Stop Spending More On Marketing Until You Watch This – Featuring Ron Latz

Welcome to Episode 16 of 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.

After being called out by our experts in a recent episode, Ron Latz (Founder of LegalFenix) joins the show to set the record straight. Ron, Nick Werker and Tony Prieto break down how call tracking and intake audits can reveal missed opportunities, why law firms should focus on what happens after the phone rings and how better systems can help firms maximize the value of leads that are already being generated. They also explore common agency transparency issues and expose some of the ways "bad actors" in the marketing space take advantage of law firms.

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

About our guest:

Ron Latz is the Founder of LegalFenix, a marketing advisory firm redefining how law firms approach growth. With more than 15 years in the legal marketing industry, Ron has guided countless firms through the complexities of modern marketing with clarity and candor.

Known for his vendor-neutral stance and results-driven approach, he helps law firms align strategy with execution, optimize budgets, and rebuild trust in their marketing partnerships. Whether he’s decoding agency jargon, demystifying performance reports, or designing a blueprint for sustainable growth, Ron’s mission is to give law firms the clarity and confidence they need to win.

Learn more about Ron's company here!

Connect with Ron on LinkedIn here!

Want more of Ron Latz? Check out his recent appearance on our Everything Except The Law podcast!

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:

We are back once again on the Legal Intake Experts Podcast, presented by Answering Legal. I am Nick Werker, joined as always by my co-host, Tony Prieto, and today on the show, we have a third host. This is not a guest, this is a host.

All right.

Well, yeah, we recently, I wouldn't say, we recently featured the thoughts, this individual, our third host here on our show, and we figured we would have him in to defend his LinkedIn posts.

I don't know that we, I don't know that we disagreed with it so much, but yeah, we got to weigh in on his thoughts. It's fair that we let him come and respond to, you know, I don't remember if we were mean. I doubt we were mean, but…

No.

No, right?

Not mean, it was a legitimate call out. I didn't provide as much context as could have been helpful to the individuals that might be reading the post, but Tony pointed it out and-

And now that we're here, we can be mean because now we can say it to your face.

Oh, geez. Here we go. Well, for anybody who's not watching this on YouTube, our good friend Ron Latz of LegalFenix is here. Thanks for joining us, Ron, and putting us back in our place.

So I'm going to reread the post so we can get into it. So Ron, you said, one of the most underutilized marketing optimization tool at most law firms, call recordings.

Before increasing your budget, before switching agencies, before redesigning or rebuilding your website and making that logo 10 times bigger, audit intake, I think I laughed at that last time too.

If prospects are calling and not converting, the problem isn't marketing. It tends to be what happens after the marketing is already working.

Firms that crush aren't just generating leads, they're borderline obsessive about what happens on that first call.

These recordings help identify gaps, can be used as coaching tools, and help build a team that makes every PNC feel like they called exactly the right place. Your marketing drives awareness and creates opportunities. Intake is what decides whether you capitalize on it.

Additional marketing spend isn't your biggest lever, it's your people.

Yeah, this post is definitely speaking our language. And we wanted to start by asking, what inspired this take on reviewing your intake? What in your experience brought that to mind?

First and foremost, I want to thank both of you gents for having me back on. I really appreciate all the work that you both do in the industry, sharing a lot of industry insights and pointing people in the right direction to focus on this area. And that's one of the reasons why I also tried to highlight it in my posts on LinkedIn, because I do think it's critical.

I share that, Tony, because a lot of firms will either automatically default to thinking that there is a marketing problem or that there is a lead problem where they have to diversify channels and go into other types of advertising, where if they were just capitalizing more on the current opportunities or at-bats that they were getting, they would essentially be increasing their marketing budget and their marketing performance anyway.

And what you had eluded to in, I forget what the segment is called, where you're going through all the different LinkedIn posts, but you called out that you do need to have some sort of call tracking in place in order to then audit, recall recordings to identify said gaps, issues or concerns, so then you could improve performance.

So I'm in the position here in which our team is managing the spend and ensuring that they've got a healthy marketing mix and we've got diversified efforts. But one of the things that we also have oversight on is taking a look at intake, monitoring things like CallRail or WhatConverts to see. Are they missing calls? Are calls going unanswered and they're abandoned? Are people not calling back after voicemails? Are they having a legitimate chase sequence in place for form fills and things like that?

So because it is such a critical component, sales and marketing, they go together. That is why it is one of the topics in which I consistently talk about repurposed content and share insights around because I think it's that important.

So call tracking, obviously, I think agency-wide, like the agency will manage the call tracking system that or they should. A good agency is managing a call tracking system for the law firm that they are performing the marketing for.

