Personal Injury pay per call & leads

Who's calling a PI intake line

The useful caller was hurt, thinks someone else is at fault, and wants a lawyer now. Motor vehicle accidents are the volume engine in most PI books: rear-ends, left turns, commercial trucks, rideshare. Premises (slip, trip, negligent security), workplace injuries with a third-party angle, dog bites, and the occasional med-mal or product case show up depending on how you buy. They are not one queue. A trucking case with a week of hospital time is not a parking-lot fender bender with a sore neck and no treatment.

Timing is part of who they are. Someone who wrecked yesterday and is calling from the ER waiting room is a different intake than someone who wrecked 20 months ago, stopped treating, and just saw a billboard. Both can be real. Only one is signable in a state with a two-year statute if you're already close to the bar. "Injured person" is not a qualifier. Injured how, when, and with what treatment is.

You'll also get the already-represented. They want a second opinion, they're unhappy with their lawyer, or they don't remember they signed. In most PI campaigns those are dead on arrival unless your firm has a written policy for replacing counsel. The retained-counsel screen exists because PI case value is high enough that another firm already fought to sign them. Asking "do you already have a lawyer on this accident" is not optional small talk.

Family members call. A spouse in the hospital. A parent of a hurt teenager. Decide whether those are qualified if the injured person can join or sign. Some firms want only the injured adult. Some will take a spouse with authority. Write it down or your intake team will improvise, and improvisation on a recorded legal line is how you get complaints.

What you should not treat as PI: mass tort docket shoppers ("I took this drug," "I had this mesh"), workers' comp-only callers with no third party, property-damage-only auto claims with no injury, and criminal defense. Legal is not one vertical. If your creative says "accident lawyer" and your landing page also collects Roundup, you'll hear it on the call. Split the offers.

Why exclusive transfers dominate, and where CPL still fits

PI firms pay for signed cases, not for conversations. Exclusive live transfers are the default for a reason: the first firm that treats the caller like a client often wins the sign-up. A shared PI call is a race. The other shop may already be texting a contract. If your intake model is a 15-minute sign-up conversation, exclusive is usually the only model that isn't masochism. Warm transfers after a retained-counsel and injury-type screen put a screened person on your intake paralegal or attorney line.

Cost per call / pay per call should bill against a written qualify: injury type you accept, time since incident versus your statute rules, not already retained, geo your licenses cover, hours your intake is live. Duration floors catch hang-ups. They do not catch "I already hired someone in the first minute." Dispositions have to carry that weight.

CPL in PI is a form or chat lead with accident details, then your team outbound. It can work if you dial fast. Accident victims talk to the first competent human who calls back. A CPL that sits until morning in a competitive metro is often already signed. If you buy CPL, staff nights and weekends for auto, or admit you're only chasing premises and slower cases. Qualified traffic into a funnel you own is the same race with extra steps. Some legal marketers want that control. The consent and the speed still have to be real.

RidgeRise sells these models from hybrid supply: in-house media buying plus screened publishers, quality-monitored against your case criteria. We will not quote you a signed-case rate, an average fee, or a "guaranteed retain." One signed trucking case can justify a lot of dead air. A pile of unsigned soft-tissue calls can look busy and still lose money. Your economics are yours. The media job is to hit the screen you wrote.

Live transfer does not mean the person will sign. They'll comparison-shop firms. They'll get nervous about lawsuits. Their spouse will say no. Buy calls like intake still has to do the job.

Injury type, geo, and hours that protect case value

Injury type is the first split. Auto vs premises vs med mal vs workplace/third party vs other. Inside auto, some firms want treatment already started. Some will take day-of-accident with pain and a promise to treat. Some exclude low-speed, no-police-report, no-visible-injury. If you take commercial truck and rideshare at different values than private auto, those should be different campaigns or at least different tags. Dumping "any accident" on a med-mal firm is how you buy noise.

Geo is license and venue, not a DMA vanity map. You need states (and sometimes counties) where your firm can file or has local counsel agreements you actually use. A Florida firm buying New York auto calls needs a real NY relationship, not optimism. Venue shopping fantasies do not belong in the brief. City-level filters help when your TV brand only converts in the metros you advertise.

Hours for PI are not senior hours. Accidents happen in rush hour and on Saturday night. If your intake closes at 5 p.m. local, you will miss a slice of the best auto calls or you'll take them as CPL voicemail and lose the race. Overnight coverage, even a small on-call intake, changes what you can buy. Premises and older injuries can live inside business hours. Fresh auto often cannot.

Concurrency caps protect attorney and intake time. A PI sign-up is not a two-minute FE pitch. If you have two intake people, you do not want five exclusive live transfers at once. Overflow to a recorded line or a scheduled callback only if your policy still treats that as a serious attempt. Many firms should lower media caps before they add overflow junk.

