Stop Sabotaging Your Law Firm: Nick & Tony's State of Legal Intake Address

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 seventh episode, hosts Nick Werker and Tony Prieto deliver their first annual State of Legal Intake address. They stress the importance of investing in legal intake processes, especially as law firms often cut costs in this area to save minimal amounts of money. Nick and Tony also explore how law firms’ adoption of technology and AI has evolved and offer insights into how focusing on client experience and intake can lead to better conversion rates and overall success.

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. Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Legal Intake Expert podcast. I am Nick Werker. Joined always by my co-host Tony Prieto. Now, you might notice that today's episode has a bit of a different tone. We usually kick things off with a few laughs, some off-the-wall stories, and maybe a tangent or two, which I am currently doing. Um, or three or four, but not today.

Tony Prieto (Co-Host): We've got too much to talk about today. It's almost the end of the year terrifyingly and Nick and I have a few important things to get off our chests. So, this is going to be our first annual state of legal intake address.

Nick: That's right. And this is my fault. We were just having a conversation with Chris early. That episode will air before this one. And why is this my fault is because I am a knowledge worker, which means that I do not ever stop thinking about all of these things. Even when I go home, I think about my team. I think about legal marketing. I think about how I can affect more change. And I had this realization that the number one problem that Tony and I face in our line of work is that attorneys and law firm owners are so incredibly price focused about what we specifically do, the answering service. They will focus on saving like a hundred to $200 a month by cutting specific questions or patching phone calls or like any time that they could cut down that uh our receptionist spends on the phone with their customer, they're going to look to do it. And I just think that that is the most insane thing in the world that you would cut.

I'm going to stop. I'm going to stop. We're not there yet.

Tony: This is why this is why we're here, right? So, it's very easy. A law firm is a business. We always say that to look at your bottom line and try to find places to cut. And here, but here's the thing is if you cut on intake, you will feel it in your bottom line, right? It's one of those it's it's it's very similar to marketing in that way where because, you know, as we often say, intake is sales. Without sales, your marketing just isn't going to work. So, you know, if you're cutting $10,000 off your marketing budget, you're not going to expect to get the same kind of results. Obviously, if you're cutting $100, $200 off your intake budget, you cannot expect to get the same results.

Nick: It's now my mission for the next undeterminable amount of time to convince law firms the same way that we used to convince law firms that needing an answering service is table stakes, needing a CRM is table stakes. And a lot of law firms have made that shift. But you need to invest in your intake. I'm gonna break this table. My hands are squeezing this table. Okay. So, let's let's we're going to get into this, right? I have been now in the space of of legal services, legal tech, CRM, all of that for 11 years.

I am approaching middle age and I have seen so much change and in fact I like to tell stories to the rest of my team who have not been doing this as long as me that uh Clio was once not the behemoth that it currently is. I remember the owner of Lexicata calling us up. they want to integrate and then like a few months later like Lexicata sells to Clio and then Clio buys other products and then there's like consolidation of power with Afinipe in my case and Lay and all that right but like we've seen that education actually works on law firms it used to be that people would would come on like a podcast or write a blog post they'd be like lawyers refused to do this lawyer it's not true lawyers adopted CRM they adopted answering services they adopted tech they adopted AI they're actually… Tony, can you school me here on how far ahead lawyers are in adopting AI as opposed to like other uh business professionals? Cuz I know we we talk about this, but you know the number.

Tony: I believe it's something like the general populace about 40% are are positive or neutral. Not positive or neutral. You know, on these on these surveys, there's always five questions and the the top two are positive, mostly positive, and then neutral, whatever. In the bottom half of it, right, negative and mostly negative and totally negative, or rather the other way around. In the top half, the general public is about 40% gung-ho about AI. For lawyers, it's closer to 70% in adoption. uh Clio uh put out this year the uh Clio Legal Trends Report of 2025 and it is almost entirely AI focused. Last year they had a whole chapter dedicated to AI. This year it's basically the entire report and what they found was that law firms contrary to expectations where law firms as Nick's saying at the beginning of Nick's storied career in the legal tech space law firms were very slow to adopt technology. that has changed whether it's the pandemic whether it's that AI the promise of AI lawyers are now at the basically the forefront in terms of of as an industry in terms of adopting AI the problem is that they are still looking to do everything as economically let's say as possible but the problem is that uh in this life you get what you pay for and uh if you are paying less for your intake, right?

