Nearly half of law firms never reply. Here is what that costs a small business.

Most businesses that worry about growth worry about getting more enquiries. The research says the bigger loss is usually the enquiries they already get. Three studies, from three different kinds of business, show the same pattern.

Law firms: 48 percent answered neither the phone nor the email

In Clio's 2024 Legal Trends Report, researchers posed as prospective clients and contacted law firms by phone and email. Only 33 percent of firms answered the email. Only 40 percent answered the phone. 48 percent answered neither. Of the replies that did come, only 18 percent told the person what would happen next or what it might cost. Meanwhile 79 percent of clients said they expected a reply within 24 hours.

Home services: about one call in four rings out

Invoca's analysis of home-services call data put the share of inbound calls that go unanswered at 27 percent. These are people who found the business, decided to call, and reached nobody. A share of them call the next listing.

Everyone: the first hour decides

A Harvard Business Review study of 2,241 US companies found that firms which contacted a web lead within an hour were nearly seven times more likely to qualify it than firms that waited even two hours, and more than sixty times more likely than firms that waited a day or longer. Most companies in the study took longer than a day.

What this means for your numbers

None of these figures is your figure. Your business might answer everything. But almost no small business can say so from evidence, because response time is rarely measured. It is the first thing our diagnostic samples: how enquiries arrive, how long each channel takes to get a human reply, and what happens to the ones that wait.

• ✦Take a sample of a week's enquiries by channel: phone, web form, email, messages.
• ✦Record the time to first human reply for each, and the share that never got one.
• ✦Note what the reply said: did it give the next step and a price, or only a promise to call back?
• ✦Multiply the unanswered share by your average job or matter value. That is the size of the leak.

You do not need more leads to grow. You need to know what happens to the ones you have.