Fees, not inquiries
The ranking is on collected fees actually earned, not on matters counted, so a channel that brings fewer and larger ones rises.
Marketing attribution for bankruptcy firms
Which channels produced filed cases?
Match filed, fee-earning cases to the calls and campaigns that produced them, past the long gap between first call and filing.
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Bankruptcy Law workspace FY2026 Sample data
Fees traced to a channel
$217,000 62% of $350,000 paid
- Google Ads $161,000 · 46%
- Meta Ads $38,500 · 11%
- Email marketing $17,500 · 5%
- Direct / Unknown $133,000 · 38%
Direct / Unknown is shown, never shared out across the channels above.
Google Ads · LeadFY2026 14 · (•••) •••-0134
Closed sale · FY2026 27$2,100
Matched · high confidence
The blind spot
What's actually happening
People call bankruptcy attorneys months before they file, and many never do. Call volume measures financial distress, not practice revenue.
What you get
Built for bankruptcy firms.
Matters resolve much later
An inquiry in one quarter and a matter in the next are one match, and the earlier campaign is credited with the later collected fees.
Defensible in a partner meeting
Only a normalized phone or email match counts on its own. Everything else waits for a human, so the number you present is one you can defend line by line.
A worked example
The number you can take into a budget meeting.
Not impressions, not leads, not cost per click. Closed revenue, by the channel that produced it, for a period you choose — with the portion we could not trace shown rather than quietly shared out across your paid channels.
Total revenue$350,000paid fees
Attributed to a channel$217,00062% of revenue
Average deal$2,100per paid sale
Match rate62%of sales matched
| Channel | Sales | Revenue | Share | % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Ads | 74 | $161,000 | 46% | |
| Meta Ads | 19 | $38,500 | 11% | |
| Email marketing | 9 | $17,500 | 5% | |
| Direct / Unknown | 63 | $133,000 | 38% |
01
The gap between the first call and the filing is the whole problem
Someone calls, weighs it up, tries to trade out of it, and files four months later. Every attribution window has closed by then, so the campaign that produced the case gets no credit for it.
Matching on the client rather than a session closes that gap, and in this practice area it can move a meaningful share of fees out of Direct / Unknown.
02
Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 are different businesses
Fee structures, payment timing and client profile all differ, and the channels that produce them differ too. A single blended cost-per-case hides which channel feeds which.
A case-type column mapped as Product / service splits the revenue so each is seen on its own economics.
03
Inquiries are abundant, qualified clients are not
Financial distress produces a very high volume of inquiries, and a large share of them cannot proceed: they do not qualify, cannot fund the filing, or resolve their situation another way. Ten or more inquiries per retained matter is ordinary.
At that ratio, cost per lead is not merely imprecise, it actively misleads. The cheapest inquiries are usually the least likely to qualify, and optimizing toward them makes the practice worse while every dashboard improves.
Ranking channels on fees actually collected is the only comparison that reflects what the firm earns, and it can produce a much shorter list of channels worth funding than the inquiry data suggests.
04
Chapter type changes both the fee and the work
A straightforward consumer liquidation and a reorganization with a payment plan differ substantially in fee, in duration and in the effort required. They arrive through overlapping searches and are counted identically.
A case-type column mapped as Product / service separates them, showing the fees of each type and how much of each traces to a channel. It does not rank channels within a type, but the channel ranking is already on collected fees, so sources carrying the higher-fee filings rise on their own — and they may not be the sources with the best cost per lead.
That distinction matters more here than in most areas, because the lower-fee work is high volume and can consume the capacity that the higher-fee work needs.
05
Fees arrive in installments, and that is the honest measure
Bankruptcy fees are frequently paid over months, and some are never completed. A report built on fees agreed rather than collected will overstate every channel, and it will overstate them unevenly because completion rates differ by source.
Exporting collected installments as rows against the client keeps the figure reconcilable to the firm's own accounts and shows which channels produce clients who actually pay through.
For a practice where realization is the quiet constraint on profitability, that is often the most valuable thing the report surfaces.
Why it matters
What changes when you can prove it.
You stop defending the budget and start growing it
"We generated 400 leads" invites an argument. "This channel closed $186,400 last quarter, here is the reconciliation" ends one. The teams that can show closed revenue by channel are the teams that get the next increase approved, because they are asking with evidence rather than with conviction.
You can cut the wrong channel without a fight
Killing spend is politically harder than adding it, because someone always owns the channel being cut. A number that reconciles to the sales export takes the argument out of the room — you are not overruling a colleague's judgment, you are reading the same ledger they are.
Your reporting survives the finance review
Platform-reported conversions do not reconcile to revenue, and eventually someone in finance notices. Reporting built from your own closed-sales export starts from the number finance already trusts, which is why it holds up when it is checked.
You answer in an afternoon, not a quarter
Because this reconciles exports rather than tracking visitors, it works on months that have already closed. You are not instrumenting now to learn something in ninety days — you can answer for last quarter today, which is usually when the question is being asked.