Like if you're and this is going this is going to sound self- serving and it you know obviously it is a little self- serving. Uh our job is to sell an answering service to lawyers. However, the reality of the situation is that when you cut costs in you you you cannot cut costs and can maintain the same results. It's easy to cut costs on intake because it doesn't feel as important as marketing, right? It's easy to say, "Okay, well, you know, if I have a 100 leads, uh I I'm not going to cut my marketing by 10% because then I'll get 90 leads, but I can cut my intake by 10%." Because, you know, I'll convert 10% leads, but because it it won't be like a direct one to one, but it will be a direct one to one if not more than that reduction in your conversion, right?

Nick: Yes. What I am trying to illustrate is that I have so much faith in law firm owners that we can actually educate them and convince them of exactly what you're talking about because here's what happened is co hit and I will give you the exact or not the exact I will give you a very short synopsis of what happened here at answering legal and and how we tried to help law firms. The large majority of law firms dealt with court shutdowns and a slowing of, you know, people reaching out to firms because I mean, what was really going on besides you staying inside? What we saw was we were one of the first things to get cut. So lawyers would call us up and be like, "We're not going to pay for this because we don't have the same call volume because everything is shut down and there's so much uncertainty." We were like, "Cool. You don't have to cancel. We'll just not bill you."

And I think in the end we gave away a few hundred thousand dollars worth of free service during the shutdown portion of COVID. And I remember like I'm the marketing guy, right? And I knew we were giving away service for free. I knew that we were improving our offer to help law firms during this time. But I admittedly spend a lot of time with the family that owns this business, family-owned business, and we live close to each other, and I remember I'm talking to the owner, and he's, "Yeah, you know, like so far we've given away x amount." And my jaw ch kind of dropped. And I just go, "Why didn't you tell me that so that I can like make that public and make a press release about that, about how helpful we're being?" and he was like, I didn't want to like brag or like come off as I don't know, out of touch or something like that. I guess he's very like concerned about spirituality in that sense. So, I saw this like slowdown and and lawyers were quick to cut things and I think we're experiencing that right now, right? Where the GDP numbers just came out and it's not looking so good and law firms are being more economical about their choices. However, this is not to say that I think you should call me and pay XYZ amount for your intake. This is not to say that I think you should wire your intake team or hire more intake team. I think all of these things need to be approached individualistically and assessed by you about your specific firm. But do not let fear force you to create a decision that you will pay for later.

I recently had a good conversation with Ron Latz about this who's a fractional CMO legal Phoenix. We're going to plug that. And he talks to law firm owners about their marketing investment. The thing that I spoke to him most about was the reason people reach out to a fractional CMO is that they're concerned that the people who are doing their marketing are not doing a good job. And maybe they can't articulate why, but they have certain suspicions that like the leads aren't converting and they're not making as much money as they should be. um maybe there's so many leads and they're all unqualified or something like that, right? And Ron as like a fractional CMO, you would think would be like, "Oh, well, this content is wrong and this SEO is wrong." And really, he doesn't do that. What he does is looks at your firm. And he's like, we have a large conversation about what you're doing with those leads, how you're communicating with that marketing company. And my my illustration I'm trying to make here is that like law firm owners are quick to just go like no cut that no more marketing. This marketing is bad marketing. When really it's how does your intake look? Uh what's your client experience like? What are your reviews look like? Are you getting reviews? Like are you focusing on the right things? It's kind of operations in that in that standpoint.

The thing that I see most often, I'll just go to a recent conversation that I had with a law firm runner where this person was, I'll just say unhappy or critical of the current process that we had in place for answering their phones because some customers had stated that they had to answer too many questions in order to like speak to the attorney. And he was like very quick to cut those questions. And I would like to challenge you to think about why you're going to cut those questions or whether or not you can tell that caller or prospect why you're asking those questions, right? Because maybe they don't understand why you're asking that question and they think it's a waste of time when really it's not.

Tony: When you spend money on a business, right, you could think of it as an expense. it goes into your sheet as an expense, but it's a little bit different when that expense will pay you back later, right? If you're running a a restaurant and you invest in a bigger kitchen, right? You expand your kitchen because you're expanding the whole restaurant. Yes, expanding the kitchen is an expense, but it's going to allow you to serve more customers faster. It's going to get you better reviews because people aren't waiting as long for their food. It's easy to think of marketing in the same way. When I spend money on marketing, I get more leads. More leads means more money. Intake, for whatever reason, doesn't have that same investment level of seriousness for law firms. And what we're saying here is that it should, right?

