Birth Injury Marketing
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Intake scorecard

By Kevin Schwaner, Founder; Chief Marketing OfficerUpdated

Pull one recorded intake call from last week — not your best one — and score it against these twelve criteria. The weights are published and argued for. Firms usually find the same two items failing, and neither of them is about tone.

Score one real call. Nothing is transmitted or stored.
Twelve criteria

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Score

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out of 100
Speed and access
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Facts gathered
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Boundaries held
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Follow-through
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The rubric, with the reasoning

Twelve criteria and why each carries the weight it does. The two heaviest are speed and never mentioning value.
CriterionWeightWhy
Answered by a person, or a call-back inside five minutes12The single highest-weighted item. Everything else is downstream of it.
The caller was asked their name and it was used again in the call4Costless, and it changes the register of the conversation.
Jurisdiction established in the first two minutes8If the firm cannot act, everyone’s time is better spent on the referral.
Child’s date of birth obtained10The most decisive single screening fact in this practice area.
The caller was allowed to tell the story before being asked a list of questions8Interrogation early loses the facts that matter and the relationship that carries them.
Nobody assessed the merit of the matter on the call10Intake screens; it does not opine. Merit assessment on a first call is a serious error.
Nobody stated or implied what the matter might be worth12Non-negotiable. This is the item that ends engagements.
What happens next was stated with a timeframe8"An attorney will call you by Thursday" — not "someone will be in touch".
Records authorisation explained and a route to sign it given6The records step is where inquiries most often go cold.
Distress was acknowledged before the process was explained6These are the worst days of a family’s life. Efficiency without acknowledgement reads as indifference.
The call was logged in the case management system with source and timestamp8Without it, cost per signed case cannot be computed for this inquiry.
A decline, where it happened, was clear, immediate and gave a reason8An honest fast no is the strongest reason a source refers again.
Weight by category. The twelve criteria grouped into four categories, showing where the weight sits. Boundaries held 22 pts — no merit, no value Speed and access 16 pts Follow-through 30 pts Facts gathered 32 pts
Figure 1 — nearly a quarter of the score is for things not said. Merit assessment and value language on an intake call are the two errors that create real exposure, and they are common precisely because they feel helpful in the moment. The scripts that avoid them.
How to run this properly.
StepDetail
Pick the call at randomScoring your best call measures your ceiling, not your process. Take the third call from last Tuesday.
Score five, not oneOne call is an anecdote. Five gives you a distribution, and the variance is usually the finding.
Have someone who did not take the call score itSelf-scoring converges on the score people expected.
Re-score the same five in ninety daysThe only way to know whether the training took.

Have us build the rubric properly → · See what intake failure costs →

Provenance

Where every number in this tool comes from. Two categories only: measured from a cited federal dataset, or supplied by you. There is no third, and there is no industry average anywhere in it.
Input or outputOriginIf it is wrong, what breaks
The twelve criteria and weightsUs — published above with the reasoning for eachNothing is hidden. Disagree with a weight and the table tells you what to argue with.
Your answersYou — scoring one real recorded callThe score. Scoring your best call measures your ceiling, not your process.
Category groupingUs — four categories, mapping shown in the result panelOnly the category breakdown, not the total.
The scoreComputed — sum of the weights passedNothing; the arithmetic is addition.

No default in this tool is a claim. The starting values exist so the page is not blank on arrival. They are not benchmarks, they are not averages, and they describe no real firm. Replace every one of them with your own before acting on the result. See Methodology.

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Authorship & review

Author
Kevin Schwaner, Founder; Chief Marketing Officer. Credentials.
Last reviewed
Corrections
Found an error? Tell us and it goes in the dated corrections log, whether or not it flatters us.