A Data Dictionary for Birth Injury Marketing

Acquisition

1. Spend: Media cost billed by the platform in the period, by campaign. Management fees, call coverage and tooling are recorded separately as fees and loaded only in the fully loaded cost per signed case.
2. Visitor: A session on a firm property. Not a person; not a lead. Reported for diagnosis only.
3. Inquiry: A call that connected or left a voicemail with a callback number, a form with valid contact details, or a chat that captured them. Excludes: bots, honeypot submissions, duplicates of an open inquiry within 30 days, vendor and spam calls, and inquiries about matters the firm never handles. Each inquiry carries a source (channel, campaign, page) and a timestamp.
4. Duplicate: An inquiry matching an existing one on phone or email within 30 days. The original keeps the credit.

5. Contacted: A two-way conversation between a human at the firm (or its intake partner) and the family. Voicemails, texts without a reply and email auto-responses do not count. Timestamp of first contact is recorded; time to first contact is derived from it.
6. Screened: The inquiry meets the firm's written screening criteria for the case type (jurisdiction, timing, nature of the outcome, providers) and records have been requested or a review has been opened. Written criteria are a precondition; without them this stage cannot be measured.
7. Screened out: Contacted and found not to meet criteria, with a reason code (out of jurisdiction, outside limitations, no indication of deviation, unrelated matter, declined by family).
8. Unreachable: Inquiry with at least four contact attempts across two channels over seven days and no two-way contact. Closed, with the attempt log kept.

9. Under review: Records received and attorney or nurse review in progress, including expert consultation. Entry and exit timestamps are recorded; time in review is derived.
10. Signed: A retainer executed. The date is the execution date, not the decision date. This is the only stage that reconciles with the accounting system.
11. Declined after review: Reviewed and not accepted, with a reason code. Counted in review cost; never counted as a case.
12. Review cost: Direct cost of records, reviewer time and expert consultation per screened inquiry, including those declined. Averaged per period for the loaded model.

13. Cost per inquiry: Spend ÷ inquiries, by channel. Reported, but never optimized to.
14. Cost per screened inquiry: Spend ÷ screened, by channel. The primary leading indicator and the number bidding is optimized to.
15. Cost per signed case (media): Spend ÷ signed, computed by inquiry cohort (the month the inquiry arrived), reported only once the cohort's review cycle has mostly closed, and restated as cohorts mature.
16. Fully loaded cost per signed case: (Spend + screened × review cost + fees) ÷ signed, by cohort. The number the managing partner should know by heart.

Stage transitions are recorded by the system with timestamps, not reconstructed from memory at month end.
A definition changes only by written amendment with a date; reports after that date say so.
No stage may be skipped: an inquiry cannot be signed without having been contacted and screened.
Platform-reported conversions are never the source of truth for any stage after the inquiry.
Medical details, narratives and the family's words live in the CRM record and nowhere else; the reporting layer sees stages, sources and dates.

The cost per signed case model uses exactly these definitions, and the argument for why they matter is the first thing we send a new client.