Ask a managing partner what it costs to sign a case and you will get a confident answer. Ask what it costs to decline one and the room goes quiet.
The declined cases are where the money goes. A firm reviewing 300 intakes to sign 40 spends the overwhelming majority of its review capacity on the 260 it turns away, and unlike the signed cases, that spend never gets recovered.
The arithmetic nobody runs
Take a category where full review runs about twenty attorney-hours: reading a compiled medical record, building a chronology, checking SOL exposure across the relevant states, forming a view on causation.
At 300 intakes, that is 6,000 hours. Roughly 5,200 of them are spent on cases the firm declines. Whatever you load that hour at, multiply it out. The number is larger than most firms' entire marketing spend for the same period, and it appears nowhere in the budget because it is distributed across salaried staff who are "just doing intake."
Why firms do not fix it by being pickier
The obvious response is to decline faster on thinner information. Most firms have tried it, and it fails in a specific way: the cases that are cheapest to evaluate are not the cases that are least valuable. A thin file often means missing records, not a weak claim. Screening on file completeness systematically discards good cases and keeps well-documented mediocre ones.
The second failure mode is inconsistency. When review is compressed under volume pressure, the standard drifts: case 200 gets judged differently from case 20, and nobody can reconstruct why either landed where it did.
Order of operations
The change that matters is not making review faster. It is making the cheap checks happen first.
Statute of limitations exposure, jurisdiction, MDL eligibility, and category weight are all resolvable from intake data alone, before anyone opens a record. In most categories they dispose of a meaningful share of intakes on their own. A time-barred case should never consume a review hour, and today it routinely consumes twenty.
Only after the procedural bars clear is it worth spending on substantive review (causation, severity, liability), and that review should produce a structured, comparable output rather than a memo whose reasoning evaporates the moment the author moves on.
What "45 minutes" actually means
When we say a case can be qualified in 45 minutes rather than 20 hours, the compression is not in the judgment. It is in the reading: the record structuring, the chronology assembly, the gap-flagging, the coding. Those are mechanical, and they are where the nineteen hours live.
The judgment stays with the attorney. It just arrives at a structured record with the evidence cited to page and paragraph, and, critically, judged against the same standard as every other case in the portfolio.