Every number on the homepage, and where it came from.

Of US law firms couldn't be reached by phone at all.

Clio, Legal Trends Report 2024. Clio commissioned the research agency Lux to secret-shop 500 US law firms by phone and email, 20 June to 5 July 2024, during business hours. 40% picked up. 12% didn't pick up but called back. 48% were never reached, even after being given the chance to return a message.

These three figures partition the sample, so 40% and 48% are not the two halves of one number. The sample covers all practice areas; Clio never published results by practice area.

Picked up the phone live.

Clio, Legal Trends Report 2024, same secret shop as above.

Couldn't be reached by phone in 2019.

Clio, Legal Trends Report 2019. The same metric from Clio's earlier secret shop. Between the two studies the unreachable share went from 27% to 48%, nearly doubling in five years.

Callers who reach voicemail leave a message.

Invoca, from an analysis of more than 60 million calls. The figure commonly quoted in legal marketing, that 80 to 90% of callers hang up on voicemail, has no source we could find. The sourced number is harsher.

Median cost of one paid lead for a personal injury firm.

LocaliQ search advertising benchmarks, median cost per lead of $159.17 across 256 legal campaigns.

The data window is 2022 to 2023. More recent benchmarks put it higher, between $183 and $442 a lead (First Page Sage, 49 firms), so read $159 as a floor.

Family law ad click to lead conversion, against 5.45% for personal injury.

LocaliQ, same benchmark. Family converted at 8.52% at a median cost per lead of $103.54. Personal injury converted at 5.45% at $159.17. Using one source for both is what makes them comparable.

This measures an ad click turning into an enquiry. It says nothing about how many enquiries become signed clients.

Of DUI arrests happen outside Monday to Friday, 9 to 5.

Our own analysis of Chicago Police Department arrest records, published on the City of Chicago open data portal (dataset dpt3-jri9). Of 747,279 arrests, 17,702 were for DUI, and 86.9% of those fell outside weekday business hours. The busiest hour for a DUI arrest is midnight (1,599 arrests). The quietest is 6am (146).

This is one city. No published national study of arrest time of day exists, which is why we ran it ourselves. Anyone can reproduce it with a single query against the public endpoint.

Of people in the US with limited English don't speak Spanish. Roughly 10.5 million people.

US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2024, table S1601. Of the limited-English population, 63.7% speak Spanish. The rest are spread across roughly 350 languages.

Average value of a criminal defence matter.

Clio, Legal Trends Report 2024, page 61. A blended figure: 59% of criminal matters are billed as a flat fee at a median of $3,500, and the rest average $1,482 billed hourly.

Why we're never paid per signed case.

ABA Model Rule 5.4 bars a lawyer from sharing legal fees with a non-lawyer, and Rule 7.2(b) bars paying anyone for a recommendation. A vendor paid a share of each signed case runs into both. So we charge a flat fee and nothing per case.

Why every caller is told they're speaking with an AI.

Florida Bar Ethics Opinion 24-1 on lawyers' use of generative AI, with consistent guidance from California, New York and Texas. Duties to prospective clients fall under ABA Model Rules 1.18 (prospective clients) and 1.6 (confidentiality).