Language, commercial-vehicle flags, and treatment-status filters are how specialized firms stay sane. Spanish auto in specific metros is a staffing plan. 18-wheeler campaigns should not be the same DID as parking-lot bumpers. "Have you seen a doctor" changes value for shops that won't sign untreated soft tissue. Put it in the screen if it's a real rule, not a preference you mention in week three.

Statute of limitations and the retained-counsel screen

Every state clocks PI filing deadlines differently. Many personal injury statutes run two or three years from the accident. Some are shorter. Med mal and claims against public entities can be much shorter and full of notice rules. Your campaign doesn't need a law-school IVR. It does need a date-of-incident question and a cutoff your lawyers already use. "Hurt in the last few years" is how you pay for time-barred files that intake still has to reject.

Near-statute cases are a policy decision. Some firms will sprint a filing. Most intake teams should not take a wreck from 23 months ago in a 24-month state unless a lawyer said yes. Put a numeric cutoff in the qualify (for example, incident within X months) that matches your practice, not a blog post. We will not invent the legal deadline for your state in this guide. Your counsel already knows it. Use that number.

Retained counsel is the other PI-specific kill question. "Do you already have an attorney for this injury?" If yes, most buyers disqualify immediately. If your firm does take second-opinion or discharged-counsel cases, that's a different campaign with different scripts and different risk. Don't mix it into the main auto buy. You'll train publishers to send represented shoppers and then get mad about it.

Prior representation includes "I talked to a lawyer yesterday and I'm thinking." That's not always retained. Your screener should distinguish signed versus shopping. Intake can still lose those. They're more signable than someone who already has a contract out. Write the distinction so QA isn't guessing.

These two screens are why PI copy cannot be cloned from insurance. Auto insurance asks about coverage and vehicles. PI asks whether the case still exists as a case. If your brief skips SOL and retained counsel, you're buying sympathy calls.

Qualification before a high-value transfer hits intake

A qualified PI transfer, for most firms, is: injured (not PD-only), injury type you accept, incident date inside your statute window, not retained, in your licensed geos, calling during intake hours, and willing to talk now. Police report, at-fault admission, and treatment can be extra filters or just intake questions. The more you stuff into IVR, the more hurt people hang up. The less you ask, the more unsigned junk you pay for. Pick the three that actually predict a reject in your shop and put those before the transfer.

Live screeners often beat long IVRs on PI. A human can hear "I already have a lawyer" and stop. A human can hear "my back hurts from a wreck last Tuesday" and move. Keep the screener script short and recorded. Campaign-specific consent for this PI offer belongs on the path that generated the call. TCPA-aware storage of the number matters if you follow up. This is not a promise of zero legal risk. It's how you avoid running legal intake on a mystery checkbox from another vertical.

Dispositions should read like a litigation screen. Time-barred. Already retained. Wrong injury type. No injury / PD only. Off geo. Workers' comp only. Mass tort / product, not PI. Minor without a parent. Those labels let you kill a publisher who is quietly sending drug-injury calls onto your auto DID.

Minors, fatalities, and catastrophic injuries may need a different routing even inside PI. Some firms want those on a senior intake attorney immediately. Don't let them sit in a generalist queue behind a bumper-tap. If you buy a catastrophic or trucking campaign, staff it like one.

Never let the screener give legal advice. Qualify facts. Transfer. Your licensed people do the case evaluation. Media qualification is a filter, not a consult.

Quality when one signed case carries the month

PI quality is unsigned-case waste, not average handle time. Listen to recordings for retained-counsel misses, old incidents, and creative that promised a check, not a lawyer. Source-level cutoffs matter because one bad publisher can flood you with already-signed shoppers while duration still looks fine. Review faster than you would on a $40 insurance CPL. The unit economics are different.

Chaser energy is a PI-specific quality problem. Callers who were pulled from crash reports or hospital-area spam will sound hunted. Some firms won't touch that demo. If your policy forbids certain generation methods, put the prohibition in the brief so supply can be filtered. Hybrid in-house plus vetted publishers still needs that rule in writing. "Vetted" is not a magic word. It's a process of cutting people who fail it.

Fake urgency and "insurance companies hate this" creative can still send real injured people. It also sends people who want a loophole, not representation. Watch close reasons. If intake is losing on "I thought you'd just get me money without a lawsuit," the ad is the problem.

Dispute windows should include the PI kills: retained, time-barred, no injury, wrong type, off-hours if excluded. Don't dispute "didn't sign." Signing is your job. We monitor whether the call should have been transferred under your rules. That's the line.

Answer rate is brutal in this vertical. Miss a fresh auto transfer and another firm gets it. Staff the phones. Cap concurrency. If you can't answer, don't buy exclusive live transfers at night. Buy a model that matches the bench you have.

Seasonality, weather, and news without treating PI like roofing

Auto PI volume follows miles driven, weather, and weekends more than a neat quarterly chart. First rain after a dry spell, first ice, holiday travel weeks: more wrecks, more calls. Summer motorcycle, if you take those. You don't need a meteorology department. You do need the ability to raise caps on a bad weather week and not leave intake at Friday staffing.

