The Response Time Reality Destroying Law Firm Growth

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 Episode 14, Nick Werker and Tony Prieto break down how follow-up speed can make or break a law firm’s ability to win new clients. They explore why today’s prospects expect fast responses, how delays lead to lost opportunities and what communication methods clients actually prefer. The conversation also highlights the importance of building a clear intake system that ensures every inquiry is handled quickly, consistently, and effectively.

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

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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. No existential questions about the ownership of Answering Legal this week.

I am Nick Werker joined as always by my co-host and partner in Zero Crimes Committed, Tony Prieto. Tony, how are you doing today?

Only zero as far as you know.

Well, if I… Oh no, I could have been I could have been a partner and and unknowingly…

I’ve framed you for many crimes.

Cool. I like it.

Because I am not guilty of any crimes. You are.

Well as long as I don't know about them. Do I have plausible deniability?

You do.

I like it. How are you doing?

I'm all right. I'm all right. Ready to be back in the saddle. This is always a a pleasure of working with you, Nick, is the podcast.

It is fun. We do talk probably too much. Um, and it is funny to like record it for the world to see. And I am overly caffeinated. I tried to not be caffeinated as much, but I am back on energy drinks. I'm not going to tell you which ones cuz they're really unhealthy. But you might see me take a sip. Maybe we'll blur it out like my uh my famous Kawaii Leonard thing.

But it's crazy to think we're actually 14 episodes in and as the series continues, we're we're digging deeper into different parts of the lead capture experience. And now producer Joe, I feel like Elvis Duran in the morning show. Producer Joe has left us a question to answer that he says will help us launch into today's topic.

So here it is. When you send someone a text or an email and they don't respond, what is the appropriate amount of time to wait before following up?

In your personal life, this is obviously in personal… Let's take professionally speaking first. I would say uh two days or a weekend. So like if you send someone an email if depends on like what it's about right as long as it's not urgent. It's like hey looking for uh to connect with you on X right and and they not X the everything app X is in um something right looking to talk to you about this thing. What time works for you?

If they don't respond in a couple days or a week or something like that… Personally speaking I send that text message. I pretend it doesn't exist until I get a reply. If I never get a reply, that's their loss, not mine.

When I get an email, in my mind, if I read your email, I am now on a 24-hour clock to respond. However, I am not in the customer service business. So, this is just me professionally. Um, this has nothing to do with if a customer or a potential customer emails me. So, put that aside.

Uh, professionally, if you email me something, you're a vendor, I need something from you, whatever, 24-hour clock, that's my deadline. If I text you and you take longer to respond than it takes for me to disengage with my phone completely, the conversation's over, whether or not you respond at all.

And a good example of this is uh my brother-in-law and and my sister-in-law just had a baby and I check on them pretty much every day. I stop checking on them every day because we just spoke to them on the phone and they're like through the thick of the baby. So now we can kind of like talk to them. I would text them, "How's it going? How's this? How's that?" and I know he has a baby and this is not a personal vendetta that I have against him, but if he he would respond like a few hours later after I checked on him. The conversation's over. I got my update. We're not It's not It's not a conversation, you know what I mean? It's more of like a correspondence at that point.

Yeah. But not to get too crush when you were in high school and you were texting like someone you had a crush on, how long… Did you ever double text?

Oh, I I'm a double text. I don't play games. And this is one of the things that Katie really liked about me when we met. Katie, it's my wife. Is that I would like double text her. I would text her like in the like I wasn't like I don't play games. I don't know. I don't I don't like to play mind games with people.

I hate texting. So if I send a text message if you don't answer, that's fine. We're just not going to talk about that thing.

Yeah, you're a bad texter. I have texted you a lot and you just like not only are you on do not disturb, which I respect. I'm always on do not disturb, but you do not answer.

The only people I answer text messages from are my mom because she never texts me. My brother uh because it would hurt his feelings if I didn't respond and my girlfriend because she has yelled at me for not responding to her text messages. My dad texts me all the time and he's like, "You never answer my text messages." And I said, “You're not on the list, man.”

I'm not… I'm glad you know that my feelings aren't hurt when you don't answer my texts.

I'm just really bad at it.

It's fine. My recommendation for we're talking about emails and texts right now. Are we going to lump web forms into this? Should we lump web forms into this?

So, if we're talking business, if we're talking networking, I am not as 24-hour clock is a really polite way to do it. I think I'm just bad at communication. Virtual communication, period. Because I said 48 hours or a weekend. Because if I get an email on a Friday, I'm like, that's waiting till Monday. But if we're talking about business, the answer is you should answer as soon as you possibly can.

