Does AI Intake Pay for Itself for a Personal Injury Firm?
Only 40% of law firms answered the phone in 2025 (Clio Legal Trends 2025). 52% of firms say a missed call already cost them business (Clio Legal Trends 2025), before any AI intake vendor is involved. This page shows the formula that tells you if paying for AI intake beats that loss, using your numbers, not ours.
AI intake pays for itself once your firm signs enough booked appointments to cover what it paid for them. That break-even point comes from your own close rate and case value, not from a number a vendor can hand you.
BookedBack has no outside case studies or proof of a return to show you today. So this page lays out the arithmetic instead: the published price per booked appointment, and what a missed lead already costs you without any AI vendor involved. Then it shows the formula that connects the two. You supply the numbers that decide the answer for your firm.
What does a missed or slow lead already cost a PI firm?
A missed lead costs a PI firm the fee on a case it never signed. That cost is your own average case fee multiplied by the leads you never reached. Clio's 2025 Legal Trends Report found 40% of law firms answered the phone in 2025, down from 56% in 2019. Clio's 2025 Legal Trends Report also found 52% of firms said a missed call cost them business.
Web leads fare no better. 26% of firms never respond to an online lead at all (Hennessey Digital 2025). Every one of those unanswered calls and unanswered forms is a person who called or clicked, then moved on to the next firm on the list.
That loss happens with or without an AI vendor. It is why a paid intake tool is measured against the cases a firm is already losing, not against zero.
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What is the actual ROI formula for AI intake?
The formula compares two numbers: what you pay per booked appointment, and what a signed case is worth to your firm. Dividing the first by the second gives a break-even close rate, the minimum share of booked appointments you need to sign to cover the cost.
- Price per booked appointment: what you pay a vendor for one qualified consult on your calendar.
- Average signed-case value: your firm's own fee on a resolved case, not the settlement amount. On a contingency file that is the fee share, not the client's gross recovery. Using the settlement figure instead of your own fee makes the break-even look about three times easier than it is. A one-third contingency fee is a third of the settlement.
- Break-even close rate = price per booked appointment ÷ the fee your firm actually collects on a signed case. Use your contingency fee, not the gross settlement: a $60,000 settlement at a one-third fee is $20,000 to your firm, and $20,000 is the number that goes in the denominator.
The lead list calculator on the BookedBack homepage does not run this formula. It estimates recoverable case value from your lead count, case value and signing rate, so run the break-even division above by hand with your own numbers.
If your firm's real close rate on qualified consults sits above that break-even number, the appointments are paying for themselves. If it sits below, they are not. No vendor's pitch changes that math. Your own case management system already holds the close rate and the case value that decide it, so you can settle this question before you speak to anyone.
What numbers does a personal injury firm need to calculate AI intake ROI?
The AI intake break-even formula only works with numbers pulled from your own practice. That means leads per month, your close rate on booked consults, your average signed-case fee, and the per-appointment price on your plan. BookedBack does not know these figures for your firm and will not guess at them.
Leads per month sets the scale of the math. Close rate on booked consults tells you how many appointments actually turn into cases. Average signed-case fee is the number that decides whether BookedBack's published price, $300 an appointment on Solo or $150 plus $2,000 a month on Growth, is worth checking at all. Pull these four from your own case management system before you run the formula, not from a vendor's slide deck.
What does AI intake cost per booked appointment at BookedBack?
BookedBack charges per booked appointment on the firm's own leads. It is done for you, takes personal injury cases only, and is based in San Diego. Solo is $300 per appointment, Growth is $150 plus $2,000 a month, and Scale is $50 plus $5,000 a month, with a custom quote above that. The first booked appointment is free on every plan.
- Solo: $300 per booked appointment, $0 monthly, up to 100 leads, month to month.
- Growth: $150 per booked appointment plus $2,000 a month, up to 300 leads, adds iMessage, reminders, and past-client outreach.
- Scale: $50 per booked appointment plus $5,000 a month, adds custom integrations and priority support.
- Custom: above Scale, priced by quote.
Example only, not a promise: on Solo, a booked appointment costs $300. Put your own average signed-case fee in place of X, and the break-even close rate is $300 divided by X. At a $15,000 fee that break-even close rate is 2%, meaning two of every hundred booked appointments have to sign before the fees are covered. At an $80,000 fee it is under half a percent. Only your own books say which number belongs there. Put another way, in this example one signed case paying a $15,000 fee covers fifty $300 appointments. That is arithmetic on numbers you supplied, not a result BookedBack has produced for any firm.
Growth and Scale add a flat monthly fee on top of the per-appointment price, so volume changes the math. On Growth, your monthly cost is $2,000 plus $150 for every booked appointment that month. Your effective cost per booked appointment on Growth is $150 plus $2,000 divided by the number of appointments that month, so twenty appointments cost $250 each. Compare that figure to your own signed-case fee multiplied by your close rate on booked consults.
