How Growing Law Firms Lose Clients & Why Your Intake Strategy Must Evolve

Welcome back to The Legal Intake Experts podcast! For more than a decade, Answering Legal has helped growing law firms ensure they never miss a chance to connect with new leads. Now, we’re pulling back the curtain to share our best strategies for strengthening your intake process and turning more callers into clients.

In our 10th episode, hosts Nick Werker and Tony Prieto discuss ways that law firms can handle growth effectively through optimized intake processes. The show makes the move into more advanced intake topics, focusing on the importance of setting up processes for scaling. Nick and Tony highlight how firms can prevent squandered investments by using answering services and proper CRM setups.

Check out the episode below. You can also enjoy it on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

The Legal Intake Experts is part of the Answering Legal podcast network. Interested in learning more about Answering Legal? Click here to learn more about 400 minute free trial!

Check out the previous episode of The Legal Intake Experts here!

This podcast is produced and edited by Joe Galotti. You can reach Joe via email at [email protected].

Episode Transcript:

Nick Werker (Co-Host): We are back once again on the Legal Intake Experts Podcast presented by Answering Legal. That is less of a tongue twister than I've been doing it. I'm joined as always by my co-host and top 10 favorite person in the world, Tony Prieto.

Tony Prieto (Co-Host): That is a high bar to clear.

Nick: It's not though.

Tony: You don't know a lot of people, okay.

Nick: I would say I'm not big fans of a lot of people.

Tony: Gotcha, gotcha.

Nick: Although, I do like people, but I would just say you're in my top 10.

Tony: Well, I mean, I'm glad you're feeling better this morning. You were kind of down, but I guess you got that second coffee, right? Because I know that you cut back on energy drinks.

Nick: Yes, this is true. My last vice, my last vice in the world, I decided because I don't know how bad they are, and they feel very good. But like, I think if you do anything like that in excess, it's not good. I don't know. I don't know. It's my New Year's Resolution. I usually don't do New Year's Resolutions, but I'm going to see how long I can go without energy drinks. I don't want to never drink an energy drink again. I think it's fine. It's whatever. It's modern science. It's cool. But I am, because I started my New Year's Resolution on the fifth, because that is the day that I rejoined society and showed up again to work. And so now it is just coffee.

Tony: I myself, I'm trying to cut down on screen time. I read 40 books last year, and I'm not trying to up that number. The number isn't so much as important as the fact that I was reading so much, but I think that I can do better than that. I have an average of three, four hours on my phone right now. I'm trying to get that down to one, one and a half.

Nick: I should focus on that too. But so you know this about me. So I used to be a big sleep with the TV on person, and I don't know what happened to me, but I stopped being able to sleep with the TV on. Well, I do know what happened to me. My wife hated it and made me want to quit it. So I started watching videos or podcasts on my phone at night on YouTube or something, and I started falling asleep to them. And so now if I put something on on my phone, I fall asleep to it. But it plays for God only knows how long before Nick in his sleep turns it off. So my screen time is elevated by a YouTube thing being, I know, and you told me I should get YouTube premium. But then does that count towards my screen time?

Tony: It doesn't. If your screen's off, it doesn't count towards your screen time. You can also set a sleep timer, you know, that will turn your phone screen off if there's no activity after a while. I used to do that as well, but now what I do is I stay up a little bit later in terms of going to bed, but I read a book on the couch until I get tired and then I go to bed. That's my solution to that problem.

Nick: I should do it in the reverse order, like turn my phone on to the sleep, do not disturb mode that I have, and then read until... I could be one of those TV people that falls asleep with a book. Do you do that? Do you fall asleep with the book open?

Tony: No, usually it hits my face because of the way that I read, kind of laying down. So if I fall asleep with the book, it hits my face, wakes me up, and then I know that it's time to go to bed.

Nick: I'm like one of those old, like I read like this in bed. I can't, I don't know. Yeah, is that what you're doing? Like this?

Tony: Because I'm on the couch, so I'm kind of... And the bigger books, I do have to hold up, you know. I just finished 800 page monstrosity, so...

Nick: Of what?

Tony: It was Gravity's Rainbow.

Nick: I just ordered, you probably already have read this, but Infinite Jest, I am going to start.