If you are spending whatever you're spending on on intake is an investment in your firm because because the more effective, the more efficient your intake is, the more clients you're going to secure. And as such, you know, it feels like an expense when you're looking at the balance sheet. It feels, man, okay, this is an easy place to cut because, you know, this seems like a luxury, but really when you if you were to sit down and think about it, it's the opposite of an expense. It it makes you money. It's an investment. And and when you when you cut those investments, you end up with with diminishing performance, which means that like when you spend that money, you're putting money into your business so that you can get more money out at the end. And it really doesn't end up costing you nearly as much as you might think.

Nick: You know, I'm a big stories guy. The the new story, and I'm not I'm going to be non-specific about this because I have friends who might watch this, but Tony, you know exactly the reference that I'm going to make. I have a very good friend who owns a small business and it's been struggling for a few years since co and it is one of those businesses that you must go to in person. It's a local business. Recently he has been talking about closing this place and the reason being that during co he took on a bunch of debt and wasn't able to pay it back and like I know this person. I know they are a good business person. I know that they do a really good job. However, as somebody who does this every day for a very long time, I it it's very obvious to me to look at a situation and to look at like a business and a law firm and be able to diagnose things pretty quickly, especially as an outsider. I know I have a good experience at this place because I am educated enough to know how to take advantage of what they offer. I know other people don't have a good experience at this place because they haven't been educated on the benefits that you're going to get over time and what the ideology actually represents and gives to them as opposed to a cheaper and more less specialized. Yes, an independent approach. Very good. Less specialized. I also can end with that this business owner is uh a sort of like a wait around and like expect good things to happen because they do ultimately have a good product. But this mismatch of outreach, like community outreach and marketing and engagement, and this lack of education to the people who actually walk through the door, I think are the two biggest holes because I know for certain that this person relies a lot on legacy, like a legacy of of of the thing that he's involved in.

And I always encourage people, especially law firm owners, you have to do it all. And especially when you are the visionary and the leader of your firm, even if you're a solo, right? You're responsible at the end of the day. The buck stops with you about your marketing. The buck stops with you about your intake and how your phones are handled. It starts it stops with you about the client experience. And so you can't just focus on one and eradicate the other. You can't say, "Oh, well, my marketing was good and uh the client intake was really good and so now I'm this person's lawyer." And then not communicate with them and then they have a terrible experience and leave you a bad Google review. Um, you can't not do any marketing, get very few leads and then like point to anything else as the reason why your business isn't growing the way that you want it to. You have to do it all and you have to be responsible for it all.

Tony: We talk about results specifically like conversion rate because it is a number that we can point to that says when you improve your intake, your conversion rate goes up. As your conversion rate goes up, so grows your firm, right? And it's true, right? Like you can see intake as I spend $1,000 a month on intake and you know depending on what kind of law firm you run, right? Like if you're if you do uh estates like wills, you're a volume business. You need a you need high volume, which means that you need a lot of calls to come in in order to justify your intake. But if you're not a volume business, right, if you're if you're doing personal injury and you're waiting for that that diamond in the rough, that $10 million case, all it takes is that one case that you might have missed and that intake is going to pay for itself for the year, right?

But it's not just about that. Like Nick Nick was saying, like intake is your first impression. It's it's how you educate your prospective clients about your process. Intake is basically everything from the first time they contact you until they sign a representation agreement. And that process, improving that process is not just going to make you more money in terms in the raw numbers of conversion rate. It's also going to make that client have a better time at your firm. It's going to make them more likely to review you. As we just talked with Chris Earley, if you watch that episode, he talks about how important reviews are. It makes that person more likely to recommend you to their family members and friends. And that right there is not just an investment in one case. It is an investment in the entire lifespan of your firm. Like the more reviews you get, the more people you have who are going to say, "Oh, you know that Nick worker, he's a good attorney. you if you get into a traffic uh accident, you know, if you get injured, call Nick Worker. That is an investment that is going to be difficult to measure, which is what makes it really easy to cut. But that doesn't mean that it isn't real. It just means that like you need to do some real calculus to figure out what the exact pay payback, what the exact return on your investment for intake will be.

Nick: Or you don't have to go that far at all and you can just understand that everything you do affects your brand and your reputation and the way that people want to work with you. And this is why I, as a marketer, absolutely hate attribution and lead capture and first touch, last touch. I hate it so much because at the end of the day, all of the things that we do in marketing affect whether or not we're attractive like we were just talking about. But I want to talk because you're talking about investments and we are supposed to be talking about uh cutting your legal intake investment. I'm shocked mostly at the dollar value that lawyers are trying to cut when working with like an answering service, right? You can work with an AI receptionist, you can work with an answering service, you can do whatever. And then people will be like, I'm really interested in your minimum plan. And I'm like, well, do you know that you need the minimum plan? You know what I'm saying? So, what is the investment that attorneys can expect to make in their intake?