Are we talking about like new business or like current customers, stuff like that, like new business?

New business is you should answer as soon as you possibly can, right? Because if you don't follow up, right, someone fills out a web form on your uh website or they call your phone number and it gets forwarded to perhaps an answering service named Answering Legal and you get a message. If you don't follow up quickly, and this goes for a lot of different kinds of business, but specifically with lawyers, because that's who we're talking to right now, if you don't follow up quickly, they're just gonna find someone else because their problem is not being solved on its own, right?

Uh their legal issue is is not going to wait. So, if you don't follow up quickly, they will have found another attorney. And you might think, I'm better than that guy. It doesn't matter because if you're the first person to offer to help them, most most often you're the one who gets the case.

There's a weird sad reality that we live in. I guess it's not sad. Here's the here's the reality I live in.

Uh I will start with um something recently that my friend Kevin Daisey posted. Kevin Daisey has pretty good social media and he makes videos. I do like his funny videos, but then he also makes um like interview style uh videos with his business partner and the business partner like sets him up questions, right? We do that softball questions because you're supposed to start a conversation and people are in on the conversation.

And it was something like every time that a law firm gets a lead and goes to call that person back, do they do they um does the person hire that firm? And Kevin is like, "No. Uh this just happened to me the other week. I had a law firm. They got the lead and they responded like 10 minutes later and the person had already been on the phone with another attorney at the same time. They had just submitted multiple forms.”

Now, did that lawyer definitely follow up in 10 minutes? I don't know. That could be like the lawyer saying I followed up in 10 minutes. I don't know where. Who knows, right? Personal accountability aside.

But, I live in this weird reality where I very much am so protective and I talk to people on LinkedIn all all the time about this of like the legal community because I think saying that you specialize in legal um I'm a legal marketing agency. All these things is just a really good sales tactic because I think lawyers both know that there is a business of law and don't know how to buy things that maybe aren't specialized for them but sound like they are.

The one thing that I do think lawyers could have a better grasp on is that the person who is reaching out to the firm is likely dealing with something really important to them. I won't I won't use emergency. I won't say that it's an emergency, but it's really important and they really want a response and they want to talk to somebody about that. And so the longer that you delay that, the more likely it is that they're going to look somewhere else for a quicker response.

It's one of those things where I have uh a friend who's a 5-year-old son and something bad happens to that kid and my friend as an adult looks at it and says, "Yeah, that's not a big deal. You're going to forget about that in a week." To the kid, it's happening right now and it's really important right?

It's the same thing with with uh legal issues. Now, it's more serious than that. But even though it isn't an emergency in the sense that perhaps a medical emergency is life-threatening, uh it feels like an emergency to the person calling you, right? And if you don't treat it like that, then there's going to be an essential disconnect between you and that person.

Now, once they're your client, it's no longer an emergency. And your job as their lawyer is to make it feel like it's not an emergency. Make it feel like it's under control. And there's two benefits to that. One, they're not going to be calling you for updates all the time. And two, they're going to feel better about it.

We spoke to on our other podcast, but we live in the same universe, right? It's all part of the Marvel Answering Legal uh podcast universe.

Mhm.

We spoke to Gyi and Conrad of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing a few weeks ago and we asked, I believe it was Conrad that we asked and he answered um about his perfect, what would you call that? Utopian legal intake. I think that's funny. Uh legal intake utopia. And he said it's a lawyer who's like always available and can answer a text, an email, a phone call, or like a WhatsApp or whatever uh modicum of communication that you use.

That was Gyi. Yeah.

They're both so…

What’s the difference?

A lot, a lot.

We asked Conrad about uh the specifics of systems and then we asked Gyi about like intake itself.

And you say you have bad memory. I but maybe you do have a bad memory and maybe mine is just worse. But I'm curious what you think about this because I don't run into this often is how do you enable text messaging as a form of uh like client communication?

And I want to ask you this and then I have an example of somebody who I know does this well, but it's not a law firm.

Yeah. Well, that's the thing is that law firms uh I've uh in like writing blogs for the website look a lot into like Clio's Legal Trends Report and they do frequent reporting on preferred communication methods by clients and how lawyers either provide that or feel about that level of communication.

The number one way that someone's going to reach out to you is by phone call the first time, but then afterwards clients actually prefer text communication because it feels instantaneous. The problem is you don't want them to be texting your phone, your personal phone, and then you have to respond to that.

There are, I believe, uh CRM and stuff that can send text messages. Um, and so like you would hook up a phone number to that, people text that phone number and then you can have a conversation with them. The beauty of it is that you don't have to use your phone. It can respond on your desktop and then it's there or on an app or whatever, right?