So I have my own opinion. What do you use and what have you seen firms have success with as like a call tracking software?

I will be transparent about our agency relationships in which we are completely neutral.

I think most people out there know that I'm pretty biased when it comes to the tech. Our preference is CallRail.

We do have clients that have used other tools like WhatConverts or Call Tracking Metrics, although I don't even think it's called Call Tracking Metrics anymore, whatever the new name is.

It's probably a better name.

Probably.

That is just our preference. We're very familiar with it. We work with many agencies that that is their default dynamic call tracking software tool. So when we are looking at making sure proper call tracking numbers are deployed against, you know, Google Business Profile, website pools, paid search, social, if they have investments in directories, maybe any out of home or numbers that they've ported in, right? We just make sure that the I's are dotted and the T's are crossed.

But to your point, Nick, most of the agencies that we work with handle that. But there are certainly some out there that don't. It's not part of their package, not part of the solution. And it's run internally, whether it's through the operations or the intake operations department within the firm.

Now, when we talked about this on our show, I did not mean to call out your post. The reason that I brought up the fact that you have to have call tracking in place the first time, the first place is so many of the attorneys that we work with just don't.

Like as an answering service, one of the things that is a selling point is like, hey, you're missing all these calls. And attorneys say, no, I'm not. And they don't know that they're missing calls because they're not tracking them. You know what I mean?

One hundred percent. We've walked into some situations and engagements where there is no call tracking whatsoever in place. Sometimes it's run through like their phone system or their VoIP and like we can back into it to try to get a little bit of a better idea of the least volume. But we're not getting metrics around by channel when that's not in place.

You know what I thought was really cool?

You’re starting from scratch, right?

I'm going completely sideways here. I don't know who sent it to me. Somebody sent me something about local service ads, and I didn't know this.

If you have call tracking in place for local service ads and you listen to the calls, and the call was like irrelevant, you can petition that or whatever it is, flag that to Google and get the money back for that call if Google had missed it. I didn't know you could do that.

It's mostly manual. I'm sorry, automatic. They used to have the manual disputes. Now it's mostly up to the AI to see that. But if they do hear certain things on that recorded call or you're pushing in notes around it being for an clients like on occasion, they will offer you the credit back into the system. But it's usually non-outside practice areas that is most successful.

Got it.

If you're shopping, you're getting DUIs and divorces, hopefully those are being credited to your account.

I don't know. Listen, whatever makes that populate for Google Local Services Ads would be wild.

I do want to ask you though, because you probably, I would say, do more of an intake audit than what I would say. And I hate the word most because you see so much of most agencies do this or most answering services do that. But I would assume that somebody who's agency neutral and invested in more of the operations and how marketing mix is strategized, like LegalFenix.

What do you do when it comes to call tracking? Say the firm has call tracking, you enter, what do you try to learn from call recordings and call tracking?

There's a lot of information that we can glean from those tools to identify if there is a gap in intake. Like if they're missing calls and we need to have some sort of service provider like yourself for overage, after hours or weekend coverage. We could see what type of volume of calls are coming in during specific times, whether or not those calls are getting answered or dropped, things like that.

But if they don't have anything in place, we will recommend that you purchase a tool, we add it to the website and we get at least our baseline tracking for business profile website pools if they've got paid search or social or directories.

A lot of times we're already stepping into a situation where the firm has the tool, they delegate us access, the agency already has it, and then that's mostly just an administrative task of ensuring that we're pushing that into whatever reporting

that they've got or is missing so that we can track how many calls, how many qualified opportunities are coming from which channels.

And then, hopefully, they've got a CRM in place where we can push that source data into the contact record and get a much better idea of where our most qualified opportunities are coming from.

But I mean, it runs again. Some firms have a completely sophisticated set up and it's running like a well-oiled machine. Those are few and far between, like they are, it's not easy to do all this, right? And I don't think that firms should be spinning their wheels, investing thousands upon thousands of dollars should try to have this sophisticated multi-touch attribution like model put into place.

Like if we just have an understanding here of what is creating the awareness and which channels are capturing that demand, we've got enough data to help us directionally know where we should be focusing our efforts. And then if we see increases in the volume of those opportunities, like instead of trying to really spread our dollars too thin, we should be doubling down and continuing to invest in that singular channel so that we can maximize as much value as we can out of that channel.

Yeah. I mean, you brought up multi-touch attribution. Nick could complain about the quest for the perfect attribution model for hours.

Doesn't exist.

It's not that I don't even want that quest. That's my complaint. I don't like that quest.

I think that's a Kobayashi Maru, though I am not a Star Trek fan.

He's on the step of The Hero's Journey, the rejection of the call.

