A 0% drop rate isn’t a good goal

Ask most managing partners how intake is going and one number comes up: the intake drop rate. It is the share of the cases you signed that you later let go, usually after the records arrive and the case turns out weaker than the first call suggested. Every dropped case costs time and money, so the instinct is to push that number to zero.

That instinct is understandable, and it is the wrong goal. The only way to never drop a case is to never sign one that is not already certain. Your intake team figures that out quickly. They ask more questions on the first call, they decline anything that looks uncertain, and the drop rate falls. Meanwhile a good case with a messy first call may sign with the firm down the street.

What a zero actually tells you

Think of your sign criteria as a dial. Turned all the way up, you sign only the cases that are obviously strong. Turned down a little, you sign some that need work, and a few of those will not hold up. Those few are the price of catching the ones that do. A drop rate of exactly zero means the dial is at the top. It does not prove your team is excellent. It may only mean your team is careful in a way that costs you cases.

Here is a made-up example, not a benchmark. Say your desk signs 40 cases a month with no drops. If you loosen the criteria slightly and sign 48, and you drop 3 of those once the records come in, your drop rate moves from 0% to about 6%. You are also holding 5 cases you would have turned away. Whether that trade is worth it depends on your case values and on what a dropped case costs your team in time. Rerun the math with your own numbers.

How to read the number instead

Treat the drop rate as one half of a pair. The other half is how many qualified calls end without a signed agreement. If the drop rate is near zero and many qualified calls never sign, look at the first call before you look at your ads. If the drop rate is high and the dropped cases share a source or a screening question, fix that one thing first. Neither number tells you much on its own.

We are not going to give you a single target, because the right one depends on your case types and your margins. A reasonable first step is to pull the last three months of dropped cases, write down why each one was dropped, and count how many one more question on the first call would have caught. The Intake Metrics Guide shows where to pull each of these numbers from your phone and case systems.

A note on the numbers. The 40 signed cases, the 48 and the 3 dropped are an invented example to show the arithmetic. They are not an industry figure. Definitions follow the Intake Metrics Guide, and your own call-tracking and case-management exports are the source for your numbers.