But it's it lives on the computer screen so that you have a nice safe boundary between it and you uh that is I would say on in that research lawyers hated that option hated text messaging because it feels too personal right you text your wife you text your friends um texting your clients is it it can be this like barrier but your clients don't see it that way because it feels like an instantaneous response, right? Because when you text someone when you text someone whose name isn't Tony Prieto, you expect a response pretty quickly.

And um and so that's part of what the expectation is. Now, like you're saying, there are other businesses that do this. A lot of service businesses um like if you have plumbers, right, they'll have a CRM that will say, "Hey, I'm coming to do this work." Or if you have a pest control company, the “hey, I'm Austin from this pest control company. I'm texting you to let you know I'm coming for your monthly checkup or whatever it is.”

That's much more common in other forms of service business and that is why that's part of why uh clients expect that because at the end of the day a law firm is a legal services business.

I do see texting done really successfully and I do think it's what you're saying is that it's like once I allow my clients to text me then they're going to text me but there are solutions for that and here's something cool that I learned.

I talk about CrossFit a lot, but the guy who owns the CrossFit gym that I go to now, um, he's a really good business owner. He has systems set up in place. He has like scheduling for all his coaches. Uh, everything about the classes is super streamlined. And when I was a new client, he was texting me.

And I remember thinking like, "Oh, it's a personal business. Like, it's a gym owner. He's texting me." And it worked, right? Like we would have correspondence.

I forget I was like hanging out with him on like a weekend because he's at the gym. He's he's a gym owner and we're talking and he's like, "Yeah, you know, I've been doing this for 13 years. I opened it up. I didn't know what I was doing. I made a bunch of money but everything was a disaster." He's like, "And I actually started following this business organization uh program for CrossFit gyms and it's called Best Hour of Their Day." And I know Best Hour of Their Day because I consume a lot of content about things that I really care about, which is why I've watched almost every episode of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.

Uh, but Best Hour of Their Day is a guy named Jason Ackerman. And I'm like, "Oh, Jason Ackerman." He's like, "Why do you know that? You don't own a CrossFit gym."

But what I gathered from that is that he uses technology to run the processes in his gym. So, he has a CRM. It's specifically for CrossFit. And in that thing is a texting platform. I am not texting his cell phone number. I am texting uh whatever the the front-facing phone number is for that thing and he answers it probably at his leisure and probably when he checks it it and and he's got like his settings on his phone to do that whatever. But he'll also send out gymwide communications.

I don't know any… But maybe you do need to do that with all your clients like hey the office is going to be closed tomorrow and you can send out that all to your your existing or active cases in your um in your practice management software, right?

But, the the thing that I see that's really cool that's popping up with with uh law firms is them using this sort of technology to correspond with their clients and it becomes this sort of like value proposition that you can use to make people want to hire you more is like, hey, our ongoing communication is really cool. What happens is you get a log into a portal and all your documents go in the portal. It's super secure and then you can send a text message uh using the portal. Um, and we send you all this using this. I don't actually know how it works cuz I don't use that.

But, like we do it here. We text our customers all the time. Uh, we have a texting platform. So, if you have a problem, you're a customer, you text us back. I just think that the the there's so many things that you assume aren't going to work for you. You're like, "Oh, I can never text my clients.” But, you can. You just haven't thought about it or been educated about a platform like that.

It's a side note, of something to think about. Is there any business that doesn't have a specialized CRM built for that kind of business? Because if so, that would be a strong investment opportunity. I feel like there's CRM to order everything.

But um yeah, absolutely. And the and the most important part is having is having these systems and technologies in place, right? Like if your CRM can do it, the portal, the texting, you can say things like, "Hey, if you send us a text message on this portal, we will get back to you within 24 hours. Uh you if you send documents, we will see them immediately. They're marked as as critical or whatever, and we'll start processing those things immediately.”

And what you could start doing is with that boundary in place, start making promises that feel really good. Even if like 24 hours you're thinking, if I text someone, I want a response right away. Um, setting those boundaries and doing it through something like the portal makes it feel a lot less like texting and a lot more like um, I don't know, like chatting with your doctor on on like their online portal or whatever.

Your doctor's busy. Nobody expects their doctor to be like to to call them back immediately because they're used to waiting for hours at the doctor's office. They know the doctor's busy. If you can establish that kind of boundary, you can have these followup and and sort of client experience tools without having to worry about burnout or it it like boiling over into your personal life. Um, and that always comes back to systems, right?