How does per-booked-appointment pricing compare to Smith.ai, EVE, Caseflood and Lawmatics?
None of the four best known legal intake vendors, Smith.ai, EVE, Caseflood and Lawmatics, publishes a price tied to a booked appointment. BookedBack publishes one at bookedback.ai/pricing. Sources are named on each vendor below, captured in September 2026. Smith.ai and Lawmatics publish these figures on their own pricing pages. EVE and Caseflood do not publish a price, so those figures come from third-party estimates and the vendor's own claims, labelled as such.
- Smith.ai is the volume incumbent: 11 years, 25M+ calls and 4,000+ law firms by its own count, with live agents behind the AI. It carries public review scores of 4.9 on G2, 4.8 on Clutch, 4.8 on Capterra and 4.3 on Trustpilot. It bills per call and offers 25 calls a month free forever. After that its published per-call rates run $1.60 AI-first, $2.50 hybrid and $7.00 human-first, with plans from $300 for 30 calls to $2,100 for 300 calls. Calls over the plan allowance are billed at $8.50 to $11.50 each, and it offers a 30-day money-back guarantee up to $1,000, month to month (smith.ai/pricing, September 2026). BookedBack has no comparable track record or guarantee.
- EVE (eve.legal) is the largest funded player in this set, with $164M raised at a $1B+ valuation. That figure comes from its own funding announcements on PR Newswire (Series A January 2025, Series B September 2025). It says 1,500+ plaintiff firms use it, covering intake through trial with named case studies carrying before and after numbers. It does not publish a price. Third-party estimates put it near $500 per attorney per month, sold through a demo and a custom contract (eesel.ai, proplaintiff.ai), captured September 2026.
- Caseflood is a human-assisted AI intake team (Luna on voice, Jess on SMS) focused on PI and workers-comp volume firms. It raised $3.2M from Y Combinator, Acquisition.com and Rebel Fund per its seed announcement on GlobeNewswire, and puts three named managing partners on video citing their own results. It charges a $3,000 setup fee, waived with a code, plus an undisclosed recurring fee (caseflood.ai, captured September 2026). Caseflood's own site claims $500 a month yields $140,000 in revenue for a PI firm, a figure from Caseflood, not verified elsewhere and not tied to a published plan price.
- Lawmatics is a full legal CRM with intake and marketing automation and its Merlin AI add-ons. It is rated 4.6 on Capterra across 50 reviews, and it publishes seven named firms with percentage lifts. It bills per seat on an annual contract, with a 3-seat minimum and a $399 onboarding fee (lawmatics.com/pricing, September 2026). Lawmatics has also started advertising outcome-based pricing on its Merlin Qualify and Merlin Engage AI add-ons (lawmatics.com, September 2026), so per-seat billing is not the whole of what it sells.
A firm with high call volume and a fixed budget may get a lower cost per contact from Smith.ai's bulk plans. A firm that wants named case studies and video proof before it buys is better served by EVE or Caseflood today; BookedBack has neither. EVE is not outcome-priced, and neither EVE nor Caseflood publishes a price. Caseflood charges a setup fee plus an undisclosed recurring cost, so whether any part of it is tied to results is not public. A firm that wants intake inside a CRM it also runs marketing from is better served by Lawmatics than by a booking-only tool. BookedBack fits a firm that wants the price up front. On Solo that means paying only when a qualified appointment lands on the calendar; on Growth and Scale a $2,000 or $5,000 monthly fee applies whether or not anything books.
Where can a PI firm calculate AI intake break-even and see BookedBack's prices?
A PI firm can do both on BookedBack's own site, free: the full price list and vendor comparison table are at bookedback.ai/pricing. The lead list calculator at bookedback.ai/#roi takes your own lead count, case value and signing rate.
The /pricing page lists the per-appointment price that goes into the break-even calculation: price per booked appointment divided by the fee your firm collects on a case it signs. The homepage calculator is a separate estimate of recoverable case value. It uses BookedBack's assumption of 5 to 8 booked consults per 100 contacts worked, so treat its number as an illustration, not as your firm's result. The first booked appointment is free on every plan. One appointment is not enough to measure a close rate, so treat it as a look at the process rather than a test of the math. Growth and Scale also carry a monthly fee and a term commitment, listed at /pricing.
What else do PI firms ask before paying for AI intake?
Does BookedBack guarantee a return on its software fee?
What numbers do I need before I can run the ROI math?
How does the break-even point change if my close rate is low?
Why does BookedBack charge per booked appointment instead of per seat or per call?
You don't have to take this math on faith. The first booked appointment is free on every plan. On Solo that means no cost until the second one. Growth and Scale bill a monthly fee from the start, so check the plan terms at /pricing before you use this to size your risk.
Run the numbers free