A plaintiff firm that buys media buys phone calls. Every call that rings through is a unit of advertising spend arriving at a desk. What happens in the next few minutes decides whether the spend becomes a signed case or a write-off. Firms have measured the missed calls for years. The money that disappears after the call is answered has been harder to see.
Lauren Rothrock is Chief Product Officer at Litify, the case management platform used by high-volume personal injury and mass tort firms. On October 20 the company launched LitifyAI Call Intelligence. It connects a firm’s phone system to its case files and transcribes intake calls. It then suggests intake answers, each with a link back to the moment in the recording where the caller said it. The launch drew a direct line between legal advertising spend and the intake desk, which is the line this series follows.
I put seven questions to her in writing. A missed call costs the firm the full lead, and every intake desk already knows it. The call shows up on a report the next morning, and someone chases it. The leak she describes comes later, on the call a specialist actually answers, where nothing shows up on any report.
The caller tells the story once, the notes land in a point tool, and the record that reaches the case file arrives messy or doubled. A second specialist then calls the same prospect and asks for the accident again. That caller has already cost the firm roughly $700 of advertising spend. Rothrock says people who have been through a traumatic incident do not tell the story twice for long. Her answer on how that money leaves the building is the one to read first.
Her fix for the handoff is to remove it. Until now the intake specialist listened to the call in one system and typed what they heard into Litify. Call Intelligence puts the transcript and the suggested intake fields in the case file itself, as the call happens. A caller who phones back is matched against the firm’s full history, including open matters, so the second specialist sees the first conversation. The transcript inherits the permissions the firm already set on the case.
The marketing source, the lead score and the call sit in the same record as the outcome. A firm can trace a campaign to the cases it produced, not only to the retainers it signed. The product reaches the calls that come through a phone system the firm has connected. It connects to more than 20 of them, including Five9, Dialpad, CallRail and NICE CXone. A call a lead vendor takes on its own number stays outside it.
Rothrock says most of Litify’s clients run their own call centers, or extend their licenses to the third-party centers they use, so the product reaches those calls. The results question gets a date rather than a figure. The product launched on October 20, so there is no quarter of data to report yet. Five design partner firms went live this month across personal injury, workers’ compensation, mass tort and Social Security disability. Rothrock will have conversion and cost-per-case numbers against each firm’s own baseline after a full quarter.
Her answers run below. The section headings are mine.
On what a call costs before anyone answers it
Meldofsky: You have said Litify’s clients are among the top spenders in legal advertising, so every call is a significant investment. Put numbers on that. In a high-volume PI or mass tort practice, what does one missed call or one unreturned voicemail actually cost? What does a duplicate record cost? Where does the money leak: the phone system, the handoff from a point tool to the case file, or the re-contact?
Rothrock: From what we have heard from our clients, the cost to acquire one signed client in a competitive market can range from $4,000 to $7,000. That is a significant portion of a typical contingency fee. Litify’s aggregated, anonymized data shows PI firms convert about 10 percent of leads into signed cases. This means each inbound lead has already cost the firm roughly up to $700 before anyone picks up. A missed call or an unreturned voicemail throws that investment away.
As for where it leaks, the phone system is usually the smallest part. Most firms can see their missed calls. The bigger leak is the handoff. Without Litify, one tool captures the conversation, but the case file gets messy notes or duplicate records. That leads to the third leak, the re-contact. Two people call the same prospect, or someone calls with half the story, and the caller has to explain their accident again. People who have been through a traumatic incident do not put up with that for long.
On the specialist who saves without looking
Meldofsky: When the AI fills in an intake answer, it attaches a link to the line in the transcript where the caller said it. The specialist is supposed to open that link before saving. A busy specialist will save without opening it. What do you know from early customers about whether they open the link, and how often they correct a suggested answer? What does the product do to make sure the check happens?
Rothrock: The product is built so that nothing is permanently saved to the case record without human review. Suggested answers stay suggestions until the staff accepts the change. The citation sits right next to each answer, not on a separate screen, and clicking it jumps to the exact quote and the moment in the transcript. Checking takes seconds, not minutes.
It also helps that the staff member was on that call. Most of the time they are comparing the suggestion to a conversation they just had, and the link is there for the answers they are not sure about. Every save is logged, so a supervisor can see who accepted changes and when.
On who rewrites the criteria when the MDL moves
Meldofsky: Lead scoring takes qualification criteria in plain language and weights liability, injury severity, economic loss, coverage, and venue. Mass tort criteria come from the litigation itself: product, exposure window, diagnosis, proof of use. They change as the MDL moves. Who maintains the criteria at a firm, how quickly can a firm reweight, and does a reweight rescore the leads already sitting in the queue?