Tony: That's a big one, I'm going to reread. My goal is to reread that one this year, so...

Nick: We can do that at the same time. Okay, listen, I could do this forever with you, and we're probably going to do this later, so enough personal lives, even though I feel like everybody knows everything about me. What's on our docket today?

Tony: So this is officially our 10th episode, and I think that means that it's time to level up in the topics we're discussing, so let's move on to some more advanced intake topics.

Nick: When you said that, I don't know why, but I just pictured me and you as Mario and Luigi eating like the Super Nintendo orange and red polka dot mushroom and leveling up. What do you have in mind? Because that's what I had in mind.

Tony: Yeah, our mega mushroom today is going to be about growth. A lot of law firms right now, maybe you've invested in your firm and it's the new year and things are paying off. You're seeing a real increase in new business. The problem is that if you aren't set up to handle that growth, you can squander a lot of the investment you've put into your firm. And so today, I think what we want to talk about is how to make sure you are not squandering that investment. Of course, by maximizing on your intake process.

Nick: Yeah, this is fun. You just gave me an idea. So one of my favorite things that we do is, well, this is like a weird gray area for me as a person and as like someone who works here. Law firms will contact us for like a few reasons. It's not an unlimited number of reasons, right? It's they have experienced growth, and they want to make sure that they're capturing this growth, or maybe they are trying to grow, and they know like, oh, if I grow, I need to make sure that I'm capturing the growth. So they're a little bit more anticipatory. What's that? If you're reactive, as opposed to…

Tony: Proactive.

Nick: Thank you, proactive approach, and there's usually like kind of no middle ground except for people that are just like, oh, I'm tired of answering phone calls, or like I had a staff member quit. Those will be like reactionary approaches to different things, but I do always appreciate somebody who's like proactive about their growth, and like, I just hired this agency, you know, like I used to do this, I used to do referrals only or I had my

cases appointed to me or something like that. I'm just starting out on my own. I love that sort of thing. So what sort of processes work in the earlier days of a firm that need to be revisited as you experience like a bunch of growth?

Tony: Yeah, we've talked about a bunch of these things. Let's say that your primary way of gathering web leads is a web form, super common. You know, the web form goes into your CRM and you have some automation set up. But here's the thing is that if you're the only person, let's say that it's a small law firm of you, maybe your partner, the only people who can go through, verify those leads, call, you know, call have have someone call them whatever it is. There's going to be bottlenecks, right? So in that situation, web forms, for example, if you're the only person who's going through qualifying those leads, that is fine when you're dealing with 10 leads a day. You can get knock that out in one hour. But once you get up to, let's say, you 10 exit 100 leads a day, that sounds great, right? From a perspective of, wow, I mean, there's so many clients to choose from, I could start turning away things that don't exactly fit what I'm looking for. If you're the only person who's doing that analysis, you're in trouble. And so there's lots of ways that you can solve those problems. But we should talk about how it's so easy when you've set up something that works for you to try and scale that. And so sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes when you reach a new milestone, as we have here at this podcast, you need to change what you're doing. Start from scratch, basically. And that could be scary. But in a lot of ways, for example, if you're looking to grow your firm and things start coming in and your CRM just isn't built to handle it, well, maybe it's time to upgrade to get a better CRM, etc.

