Personal Injury Case Type CAC: Why Auto, Med-Mal, and Mass Tort Need Separate Numbers

A firm running a general "personal injury" campaign doesn't just get one kind of case back. It gets auto accidents, slip-and-falls, the occasional medical malpractice referral, and — if it advertises broadly enough — mass tort inquiries. All of it lands in the same intake queue, gets measured against the same cost-per-lead target, and gets reported on the same monthly dashboard line.

The problem with that is personal injury case type CAC isn't one number. It can't be, because case value isn't one number. According to Insurance Research Council and Martindale-Nolo survey data cited by fairsettlement.org's 2026 settlement statistics, auto accident cases with attorney representation average approximately $77,600. According to National Practitioner Data Bank figures cited by Forbes Advisor, the average medical malpractice award is $679,000 — roughly 9x the auto accident average. Product liability cases land at a median of $748,000 by the same source.

A single acceptable-CAC threshold applied across all three case types will systematically misallocate spend. This post covers what personal injury case type CAC actually requires, and how it extends the campaign-level ad spend attribution already covered on this site with a second dimension: case type.

Why Personal Injury Case Type CAC Has to Be Segmented

Contingency fee structure is fairly consistent across case types — most firms use an escalating schedule of roughly 33.33 percent pre-litigation, 40 percent once a lawsuit is filed, and up to 45 percent at trial. But because the underlying case value swings by close to an order of magnitude between an auto accident and a medical malpractice case, the resulting attorney fee — and the CAC a firm can rationally spend to acquire that case — swings just as much.

How This Extends Campaign-Level Reconciliation

Campaign-level ad spend attribution separates cost and outcome data by which campaign generated a lead. Personal injury case type CAC adds a second dimension on top of that: separating the same cost and outcome data by what type of case each lead actually became. A single non-branded search campaign can generate both auto accident leads and the occasional medical malpractice referral — and evaluating both against the same acceptable-CAC threshold treats a $25,860-fee case and a $226,270-fee case as interchangeable.

Reconciling this requires the same underlying mechanism already covered in the True CAC reconciliation guide — tracing cost and outcome data to a shared identifier — extended to tag each signed case with its case type at the point of attorney review, not just its originating campaign.

This is a case-type-specific version of the reconciliation gap covered in the 2026 Marketing Margin Distortion Index, and it feeds directly into the Scale, Hold, Cut, Pause directive framework — a directive to scale a campaign only makes sense once it's known which case types that campaign is actually producing, not just its blended cost per lead.

What Segmented Personal Injury Case Type CAC Changes

• 1
  A campaign generating mostly auto leads gets evaluated against auto-case economics. Chasing an aggressive CPL target on a channel that happens to produce occasional high-value case types undervalues what that channel is actually worth.
• 2
  Intake and marketing can align on which case types to prioritize. If a channel reliably produces higher-value case types, that channel deserves a materially different CAC ceiling than one producing volume auto leads.
• 3
  Blended reporting stops masking the mix shift. If a firm's case mix shifts toward lower-value auto cases over a quarter, a blended CAC number will look worse even if every individual case type's economics stayed exactly the same.

Personal injury case type CAC isn't a refinement of channel or campaign reconciliation — it's the dimension that determines whether either of those numbers means anything at all once a firm handles more than one kind of case.