Listen, I love data. I love CRN. Like if I can at least get, for example, paid surge if we're getting campaign level data, especially for more of a general practice firm, if we've got PI, family, criminal estate planning campaigns running on the ad side of the house because we can't break it out with LSA, then yes, I would like to see that data so I can get an understanding of the average cost per lead, as well as qualified opportunity and acquisition costs for individual lines of business.

For sure, the majority of our clients are mostly personal injury, motor vehicle or catastrophic injury firms where we are running campaigns to identify opportunities within accident victims. And for the most part, if we can know this is how much we spent, these are how many leads that we got out of those leads, these are how many are qualified, these are how many signed up, we can get that data and we can have that conversation with the agency directionally to say things are good, bad or ugly.

Outside of that, tying in your business profile, making sure that you've got the website pool so that you could see the types of volume that are coming in from there to evaluate whether or not you're getting the results that you want from things like an SEO investment or local community involvement type of stuff. Right? It's very helpful, but we're not necessarily attributing values or weights from first to mid to last touch.

We can go into the tool, we could see first touch, we can get last touch. But the end of the day, if we know that our qualified opportunities are increasing, our acquisition costs are within a level of profitability that is sustainable for the firm to continue investing, we're pretty good.

Who does that sound like, Tony? Come on.

Yeah, minimum viable product, right? Like you need a certain amount of data to make educated decisions. But at a certain point, you don't need all that extra data. Trust me, as Nick and I have this argument all the time, I would love that data, all of that data. I would love for it to pour across my eyes, like the numbers in the matrix, just so I can understand everything. That's a waste of time.

At a certain point, it becomes paralysis, or what is it? Yeah, paralysis by analysis.

Yeah.

Can't make any decisions then.

Yeah, because you just need more data.

Yeah. Listen, if we're collecting qualitative and quantitative data, again, realizing what created the awareness and then what captured it, the ones that are qualified, like that's what we should be doing more of.

I have a curiosity question that is going to derail us, but I like to derail everything. How does it usually go when you are brought in to engage with an agency? Like how does the agency react?

Listen, I know you well enough to know that you're a consummate professional. I've met Kristen, I think, like the world of you guys, right? But I'm curious on how that goes with an agency because I don't think, for the most part, that like what did you say yesterday, Tony? Innovation is driven by necessity or...

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Thank you. Necessity is the mother of invention. Not something I came up with, of course.

Well, yeah. But I think the necessity of someone like LegalFenix is because there are marketing agencies out there that needs to be held accountable, right? And that there needs to be or there is a bridge that needs to be gapped between law firm owner and agency. How does that go usually?

I'll say this. First and foremost, there are bad actors and bad apples in every single industry, right? Legal marketing isn't special in that regard. There are going to be companies out there that kind of taint the entire industry as a whole with some of the shenanigans that they might hold.

As far as being introduced to the vendor landscape or the agency pool on behalf of a client, the firm is typically brokering the introduction to let them know that they have retained us in order to help them kind of manage their entire marketing

ecosystem.

One of the things that I've done by design so that there wasn't a concern about us and our company encroaching on an agency's turf or stealing scope or taking monthly repairing revenue from them is by design, we do not do SEO, we are not managing ads on their behalf, we're not designing or redeveloping websites, we're not doing organic social on their behalf. We are not going to be the people that take business from you in any shape, way or form in that regard.

We've done that on purpose because we want to ensure that everybody that is involved in helping the firm improve their results is on the same page, we're on the same team aimed at the same targets, rolling in the same direction, whatever analogy you

want to use, we are all in this together to ensure, at least our feeling is, that the firm's best interests are protected and that we are helping them meet their growth targets, their goals, their objectives.

There are some that welcome us with open arms. There's very little overlap across our entire portfolio of agencies. Sure, we've got a couple of clients that both work with the same legal marketing agency, but that just, it's random.

It's not like we are inheriting a lot of those relationships, right? So it brings up another point of where there are firms out there that will say the same agency is either the best thing or the worst thing that they've ever experienced. Both of them can be true, right? And that's okay.

But the ones that are typically looking out for the firms, like they don't really have a pause or concern about us coming into play because they know our positioning, they know that we're neutral and that we're just there to help the firm.

There are other firms or other agencies that are out there that I think, if they do make a lot of noise about whether it's us or somebody else, I feel like that sometimes there's maybe something that they're hiding, maybe something that they don't want to necessarily be exposed to.

The easiest thing that you could do there or you can call out there is some firms don't realize that they have relinquished control or access and administrative control to their systems and their tools, right? So like we've gone into situations where like they have no idea what the breakout of their Google ad spend versus their management fee is. That's a problem. It's just an issue.

