Legal Intake Process Design: How To End A Legal Intake

Last time on the Answering Legal blog, we went deep on the beginning of a legal intake. We covered everything that happens in a phone intake before you start getting the details about the caller’s case: the greeting, collecting personal information, and answering initial questions.

As we mentioned in that blog, we can’t give specific advice about the bulk of the legal intake; too much of it depends on your firm and on what kind of law you practice. And since advice is more useful the more specific it is, this week we’re going to give specific advice about how to handle the end of your legal intakes.

In this blog, we’ll be covering the discussion of what comes next after all of a caller’s information is taken down, what you should do with that information, and the follow up process. Through all of this, we’ll be emphasizing the importance of automation. After all, for most attorneys, time is money!

Ending The Legal Intake Process

For the purposes of this blog, a legal intake doesn’t end until you’ve followed up with that caller and tried to secure their business. Everything that comes after the caller’s description of their legal issue, from the end of the call to managing the data in your CRM, is part of this process. It might seem like an expansive definition, but the best way to reduce leaks in your caller-to-client pipeline is to take the whole pipeline into account.

As always, we’ll start by identifying the goals of this stage of the process:

• Make the information you’ve gathered available when you need it.
• Give the caller the experience they’re looking for.
• Eliminate human error.
• Use time management tools to reduce the attorney’s lift.

It might seem like we’re missing a goal. After all, isn’t the point here to secure more clients for your firm? Of course it is! All together, achieving these goals will increase the number of callers you’re able to turn into clients. Find out how below.

Discussing Next Steps

To introduce this part of the legal intake process, we want to ask you one question: what’s the number one thing people calling lawyers want? The answer should be obvious: They want to feel like they’ve made progress toward solving their legal issue.

No matter what practice area you work in, people aren’t usually calling you because things are going well in their lives. Legal consumers are stressed out, and at the end of a call with a lawyer, they want to know what comes next. Are they on their way to peace of mind, or do they have to keep calling law firms? Shockingly, however, very few attorneys are actually providing them with this information:

In Clio’s 2024 Legal Trends Report, they found that only 36 percent of firms they spoke to provided information on what comes next for the caller.

This is a mismatch in expectations that comes from being on the other side of the lawyer/legal layperson divide. However, as usual, your competition’s failure provides you, the reader, with an opportunity. By ensuring that at the end of every call, your legal intake team is thorough in discussing next steps with the caller, you’ll be vastly increasing your caller-to-client conversion rate.

This can lead to complications, of course. They’re not technically your client yet, after all. If you’re delegating your legal intake (as you should, which we’ll discuss later in this blog), you’re going to want an opportunity to review the case and make sure it’s right for your firm. Your intake team should avoid promises other than that you’ll be getting back to them as soon as possible.

Most often, however, this process won’t be complicated. Callers want to know what comes next. A simple “the attorney will call you as soon as possible to discuss your case” will get you there a majority of the time. Any extra information you can provide will of course help ensure this caller waits patiently for a follow up. Rate information, digital calendar pages, or even educational materials describing your process will each help improve your conversion rate.

Data Management

For this step, let’s imagine everything is going well. Your marketing is paying off, your phones are ringing off the hook, and your legal intakes are securing all the information you need. Great news, of course. The bad news: if your CRM isn’t well organized, none of what just happened above really matters.

Managing all that data is essentially a full-time job, and not one you have time to worry about. Luckily for you, however, a little work up front can really set you up for success where data management is concerned.

To eliminate as much human error as possible, your intake team should be entering data into your CRM as they take calls. This can be done via direct entry, of course, but setting up forms that send information to your CRM immediately is just as effective and can be easier for your busy intake team to manage if your CRM is complex.

You want all of the caller’s personal information and case data, of course, so that you can evaluate the best fits for your firm and secure their business. Just as important, however, is tracking marketing information, like how they heard of you or where they found your phone number. Luckily, call tracking software can make that easy by providing dedicated numbers to determine the source of your phone calls, and it’s just a matter of making sure your CRM can identify and correctly classify those sources.

When you put all this together, what you’ll have is a well-oiled caller-to-client conversion machine. All of this data will make it easy to identify which cases are the best for your firm and follow up on them. The big picture, though, is that collecting this data will make it possible to better identify your ideal client profile and tailor your marketing efforts to ensure you’re targeting them as much as possible, thus ensuring your phone will keep ringing and your firm will keep growing.

Following Up

We have an issue: We’ve come to the end of the legal intake process, and the person who called still isn’t your client! Well, this is the part where that happens, and if you’ve followed our advice, both in this blog and in its predecessor, you’re very likely to end up with a signed representation agreement.

You’ve identified a client as a good fit for your firm. You want to take on their case. When should you call them to secure their business? The consensus: as soon as possible.

Clio’s 2019 Legal Trends Report found that callers expect a return call within 24 hours of leaving a voicemail.

They didn’t leave a voicemail, of course, they spoke to your legal intake team. Still, even though legal issues have varying levels of urgency, they all feel urgent to your prospective client. The sooner you call them back, the better your chances of securing their business.

There are, of course, ways to automate this process. You can send out e-sign documents like representation agreements via email or text message, or scheduling links for consultation appointments, whether they’re online or in-person. But the most successful way to make a caller a client is to call them back. They called a law firm to speak to a lawyer, after all. Sometimes it’s the only thing that will keep them from calling another law firm.

This presents a problem. As a law firm owner, you have a lot of demands on your time. The demands on an attorney, namely, serving your clients by practicing the law on their behalf, have to be balanced with the demands of a business owner. Since most law firms don’t have a sales department, that means you have to handle this yourself. And the best way to do that is to schedule it.

As often as you possibly can, you should put “follow-up time” on your calendar. Even if it’s just a half hour every day, it will go a long way toward upping your caller-to-client conversion rate. Putting it on your calendar means you won’t be pressured to take calls at all hours, but will still have a reminder that will make sure this task doesn’t get neglected. Each of these calls should only take a few minutes. All you have to say is that you’re going to take their case and let them know what comes next!

Make Answering Legal Your Legal Intake Solution

Once you’ve spoken to a caller and secured their business, their journey through your legal intake process is done, and their journey as your client begins. From there on, your legal work takes top priority. Don’t neglect their experience, however, as their reviews of your law firm will help inform future clients’ opinions.

The best way to ensure that along every step of those journeys your clients are happy is to give them 24/7 support, and the best way to do that is to hire Answering Legal.

Answering Legal will be your dedicated legal intake and client experience specialists. Our receptionists spend months training to answer exclusively for lawyers, a process you can read about here. We built our service to be compatible with your law firm, meaning we’re fully customizable and even integrate with your CRM so you can automate your incoming phone calls and bring your whole caller-to-client pipeline into the 21st century.

Secure more new clients than ever before, for free. Click here or call 631-686-9700 to sign up for our free trial. For a limited time, we’re offering firms that sign up for our service their first 400 minutes free.