While demand for legal services is trending upward, growth is a double-edged sword. Law firms have more competition, with the average number of law firms in the US increasing 0.7% per year from 2019 to 2024. When you add in alternative legal providers and the influx of legal tech startups, the marketplace is crowding and diversifying rapidly.
That’s a big reason why the average cost per lead (CPL) in the legal industry consistently ranks as one of the highest — a staggering $649 on average. For the more traditional firms that aren’t used to managing high volumes of leads from forms, calls, social media, and referrals, converting a lead to a client is more difficult than ever.
Learn how law firms can make the most of every lead by using new technology like Convert Assist, CallRail’s AI-powered assistant for client conversations.
3 lead conversion challenges every law firm faces today
The average US law firm employs 3.1 people — which means much of the lead management work falls to the firm’s attorneys or office manager. That means for small and mid-sized firms, the client intake process is often a secondary or tertiary job function.
The lack of dedicated lead conversion resources results in the following common struggles:
1. Slow or inconsistent follow-up drives prospective clients to other, more responsive firms. In our 2025 marketing outlook for law firms, we found that only 50% of law firms respond to prospective clients within an hour, even though 98% believe clients are satisfied with their response times. Research shows, however, that the follow-up time frame must be closer to 15 minutes to remain competitive.
2. An all-hands-on-deck approach can send prospective clients to under-trained staff who can’t effectively convert them into clients. Whether they’re unable to effectively answer the potential client’s questions or fail to follow best practices for lead conversion, an unprepared staff member can be more damaging to your firm’s brand than no response.
3. Firms with marketing teams are generating many poor-quality leads that eat up budget but fail to convert. For consumer-oriented attorneys, the average conversion rate runs between 5% to 15%, meaning at least 85% of the lead generation budget is going to waste.
To solve these issues, law firms need to improve the entire process from the time a lead raises their hand to the time the lead is signed on as a client. Typically, this would require more payroll hours or more staffing to effectively monitor conversations, follow-up with leads, and train the staff that deal with new leads — a costly and impractical solution for most firms.
This is where CallRail’s Convert Assist steps in to enable the staff you already have to more efficiently manage and convert leads. This helps raise your conversion rates and grow your revenue with minimal investment or process changes.
Here’s how Convert Assist is helping law firms secure more clients
Convert Assist is an AI-powered assistant that works alongside your staff (or with attorneys, if you’re a smaller firm) during lead conversations to ensure every “I” is dotted and every “T” is crossed. There are three ways that Convert Assist helps with every conversation: action plan, coaching, and smart follow-up.
Take the conversation above between the Anderson & Parker Law Firm and a potential client who was in a car accident. There is a wealth of information in this less-than-four-minute call, and from this call there are many things to do, like setting up follow-up appointments, updating case notes, and sending follow-up emails.
Convert Assist can help with all of them. See Convert Assist in action through this breakdown of each feature.
1. Conversation coaching
With Convert Assist, law firms have an always-on, AI-driven source of feedback for conversations. With extensive training on legal industry-specific data, Convert Assist can provide positive feedback and identify areas for improvement to help any staff member improve from call-to-call, rather than when there’s time to review call transcripts and discuss — which may be never at a busy firm!
Coaching helps reinforce the good while providing actionable insights, like remembering to provide a recap at the end of every call, to increase the likelihood of a positive outcome on the next call.
2. Action plan
When a new lead calls in seeking legal counsel, your firm needs to assuage the fears and uncertainty they have about the process — and attorneys, in general, as only 16% of people trust lawyers to be honest and ethical. Seeming distracted on the call while taking notes or failing to follow-up on every promise can undercut the good work your firm does before it even has a chance to close the deal.
Convert Assist’s action plan provides your firm with intelligent step-by-step recommendations after each call. It provides an at-a-glance way to prioritize lead follow-ups based on the case’s potential. And it ensures that no promised action from the conversation falls through the cracks. In the example, you can see how it not only tracks the logistics of the follow-up, but gives detailed action items that need to happen before the next meeting.
3. Smart follow-up
Last but not least, Convert Assist automatically draft a response based on the substance of each conversation, reducing the time it takes to follow up with each conversation to minutes or seconds. The faster the follow-up, the more likely you are to gain or retain clients, as it shows your level of care for their individual case.
As you can see in the example, smart follow-up reliably addresses all the key points — the time and what documents are needed — in a professional manner.
More cases, higher revenue
Convert Assist is designed to help law firms of every size get the most out of their client intake process. It helps law firms get the most out of their current marketing budget by increasing conversion rates without the need to increase ad spend. It solves one of the key challenges — slow lead follow-up — that keeps small law firms from growing (without adding more headcount or outsourcing to expensive third-party services, at least).
The result? More cases and higher revenue — all from the simple act of adding Convert Assist to their lead intake process.
If lead conversion is leading you to pull your hair out, it may be time to experience the benefits of CallRail and Convert Assist for yourself. Get started with a 14-day trial today.
