How long does an employment law lead take to become a signed case?

Longer than most practice areas, because the claimant is often still employed when they first search and may be waiting on an internal process, a termination or a retaliatory act that has not happened yet. Rather than assume a number, measure your own median from first contact to signed retainer, then set every lookback window and every report period longer than it.

Why do we get so many employment law inquiries and so few cases?

Because most employment is at will and a great deal of unfair treatment is lawful, so a high decline rate on the merits is usually the screen working rather than the intake failing. The useful response is to code each decline with a reason, then compare the reason mix by channel. A source generating mostly not unlawful declines has a content problem, not a volume problem.

Can Google Analytics track a case signed six months after the first visit?

Not on its own. GA4 attribution settings cap the lookback window at 90 days for most conversion events, and browser storage is frequently gone before then. The workable approach is to stamp first and last touch onto the intake record at submission, ask a self-reported source question, and carry both onto the matter record, so the join happens in the case management system rather than in analytics.

How do you measure cost per signed case on contingency employment work?

By cohort, and with patience. Cost is incurred monthly, and the fee on a contingency matter is not known until resolution, often a year or more later. Report cost per qualified consultation and cost per accepted matter now, group accepted matters by the quarter they opened, and revisit each cohort as matters close, restating the figure openly as it firms up.

Does fee shifting change what an employment case is worth to the firm?

Yes, and it breaks the usual contingency arithmetic. Statutes including Title VII and the Fair Labor Standards Act allow a prevailing plaintiff to recover attorney fees from the employer, commonly assessed from hours worked rather than as a percentage of the recovery. A case with modest damages can produce a fee larger than the award, so estimating revenue as a percentage of an expected settlement understates some matters badly and overstates others.

Part of: Marketing attribution

Employment Law Marketing Attribution

By Mohammad Kashif, Chief Technology OfficerLast updated September 21, 2026

Employment claims begin while the person is still employed and sign months later, after a merits screen turns many callers away. Attribute on qualified consultations and signed retainers stamped at intake: analytics lookback windows expire before the case does.

Title VII gives a claimant 180 days to file a charge, or 300 days in states that run their own fair employment agency. The longest attribution lookback window Google Analytics 4 offers is 90 days. The claimant's own deadline outlasts the measurement by months.

Why employment law inquiries take months to turn into cases

The person reading your page is usually still employed. They are deciding whether to raise it internally, collecting documents, or waiting to see whether the complaint they already made costs them the job. None of that is a marketing problem. It is the shape of the claim, and it puts weeks or months between the first visit and the first call.

The statutory clock sets the outer edge. A charge under Title VII has to be filed within 180 days of the act complained of, or 300 days in states that run their own fair employment agency, and claimants routinely use a large part of that runway before they speak to a lawyer. Where the claim is retaliation, the event that finally prompts the call has not happened yet at the time of the first search.

Measurement tools are not built for that span. Google Analytics 4 caps its attribution lookback at 90 days for most conversion events and 30 days for acquisition events, and browser storage rarely survives even that intact. A first visit in January and a retainer in June is not an unattributed case. It is a case the default configuration is structurally unable to see, which is a different problem with a different fix.

The claimant is still employed and not ready to act.
An internal complaint, grievance or human resources process has to run its course first.
The claim is retaliation, and the retaliation has not happened yet.
The agency charge process runs before any private suit, so there is a second wait after the first call.
They return through a branded search or a referral months later, and that last click gets recorded as the source that produced the case.

How do you attribute a signed case to a visit six months earlier?

Stop asking the analytics tool to remember, and move the record onto the matter. A session is a perishable object. A matter file is not. Everything below is about writing the source down at the moment you first meet the person, then carrying it forward on the record that survives.

None of this requires a new platform. It requires that the source stops living only in the reporting tool and starts living in the case management system alongside the matter it produced.

Store the first landing page, the referrer and any campaign parameters in a first-party cookie with a lifetime measured in months, then write both the first and the most recent values into the intake form as hidden fields.
Give each channel its own tracking number, so a phone call arrives carrying a source instead of arriving anonymous.
Ask one plain question at intake, in the caller's words: how did you come across us. Self-reported source is imprecise, and it is the only signal that survives a new phone, a cleared browser or a six month gap.
Copy the source onto the matter record when the matter is opened, not just into the analytics property. The matter is the object you will still have in a year.
Reconcile monthly on matters opened rather than on visits. The question is which channel produced the matters you accepted this month, whenever those people first arrived.

What counts as a qualified employment law lead?

Most employment in the United States is at will, and a great deal of what callers describe is unfair without being unlawful. A practice that declines a large share of consultations on the merits is working correctly, not failing at intake. That makes raw lead volume more misleading here than in almost any other practice area: a channel can fill the consultation calendar and produce nothing.

