This glossary collects six terms that come up constantly in law firm marketing but are rarely defined precisely: legal intake, legal answering service, cost per case, intake conversion rate, E-E-A-T, and GEO. Each term below gets a short summary and links to the full, detailed entry. Together, they describe the same underlying process, how a search becomes a visitor, a visitor becomes a contact, and a contact becomes a signed client, from a few different, connected angles. Reading all six together, rather than looking up one in isolation, tends to reveal where a firm's own marketing chain actually has a gap. Each entry links out to a much longer, dedicated post covering the term in full depth, with practical examples and, where relevant, a worked illustration.
Legal Intake
Legal intake is the process a law firm uses to receive, qualify, and onboard a potential client, starting from the first contact and continuing through conflict checks, information gathering, and scheduling until the person is either retained or referred elsewhere. It is the pre-representation stage, and it carries real professional-responsibility weight from the very first message, since prospective clients generally receive the same confidentiality protection as existing ones under the ABA Model Rules.
Intake is often treated as an administrative afterthought, but it is the single point where marketing spend either converts into a signed case or quietly disappears. A firm can run a technically excellent marketing plan and still lose most of its return if intake is slow or inconsistent. The steps involved, first contact, qualification, conflict check, information gathering, and retention or referral, are the same regardless of practice area, though how urgently each step needs to happen varies considerably from one practice area to the next.
Read the full entry on legal intake →
Legal Answering Service
A legal answering service answers calls on a firm's behalf when in-house staff are unavailable, handling message-taking, basic qualification, and scheduling so an inquiry does not simply go unanswered. This can mean a traditional live answering service billed per minute, a simple voicemail system, an in-house after-hours rotation, or an AI voice agent built to hold a real conversation and schedule a callback automatically.
Each option carries different tradeoffs in cost, consistency, and how well it fits a specific practice area's call patterns, from the always-on urgency of criminal defense to the more private, patient intake needs of family law. Pricing structure matters as much as capability here: a per-minute service becomes most expensive exactly during a firm's busiest, highest-value periods, while a flat or usage-based AI system does not scale the same way with call volume. Whoever or whatever answers a call is also handling information covered by the same confidentiality obligations that apply to the firm itself.
Read the full entry on legal answering services →
Cost Per Case
Cost per case is the total amount a law firm spends on marketing and business development to acquire one signed client, calculated by dividing total spend over a period by the number of cases signed in that same period. It is different from, and more meaningful than, cost per lead or cost per click, since it is the only one of the three that reflects an actual business outcome rather than an earlier, less certain stage of the funnel. Two firms with identical cost per lead can still have very different cost per case, depending entirely on how well each one converts.
A reasonable cost per case varies enormously by practice area, market competitiveness, and fee structure, which is why there is no single industry benchmark worth trusting. A firm's own cost per case, tracked by channel and over time, is the only version of this number worth acting on. Case value matters as much as acquisition cost: a practice area with strong repeat or referral business can reasonably sustain a higher cost per case than a purely transactional one, since the value of a client extends beyond the first signed matter.
Read the full entry on cost per case →
Intake Conversion Rate
Intake conversion rate is the share of new contacts that a firm actually turns into signed clients, calculated by dividing signed cases by total contacts over a given period. The exact figure depends heavily on what counts as a "contact" in the denominator, a raw-contact rate and a qualified-lead rate answer different questions and are not directly comparable to each other.
This metric is directly connected to cost per case: for a fixed level of marketing spend, a higher intake conversion rate produces a lower cost per case, since the same spend now produces more signed clients. It is also one of the most commonly skipped metrics, since marketing platforms report traffic and calls automatically while conversion tracking requires deliberate effort to tie an outcome back to its original contact. Response time and consistent, well-qualified follow-up are usually the two highest-leverage ways to move this number, and both are entirely within a firm's own control, unlike generating more raw contacts in the first place.
Read the full entry on intake conversion rate →
E-E-A-T
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, Google's framework for evaluating whether content is genuinely helpful and credible. It matters more for law firm content than most other websites because legal information generally falls under Google's "Your Money or Your Life" category, content that can meaningfully affect a person's finances, safety, or rights, which is held to a stricter quality standard.
E-E-A-T is not a single, direct ranking factor a page either has or lacks; it is a framework reflected through many smaller signals, author credentials, citation patterns, accuracy, and consistency over time, rather than a setting a firm can simply switch on. Trustworthiness is the pillar Google's own guidance describes as the most important of the four, which is why avoiding invented claims and disclosing assumptions clearly matters as much for E-E-A-T as it does for basic honesty.