Tony: It depends obviously on what you're what you're going for. And like I said, the more you spend, the more you're going to get out of it. The biggest firms in the country can afford to have their own private personal call centers essentially where you call their phone number no matter what hour and there's going to be a receptionist available right away to answer the phone. Most law firms are not going to be able to afford that. But what that means is that you're at a disadvantage with those those law firms, right? Like I always think of Morgan and Morgan, a law firm that is, you know, the biggest in the country. They can put billboards all across the country. And what they have is an intake team that is hundreds of people all at all hours ready to answer the phone. Very difficult for you to get that. And if you were to try to achieve that as a smaller law firm, you would probably bankrupt yourself.

But there are other solutions that will cost much less. for example, answering legal that would provide you the same level of support while allowing you to spend a little bit less. Now, we aren't a perfect replacement for an in-house receptionist. Obviously, someone who's in your corner 24 hours a day would be expensive, but would would give the the caller the exact, you know, they'd be speaking to someone in your office, but you know, not to tutor on home. We're pretty damn close.

Nick: Here's the thing that I really enjoy about what we do is, and this is something that I keep trying to educate law firms on. If you go to our website right now and you are interested in an answering service and you try to sign up, all you're doing is letting us know that you want to sign up, we have what I like to call a consultative approach where you're not going to tell me what you want. You're going to tell me about your business and I'm going to make some suggestions about what I think will help you most. And what I really really want to do is so like for so long we spent so much time convincing lawyers that answering the phone is like the most important thing in the world which it is.

Tony: And yet last year they found that only 40% of law firms picked up the phone.

Nick: Insane. Abundance mindset right buddy we largely did that. I think we affect the change. Lawyers know how important it is to actually provide a live receptionist when someone reaches out to their firm. What I don't think we did a good job of, because I'm a big self finger pointer, is explain to law firms how legitimately talented we are at following your instructions. We get on the phone and we can ask the client name, number, message, what happened, what type of case, whatever, right? And then you get that message and you're like, "Oh, this person's qualified. I'll call them back and have a uh I don't know, a case evaluation with them or consultation. I know lawyers hate consultations." Or you can just really briefly call that person back and be like, "Hey, we don't handle this type of case. We're happy to refer you to X, Y, and Z. Hopefully, you have your referral partnerships handled. If not, call my friend Delisi Friday."

What I want to talk about is the fact that after we've asked this client questions, we can tell them how your firm plans on handling the process by which they hire you. You can tell us like, "Oh, okay. Here's exactly what's going to happen right now. You've just called our initial receptionist team. We just wanted you to have a good experience and let you know that we're here for you and that if we feel that we can handle your case, here's what's going to happen. We are going to call you, do a free case evaluation, find out more information, and we're going to send you a retainer agreement whereby I'm now your representative, and we're going to come up with a strategy to help you and explain to you how we're going to communicate with you, what kind of thing you can expect. Like maybe you're using uh one of those cool like pizza tracker apps and we tell them like, "Oh, here's what's going to happen. We're going to like send you a link. You're going to sign in and then you're going to see like all the steps of everything that you need while you go over with like your case." You know what I mean? Like we can tell these people that and and lawyers are like, "No, just get name, number, message, and hang up because I don't want the bill to go up." But we're talking about like what's the most that we cost? $3 a minute. You're trying to save like $3 a minute when how long is that going to take for me to do that on the phone? Two more minutes. You're talking about $6 for you to provide a better experience for your caller to make them more likely to want to work with you because they understand the process that they're going to go for. Am I that's I that's as simple as I can put it.

Tony: And that's the thing is that imagine right someone has a case. If they call your law firm and you speak to them and they tell you how they want their case handled, you're going to think that person is nuts because you know you're the expert, right? But you charge by the hour. They want their case handled Xway because it will require fewer six-minute increments and produce the same result. That's not true, right? like you you aren't out there to scam people, right, as an attorney. You're out there to provide a service hopefully and help someone solve a legal issue and it's going to take as many six-minute increments as it's going to take to solve this problem.

But if someone comes in and says, "Yeah, I don't want to go over this many hours." You're going to say that that person is not a right fit for your law firm. Very politely. Uh but in your head, you're going to think that they have no idea what they're talking about. And that's not how we feel about our customers at all. However, it does sort of, you know, you're a legal expert. We're going to say this a lot throughout the course of this podcast. We're legal intake experts. And so when you as when as a law firm, whatever your intake is, right, you know your firm better than than we do. And so we will listen to your firm and use our 13 years of experience, our hundreds of thousands of of hours, millions of calls answered to try and build exactly the intake process that will get you more business to help your business succeed because we're in the business of helping you succeed. Right?