The fix is to code the decline rather than merely count it. Choose a short fixed list once, and record one value at the end of every consultation.

The mix of reasons is the channel diagnostic, and it is invisible in a lead count. A source producing mostly not unlawful declines is reaching people at the wrong point in their question, which usually means the landing page answered a workplace grievance rather than a legal one. A source producing out of time declines is reaching people late, which is a publishing and timing problem rather than a targeting one. The two call for opposite responses.

Conduct is not unlawful: at-will termination, a difficult manager, no protected characteristic or protected activity involved.
Out of time: the charge or filing deadline has already passed.
Wrong forum: a union grievance, a workers compensation claim, a public sector process, or another state entirely.
Viable but too small to pursue under the fee arrangement available.
Conflict: the firm acts for that employer, or against an existing client.
Viable and accepted, which is the only row that becomes a signed case.

How do you value a contingency case before it settles?

Plaintiff-side employment work is usually contingency, and the fee is not a simple share of what the client recovers. Fee-shifting provisions, including those in Title VII and the Fair Labor Standards Act, let a prevailing plaintiff recover attorney fees from the employer, commonly calculated from hours worked rather than as a percentage. A modest damages award can carry a larger fee than the award itself.

So the revenue attached to a matter is unknown at signing and stays unknown for a long time, and multiplying an estimated settlement by a contingency percentage produces a number with a very wide spread around it. Do not book it as revenue. Record the matter, its type and its source, and let the fee arrive when it arrives.

The timing mismatch is the reason a monthly return figure misleads. A firm spending $4,000–$10,000 a month across channels carries that cost every month, while the fees from the matters that spending produced arrive across the following year. Compared month to month, the practice will look unprofitable early and implausibly profitable later, and neither reading is true.

Report cost per qualified consultation and cost per accepted matter monthly. Both are knowable now.
Treat revenue per matter as a cohort figure: matters opened in a quarter, revisited each quarter as they resolve, and restated openly as the numbers firm up.
Where a forward estimate is needed, use your own closed matters by type rather than an industry average, and label it an estimate on the face of the report.
Keep employer-side advisory and defense work on a separate line. It is hourly, it converts on a different timescale, and blending it with contingency matters makes both averages meaningless.

What an employment matter lets you measure at each stage

Stage	What you can record	What is still unknown	Metric it supports
First research visit, often while still employed	Landing page, query where available, referrer, consent state	Whether there is a claim at all	Sessions and engaged sessions by channel
Consultation requested	Stored first and last touch, plus the self-reported source	Whether the facts are actionable	Cost per consultation request
Consultation held and screened on the merits	Outcome plus one coded decline reason	Whether a viable claimant will actually retain	Qualified consultation rate by channel
Matter accepted	Case type, forum, fee arrangement, source carried from intake	What the fee will be	Cost per signed case
Charge filed with the agency	Statutory basis, agency, filing date	Whether fees will shift to the employer	Matter progression by source
Resolution	Fee actually received, including any statutory fee award	Nothing further: this is the settled number	Return by channel, restated for the cohort

Common questions

How long does an employment law lead take to become a signed case?: Longer than most practice areas, because the claimant is often still employed when they first search and may be waiting on an internal process, a termination or a retaliatory act that has not happened yet. Rather than assume a number, measure your own median from first contact to signed retainer, then set every lookback window and every report period longer than it.
Why do we get so many employment law inquiries and so few cases?: Because most employment is at will and a great deal of unfair treatment is lawful, so a high decline rate on the merits is usually the screen working rather than the intake failing. The useful response is to code each decline with a reason, then compare the reason mix by channel. A source generating mostly not unlawful declines has a content problem, not a volume problem.
Can Google Analytics track a case signed six months after the first visit?: Not on its own. GA4 attribution settings cap the lookback window at 90 days for most conversion events, and browser storage is frequently gone before then. The workable approach is to stamp first and last touch onto the intake record at submission, ask a self-reported source question, and carry both onto the matter record, so the join happens in the case management system rather than in analytics.
How do you measure cost per signed case on contingency employment work?: By cohort, and with patience. Cost is incurred monthly, and the fee on a contingency matter is not known until resolution, often a year or more later. Report cost per qualified consultation and cost per accepted matter now, group accepted matters by the quarter they opened, and revisit each cohort as matters close, restating the figure openly as it firms up.
Does fee shifting change what an employment case is worth to the firm?: Yes, and it breaks the usual contingency arithmetic. Statutes including Title VII and the Fair Labor Standards Act allow a prevailing plaintiff to recover attorney fees from the employer, commonly assessed from hours worked rather than as a percentage of the recovery. A case with modest damages can produce a fee larger than the award, so estimating revenue as a percentage of an expected settlement understates some matters badly and overstates others.

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