Speed to lead for law firms.

Hennessey Digital, a law firm marketing agency, has submitted a web form under an alias to more than a thousand law firms every year since 2021 and timed the first personal reply. In 2025: 1,333 firms, 25% within five minutes, 33% within ten, 56% within an hour, a median of 13 minutes, and 26% with no reply in seven days. In 2021 the median was 25 minutes and 40% never replied.

The older, broader study is Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington in Harvard Business Review, 2011: a test lead sent to 2,241 US companies of all kinds. 37% responded within an hour, 24% took more than a day, 23% never responded, and the average among those who did was 42 hours.

Then the number everyone quotes: a lead contacted within five minutes is 21 times more likely to qualify than one contacted at 30. That comes from a 2007 analysis of one vendor’s call data at six companies, presented at a conference and often miscredited to MIT. The direction is likely right. Don’t build a business case on the multiple.

On the phone side, Clio’s secret shoppers found about 40% of firms answered live, and a 1,200-call audit of small and mid-sized firms found 34.8% unanswered in business hours.

A person with a legal problem often contacts more than one firm. The first firm to reply gets the conversation; the second gets “I’ve already spoken to someone.” The evidence shows no five-minute threshold. It does show, study after study, that faster is better and that a quarter of firms do not reply within a week.

A fast reply with nothing in it reads to the prospect as an auto-reply. The first response should:

1. Say who you are and that a person will follow up, and when.
2. Ask the matter type and the one or two facts that decide whether the firm takes it: jurisdiction, date, the other party’s name for a conflict check.
3. Offer a consultation time, from the real calendar.
4. Leave out legal advice and fees.

An intake agent connected to the firm’s case management system does all four within a minute of the form landing, at 2am as at 2pm, and opens the intake record. The lawyer’s first touch is then a scheduled call with the facts already in front of them. How our intake agent answers for law firms.

The form is the easy one: it arrives as text and you can answer it as text. Calls are where firms lose the most, because 60% are not answered live and a prospective client with a fresh problem often does not leave a voicemail. The missed-call calculator for law firms puts a number on it. Chat widgets are the same problem as forms with a shorter fuse: a prospect waiting on a chat gives you about a minute.

Confidentiality. The ABA’s Formal Opinion 512 says Rules 1.6 and 1.18 cover information from prospective clients, so where the form data and the call content go, who sees it, and whether any of it trains a model are questions for any intake vendor. Recording. Eleven states require every party’s consent to record a call; if calls are recorded, decide how consent is captured before anything goes live.

• Median time to first personal response, by channel and by hour of day. Look at the after-hours number first.
• Share of leads answered within five minutes, and share never answered.
• Share of leads that booked a consultation, and the no-show rate on those.
• Run Hennessey’s test on yourself: fill in your own form at 7pm on a Tuesday and time it.