You know what I think it is? And and we're going to talk about systems, I promise. But what I think it is, and I can say this because we are a company who offers 24/7 live support.

If you email us, we're going to get back to you. It's literally a 24-hour call center, brother. If you call us, we're going to answer. So, I have a distinct advantage in saying this in that department. I understand that. However, there are other what I will say are vendors that uh law firm owners will use, marketing agencies, and I'm not saying all marketing agencies.

I hate when people say most of marketing agencies do this and we do that. I hate that. Marketing agencies, um media buying companies, uh I don't know, like the the witness experts that you hire, the research, all that stuff, right? All the print stuff that you need in order to do everything. Those vendors don't necessarily set a good example all the time for being super communicative with the law firm owner.

And I know this to be true because a lot of law firm owners meet once a month maybe with their marketing agency and that's the only time that they hear from them. There's no email correspondence. Like sure, you can reach out. Um, but there's no regular system besides this one monthly sending you a report and you, I don't know, glancing at it and not understanding it because no one's there to explain it to you. There's no, the best of the best have like Slack channels, right?

And then you have your dedicated account manager, you slack this person or they send new updates. I'm not saying that doesn't exist. I'm saying by and large, no one… Not no one. I'm making blanket statements, which I hate.

I don't think that there is a majority of partners out there doing business with law firms that make themselves as readily available as law firms should be making themselves to their clientele.

I can imagine as a lawyer you're dealing with any other kind of service and you think if I did this to my clients they would fire me. Uh but you know there's different expectations of lawyers uh than there are of other kinds of service businesses and that's part of being a lawyer but there's also ways that you can control that.

Um, for example, a Slack channel. You can't have a Slack channel with your clients, but that texting uh feature of your client portal is basically a Slack for you and your clients, right?

So, um, it's all about making sure that you're looking at your whole process from the first time they call in all the way through when you've resolved their matter and making sure that the communication points there are always um, what's the word? It's not, it's not urgent, but that they're always open, right? That they understand that they can reach out to you and they're not going to get an immediate response unless it's absolutely critical, but they are going to get a response within a timely manner that will either address their problem or soothe their anxiety or whatever it is.

However, that first time that they call, you do need to have a way to make sure that you are ready to take that call, that you're ready to turn that person into a client. If they fill out a web form, uh, you need to make sure that they are quick because like you said… Let's take that, um, lawyer that Kevin Daisey was talking about at his word took 10 minutes. That's a really… That's a pretty decent response time. Most on average, I believe, like I said in the Clio Legal Trends Report, the average response to something like that is 20 is 24 hours. If you get it within 10 minutes, that's great. And if we take this lawyer at his word, did it in 10 minutes and it still wasn't good enough.

Yeah. So, I think we got to where I think we should end up, but we're going to talk about the process here, right?

So, what you're talking about, and I really like this, the first call being answered, that's great. I think we've hit that nail on the head a thousand times.

We're Answering Legal. We answer calls. We make sure you never miss the new client.

And I went on this rant a while ago that people are so worried about the cost of answering services. If you really cared about the cost of answering services, you'd set a new client line. We answer just the new client line and then you give all the new client all the signed clients uh like a different phone number to call when they're your existing clients and we don't have to answer those. And that also is just a terrible idea.

I will admit that's a terrible idea because why would you not want to keep giving a positive experience to your existing clients when you can help us or an answering service, any answering service, understand how to field those questions, who your case manager… Like you can do all of that. If the person knows who is handling their case, case manager, lawyer, paralegal, and they ask for that person, we can send the message to them. We can keep the information that they sent to us on file.

So it's like, oh, if this person calls, tell them we're working on this and this person's out of the office in court and meeting with who knows, right? It's up to you. You could control all of that.

But I think in order to do that, you sort of have to map out what you want your clients to experience and you have to understand from start to finish. You kind of have to go backwards, too. Like what do we have that we can get a client into? Um what are our resources that can help us get there? And then how can we handle the intake upfront and make sure that that whole process makes sense to them so we can communicate it to them.

And uh one of the great sort of and that's things that we're just talking about phone calls, right? Web forms and other kinds of inquiries are completely different and the standard of communication for that is even worse. People who call a law firm are expecting an answer. Um they most often don't get that.

But like most businesses when you fill out a web form on there in my personal experience when I filled out web forms, I've got no response like 80% of the time. And that is that is me looking at a form that says, "Hey, contact us with what you need and we'll get back to you." And nothing. I my girlfriend was like, "I want to have the car detailed." And so I found a bunch of car detailing places. I filled out three or four web forms. Zero answers.

