Your Signed Claimant Is Not a Filed Claimant. That Gap Is Eating Your Budget.

You ran the ads. You paid for intake. You got the retainer signed. And then somewhere between that signature and the actual filing at AAA or JAMS, a chunk of your claimants vanished.

Not dramatically. Nobody called to fire you. They just stopped responding. Stopped uploading the ID verification document. Stopped returning the call about the supplemental declaration. Stopped existing as a viable filed claim.

Every plaintiff firm I talk to knows their cost per signed claimant. Almost none of them track their cost per filed claimant. And that number is the only one that matters, because AAA does not care how many retainers are in your CRM. The release threshold in your settlement agreement does not count signatures. It counts completed, filed, verified claims.

The Attrition Nobody Models

Here is what typically happens on a consumer mass arbitration matter with 5,000 signed claimants and a blended CPA of $800 per signed retainer. That is $4 million in acquisition spend. Respectable. Defensible in a budget meeting.

But between signing and filing, you lose claimants at three distinct points:

1. Document collection failure. You need ID verification, proof of purchase, or a supplemental declaration. Somewhere between 8 and 15 percent of signed claimants never complete this step, because nobody follows up persistently enough or the process requires too many clicks.
2. Eligibility fallout. On closer review, some claimants do not actually meet the arbitration clause criteria, signed a different version of the terms of service, or fall outside the relevant time period. This is typically 3 to 8 percent, depending on how tight your intake screening was.
3. Communication decay. Claimants who signed three weeks ago simply stop engaging. They changed their phone number. They moved. They forgot what this was about. Another 5 to 12 percent.

Add those up and you are looking at 15 to 30 percent attrition between signed and filed. On a 5,000-claimant matter, that means 750 to 1,500 claimants who cost you $800 each and will never generate a dollar in recovery.

Your real cost per filed claimant is not $800. It is $940 to $1,140. On the full portfolio, that is $600,000 to $1.7 million in acquisition spend that produced nothing.

Why This Matters More Than Your CPA

The firms that are building durable mass arb practices have figured out something simple: the metric that predicts profitability is not cost per signed claimant. It is cost per filed claimant divided by expected per-claimant recovery.

If your settlement model assumes $1,500 per claimant in recovery and your fee is 33 percent, you are working with roughly $500 in fees per filed claimant. If your cost per filed claimant is $1,100 after attrition, you are underwater before you even account for admin fees, filing fees, or the cost of capital over a 12-to-18 month lifecycle.

The math only works when you either push CPA down (harder every quarter as more firms compete for the same claimant pools) or push the signed-to-filed conversion rate up. The second option is almost always cheaper and more controllable. But it requires you to actually measure it.

Where the Conversion Rate Breaks

I have seen the same failure pattern across dozens of matters. The signed retainer happens on a landing page or through a call center. It feels like the finish line. The firm's marketing team celebrates the number. Then the file gets handed to a paralegal or a third-party administrator, and the claimant enters a completely different experience.

Suddenly the communication cadence drops. The channels change. The claimant signed on their phone via SMS, and now they are getting emails they do not open. Or they are asked to download an app, create an account, and upload a photo of their driver's license through a portal that was designed for class action notice compliance, not for converting a warm lead into a filed arbitration demand.

Three things kill conversion between signed and filed:

• Channel mismatch. If the claimant signed via text, keep talking to them via text. If they signed on a call, follow up on the phone. Switching channels mid-funnel is the single biggest source of drop-off.
• Friction in document collection. Every additional login, every redirect to a third-party portal, every "please check your email" message costs you 5 to 10 percent of the remaining pool. Native document signing (where the claimant can review, sign, and upload ID in the same thread they used to sign the retainer) compresses this to one interaction instead of three.
• No persistence model. Most firms send one follow-up. Maybe two. The claimant who ignores you on day three might respond on day fourteen if you show up again with a clear, simple ask. But legacy admin platforms treat each outreach touch as a cost center, so they minimize touches to protect their own margin.

The Fix Is Operational, Not Strategic

You do not need a new strategy. You need a better funnel between signed and filed. Specifically:

Measure the gap. Pull your last three matters. Count signed claimants versus filed claimants. If you do not have that number, that is the first problem. You cannot optimize what you do not track.

Keep the channel consistent. If your acquisition funnel is SMS-first (and in 2026, for consumer mass arb, it should be), then your post-signing completion workflow should also be SMS-first. Same number. Same thread. Same experience for the claimant.

Compress the document collection window. The data is clear: claimants who complete ID verification and supplemental documents within 48 hours of signing have a filed-claimant conversion rate above 90 percent. Claimants who are still outstanding at day seven drop below 60 percent. At day fourteen, below 40 percent. Front-load the ask.

Build persistence into the economics. If your administrator charges per touch or marks up every SMS, you will naturally limit follow-up to protect your budget. That is rational behavior that produces irrational outcomes. The firms hitting 85-plus percent signed-to-filed conversion are the ones whose outreach cost structure allows ten or fifteen touches over 30 days without blowing up the per-claimant cost line.

What This Looks Like in Practice

On a recent matter, a firm came to us with 3,200 signed claimants and a CPA of $750. They assumed they would file all 3,200. When we audited the roster, 2,400 had complete documentation. The other 800 were in various states of incomplete: missing ID, unsigned supplemental declaration, unverified email address.

We ran a 21-day completion campaign through the same SMS channel the claimants originally signed through. Native document signing, so the claimant could tap a link, review the document, sign it, and upload a photo of their ID without leaving the text thread. The AI super agent handled the 80-plus percent of inbound questions ("What is this about again?" "Is this legitimate?" "Do I need to do anything else?") so the firm's team could focus on the edge cases.

Final filed count: 3,040. That is a 95 percent signed-to-filed rate. The 160 claimants who never converted were genuinely unreachable (disconnected numbers, bounced across every channel). The firm's effective cost per filed claimant dropped from the $1,000-plus it would have been with 800 unfiled claimants down to $789.

That $211 difference, multiplied across 3,200 claimants, is $675,000 in recovered acquisition spend. Not new revenue. Recovered spend. Money they had already committed that would have produced nothing.

The Number to Watch

If you take one thing from this: add "signed-to-filed conversion rate" to your matter dashboard. Track it weekly during the first 30 days after signing. If it drops below 80 percent at day 30, you have a completion problem that no amount of additional ad spend will fix.

The firms that treat claimant acquisition as a funnel that ends at the retainer signature are leaving money on the table. The ones that treat it as a funnel that ends at the filed arbitration demand are the ones building practices that compound.

Signed is not filed. Filed is not completed. Completed is not collected. Each conversion point has a rate, and each rate has a cost. Know your numbers at every stage, and the business model starts to look very different.