How to Audit Your Mass Tort Intake Pipeline in 30 Minutes

Most mass tort attorneys find out about intake problems the wrong way — during a partner firm reconciliation, or when a claimant calls wondering why nobody has been in touch.

The alternative is a proactive audit. Done properly, it takes about 30 minutes and tells you whether your pipeline is clean or whether cases are falling through somewhere between your form and your partner firm.

This post walks through the exact audit process, step by step.

What You're Looking For

A mass tort intake audit has one goal: verify that the number of claimants who submitted your form matches the number of cases your partner firm received.

If those two numbers match, your pipeline is clean.

If they don't, the gap between them is cases you paid to acquire that your partner firm never received. The audit helps you find where the gap is, why it exists, and how to close it.

Step 1: Pull Your Raw Form Submission Count

Start at the source. Go to wherever your intake form submissions are stored — your form tool, your database, or your CRM — and pull the total submission count for a defined time period. Use the last 30 days if your campaign is active, or the full campaign duration if you're doing a retroactive audit.

This is your baseline number. Write it down.

If you don't have a place to pull this number — if your form submissions aren't being logged somewhere permanent — that itself is a significant finding. Raw submission logging is the foundation of intake integrity. Without it, you have no source of truth to audit against.

Step 2: Pull Your CRM Contact Count for the Same Period

Go to your CRM — HubSpot, Salesforce, or whatever you're using — and pull the number of new contacts created during the same time period, filtered to contacts that came from your intake form.

Compare this to your raw submission count.

If your CRM count is lower than your form submission count, leads are being lost between your form and your CRM. This is typically a webhook or API sync failure. The leads submitted but never made it into your contact management system.

The gap between these two numbers is the first category of lost leads.

Step 3: Pull Your Partner Firm Delivery Count

This step requires either a direct count from your partner firm or a log from your own system showing how many cases you attempted to deliver and how many received a successful response.

Ask your partner firm: how many cases did you receive from our campaign during this period?

Compare that number to your CRM contact count.

If your partner firm received fewer cases than your CRM contains, leads are being lost between your CRM and your partner firm's intake system. This is the most common source of significant loss and the hardest to detect without proper logging.

The gap between these two numbers is the second category of lost leads.

Step 4: Check for Signed Contract Gaps

If your campaign captures e-signatures as part of intake, add a third comparison: how many signed contracts exist in your contract storage versus how many form submissions you received?

For campaigns where partner firms require signed contracts before accepting cases, a submission without a corresponding signed contract is effectively a lost case — even if the lead data reached the partner firm.

Pull your signed contract count from wherever contracts are stored and compare it to your raw submission count. Any gap here represents claimants who completed intake but whose contracts were never generated.

Step 5: Check API Error Rates

If you have logging on your partner firm API calls — and you should — pull the error rate for the audit period.

Look for:

HTTP 400 errors (bad request — usually a payload or field mapping issue)
HTTP 500 errors (server error — partner firm system issue)
Timeout errors (connection dropped before a response was received)
Null responses (call was made but no response was logged)

Any non-200 response that wasn't followed by a successful retry represents a potentially lost case.

If you don't have API error logging, you can't complete this step — which means you have no visibility into whether your partner firm deliveries are succeeding. This is the single most important gap to close.

Step 6: Compare Your Numbers

By the end of the audit you should have four numbers:

Raw form submissions
CRM contacts created
Cases delivered to partner firm
Signed contracts generated

In a clean pipeline, all four numbers should be equal or within a small margin explained by legitimate disqualifications.

Gaps between consecutive numbers tell you exactly where cases are being lost:

Gap between 1 and 2: Form-to-CRM sync failure
Gap between 2 and 3: CRM-to-partner-firm delivery failure
Gap between 1 and 4: E-signature generation failure

What to Do With the Results

If your numbers are clean — or close enough that the gaps are explained by deliberate disqualifications — your pipeline is in good shape. The next step is putting monitoring in place so you catch any future failures immediately rather than during the next audit.

If you find significant gaps, you have two options. The first is to investigate and fix the specific failure points yourself, which requires technical resources and time. The second is to bring in someone to rebuild the affected parts of your pipeline with proper logging and retry infrastructure.

Either way, the audit gives you the information you need to act. Running a campaign without knowing these numbers is the equivalent of running ads without tracking conversions — you're spending money with no visibility into whether it's working.

The Faster Version: The Intake Integrity Diagnostic

If pulling these numbers manually sounds time-consuming — or if you're not sure where to find them in your current setup — the Intake Integrity Diagnostic below walks through the same framework as a structured questionnaire.

It asks 20 questions across five categories, takes about five minutes, and gives you an immediate score showing where your pipeline is strong and where it's vulnerable. It's designed to be completed by the attorney or office manager, not a technical person.

The results are emailed to you with a breakdown of your two highest-risk areas and specific recommendations for each.