Nick: A lot of times, the firms that we work with will come to us. And it's like what you were saying and what I was saying before, right? They've done things by themselves for so long that they know how to do it, but they don't necessarily have it documented or outlined or written down. Let's just say it's not written down somewhere, but you can take written down as whatever you interpret that in your firm to reflect. So somebody will call us like a usually like a solo practitioner or somebody who's just hired somebody, something like that. And we will go through the process of onboarding them. Here's how we're going to answer your calls. What type of cases do you handle? This way we can get an understanding of their firm and who's calling. Do judges call you? Do insurance suggestors call you? Do jails call you? And we set up different lines and protocols for each of those things. But invariably, I would say, let's not put a number on it. Some of the time, we will ask the law firm owner or whoever the representative of the firm is, what do you want us to ask new clients or potential new clients on the phone as it pertains to their case? What's like your script? How do you go through this flow? So I can imagine, because they can't answer those questions with documentation, they're like, oh, I would like to know this, I would like to know, oh, and sometimes I ask them this, because it depends on this, and we can do that with logic and flow based on what we fill out. But say you're trying to hire an intake specialist for your firm, which is always a good idea, regardless of whether or not you have an answering service, because the answering service will capture the lead, but the intake specialist can really take them through and all that, and you hire them, and you don't have a plan. You just give them a phone and say, like, oh, when they call in, ask them this, this, this, this, and this, and this is what we do. But you haven't given them documentation or how it works for you or your experience with other clients and what they're looking for and what you're trying to answer. So I would say get super regimented about the scenarios that you're in, and listen to your successful phone calls. You can go, I hope you're recording your phone calls, but you can go and outline the flow of a phone call with your typical wanted case and say, okay, this is how I answer the phone in this manner because this represents who I am as a person. They were like, oh, I'm calling because XYZ, great. Can you tell me a little bit more about this? Oh, here's how we usually handle this. How did you hear about us? And then ask them, I could go on forever and ever, right? But if you don't have that outline for a person that you're trying to hire or outsource to, you are abdicating the control that you're looking for.

Tony: Yeah, and you're wasting your investment, right? Let's say you hire an intake specialist. We talked about this, an SDR, Sales Development Representative.

Nick: Yeah.

Tony: Right? An intake specialist is essentially that, right? Intake being sales. Their job is to communicate with the lead, qualify them, and make sure that they stick with your firm. Now, our answering service can do some of those things, but what it really ends up doing is you set up a system whereby we ask the questions you need. We identify what kind of client this is. If you really want to, we can transfer them to you. But if you just want to review the message, it's on you. You review the message, you see what the intake said, and you say, okay, this is a qualified lead. I'm going to call them back, see if I can turn them into a client. If you hire an intake specialist and that is what they're doing, you haven't actually saved yourself any time. You're still the one who is looking at every lead, analyzing whether or not they're qualified. And so in that scenario where you hire an intake specialist, you need to make sure that you've set up criteria so that they can tell, okay, this is a person who's worth our time. This is what we're looking for.

It might seem like a little bit of a nuance, right? Something that doesn't matter on the face of things. And that might be true, again, when you're dealing with 10 phone calls a day. But once you scale up to 50, 100 phone calls a day, that 30 seconds of reviewing every lead is going to save you so much time. And it's something that you are basically already paying for if you've hired something like an intake specialist.

Nick: I'm not a business owner. I do have my, is it fingers and a lot of pies? Or hands and a lot of, oh, irons and a lot of fires. Because I have friends, I think I talked to you about this, or maybe I was talking to Cassidy Lewis about this. But I'm at the age now where my friends are starting businesses and they ask me to help them or consult or write a quote for a thing that they're working on. And when you just said, oh, if you're dealing with 10 phone calls a day, I just, I'm what I would consider to be an empathic person and I'm very able to put myself in other people's shoes, which often comes to my own detriment because it's not, I can't ever really blame somebody for something because I'm like, oh, but I understand why. Regardless, I just pictured myself as like a lawyer, like trying to do quick books and like escrow accounts and serve my existing clientele. And on top of that, have to handle 10 phone call inquiries a day. I just, I don't know if that's even realistic, right? But just imagine 10 phone calls a day with no help trying, they say entrepreneurship is tough and I'm sure people like me look at entrepreneurs more like, oh, you guys, you make money and then, you know, you do this and you do that and you don't work for anybody. But like, it's seriously, like with no help, 10 phone calls a day for one person, I think is a lot.

Tony: Well, that's the thing, right? Hopefully you have help. Hopefully you are, let's say you have a receptionist, you have an answering service, but there are ways that you can, even if you have these tools, expand on your intake when your firm is ready to level up. So, you would think we are sitting here telling you, get an answering service, don't worry about your internal intake team. That's not what we're talking about, right?