Honest answers
The pushback we hear from Bankruptcy Law.
They say
Most callers never file.
We say
Which is why filed cases are the measure. Unconverted calls appear as unmatched leads and cost nothing.
They say
There is a long gap before filing.
We say
There is no attribution window — the match holds however long the gap, provided both records are in the data.
They say
Our clients are in financial distress and private about it.
We say
Only a contact detail, a fee and a date are needed. No chapter, no schedules, no case details.
Pricing
Flat monthly pricing. No per-call fees.
The price here is the price on the invoice, plus any sales tax that applies — no per-call, per-minute or per-form fees. Growth usually fits consumer and business bankruptcy practices — thirteen months of history to compare a month to the same month last year, and a PDF you can put in front of whoever holds the budget.
Recommended
Growth
A business scaling ad spend
$49/mo
billed monthly
- 1 workspace · 2 seats
- 1,000 sales records / month
- 13-month history (year over year)
- Campaign drill-down and period comparison
- PDF + shareable read-only report
- Your logo on every report
Questions
Questions we get about Bankruptcy Law.
Anything else? Talk to us — a person answers, usually the same day.
Filed or fee-earning cases: a client contact email or phone, the fee, and a date.
Yes, with a case-type column.
As long as it turns out to be. There is no window to fall outside of: however much time passes between the inquiry and the retainer, it matches if the client is in both files.
No, but their export works as the second file if you use them.
Encrypted in transit and at rest, isolated so that only your workspace can read it, and removable in one click. A DPA is available.
Yes. Most consumer and business bankruptcy practices begin with last year, because it is the cheapest way to find out whether the exercise tells them anything.
Yes: an office column mapped as Location, or an attorney column mapped as Product / service (one extra breakdown per import).
Case rows analyzed in a calendar month. Call rows do not count.
Collected. Completion rates differ by source and agreed fees hide that difference entirely.
Yes, with a case-type column mapped as Product / service, which shows the fees of each chapter or case type and how much of each traces to a channel.
Yes, by uploading the inquiry file alongside the fees. At ten or more inquiries per matter this is usually the decisive view.
Twelve to eighteen months, so installment plans are fully inside the file.
Not required, but this practice area converts on the phone and a call export generally raises the match rate.
Whatever you export. If you export payments received, the channel is credited with what actually arrived and nothing more. That is the honest picture, and it matters here because installment plans do not fail evenly across sources. A channel that agrees large fees and collects half of them looks very different once it is read on collections.
Not on one month. A small practice files a modest number of cases in four weeks, so a single quiet month moves the figure a long way without meaning much. Look at that channel across a quarter, and set it beside the same quarter last year, before you change anything about what you are spending.
Smaller volumes make each number noisier, not useless. Run it over a longer window — a year rather than a month — and treat the output as a ranking rather than a precise figure. The question a small firm can answer with it is which two or three sources are worth keeping, which is usually the only decision on the table.
It cannot tell you what a case cost in effort, whether a filing was the right advice, or how a channel would perform at three times the spend. It reports where paying clients came from across a period you choose. Everything beyond that is interpretation, and the scope is kept narrow so the part it does state stays defensible.
Start with the matched rows for the channel that surprised you and read a dozen of them. If the clients are real, the fees are yours and the source is right, then the belief was the thing that was wrong. If a row looks off, the link behind it is visible and reversible, which is exactly why weaker matches stay flagged.
Nearby
Also worth reading.
Law Firms
Match signed, fee-earning matters to the calls and ads that produced them — including the ones that settled a year later.
See how it worksCriminal Defense
Match retained matters and fees to the calls and campaigns that produced them, in a market where the decision is made within hours.
See how it worksEstate Planning
Match engaged matters and fees to the seminars, inquiries and campaigns that produced them.
See how it worksWhere your sales already are
What to export, by system.
Clio
Match collected fees to the campaigns and calls that produced the client, across the months between the first call and the money.
What to exportPracticePanther
Export collected fees, upload the inquiries beside them, and rank marketing on what clients paid rather than on consultations booked.
What to exportSmokeball
Export billings from Smokeball, upload the leads behind them, and rank channels on work that was worth doing.
What to exportFrom the blog
Further reading.
Your call tracking knows which ad rang the phone. It does not know which call paid.
Call tracking answers one question well: which campaign produced the ring. It has no view of what happened after the call ended, which is where the money is decided. This is what the gap costs, and how to close it without replacing the call tracker you already have.
Read the articleNobody clicks a billboard, which is why it can be measured honestly
Out-of-home advertising is sold on impressions nobody can click and measured, increasingly, with location data few buyers ask about. For a business that closes by phone or in person there is a better route: a number on the board, sales matched back to the calls it produced, and a comparison between the places the board could be seen and the places it could not.
Read the articleNobody will tell you what a good match rate is, so here it is
Every attribution vendor quotes a match rate and none of them define it the same way. Here is what the number actually measures, what range is honest for a mid-market business, and the three ways the figure gets inflated before it reaches your slide.
Read the article
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