Read the full entry on E-E-A-T →
GEO
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization, the practice of structuring content so AI-powered answer systems, including Google's AI Overviews and standalone assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity, are more likely to cite or summarize it as a source. Google's own guidance states that the fundamentals of SEO remain relevant for its AI features, with no separate optimization required, which cuts against a lot of industry hype treating GEO as an entirely new discipline.
Content built around a direct, early answer, clear question-style structure, genuine expertise, and factual accuracy tends to perform well across both traditional search and AI-generated answers, since the two systems draw on a closely related set of underlying signals. A firm building genuinely strong E-E-A-T signals is, in effect, already doing most of the work GEO requires, which is part of why the two terms are covered as companion entries in this glossary.
How Do These Six Terms Connect?
Read together, these terms describe one continuous process rather than six unrelated concepts. E-E-A-T and GEO describe what makes content visible and trustworthy enough to be found in the first place, whether through a traditional search result or an AI-generated answer. Legal intake and legal answering service describe what happens the moment that visibility produces an actual contact, a call, a form, or a message. Intake conversion rate measures how many of those contacts become signed clients, and cost per case translates the whole chain back into a single number a firm can budget and plan around.
A firm that only understands one or two of these terms usually has a blind spot somewhere in the chain. A firm strong on content and visibility but weak on intake will generate traffic that quietly leaks away. A firm with excellent intake but no attention to cost per case will not know whether its marketing spend is actually working. Understanding all six, and how they connect, is closer to a complete picture than any single term on its own, and it is usually faster to fix the specific weak link once it has a name than to overhaul the entire marketing plan at once.
(Assumptions, not statistics)
Stage of the chain Term that measures it What a gap here looks like Getting found E-E-A-T, GEO Content exists but rarely ranks or gets cited First contact Legal intake, legal answering service Calls and messages arrive but go unanswered or poorly handled Converting contact to client Intake conversion rate Contacts arrive and get handled, but few become signed clients Measuring the whole chain Cost per case Spend and results exist, but the firm cannot say whether the spend is actually working This table illustrates the general relationship between the six terms, not a scoring system or a measured statistic from any specific study.
Where Should You Go From Here?
If you are building or auditing a full marketing plan rather than looking up a single term, our complete law firm marketing plan guide covers how these pieces fit together into an actual strategy, including budget, channel priority, and measurement. It is the natural next stop once you have the vocabulary from this glossary and want to see it applied to an actual plan rather than defined in isolation.
If you want to turn cost per case and intake conversion rate into an actual number for your firm, our missed call cost calculator and marketing budget calculator are both built around the exact terms defined on this page. Both calculators ask for your own numbers rather than assuming an industry figure, which is the same honesty standard this glossary applies to every definition above.
If you want a second opinion on where your firm's marketing has a gap in this chain, you can talk to us about your firm's marketing. A short conversation is often enough to identify which of these six terms is actually where the gap lives, and fixing the right one is usually far cheaper than overhauling the whole plan.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between cost per case and intake conversion rate?
Cost per case measures how much it costs to acquire one signed client. Intake conversion rate measures what share of contacts become signed clients. The two are connected: improving intake conversion rate, without spending more on marketing, lowers cost per case, which is often a faster and cheaper improvement than trying to generate more raw contacts.
Do E-E-A-T and GEO mean the same thing?
No, but they overlap heavily. E-E-A-T is Google's framework for evaluating content credibility, used both by human quality raters and reflected in automated ranking systems. GEO describes the broader practice of structuring content so AI-powered answer systems are likely to cite it, and strong E-E-A-T signals are one of the things that supports GEO performance, since a generative system summarizing a source is effectively vouching for it.
Is a legal answering service the same as legal intake?
No. Legal intake is the entire process of receiving and qualifying a potential client, from first contact through the decision to retain or refer elsewhere. A legal answering service is one specific tool, among several, that a firm might use to handle the first-contact stage of that broader intake process.
Which of these six terms should a firm learn first?
Legal intake and cost per case are usually the most immediately useful, since they describe where marketing spend most commonly leaks and how to measure whether it is actually working. E-E-A-T and GEO matter more once a firm is actively producing content and wants that content to perform well, both in traditional search and in AI-generated answers.
Where can I find more detail on any of these terms?
Each section above links to a full, dedicated entry with the complete definition, examples, and practical guidance specific to that term. The dedicated entries go considerably deeper than the summaries on this page, including worked examples, common pitfalls, and how each term connects to the broader practice-area guides published elsewhere on this site.