Like if you are looking to go, like you could think of an answering service, like Answering Legal, as like a support network for your firm. If you are just one attorney and you don't have any help, then that support network is a lifeline. That way you don't have to take 10 phone calls a day yourself, right? Let's say three of those are qualified leads. Well, then that's only three phone calls you need to make, right? You review all the messages, you can see three of them are qualified leads, you call them back, and hopefully you turn, you know, one and a half of them into clients. But once you're expanding past that, right, you have receptionist, that doesn't mean that the answering service is superfluous. In fact, you know, we can support them. And it goes even further, right? So if you, let's say, are growing your firm, you know, you and your partner, you each have a receptionist and, you know, there's an associate running around in there, and suddenly you are making a big investment into your marketing, what's going to

happen is what you, your partner, two receptionists and the associate are set up to handle, is going to be easily exceeded. And even if you hire an answering service, you're still, like we said, going to be the one who has to, you're going to be, unless you set up the right systems, you're still going to be overloaded. And so you can expand your internal intake team with something like an intake specialist. And if you set up the right processes, what you'll find is that like very successful law firms, growing law firms, again, you do end up taking on a lot of a business owner, CEO type role, even though you still do practice the law.

Nick: I've been doing this a long time. There's a few things that always, like I'm inside our CRM, right? And so I can't listen to every single conversation that our account managers and executives have with clients and agencies and partners and everything, right? I sort of exist in a world where I analyze numbers and then I speak to people.

I listen to phone calls sometimes, and then I have my own interactions with the law firm owners that we do business with. But you just reminded me of something that I think is a weird misunderstanding of an answering service and also your intake for law firms. So I'll lay this out for you, right? You know this. There is a field that we have for like prospects, law firm owners who decide not to go with our service. And that field will be called like the reason that they didn't go with us, and it will be features not offered, right?

And I won't sit here and say that we offer every single feature out there, because right now we don't offer like AI voice, we don't offer an IVR. And some of those are purposeful choices. But one of the things that we don't offer is taking payment over the phone. And I used to, because I was younger and didn't have like the foresight, I would be like, oh, that's so easy. Like we could just put payment processors in our thing or like login to people's portals and take the payment for lawyers over the phone. And then I realized that that doesn't make any sense for us to do. Because think about what you're really asking of us, and really what you're asking of your intake team. And I know that my friend Robert Williams, I should start sending him these because like I'll talk to him in an email, and he's like, no, I haven't watched. I'm like, but I shouted you out. He's like, I appreciate it. I gotta go watch. He is the one who pointed me out to like a really good flow. It is, say a web form comes in, it's an inquiry. Do I have a case? Then somebody from your team will speak to that person briefly, and decide whether or not it's a, they'll decide if it's a want to lead based on the form, right? Or maybe they'll reject it. They'll speak to them and they'll say, okay, it's an intake qualified lead. And on the intake call, the next step is to book an attorney, jeez, book an attorney, book a call with the attorney, right? It could be the associate, the trial lawyer or the law firm owner. It depends on your specific case. And the law firm owner or that person is the one who decides whether or not it's an attorney qualified lead and whether or not you offer them the agreement to sign with you. So, how many steps are you skipping to try and get your answering service to just collect a credit card, right? You're not accounting for the fact that intake is sales and that you aren't looking at whether or not you actually want that case. You're just going to blindly send this person. Like, I understand maybe at the conclusion, right? Like, say the case is over and you sent them an invoice and they call you and you want us to collect that. That's a totally different thing. I'm talking about law firm owners, law firm owners who…

Tony: Accent slipped out.

Nick: Yeah, right? I just... Like, you're skipping over this whole part of intake, right? Where you're providing them information or, like, empathy about their case or convincing them that you're even the right firm to do it. You were saying all that and I was like, oh my God, I know this exact situation because I've dealt with it.

Tony: It used to be very normal to give your payment information over the phone. Now, if I'm asked to do that, I'm very suspicious. But obviously, I'm a little bit younger, perhaps younger, might be younger than the clientele you might be dealing with. Still, it's at the point now with online portals and such where it can be as simple as, okay, well, how do I pay? Oh, don't worry. Once we hang up this phone call, I'm going to send a link to your phone, tap the link, sign in to the portal, scan your credit card, you don't even have to enter the information, and boom, you're done, right? That is one of the coolest things that phones can do is just scan the credit card and put in all the information without you even having to type it in. And you can take advantage of things like that because those are natively built in to an iPhone. You don't even have, you know, your payment portal probably has a feature to make use of that. Anyway, it's sort of the wrong tool for a job that needs to be done, obviously, but like it would be like trying to, you know, if you have a Phillips head screw and all you have is a flat head screwdriver, sure, you could try and make do, but why not

Nick: Yeah, I'll tell you this as a closing parting gift. Dude, all of my terminology is gone. I would like everybody to know that where I am, it is 1:58 p.m. And I just drank this entire thing full of coffee, and it is not the first one of the day, and I still can't remember any words.