Some of them go into that relationship just being none the wiser, others just they realize it a little bit too late, right? So I'm not shy about my feelings when I write posts on LinkedIn or newsletters about what I think is a good working relationship with an agency. That's just my opinion, right? To each their own.

But there haven't been situations where we go into an engagement, agency just completely puts up a roadblock, is not going to allow us to do our thing, right? That's not happening.

I can think of one or two situations where there was a little bit of friction. And quite frankly, I posted about this, I don't know if it was this week or last week. It was the one that basically held the firm hostage.

Site was taken down. Business citation tool was canceled, right? I feel that there was malicious intent to create our local rankings, bring the website down. Thankfully, like we were able to mitigate some of that, but not all of it because we didn't have control or administrative access to kind of put the pieces in place to avoid it before it went down.

But like I said before, that is we are not running into that consistently. There are just, there's some actors out there that don't always act in the best interest of the client. And if we can help the firm navigate that, we do as best as we can.

I mean, that's a horror story right there.

Yeah.

I mean, that's, it's sabotage, you know?

I saw it.

I saw it recently, where… Well it was two things. It was an agency wouldn't, what would you call that? I don't know, share access to the Google Ads campaign that was running.

And also the, I couldn't figure this out, and there is no way to figure it out because it's just hidden. The total, like say you look at your total Google Ads spend at the end of the month, and it says $5,432.17. That number was just being passed. There was no, it didn't say fee, it didn't say 10%, it didn't say, it just said a number. And I was like, well, I don't know what's going on in there. And it was explained that it was some proprietary system that they use. I don't believe that it was proprietary at all to manage the the bidding of Google Ads auctions. Again, I don't believe any of it.

But I have to imagine that it was charging a commission, somehow, like that you built in a commission per click, and they just pass that number on.

I've run into it.

Crazy.

Yeah. If you don't have your Google Ads spend, listen, I'm just saying it has to be, I guess itemized is the word on the invoice. You should have the spend separate from the fee, so that you can understand what is going towards channel spend and what you are paying the agency for their services. Right?

We've run into situations where we're retained, they don't have access. There are agencies out there that willingly and openly share that all their clients are stored within one agency account or MCC, and that you cannot have access into that tool, because then you would basically see all the other campaigns. They've made that decision to operate the business in that capacity, right?

Unfortunately, the question wasn't asked prior to the firm working with the agency, so now they could be locked into, who knows, 12, 24, 36-month contract and they can't really get out of it.

There's not a lot that we can really do in that situation, unless you want to buy yourself out of the contract and try to get out of it early, and some agencies are not going to do that.

Right, so… There's other situations where I had posted about this and actually jumped on a podcast with a couple of other agency owners, where the deal with the agency was that unused LSA funds would roll into the following month. And we discovered over the course of six to seven months, those dollars are not rolled over.

Oh, wow.

I posted about that on LinkedIn as well. But when you don't have access to the platform, there's no way for you to kind of have the check and balance.

Yeah.

That's just a situation in which contract came up. We put them in a position where we evaluated alternatives, found another partner, they were going to get all the access to those systems and tools, and we just, you know, they parted ways.

There’s a line, right? I, for example, I'm not the PPC guy. When I go into our Google Ads engine, I don't touch anything outside of reporting because I don't want to screw anything up, right? So, but there's a line between that. I still have access to it. You know what I mean? There's a line between that and sorry, there's not a line. There's miles between that and what we're talking about here.

Yeah, some of them will pump it into their own reporting. And they'll have you, so, for example, for LSA is like one of the biggest things to help those things get going outside of like your intake performance, review velocity, answer rate, right? You have to be updating the back end. You've got to go in and mark leads as booked, or archive them, or rate them, like put that information in it.

There are companies out there that will pump that into their own reporting, and then you can mark them, and then it updates it on the back end. But you still, there's a layer in between firm and actual account, right?

So that's, if you don't know that, and you can't get access into the tool, there's no way you're ever going to be able to reconcile, well, this is what we said we were going to spend, this is what we actually spent.

So these are just questions, and why I kind of post about it, ad nauseam, and hopefully, one day, firms will then, when they are evaluating another agency or a partner, that they just ask the question, hey, am I going to have access to all this stuff? Can I see all of my data? Do I know what goes to channel? Do I know what I'm spending? So that they can make better decisions about their marketing.

Yeah, build awareness and try to demand some transparency. I mean, at the end of the day, if you aren't being transparent, it does kind of mean you have something to hide, right?

They will say that the strategy is proprietary and that they want you to see other accounts and other information, right? To each their own. Everyone can run the business the way that they want to run their business.

