You Know Your CPA. Do You Know Your Cost Per Completed Claimant?

I talk to plaintiff firms every week who can quote their cost per acquired claimant down to the penny. $340 on Meta. $510 on paid search. $185 from an affiliate channel they found last quarter. They have spreadsheets. They have dashboards. They have arguments about whether TikTok is worth testing.

Then I ask a different question: what does it cost you to get a signed claimant from "retained" to "release executed and threshold met"?

Silence. Almost every time.

That number, the cost per completed claimant, is the one that actually determines whether your matter makes money. And almost nobody models it.

The Acquisition Illusion

Here is a scenario I see constantly. A firm signs 8,000 claimants on a consumer mass arb matter. The blended CPA is $400. Total acquisition spend: $3.2 million. The settlement agreement requires 85% of claimants to execute releases within 180 days. The fee is 33% of a $6,000 average recovery per claimant.

On paper, the math is beautiful. Gross fees of roughly $15.8 million against $3.2 million in marketing. The partners nod.

But then the release campaign starts. And the firm discovers something uncomfortable: getting 6,800 of those 8,000 people to open an email, verify their identity, and sign a release is not an acquisition problem. It is an entirely different discipline, with its own cost structure, its own failure modes, and its own timeline.

Where Completion Cost Hides

Most firms do not have a line item called "completion cost." Instead, the expense is scattered across four or five buckets that nobody rolls up into a single number:

• Claims administrator fees. Legacy administrators charge $20 to $25 per claimant. On 8,000 claimants, that is $160,000 to $200,000 before a single release is signed. And that fee typically covers a limited number of outreach attempts, often one mailed notice and one or two emails.
• Supplemental outreach. When the initial campaign stalls at 55% completion (which it almost always does), the firm starts paying for additional touches. SMS campaigns, call centers, skip tracing for bad addresses. Each round is a new invoice.
• Internal labor. Paralegals fielding claimant calls. Associates reviewing exception cases. Someone on staff updating spreadsheets because the admin's dashboard does not integrate with the firm's case management system.
• Time cost of capital. If the matter is funded, every month past the projected completion date costs real money. A funder charging 15% to 20% annualized on a $3.2 million advance does not care that your admin only sends mail once a month.

Roll all of that up and divide by the number of claimants who actually complete, and the cost per completed claimant on a typical matter is often $35 to $55. On a poorly run campaign, I have seen it north of $80.

The Threshold Math Nobody Does

Here is where it gets interesting. That 85% release threshold is not a formality. It is the binary switch between "you get paid" and "you do not get paid." And the last 10% of claimants needed to cross the threshold are dramatically more expensive to reach than the first 75%.

Think about it as a response curve. The first wave of outreach captures the easy responders, the people who open email, recognize the matter, and sign quickly. By week four, you have picked the low-hanging fruit. The remaining claimants are people who changed phone numbers, ignore unknown emails, are skeptical of the legitimacy of the outreach, or simply do not check their mail.

Each successive outreach attempt to reach those remaining claimants costs roughly the same to send but converts at a fraction of the rate. Your effective cost per incremental completed claimant rises on a curve. The 6,000th completed claimant might cost you $15 in outreach. The 6,800th might cost you $120.

This is the math that matters, and it is invisible if you are only looking at per-claimant admin fees on the front end.

Why Legacy Admins Cannot Fix This

The structural problem is incentive alignment. A legacy claims administrator charges per claimant at engagement, collects the fee regardless of completion rate, and has every reason to minimize the number of outreach touches. Every additional SMS, every follow-up call, every re-sent document package is a cost against their margin.

When your admin is licensing five different tools (e-signature from one vendor, SMS from another, email delivery from a third, ID verification from a fourth, a call center from a fifth), each incremental touch carries a real marginal cost that comes out of their profit. The rational business decision for the admin is to send the contractually required minimum number of touches and call it a day.

Your incentive is the opposite. You need 85%. They need to keep their costs down. That misalignment is baked into the business model, and no amount of "we care about completion" marketing copy changes it.

What a Completion-First Model Actually Looks Like

The firms I work with who have figured this out share a few characteristics:

1. They model cost per completed claimant before they sign the settlement agreement. Not after. Before. They stress-test at 70%, 80%, and 90% completion and know exactly where their break-even is.
2. They demand threshold-aligned billing from their administrator. If the admin does not get paid until the firm hits its release threshold, the admin's incentive flips overnight. Suddenly every additional outreach touch is an investment in getting paid, not a cost against margin.
3. They choose administrators who own their outreach stack. When your admin built native document signing, SMS delivery, email, branded caller ID, and AI-powered claimant inquiry handling into a single platform, the marginal cost of the twelfth outreach attempt is nearly zero. That changes the entire calculus of persistence.
4. They treat completion as a funnel, not an announcement. The best-run campaigns I see have 12 to 20 touch points over 180 days, across multiple channels, with escalating urgency. They look more like a well-run sales sequence than a legal notice.

I am biased here. I built GroupSettle specifically around this thesis: that owning the full stack (native document signing first, then SMS and email, then our AI super agent that handles over 80% of claimant inquiries on its own) means persistence costs almost nothing at the margin. That is why we can charge $11.99 per signed claimant and bill on a threshold-aligned model. The economics only work because we are not paying five vendors for every touch.

The Monday Morning Exercise

Pull up your current mass arb matters. For each one, answer three questions:

1. What is your release threshold percentage, and what is your current completion rate?
2. What have you spent, all in, on administration, supplemental outreach, internal labor, and time cost of capital to reach that completion rate?
3. Divide that total by the number of claimants who have actually completed. That is your real cost per completed claimant.

If the number surprises you, you are not alone. Most firms have never calculated it. But it is the single most important unit economic in your mass arb practice, because it is the number that sits between your acquisition spend and your fee.

Your CPA tells you what it costs to find a claimant. Your cost per completed claimant tells you what it costs to get paid.