Legal Intake Process Design: How To Start A Legal Intake

Every firm’s legal intake process is different, which makes it a difficult topic to write about. Generally speaking, the more specific advice is, the more useful it is. But the bulk of a legal intake is so unique to your firm that it’s difficult to give advice that really fits what your firm needs.

We’ve spent years performing legal intakes for thousands of law firms here at Answering Legal, so we consider ourselves legal intake experts. And even though it might be difficult to give specific advice about the middle of the legal intake process, there’s plenty we can say about the beginning and the end of it.

Each of the law firms we answer for has a unique and custom legal intake process, but there’s a lot of overlap at the beginning and the end of the legal intake. While it might not seem as important, there’s plenty of opportunity for optimization and improvement to your firm’s conversion rate. In the first part of this two-part blog, we’ll cover how to improve the beginning of your legal intakes, and in a followup post we’ll give some advice about the end of the process.

The Goal Of Your Legal Intake Process

Whenever we give advice on the Answering Legal blog, we like to show you where we’re headed. In this case, it’s important to know the goals of the beginning of your legal intake so that you can better understand how to improve it.

For the purposes of this blog, the beginning of a legal intake involves greeting the caller, getting their contact information, and answering any immediate questions they may have before moving on to getting information on their case. Though simple, these steps in the process should accomplish many goals:

• Your client should feel comfortable and welcome at your firm.
• You should always be displaying your firm’s expertise and professionalism.
• Make sure that if there’s a disconnection you can call the lead back.
• Set up the next parts of the process for success.
• Leverage your technology to better understand where your leads are and help them complete their journey to client.

Sounds like a lot, right? Well, even more incredibly, all of that can happen in less than thirty seconds! An effective beginning to the legal intake process could involve fewer than fifty words, which makes each of those words incredibly important.

We’ll discuss each of those goals throughout the rest of this blog, but we’ll take a moment here to discuss technology.

Clio’s 2024 Legal Trends Report found that firms using technology in their intake process to enhance client experiences had 51 percent more leads and 52 percent more revenue than those that did not.

It seems like a no-brainer, then, to involve technology in your intake process where appropriate. While in this blog we’ll only be discussing phone conversations, there are plenty of other kinds of legal intake, and bringing in webforms and calendars can make those much more efficient. In terms of phone intakes, technology’s involvement is fairly simple: make sure that your intake specialist is entering all of the information they gather into a form that will connect directly with your CRM. Doing so will eliminate data entry and even a lot of human error, saving you so much time on the backend without making your intake process any more complex.

Greeting Your Callers

The first step, of course, is to welcome the caller to your firm. It’s often as simple as saying “Thank you for calling Big Red Law Firm, how can I help you today?” But just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s any less important. After all, it’s your first impression, so you have to make it count.

The most important part of the greeting is making sure the caller knows who they’ve dialed right away. It might not seem obvious, but the standard “law office” greeting is demoralizing to hear when you have a legal issue. They’ve likely picked your name out of a long list of law firms; maybe you’re not even the first firm they’ve called today!

That’s why making your greeting unique to your firm is so important. Just the reassurance that they’re speaking to the law firm they called is enough to get many callers feeling much more relaxed and welcome at your law firm.

Of course, tone is important as well. Even though most people going through legal trouble aren’t likely to feel too sunny about it, a friendly but professional demeanor can be contagious. Your intake specialists should always be empathetic, however, and respond to someone’s tone with the correct tone of their own. Nervous callers could use a steady voice on the other line, while upset or angry callers

Gathering Contact Information

Nothing ruins your chances of getting a caller’s business like a dropped call. While your intake specialist is probably handling a call from their desk or over VoIP, your callers can be anywhere. In many cases, they’ll be in their cars on their way to or from work; if they go through a dead zone or a tunnel, they’re going to lose you, and feel like they’ve lost any progress they’ve made toward solving their legal issue.

That’s why it’s important to get a callback number as soon as possible, especially for law firms. Legal intakes can take a few minutes, and a callback number will make sure that if something happens, you can pick up where you left off. Sure, it seems a lot like you’re calling the cable company, but there’s a reason why call centers do it: it increases client satisfaction.

When your intake specialist calls a lead back after a dropped call, you’re likely to have secured their business right there. That single action means that you actually care about their case, and will go a long way for your callers. You can gather other information like addresses or emails later, once you’re gathering case information, but you should always get a callback number first.

Addressing Specific Inquiries

Before you actually perform a legal intake, you have to make sure that the caller actually wants to hire you. Sometimes, though, callers have a few questions before they will give the information you need to perform a legal intake.

Even though you might not actually secure the lead, it’s important to answer these questions.

In the 2024 Legal Trends Report, fewer law firms were providing information requested by callers than in 2019.

That drop, in some categories by as much as 40 percent, led to a significant drop in caller satisfaction. Those callers who didn’t get the information they were requesting were much more likely to become detractors of your firm.

Now, obviously we’re not suggesting that your intake specialists should offer legal advice. Rather, they should be answering questions about how your firm handles legal matters. You should especially be answering inquiries about your experience with cases similar to the ones callers are dealing with. Remember, conveying your expertise is an important goal of this process!

Invest In Legal Intake Solutions For The Next Steps

Once you’ve answered any top-level questions the caller might have, you’re ready to bring them into the next step of the process: getting the details of their case. As we discussed, this part of the process is very specific to your practice area and even the way you run your firm, but we have written about how to prepare for it in a blog here.

Of course, this blog assumes that you have a dedicated intake staff. If you don’t have dedicated intake staff, we have a great blog on how to train your receptionists to specialize in legal intake here.

If you’re performing these legal intakes yourself or need specialized intake help, we think you might benefit from outsourced legal intake: a legal intake answering service like Answering Legal. Spending your time handling your own phones is just not an efficient way to run your firm; after all, you didn’t go to law school to spend all day performing legal intakes! But since the intake is your firm’s first impression, we believe specialized training is important to making it as effective as possible for our law firm customers. To read more about how our receptionists handle legal intake, click here for an in-depth look.

In our next post , we’ll be covering the end of the legal intake process: discussing next steps, data management, and following up. Stay tuned to the Answering Legal blog for more legal intake advice!

Build the most efficient and effective legal intake process possible for your firm. 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.