That's crazy.

I'm trying to give you my business. You know what I mean?

And so that is the expectation from web forms for your average consumer is, “I don't know. I'm just filling this out. Hopefully they send me something in the email or that can help me or something like that.”

And so what that is anytime where the expectations don't meet the reality, it can either be, you know, a benefit or a detriment to your business, right? The expectation of a phone call is talking to the lawyer immediately. That is a problem that you have to deal with because you just don't have time to to speak to everyone right away. That was, you know, Gyi’s fantasy of perfect legal intake. It's a lawyer whose job is just answering the phone.

But uh in other places like with uh web forms, you can set up systems. You respond with an email. That much is like table stakes, right? But if you set up a an hour a day where you look at your web form inquiries and and you you or you know your intake specialist calls those people, that right there is going beyond their expectations. And that is an opportunity for your business to secure more clients by defying their expectations.

Oh, I like that. Defying their expectations. First of all, you have to have a system. There are so many law firms that we talk to that are like, "What do you mean a CRM?" And I just want to know… I really want to know what people are still doing with their cases. Are they in files? Do you have paper calendar?

I do think that's becoming less commonplace, but it's still it's still happening. And it's 2026 and I've been doing this a very long time. And I used to manage all my correspondents with index cards. And I am not that old. However, I do have a CRM now.

So, Robert Williams says, "The best CRM is the CRM that you use or the best technology is the technology that you use." So, I won't make recommendations on technology. I won't even make recommendations on how you manage your cases.

What I will say needs to be the outline of your process as it pertains to taking care of your customers is any way that you give a potential client the opportunity to reach out to you, you need to make that a good experience using the arsenal, repertoire, uh resources. Resources that you have available to you.

So sole practitioner, receptionist, paralegal, whatever you have all these resources and you know that you can you know that you want to provide a good experience and you have a web form on your site for a free consultation and you have a phone number where the person calls in and and and tries to uh explain their situation kind of also asking for a free consultation.

Spills their soul.

Hopefully. So what do you do with that information? Right. Um, you can hire an answering service to answer all the calls. You can hire an answering service to handle calls that you miss. But have a plan. Do I need a receptionist or am I going to be my own receptionist? And what do I do when the phone gets answered? Right?

Then figure out… Obviously you have to convert that client, but how you're going to correspond with that client once they do become a customer. And, how you’re going to manage that relationship through the hopeful resolution of their case.

And the thing is that it the problem is for many uh many of the lawyers we're talking to, there's nobody else to do that work but them, right? Like uh if you have paralegal they can probably qualify cases but you get calls and the first thing you have to do before real before even following up is does this person have a case you still need to follow up but like if they aren't the right fit for your firm or they don't have a case at all you need to be able to tell them that and point them in the right direction or do something else.

But, if we're talking technology the simplest form of technology that you can use to manage this is a whiteboard because on a whiteboard you can draw a flowchart and on that flowchart you have phone call comes in. You draw a line and the next line is qualify. Is this… Does this person have a case? Yes, but not for us referral etc etc.

And you build that flowchart and when you look at it you'll realize how easy it is. Not easy was the word. It's difficult to set up but the actual process of it is pretty simple. And all it is is building that process into your day. I always say this, if it doesn't get on the calendar, it's not happening.

Um, you can set up, you know, you have to obviously work for your clients, but you also have to work for yourself, for your business. You can set up times that are, you know, to respond to uh new client inquiries. You can have a, you know, when someone calls in, if let's say the answering service gets it, you know, you got a little bit of extra time to follow up there.

So, you're able to say, "Okay, call came in this morning. I need to get to it around lunchtime.” Because maybe, you know, they're working. If I call them on their lunch break, they'll be able to speak to me or something like that.

Um, it's all about building that flowchart and then finding out where in your day you can fit it in. There are some people who don't like to do that. Don't like to schedule their days out as regimentedly like that. Uh there's some people who thrive in chaos. I'm not like that. I don't think that most people do.

I smiled very bigly when you talked about a flowchart because I've seen you draw many flowcharts to help you understand how to build HubSpot workflows.

And with that, I want to say I know we referenced Answering Legal a few times during today's episode, so I just want to let our listeners know that they can head to answeringlegal.com to learn more about our virtual receptionist service. There's also a link in the bio of this episode to get started with a 400 minute free trial of our service.

Thank you for the plug, Nick. I'd like to thank all of our listeners and if you'd like to listen to more episodes, you can join us for the next one, next episode of uh The Legal Intake Experts. All of our episodes can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and the Answering Legal YouTube channel.

We'll see you next time, everyone.