How to Qualify Personal Injury Leads: A Framework
The five questions in order, and how each answer routes a caller to accept, decline, or attorney review.
Knowing how to qualify personal injury leads comes down to five questions in a set order: injury, liability, insurance coverage, treatment, and timing. Each answer routes the caller toward one of three outcomes. The file gets accepted for a consult, declined with a referral, or held for attorney review. The framework only works if the criteria are written down before the phone rings, because the person answering at 9pm cannot invent judgment on the spot.
Most small plaintiff firms qualify leads by feel. The senior attorney can hear a weak rear-end case inside ninety seconds, so the criteria live in her head, and case intake quality collapses whenever she is in a deposition. Writing the framework down turns lead qualification from a talent into a procedure that anyone, staff or software, can run the same way at 2pm and at 2am.
Nimbus Marlowe is the AI operations layer for personal-injury law firms, starting with intake. Our intake coordinator answers every call by voice, walks the caller through the firm's own qualification questions, and organizes the answers against criteria the attorney set in advance. The agent collects and organizes; every judgment about the merits of a claim belongs to a licensed attorney.
How to qualify personal injury leads in five questions
The order matters as much as the questions themselves. Each one screens for something the next question depends on, which is why experienced intake staff rarely rearrange them.
What is the injury?
Start with harm, because a case with no documented injury has nowhere to go regardless of how clear the fault looks. Ask what happened to the caller physically, whether they went to the ER or urgent care, and what the diagnosis was if they have one. A caller who describes a fractured wrist and two nights in the hospital has cleared the threshold question. A caller who says they were shaken up but fine is telling you something important, and the script should capture that answer verbatim rather than paraphrase it into something stronger.
Who caused it?
Liability comes second. The caller's own account of fault is the rawest data intake will ever collect, so the questions here stay open: what happened, who else was involved, did police respond, was a citation issued, did anyone admit anything at the scene. A rear-end collision with a police report naming the other driver reads differently from a single-vehicle wreck on wet pavement. Intake's job is to record the story in enough detail that the attorney can evaluate it in two minutes instead of twenty.
Is there coverage?
A serious injury with clear fault still stalls without a source of recovery, which is why insurance questions come third. Ask whether the other party's insurer has been identified, whether an adjuster has already called, and whether the caller carries uninsured motorist coverage of their own. Callers rarely know policy limits, and the script should never pretend they do. What intake can capture is the carrier's name, the claim number if one exists, and whether the caller has signed anything an adjuster sent over.
Has treatment started?
Treatment history tells the attorney how well the injury will document. Ask when the caller first saw a doctor, whether they are still treating, and whether any gap in care has opened since the incident. A caller three weeks post-crash who has never seen a physician is a different file from one in active physical therapy, and the attorney will want that distinction flagged the moment the file lands.
When did it happen?
Timing runs last because it can end the conversation. Capture the incident date precisely, along with the state where the injury occurred. One hard compliance rule sits here: software must never compute or communicate a legal deadline. The intake coordinator records the date; a licensed attorney determines what the statute of limitations means for that claim in that jurisdiction.
How do answers map to accept, decline, or attorney review?
The five answers land the file in one of three lanes, and the firm defines the lane boundaries in writing before any call is taken. Written PI case criteria beat memory for the same reason checklists beat memory in an operating room.
- •Accept for consult: the answers clear every threshold the attorney set. Documented injury, an identifiable at-fault party, a known carrier, treatment underway, a recent incident date. The intake coordinator books the consult on the spot, because a qualified caller who waits for a callback is a caller your competitor will sign.
- •Decline with referral: the answers miss a threshold the firm treats as absolute, such as a matter type the firm never handles or a venue it will not travel to. The decline is a routing outcome produced by the firm's own criteria, delivered politely with a referral and logged in the CRM so the attorney can audit the pattern later.
- •Attorney review: everything in between, like a serious injury with murky liability or clear fault paired with a six-week treatment gap. These files get packaged with every answer organized under the five headings and routed to the attorney the same day.
Qualification criteria are the attorney's judgment written down in advance; intake, whether human or AI, runs the checklist and routes the file.
The lanes also protect callers. A borderline file that would have been waved off by a tired receptionist at 4:55pm instead reaches an attorney with the full picture attached.
Where does the handoff to the attorney happen?
The framework has one author. Before the first call, the attorney writes the thresholds: which injury levels justify a consult, which counties, which matter types, how recent the incident has to be. During intake, borderline files route to the attorney with answers organized under the five headings, so review takes minutes rather than a full re-interview. Nothing becomes a client relationship until the attorney holds the consult and signs the engagement. At every step the software collects and organizes, while each judgment call, from the criteria themselves to the signed agreement, stays with the person licensed to make it.
This is also why lead qualification belongs in the same layer as the rest of the firm's operations. The answers gathered at intake seed the matter record, feed case preparation when the file is accepted, and give the demand letter drafter a head start months later. A point vendor that only handles phone answering drops that thread the moment the call ends.
What does it cost to run this around the clock?
A part-time intake specialist typically runs $3,000 to $4,000 per month and covers business hours, which leaves the 9pm car-accident lead ringing to voicemail. Nimbus prices a qualified intake at roughly $18, flat and published, with no monthly minimum on pay-as-you-go. The CRM underneath, with contacts, matters, documents, and the client portal, costs $0 and is never invoiced.
No fee is ever a percentage of a recovery. The rate for a qualified intake is identical whether the matter becomes the firm's largest settlement or closes without recovery, and Nimbus never holds, transmits, or takes custody of client funds. A firm can read the full price list before signing up, which is worth remembering the next time a point vendor answers a pricing question with a request for a discovery call.
Frequently asked questions
Who sets the qualification criteria?
The attorney does, in writing, before the intake coordinator takes its first call. The agent runs the firm's own thresholds for injury, liability, coverage, treatment, and timing. Updating the criteria is a configuration change the firm controls at any time.
Does the AI decide which cases the firm accepts?
Attorneys make every accept decision. The intake coordinator collects answers and organizes them against the attorney's written criteria, then routes each file to a consult booking, a polite referral, or attorney review. Judgment about claim merit stays with licensed counsel.
Does Nimbus take a percentage of settlements?
Never. Every rate is flat, published, and identical regardless of how a case resolves, and Nimbus never holds or transmits client funds. A qualified intake runs about $18 whether the matter settles large or closes with nothing.
What does lead qualification cost compared to hiring?
A part-time intake specialist runs $3,000 to $4,000 per month for business-hours coverage. Nimbus charges roughly $18 per completed qualified intake with no minimum on pay-as-you-go, and the free CRM stores every answer the agent collects.
Write your five thresholds down this week, then let an agent run them around the clock under your supervision. Sign up now and start free, since the CRM costs $0 either way, or book a call and we will walk through your current intake script together on a live screen.
Put your firm's operations on autopilot. Reviewed by you.
Nimbus Marlowe is the AI operations layer for personal-injury firms. The CRM is free, pricing is flat and per-unit, and every output is a draft your attorneys review and adopt.