Case Types

Case types are the kinds of cases your firm accepts: Family Law / Divorce, Criminal Defense / DUI, Estate Planning. Every lead and case gets one, and the type carries a surprising amount of machinery: stages, default pricing, trust requirements, and deadline rules all hang off it. The same list appears under both Leads and Cases in Settings.

What a Case Type Defines

• Category and Subcategory: the practice area and the specific kind of case within it (Family Law / Adoption).
• Code (required): a short code used when generating case numbers and codes for cases of this type.
• Average Value: what a typical case of this type is worth. This seeds the estimated value on new leads, so your pipeline numbers mean something even before a fee agreement exists.
• Retainer: the default retainer requested for this type.
• Min Trust: the minimum trust balance for this type; open cases use it to warn when client funds run low.
• Rate Type: how this type is normally billed, whether Hourly, Flat Fee, or Contingency (the row icon reflects it). See Fee arrangements.
• Paid Consult?: overrides the firm-wide paid-consultation default from Lead Settings for this type only.
• Stages: the ordered stages a case of this type moves through, shown as the stage flow at the top of every case page.

The list also counts each type’s deadline rules (managed on the Deadline Rules page) and how many leads and cases currently use it.

Your Numbers, per Type

Ever wonder what an average divorce actually costs? The Stats column answers it from your own data: usable cases, average and median cost, total billed, total paid, and the recovery ratio (billed versus actually collected), so you can see whether a type of case is losing you money. Inside the editor, a Price Plot charts the total cost of every case of the type, drawing from your open, closed, withdrawn, pending, and on-hold cases.

How many times has a client asked “how much will this cost?” Without firm flat fees, the answer is usually either “It Depends” or “somewhere between X and Y.” The Price Plot puts real numbers behind that conversation: you can see the spread of what cases of this type have actually cost and quote a range you can stand behind.

The plot is also how you spot a flat-fee candidate. When the points bunch tightly, that service is a good one to price as a flat fee. For example, a strong grouping around the $1,000 to $2,000 mark says a $1,200 flat fee would fit a case like this well. A wide, scattered spread says the opposite: the work varies too much to price as a single fee.

Importing Case Type Packs

Instead of building types by hand, Import Case Type Packs: pick the areas of law your firm practices and Outlaw offers ready-made category/subcategory sets. Each pack entry can create a new case type or map onto one you already have.