Rothrock: Criteria are set by the firm, usually the intake director or the operations lead. Anyone with the LitifyAI admin role can change them in settings. They are written in plain language by case type. A firm can have separate criteria for each tort, plus a default for calls that do not fit a known type.
There is no code, no ticket to Litify, and no release cycle. If an MDL’s diagnosis list grows or the exposure window moves, the team can update the criteria as needed. Every score comes with subscores and cited justification, so a reviewer can see the scoring at a granular level.
On the call the firm never took
Meldofsky: Call Intelligence works on calls that pass through a phone system the firm has connected. A lot of mass tort intake calls happen at a lead vendor’s call center on the vendor’s number, and the firm gets the signed case afterward. Does the product reach those calls at all? If a vendor feeds its call data into a firm’s Litify, who owns the transcript?
Rothrock: Call Intelligence works on calls that run through a phone system the firm has connected. It integrates with more than 20 providers, including Five9, Dialpad, CallRail and NICE CXone. If a vendor takes the call on its own number, on its own system, and sends over a signed case afterward, we do not see that call today. However, most of our clients own their own call centers, or they have dedicated resources at third-party call centers and extend their telephony and software licenses to them.
On intake inside the case file
Meldofsky: Firms have been running intake through a separate AI intake vendor’s software and connecting it to Litify. The launch says they no longer need that. What does a firm get from having intake AI inside its case management system that a separate tool cannot give it? What is still ahead for Call Intelligence on a mass tort docket?
Rothrock: I think you are referring to telephony providers. Litify does not offer its own telephony. We integrate with more than 20 third-party telephony providers. Until now, the information gathered on client calls has been keyed into Litify Intakes by our clients’ staff. With LitifyAI Call Intelligence, we are connecting telephony directly to Litify, which brings several major benefits.
- There is no sync to fail. When a caller phones back, we match them against the firm’s full history, including open matters. The transcript and key data are saved to the proper record and fields within Litify as suggested entries.
- Existing controls apply automatically. Transcripts and call records live inside the firm’s existing Litify permissions.
- Marketing connects to outcomes. Lead scores, the marketing source and the call itself sit in the same system as the case outcome. A firm can ask which campaigns produced leads that turned into good cases, not just signed retainers.
- Speed to convert. The entire intake happens in one platform, so leads are captured and qualified automatically, which means firms can convert those leads into clients even faster.
These benefits are possible only because Litify, the platform of action, now has real-time access to client calls with an AI companion that joins every call.
On what is to come for mass tort, the next releases cover the problems that come with volume. Firms will get keyword signal libraries that flag priority leads and trigger their own workflows. Callers’ statements will be checked against prior records during the call. An after-hours voice agent will take intake details instead of sending callers to voicemail. Outbound voice agents will make calls on behalf of the firm, such as client reminders for upcoming appointments.
On consent and the caller who says stop
Meldofsky: Every inbound, outbound, and voicemail interaction gets transcribed and stored. How does the product handle recording consent and a caller’s request not to be contacted again, and what stays with the firm to configure?
Rothrock: Consent stays with the firm, on purpose, because the rules depend on the state and on how the firm runs its calls. With Call Companion, transcription starts only when the specialist clicks Record, so any disclosure or two-party consent happens before that click.
For calls transcribed through the firm’s phone provider, disclosures and consent follow the firm’s phone setup: the IVR message, the announcements and so on. Litify does not record anything the firm’s phone system is not already set up to capture. The firm decides which numbers, queues and directions, inbound, outbound or both, go through Call Intelligence.
On the numbers that do not exist yet
Meldofsky: Numbers. From early customers, has cost per signed case gone down? Has the share of callers who reach intake and sign gone up? How many signed cases have come from calls that went to voicemail or came in after hours? For each, how was it measured: which firms, which case types, and what the number was before Call Intelligence?
Rothrock: We built this with five design partner firms, in personal injury, workers’ compensation, mass tort and Social Security disability, beginning in April. They are the first clients to go live on the tools this month. What we model is that a 3 percent lift in intake conversion pays for the product several times over in fees alone. We will measure the metrics you listed, using the firm’s own pre-launch baseline, by case type. I am happy to share results once we have a full quarter of data.
Lauren Rothrock is Chief Product Officer at Litify, an AI-native matter management platform for law firms and legal teams. The company announced LitifyAI Call Intelligence on October 20, 2026.
Rothrock answered seven questions in writing. Her answers appear as written, edited for length and clarity. The acquisition cost, conversion rate, per-lead cost and modeled 3 percent lift are Litify’s own figures and have not been independently verified. — DM
Disclosure: This interview was arranged through Litify’s public relations firm in connection with the Call Intelligence launch. The publication has no commercial relationship with Litify. The author holds referral relationships with plaintiff-side firms in mass tort litigation, as described in the editorial standards. No litigation is discussed in this interview. No payment was exchanged in either direction.