Premises can tick up after snow and ice (slips) or after local news about a property. Med mal and slower PI don't follow the same clock. If you mix them on one campaign, you won't know why Tuesday was busy. Separate what you can.

News stories about verdicts sometimes create looky-loos who were not hurt. That's more of a mass-tort pattern, but PI billboards after a famous crash can draw unrelated callers. Keep qualification tight when your brand is loud. Volume after a Super Bowl ad is not the same as volume after a pileup on I-95.

Court calendars affect your intake capacity more than consumer demand. Trial weeks, your own TV flights, and competitor flights all change how fast you must dial CPL. Media should know when your intake is in trial mode and half-staffed. Lower the cap. Don't discover it on a recording of a hold that lasted until the caller hired someone else.

There is no PI equivalent of AEP. Anyone selling you "PI season" as a single national event is recycling insurance language. Plan weather and staffing. Ignore fake calendars.

Who should buy PI calls (and who should not)

PI law firms with real intake coverage in the states they want are the core buyer. Intake partners and answering services that sign up for a firm can buy if the retain rules are the firm's rules. Legal marketers running exclusive transfer campaigns for a firm belong in the brief as the operational contact, with the firm still owning case criteria.

Firms that only want catastrophic trucking should not buy general auto to "see." You'll hate 90% of the calls. Firms that want volume soft-tissue in a big metro can buy a wider injury screen and must staff for it. Match the buy to the docket you actually litigate.

Poor fit: firms with no after-hours plan buying night auto; firms that won't take exclusive pricing but also won't accept shared competition; shops that wanted mass tort inventory and said PI because the words "legal calls" felt close enough. Also poor fit: anyone who needs every call to become a signed case. That's not a media product.

If you're an insurance buyer reading this page, you're in the wrong brief. PI callers are not shopping a policy. They're shopping a lawyer. Different consent, different screens, different hours.

If you publish accident-intent traffic

Publishers who can run local accident-intent search or call paths, with scripts that ask injury, timing, and counsel status, are the ones PI buyers keep. Loose "legal help" traffic dies in QA. Campaign-specific consent for this firm's PI offer is required. We won't invent payouts. If your path can hold a qualify without coaching callers to lie about representation, start on /publishers.

Buyers still set the case rules. Your job is to hit them, not to argue that a represented caller is "still interested."

Local intent beats national accident-lawyer spray. A firm in Atlanta does not want a wreck in Oregon unless they said they do. If you can't hold geo plus injury type, timing, and counsel status, this isn't a PI path.

Mistakes that waste PI budget

Skipping the retained-counsel question because it "hurts conversion" on the media side. It hurts because it removes people you cannot sign. Paying for them is the expensive version of a high conversion rate. Ask it. Disqualify. Move on.

Skipping statute timing. Intake will still spend ten minutes being kind to a time-barred caller. That's attorney-time theft. Put a date cutoff in the screen that matches your states.

Buying shared PI transfers while running a slow sign-up. The other firm sent the contract before your hold music ended. If you need a conversation, buy exclusive and cap concurrency so you can actually have it.

Mixing mass tort, workers' comp-only, and PI on one number. You'll poison dispositions and you'll train AI-sounding reports that say "legal quality is down" when you really bought the wrong lawsuit type. Injury type is the product.

Judging the campaign on call count week one instead of signed files and reject reasons. PI is lumpy. A quiet week and a signed trucking case can beat a loud week of untreated bumper taps. Read the dispositions. Then change filters. Then change spend.

How to brief a personal injury campaign

Write the case: injury types in, injury types out, incident-date cutoff by state if they differ, retained-counsel rule, geos you can file in, hours intake answers, exclusive versus shared, language, and whether family callers qualify. Add treatment requirements if you have them. Add commercial auto / rideshare / motorcycle as in or out. Add catastrophic routing if it exists.

Send the qualify script you want on the transfer path. Shorter is better if the three PI kills are in it: type, timing, counsel. Add campaign-specific consent language your malpractice carrier and marketing counsel already like. TCPA-aware follow-up rules if CPL or missed-call outbound is in play. Don't ask us to certify legal risk away. Real process, written.

Name the dead dispositions you'll actually code. Already retained. Too old under SOL. PD only. Wrong type. Off geo. That's how we monitor sources on hybrid supply.

If you want qualified traffic into your own intake form, send the form fields and the speed-to-call plan. If you want live transfers, send the answering path and the cap. If you want both, say which hours belong to which model.

Use /buyers to talk models against your intake, or /contact when the injury list and SOL cutoffs are already on paper. Bring the PI-only facts: injury type, statute window, retained-counsel screen, exclusive transfer need. That's the brief that keeps high case value from turning into a pile of unsignable talk time.