Which channels produced signed comp cases?

Comp matters resolve on statutory timelines, not marketing ones. By the time a fee lands, the campaign that produced the client may not have run for two budget cycles.

Matching on the client rather than the session lets you pull last year's fees against last year's spend, which is the only way to evaluate spend in a practice with this shape.

A large share of comp work arrives through treating physicians, clinics and union representatives, and firms normally treat this as unmeasurable.

Referred clients added to the lead file, tagged with their referrer, rank alongside advertising, including which referrers send cases that actually earn.

Workers' compensation fees are frequently governed by statute or a fee schedule, which removes the pricing variance other contingency practices have. What varies instead is how long a case runs and how much work it absorbs before it resolves.

That changes what a good channel looks like. A source producing cases that settle cleanly is worth substantially more than one producing cases of the same nominal value that run for three years through hearings and appeals.

Matching collected fees back to the inquiry, with the dates on both, lets the report show fee per case and time to resolution by channel — which is the pair of numbers that actually describes profitability here.

A compensation case cannot resolve until treatment has reached a stable point, and that timetable belongs to the medical system rather than to the firm. Eighteen months to resolution is unremarkable and longer is common.

Any measurement that needs the revenue to land inside a reporting window is therefore wrong by construction in this practice area, and the intermediate metrics firms fall back on measure the first two weeks of a two-year process.

Because the match is on the client, the interval costs nothing. The inquiry from two years ago and the fee collected this month are one record.

A large share of this work arrives through unions, treating physicians, chiropractors and prior clients. These are institutional relationships maintained over years, and they are almost never included in a marketing comparison because they cost no media spend.

That omission makes paid search look like the practice's engine when it may be a minor contributor. Firms then scale advertising while the relationships that actually produce the cases go unmanaged.

Adding referred clients to the lead file puts referral sources on the same collected-fee axis as advertising. Where each row names its referrer, the report ranks each one, which turns relationship management into something that can be prioritized on evidence.