The more your law firm succeeds, the more you're going to invest in your marketing. More people will call us and then we and then you'll say, "Hey, you know what? Maybe I need more intake. We're not in the business of scamming people because it's not a long-term view. And obviously, people have had negative impressions of call centers answering services just like people have negative call impressions of lawyers, right? There's going to be some people who call you expecting uh Saul Goodman, you know, a criminal attorney as they said. And um and you have to sort of break through those expectations. Uh, we have the same same issue and we do that by providing a stellar service.

Nick: I only watched like the first two or three seasons of Saul Goodman, but didn't he end up being a good lawyer.

Tony: No, I'm talking about I'm talking about Breaking Bad Saul Goodman.

Nick: Oh, okay. Okay. Okay.

Tony: That very first when when when Jesse Pinkman says, "You're a criminal. You need a criminal attorney." And they go to to Saul Goodman.

Nick: Yep.

Tony: And he's like begging them to put a dollar in his pocket because now they're they're protected by attorney client.

Nick: That's right. Oh my god. Okay. Do the thing that you know I hate. How long ago was Breaking Bad?

Tony: Uh the finale was in 2013. So the episode I'm talking about was 17 years ago.

Nick: Tony does this thing to me all the time where we'll be talking about something like this and he'll be like, "Can you believe that was like 17 years ago?" And I'm like, "No, I can't, Tony."

Tony: That episode of Breaking Bad is almost old enough to vote.

Nick: That is absolutely disgusting. They're actually trying to lower the age required to vote. So, if they do, it is already old enough to vote. Anyway, here's my bottom line is I care very much about law firms. I care very much about their success. I care very much about lawyers because I think they do some of the best and hardest and most difficult work to help people when they are in serious serious problems. So I want them to succeed. So I encourage you find it in your operations and your business planning to figure out the best way to help people more because ultimately I know that's what you care about. That's what I care about. And so like if you get that solution somewhere else, I'm so happy. If I could provide any sort of education to encourage you to invest more in your client experience and your intake, I'm so happy. That being said, I do think that we over here at Answerinal do a pretty good job of that. And I hope to talk to you about it. You can email me at nickansweringlegal.com. And if you call the company phone number and you ask for me, I will most likely take your call. I'm not going to put my cell phone out there like Chris Earley does because of the same reason that you said before because I get about nine spam calls a day and I leave my phone on do not disturb anyway. So if you call me it's not going to work. But yeah, answeringlegal.com [email protected]. I'd love to talk to you about this stuff.

Tony: We do this show because we genuinely believe that law firms are dropping the ball on intake and that if they were to improve that through any means at all, right? Whether a hiring answer is illegal or not, it will be a genuine improvement for the industry at large. And if you want to be cynical and like you know everything it's as my 10th grade uh chemistry teacher said, money makes the world go around. Yeah, of course. uh we're looking to like harp on the the uh importance of intake because it's our job to market this intake solution to lawyers, but like also we don't care what intake solution you get. Because the more you care about your intake, the more you're going to tell your colleagues and your fellow attorneys about, oh wow, you really need care about your intake and turn my law firm around. And all of that will be a net gain for the entire industry of legal industry, legal tech, it takes intake solutions like us. And so we talked a lot more about Answering Legal in this episode than we normally do. That's just because we believe in ourselves as an intake solution. And so we want to let you know that you can get a free trial of Answering Legal if you go to answeringlegal.com or click in the link in the bio of this episode to get a 400 minute free trial of the service.

Nick: I want to end with one parting thought. I think the mission of every law firm owner is a little bit different, right? You have different values, but the mission of every law firm owner is to help people who are in a really tough situation. And that the mission of us Answering Legal is to help facilitate people who are in tough situations having a good experience with a lawyer and getting the help that they need. And that when I boil it down after I get home from the rat race and the stress and the data and the and and and all of it, I sleep pretty good knowing that we're able to in some way affect that. That's hopefully the end game of of all of us involved in the legal space is to make sure that people like who are reaching out to lawyers who are probably having one of the worst days of their lives just get a little bit of comfort. And you know, even if it's if if it's, you know, an ounce, every time that happens when someone calls one of our customers, that all adds up to to a ton by the end of the year. You know, also what we're talking about is like preventing you from losing the ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

I'm going to stop now. Be sure to check out the next episode of Legal Intake Experts and other episodes on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and the answer legal YouTube channel. We will see you next time, everyone.