Every agency that will ever pitch you has a favorite number. For some it is cost per click. For others, cost per lead or cost per call. The number on the rate card is always the one the vendor controls, which is the problem: your firm does not deposit clicks or leads. It deposits fees earned on signed cases, and the distance between the quoted number and that one is where marketing budgets disappear.
Lemon law widens the gap further than most practices. Your economics are fee-shifted: when the case resolves, the manufacturer pays the fee. The value of a signed case has nothing to do with what the caller could afford, so the only honest way to price the marketing that produces it is against the outcome: a retainer with a name on it.
The denominator the vendor prefers
Cost per lead is a flattering metric because it is partially within the vendor’s control and almost always improvable on paper. Widen the audience, buy cheaper auctions, loosen the definition of a lead, and the number drops while your sign rate quietly collapses. The report looks better every month; the intake team feels worse every day.
The cheap lead that never signs is not cheap. It is the most expensive entry on the report once you count the paralegal hours spent chasing it, the calendar slots it consumed, and the real caller your team was too busy to answer. Priced honestly, the premium channel often turns out to be the discount.
What a signed case is actually worth
Under Song-Beverly, a prevailing buyer’s attorney fees and costs come from the manufacturer, and Magnuson-Moss carries the same principle nationwide. The consumer’s ability to pay never enters the equation, which means a signed lemon law case is worth what the statute and your terms say it is, not what the caller’s wallet allows.
That changes what you can rationally pay to acquire one. The test for every channel, vendor and campaign is the same division: spend divided by retainers signed. Everything upstream (impressions, clicks, leads, qualified calls) is a proxy for that quotient, and a proxy exists to be gamed by the party reporting it.
Cost per lead is a metric about the vendor. Cost per signed case is a metric about your firm.
The three ways agencies price, and what each hides
A flat retainer prices the effort, not the outcome: the agency is paid the same whether the phone rings or not, so accountability hides inside activity reports. Per-lead pricing charges you for the auction ticket: the vendor is paid the moment a name changes hands, before anyone knows whether a case exists. Performance pricing pays on signed cases, the honest shape, but it works only when the vendor owns enough of the funnel to control the outcome. Most vendors control a slice of it and price the slice.
None of these is automatically wrong. What matters is which number the invoice makes visible. A pricing model that cannot show you cost per signed case is not a better deal; it is a better hiding place.
What to ask before you sign
Five questions turn a pricing conversation into a diligence exercise:
- “What does a signed case cost through your program: not a lead, a signed retainer?” An answer denominated in leads means you are being sold the denominator.
- “How is a signed case counted, and who audits the count?” The vendor should trace spend to retainers without your staff doing the bookkeeping.
- “What happens to my cost per case as the program compounds?” A funnel that deepens should get cheaper per case over time; a model that cannot answer is not measuring the outcome.
- “Will you run campaigns for another firm in my metro?” A second client in your market raises your cost per case the way a second bidder raises an auction price.
- “If I leave, does the funnel history leave with me?” Reporting you cannot keep was rented, not owned.
The honest invoice
Our version is the standard this essay argues for. Every channel is measured on signed cases and cost per signed case, and the report shows the funnel that produced them rather than impressions or click-through theater. Pricing itself is scoped to your market and your capacity rather than pulled from a rate card, because an honest number depends on the market’s ceiling and the work required to reach it.
If your market is open, claim it before a competitor does. If it is claimed, the waitlist is the honest queue: we would rather lose a contract than sell you a denominator.