And every one includes an easy path back to booking a consultation when they're ready.

Total monthly cost: £420. That includes API calls, SMS credits, and all platform subscriptions.

For context, £420 is roughly what the firm spends on Google Ads in three days. The intake agent makes those three days of spend worth significantly more.

The qualification logic took longer than expected. Scoring PI case viability isn't straightforward. A broken arm in a workplace accident is different from a broken arm in a pub fight. The agent needed the firm's solicitors to sit down and articulate their actual decision criteria, not the ones they thought they used, but the ones they really applied when screening cases. That took three sessions over two weeks. The result was a scoring matrix that matched partner decisions about 85% of the time. Good enough for triage. Not good enough to replace judgment.

Tone was everything. These are people who've been injured. The first version of the AI responses was too clinical. "Based on the details you've provided, your enquiry has been categorised as a road traffic accident claim." Nobody wants to hear that when they're in pain. We rewrote the prompts to lead with empathy. "I'm sorry to hear about your accident. That sounds like a difficult situation." Same information, completely different experience. It took four rounds of prompt revision before the solicitors said, "Yeah, that sounds like us."

SMS outperformed email by a wide margin. Prospects who received an SMS within 90 seconds responded to qualifying questions 73% of the time. Email-only responses got a 31% reply rate. For time-sensitive intake, text wins. Not everyone provides a mobile number on the form, so the system handles both, but we added a phone number field as required on the website form after seeing the data.

The 2-hour escalation rule prevented three lost leads in the first week. One solicitor was in court all day. Another had back-to-back client meetings. Without the escalation, those leads would've sat until the following morning. Gemma caught the alerts and reassigned them within 20 minutes.

The number that surprised the partners most: their Google Ads ROI effectively tripled without changing the campaign. Same keywords, same budget, same landing page. The only difference was what happened after someone clicked "Submit."

Gemma's reaction was more practical. "I got nine hours of my week back. I can actually do my actual job now."

Primary: enquiries answered instantly, while the person is still engaged. Secondary: higher conversion from existing marketing spend, making the £4,500/month dramatically more productive. Tertiary: Gemma freed from intake triage to focus on billing, compliance, and the operational work that was piling up. And something the partners hadn't considered: the nurture sequence started converting enquiries from months earlier. People who'd enquired in January and weren't ready were booking consultations in March after a limitation period reminder.

The firm didn't increase their ad spend. They didn't hire a receptionist. They stopped losing the leads they were already paying for.

Every client-facing professional services firm we talk to has some version of this. Enquiries come in through multiple channels. Nobody owns the intake process. Response times drift. Leads go cold while good people are busy doing good work.

It's especially acute in legal because the stakes are personal. Someone filling in a PI enquiry form isn't shopping for accounting software. They're dealing with an injury, worried about finances, looking for someone who'll take them seriously. Responding in 90 seconds with something that shows you've read their situation doesn't just improve conversion rates. It's the right thing to do.

If your firm is spending money to generate enquiries and watching them evaporate, this is worth a conversation. Not because AI is fashionable. Because a 27-hour response time in a market where speed wins 70% of cases is a maths problem with a clear solution.

Want to see 25 agent architectures across different industries? Download Unstuck. It includes blueprints for lead generation, scheduling, quoting, collections, and more.

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by SP, CEO - Connect on LinkedIn
for the AdAI Ed. Team