If you're going to work with LegalPhoenix, we're going to try to put you in the best position we possibly can so that you have administrative access, control and ownership of those tools and that you're in the driver's seat, including kicking us out, right?

If you don't want to work with us anymore and you're saying, hey, I don't want you to have access to the data, you can log in to the tool, remove our account, and we're all set.

I'm gonna, well, I think I almost did a good job at hosting. So I tried to derail us before to talk about-

Keep them coming.

Because I wanted to talk about your relationship with agencies, A, because I'm curious and B, because it's not that I work so much with legal marketing agencies, because I generally don't unless they have a client that has a specific need, and then I'll pass it off to somebody in order to get that set up. I do have relationships with law firms that tell me about marketing agencies, but that's really about it.

The thing that I notice about the better agencies out there is that they do have someone who is like the intake consultant for that agency. But I think it's so rare.

So I wanted to ask you, because this is a show about intake, say you go into an engagement and the reason that you're brought in is the marketing agency is so reputable, right? And they say that they're delivering these leads at a great cost, and they have the call tracking in place, and they're looking at the transcripts of these calls, and it's perfect, right?

They're looking at LSAs, perfect, they're managing it. They're looking at web form fills, and everything that somebody's writing in the form is perfect. And the firm is like, I don't see any ROI on this, right? What do you do there in order to like fix intake? Because it's obviously intake, that's where I'm going with that.

Yeah, there's likely an issue that is happening on the phones with an intake. There's maybe no formalized process, no standardized procedure. People are going rogue and not following scripts or playbooks, or however you are managing the collection of the criteria in which would allow you to define a lead as qualified.

There are tools that we could use where you can collect like the conversational intelligent and user and sentiment to see if there are long gaps or holds or you're not setting expectations when you're transferring an individual to another person on

your team, or they're asking for the same information, right, kind of like a dentist office. You go in there, you already filled it all out on ZocDoc, and now you're inside the office and you got to fill out all the paper forms, right, or anytime you go to the doctor's office, right? Like that's just not a good experience.

So I'll relate this to a situation in which where we are brought in to kind of clean house and office space an entire firm like, A, I don't want to go in and just launch this major change management effort and try to off board and on board. Like there's a real cost to doing that and switching agencies and provide it. You got to get everyone up to speed. You have to get systems access. They've got to get accustomed. They got to run through their process. But like if we can avoid that because there's still a good relationship in place, we will.

We also want to look at the data. So to your point, Nick, we'll go into Call Rail or we'll go into dynamic call tracking. We will go into the CRM. We'll try to identify where the issue is.

There's also now great tools like Speed AI, where you can get the AI layer over on top of that to see agent performance, lead rescue, like things where it's highlighting where a prospect or a qualified opportunity might be slipping through the cracks. Right?

So if we really can't get a handle on that, right, that it makes it difficult for us to make recommendations as to where to move dollars or increase spend.

And if it's required, right, there's a lot of intake consultants and coaches out there. If we see that the operations aren't in place, performance is not good. Maybe we don't have skilled intake specialists.

Maybe they need more training, mentorship or guidance. Right. Like we will try to point them in the right direction because at the end of the day, like we really want to be focusing on marketing.

We want to ensure, you know, branding and messaging cohesiveness and consistency across channels or getting more actively involved in the community, diversifying our efforts, right?

Like if we have to spend more of our time focusing on more of like that fractional COO role, right? Like now, like there's a conversation to be had with the firm to say, this isn't really what you are paying us for. We've identified it. We shine a light on and we want to put you in a better position to improve it because there's more meat on that bone that we are, we're not taking.

Got it. Cool. See, I told you, I derailed us, but then I somehow got the train back on the tracks, which is kind of how I live my life.

Anyway, Ron, thank you so much for hopping on with us today. If our viewers want to connect with you further, oh no, I got to switch this. It's how Delisi says, What is the best way that I can refer someone to you?

Send it to legalfenix.com or find me on LinkedIn. Right? The website, we've got some resources. You can sign up for the newsletter with it, which has a weekly drop, or you can find me on LinkedIn. Follow everyone else on LegalFenix as well. Happy to have more people into the fold and try to spread more awareness about some of the things that firms can do to protect themselves, protect their investments and just safeguard themselves in general.

We'll have links to ways to contact Ron and LegalFenix in the description bio of this episode along with a link to answeringlegal.com where you can get started with a 400-minute free trial of our virtual reception service.

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, the Answering Legal YouTube channel, and recently I found out Amazon Prime Podcasts.

Always a pleasure, gents. I appreciate it. Thank you.

We’ll see you next time.