Tony: Maybe you do need the energy drinks.

Nick: Don't say that. So I tell the story often of when I started here in sales. It's just so one of those things where you get a little bit older and you realize how stupid you were as a younger person. But I just remember being on the phone with law firm owners and being trained by our sales manager and the owner that we would... This is like say I were to have a successful sale, which was very few and far between. I'm just not a pushy person. I'm just a good talker. So usually, you would have to know you were ready to have an answering service because I wasn't going to be able to be like, but here's why. I don't know. I feel like this, I'm the person that we're talking to, right? So I'm really talking to myself that sales is not a bad thing. You're trying to help the person. But I didn't know that back then. But I would during the sign up and customization portion of the phone call, I would say things like, because I was just mimicking what other people said, when do you want us to try and patch you into a new client call? And I would not finish that sentence without adding, because you are the person, as I'm sure you are aware, who has the most likelihood to turn that potential caller into an actual paying client. And nobody ever disagreed with me, but nobody ever told me that I was so right, because someone who's calling your firm is not calling to speak to an answering service. They are not calling to speak to your intake specialist. They're not calling to speak to anybody, but you, they need to speak to a lawyer. They are willing to accept the fact that they need to be qualified in order to get to that step, because everybody kind of knows that, right? Right. The closing of that person is going to be up to hearing from the lawyer or the person who's going to handle their case or their matter or whatever we're talking about and having the confidence to say, okay, I believe in what you're saying. Let's move forward.

Tony: Yeah. Unfortunately, that's the person who is most, shall we say, qualified to qualify and seal the deal on that lead is also the person whose time is just literally money. And so by setting up these steps, you ultimately are going to have to be the person who shakes the hand and says, yeah, welcome, we're going to do that.

But that's kind of also part of why you became an attorney is to be able to see this person's like, I'm going to help you help resolve their issue. And the money is no object either. But the whole point of the structures we're talking about is to try and make it so that your role as the attorney is just that final, okay, let's do it and handshake and seal the deal. Because that's the part that honestly takes the least time. And it's the part that you are necessary for. Because maybe you can answer the phone. This is something we're going to be saying a lot during the lifetime of this podcast. You can answer the phone. You can qualify a lead. Are you the best possible person to be doing those things? No. Not because your skill set doesn't match it. Maybe it does. But because you have more important things to do with your time. More important might not be the right word. Things that only you can do. Whereas you can hire someone or hire an answering service to handle the qualification and the intake.

Nick: Pro, pro, pro, pro, pro tip. If your CRM offers lead scoring capabilities, you can attach like a point system to intake questions. And if a person answers yes, no, like a yes is a plus one, a no is not a plus one, and then you see all the leads come in, and you need to be strategic with your time and call back people, you can see who has the highest score. Call them first. Talking to you HubSpot, talking to my boy Robert Williams. But yeah, we got to go, we got to wrap up.

Tony: Well, hopefully, in this new year, if you want to grow your firm, if you're happy where you are, then all the power to you. But as you start to grow your firm, there's going to be issues you can face, and you're going to face. And one of the problems is that with anything in life, is that it is so much easier to solve a problem once you've faced it yourself, no matter how much advice you get. Until you face it yourself, sometimes you don't even recognize you're in that position until you're there. But when you recognize you're there, we here at Answering Legal will be here to take your call and set up an answering service to make sure that you are capturing all of the leads that you can.

Nick: You are so wise and so smooth. So thank you, Tony, and a special thank you to all of our listeners.

Tony: Yes, and if you would like to participate in our free trial, you can go to answeringlegal.com, learn more about our receptionist service, and click the link in the bio. You get 400 minutes free.

Nick: Be sure to join us for the next episode of The Legal Intake Experts. All episodes of the show can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and the Answering Legal YouTube channel.

Tony: We'll see you next time.