138% More Case Intake and 56% Lower Cost Per Case for SterlingLex

Overview

SterlingLex is a legal services firm based in London specializing in personal injury and related practice areas. We started working with SterlingLex in March 2025, when the firm generated around 480 qualified leads a month at a cost per qualified lead (CPQL) of £114.60, converting to 149 case intakes a month at £369 per case, with 47% of inquiries unqualified. Today, monthly case intake has grown to 355, cost per case intake is down to £161, CPQL has fallen to £42.40, and the unqualified inquiry rate is down to 22% — all while monthly ad spend actually fell, from roughly £55,000 to roughly £42,000.

A qualification problem, not a demand problem

This wasn’t a demand problem. Personal injury inquiries were coming in from day one. This was a qualification problem: too much of that volume was never going to become a real case, intent targeting was loose, and there was real friction between a click and an actual, qualified consultation.

We treated this as a qualification problem, not a raw demand problem, and built the account around getting more of the right inquiries to an actual consultation, not just more inquiries.

Five phases, and the July that changed the account

This account is organized as a dated timeline rather than a channel-by-channel list.

Phase 1: Search rebuilt around high-intent keywords

We rebuilt Google Search around high-intent keywords with expanded negative lists, because loose intent targeting was the biggest single driver of unqualified inquiries. We rewrote landing pages for clarity, trust signals, and faster load speed, and implemented call and form tracking alongside basic qualification questions.

Phase 2: Lead-to-case rate climbs to 36%

Monthly qualified leads rose to 610 and CPQL fell to £89. Lead-to-case rate improved to 36%, and the unqualified inquiry percentage dropped to 38% — early, real evidence that tighter targeting and clearer pages were changing who actually reached the intake team, not just how many people clicked.

Phase 3: Consolidation

We fully paused broad “legal help” campaigns, which were generating volume but almost no qualified cases. We also replaced an emotional but vague creative approach with clearer, process-oriented messaging. This was a consolidation phase, not yet the main inflection.

July 2025

The source material calls this the decisive inflection month, and it’s the account’s single most important dated fact for two reasons at once. High-intent structure, clearer landing pages, qualification questions, and the removal of low-quality traffic sources compounded together: qualified leads exceeded 790 and CPQL fell sharply, to around £53.80. But this is also the point where efficiency gains became strong enough that we optimized absolute spend lower — down to roughly £42,500 from around £55,000 at the start — while volume kept rising. That’s a genuinely stronger outcome than simply holding spend flat while scaling, and it’s worth stating plainly rather than treating as a footnote.

Phase 5: More cases, on a smaller monthly spend

Volume and efficiency stabilized at the new higher level. Absolute monthly spend settled in the lower end of the range, around £42,000, as cost per qualified lead continued to improve, reaching the current 985 leads, £42.40 CPQL, and 355 case intake by the latest reporting period.

Growth against declining spend

The spend-reduction story here deserves real weight, not a passing mention. Most accounts in this series show growth against flat or slightly increased spend. This one shows growth against declining spend from July onward: monthly ad spend fell from roughly £55,000 to roughly £42,000 — down about 24% — while qualified leads nearly doubled. That’s a stronger, less common claim than simply scaling volume against a proportionally scaling budget.

Cost per case intake fell from £369 to £161, down 56%. Unqualified inquiry rate fell from 47% to 22%, a 25-point drop. Landing-page conversion rate rose from 3.8% to 6.9%, an 82% relative increase, and form completion rate rose from 9.4% to 16.2%. Average time to consultation booking fell from 38 hours to 14 hours, down 63%.

We don’t think all of this came from the media program alone. UK personal injury claim volume is sensitive to broader regulatory conditions — claims-management-company competition, sector-wide advertising standards — and general accident and claim rate fluctuation, not solely media performance.

From a high-intent search to a case review

The path a SterlingLex inquiry takes today is built to filter for the right cases early, not late.

Where the case intake comes from today

Fewer, better-qualified inquiries reaching intake

Four workstreams ran across the engagement, summarized here and detailed in the table below.

Services delivered

Channel / Workstream	What We Did	Why It Mattered
Google Search	Rebuilt around high-intent keywords with expanded negative lists.	Loose intent targeting was the biggest single driver of unqualified inquiries.
Landing Pages	Rewritten for clarity, trust signals, and load speed.	Landing-page conversion rose 82% relative, from 3.8% to 6.9%.
Lead Qualification & Tracking	Call/form tracking plus basic qualification questions.	Unqualified inquiry rate fell from 47% to 22%.
Creative	Replaced emotional, vague messaging with clearer, process-oriented creative.	Gave inquirers an accurate sense of what came next, reducing drop-off.

SterlingLex against a typical UK legal services (PI) lead-gen account

SterlingLex compared with a typical account

Metric	Typical Personal Injury Lead-Gen Account	SterlingLex (Actual, GBP)
Cost Per Lead	The average PI firm pays around $284 per lead across paid channels, per a 2026 analysis of $3.3M in ad spend across 13 plaintiff-side firms (rankings.io). 1	£42.40 blended CPQL, down from £114.60
Lead-to-Case Conversion Rate	The same analysis found an average 7% lead-to-case conversion rate across those firms. 1	36% lead-to-case intake rate, up from 31%

More cases, less spend, fewer wasted intake hours

Monthly case intake grew from 149 to 355, up 138% — more than doubled. Cost per case intake fell from £369 to £161, down 56%. Cost per qualified lead fell from £114.60 to £42.40, down 63%. Unqualified inquiry rate fell from 47% to 22%. None of this happened in a straight line, and we don’t think it happened from the media program in isolation.