Attribution models, explained for law firms

Ask two marketing tools which channel brought you a case and you can get two different answers. Neither one is lying. They are just using different attribution models, and most reports never tell you which one is running underneath the number.

For a law firm, that matters more than it sounds. A signed case rarely comes from a single click. Someone sees your firm in an AI answer, reads a page a week later, calls after a friend mentions you, then signs a month after that. Attribution is the attempt to assign credit across that path. The model you choose decides who gets the credit.

Here are the four you will run into most, in plain terms.

First touch

First touch gives all the credit to the very first interaction: the AI answer, the search result, the referral link that started the whole thing.

It answers one question well: what introduces people to your firm? If you want to know which channels fill the top of your funnel, first touch is honest about that. Its blind spot is the finish. It cannot tell you what actually turned an introduction into a signed matter.

Last touch

Last touch is the opposite. All the credit goes to the final interaction before the person became a lead, usually the click or call right before intake.

This is the default in most analytics tools, which is exactly why so many firms overvalue whatever sits at the end of the path. Last touch makes your brand-name searches and your “call now” buttons look like heroes, when really they were just the last step of a journey that started somewhere else entirely.

Linear

Linear splits the credit evenly across every touch on the path. First AI answer, blog post, referral, branded search: each gets an equal share.

It is fairer than the single-touch models because it admits the whole path mattered. The tradeoff is that it treats a throwaway visit and a decisive one as equals, which they rarely are.

Time decay

Time decay gives more credit to the interactions closer to the moment someone became a lead, and less to the earliest ones. A touch last week counts for more than a touch three months ago.

For firms with long consideration cycles, this often feels closest to reality. It respects that the recent nudges do heavy lifting, without erasing the channels that started the relationship.

Why one number lies

Here is the practical point. If you only ever see one attribution number, you are seeing your marketing through one of these lenses without knowing which, and you are making budget decisions on it.

Run the same firm’s data through first touch and it looks like content and AI search drive everything. Run it through last touch and it looks like branded search and direct calls do. Both are true. Both are incomplete. The channels that *start* cases and the channels that *close* them are usually not the same, and a single model will always flatter one at the expense of the other.

This is why Scout Recon shows the models side by side instead of picking one for you. You see how credit shifts as you change the lens, which tells you something no single number can: where cases begin, where they get won, and which channels you would wrongly cut if you trusted only the last click. We report all of it in rates and proportions, never as dollars we claim to have earned you.

If you want the version of this that starts from the funnel rather than the model, our sister guide on which marketing actually starts cases covers it from the firm-owner’s side.

Attribution is not about finding one perfect number. It is about seeing the whole path clearly enough to spend where the cases are. Book a demo and we will walk you through your own funnel across every model.