The Shocking Truth About Law Firm Intake Failures

Welcome 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 debut episode, hosts Nick Werker and Tony Prieto dive into the common issues law firms face with their intake processes. Discover why failing to manage your intake properly could be costing you clients and how you can address these mistakes.

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

Nick and Tony discuss the importance of answering calls, the significance of having a well-structured intake script, and how using a CRM can help you keep track of and convert leads. With insightful anecdotes, data from our friends at Clio, and practical tips, this episode provides a comprehensive guide to improving your law firm’s client intake process.

Want to connect with our experts?

Reach out to Nick Werker via email at [email protected]

Reach out to Tony Prieto via email at [email protected]

For more legal intake tips, explore our blog: https://www.answeringlegal.com/blog

The Legal Intake Experts is a part of the Answering Legal podcast network. Interested in learning more about Answering Legal? Click here to learn more about 400 minute free trial!

This podcast is produced and edited by Joe Galotti. You can reach Joe via email at [email protected].

Episode Transcript:

Intro

Nick Werker (Host): In a world where law firms constantly miss out on new leads due to sloppy legal intake and often because they just aren’t answering the phone. Two marketers aim to provide a glimmer of hope.

Tony Prieto (Co-Host): Like I thought we agreed we weren’t going to do the announcer thing. Thank God because that hurts my throat. You do the intro.

Tony: Gladly. I’m Tony Prieto and this is my colleague Nick Werker. Believe it or not, we’re marketing professionals.

Nick: Well, I think you’re the professional. Um, but we are true experts when it comes to all matters legal intake.

Tony: For over a decade, our company, Answering Legal, has helped ensure that growing law firms never miss out on connecting with new leads.

Nick: And now, we’re ready to share our trade secrets and help make the legal world a better place.

Tony: Or at the very least, help our listeners shore up their lead capturing processes and convert more callers to clients.

Nick: Welcome to the Legal Intake Experts podcast.

Tony: Let’s dive right in.

Why Law Firms Keep Missing Leads

Nick Werker (Host): Today we’re breaking down why your law firm’s intake process is currently costing you clients. And hopefully we can talk about what you can do about it.

Tony Prieto (Co-Host): Hopefully we have some tips. That would be the whole point of the process. So before we dive into those tips, we’ve got to take a moment and um and talk about a problem that law firms face with their intake.

Nick: Yeah. So, this is going to be my favorite part because I like to be contrarian. I think it’s just a personality trait of mine. But we are going to start off this show essentially by roasting the viewing audience and our target customer, all that stuff.

Tony: How are we going to do it? So, in 2019, Clio conducted this secret shopper survey process where they called 500 law firms to see how they were answering the phone and whether they answered the phone. And in 2019, they found that only 56% of law firms answered the phone live and only 38% of the law firms that missed calls actually called Clio back.

Nick: That is alarming. And I remember reading that and thinking to myself, well, at least I will have employment for a little while.

Tony: It’s true. It’s job security for you and I. But you would think, right, you’d think that upon seeing that data, law firms would say, well, I’m either failing the market or my competitors are failing the market, and that’s an opportunity for me to pick up some, you know, percentage points. And you’d think it would get better, but it did not.

Nick: In 2024, Clio repeated the test and they found that compared to 56% in 2019, only 40% of firms picked up the phone live and only 25% of the firms who missed the call actually bothered to call back. That’s again compared to 38% in 2019.

Tony: That’s brutal.

Nick: And here’s what’s funny for me is I’ve been doing this a very long time. I’ve been at this game convincing people, law firm owners, that they need an answering service.

Why Live Answering Matters

Nick Werker (Host): But let’s put that aside for the time being here and assume that you have some staff in the office and that Clio — let’s just make the assumption — called during like normal business hours, right? 9 to 5. They didn’t call at 5:30. They didn’t call at 7:00 in the morning. And they reconciled for time differences.

Can you talk a little bit about why providing a live answer for prospective clients is so crucial? Like, why would Clio even report on this in the first place?

Tony Prieto (Co-Host): So, this is one of those things that lawyers might not realize because they go through three years of law school and then whatever else comes after that. Whatever your legal jobs are, that is kind of like a divider between you and the rest of the people on the street, right?

A doctor goes to med school and they look at human bodies completely differently. Lawyers look at legal issues completely differently.

Me, I’m not a lawyer. I’m vaguely familiar with legal processes. If I needed a lawyer, I would be freaking out and I would be calling a lawyer. Thankfully, I know a few people that might be able to help, but I’d be calling a lawyer — and if they didn’t pick up, I’d be even more freaked out because then I’d have to get not my first choice, but my second choice.

And the person who was my first choice worked really hard to be my first choice — and just by not picking up completely lost my business. Because I’m not waiting for my first choice to call me back. I need that legal problem solved now.

Nick: So, I’ve told this story on the podcast before, but it’s been a few years, and I am not going to date myself because I am now getting to that point where I don’t want you to know how old I actually am.

But when I was a young lad at the university I attended, I was awoken one night by a loud bang on my door. This is probably at like 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. And someone who lived on my floor — very nice young woman, who is very successful now (good for her) — was in hysterics.

She had just been arrested for… I don’t care, for smoking weed on our campus. Some sort of citation. I don’t remember the local regulations or anything at the time.

She’s like, “What do I do? My parents are going to kill me. They’re going to expel me.”

And I was like, I don’t think you’re going to get expelled because it’s a citation. But I don’t have a job yet, I’m probably a freshman or a sophomore in college, I don’t remember. I just remember I pulled out my laptop and we Googled — this is when search used to work like this too — we Googled “what to do when I get a marijuana citation” and “I go to XYZ University in this area.”

And we submitted a bunch of web forms on websites and we didn’t even think to call because it was like 2:00 in the morning.

So I think sometimes we set this unrealistic expectation — even though I’m sure people like… I’m employed because people call overnight — but sometimes people’s expectations are different.

And I think we submitted like three or four web forms and in the morning, after everybody had calmed down, only one of the firms had called my friend back.

Now, I don’t remember what ultimately happened. Like I said, she’s wildly successful now, and I wish her very well in her anonymity. But that is… it just speaks to what we’re talking about here, right?

Tony: I think so many lawyers go to law school and they get sold on this dream of, you pass all your classes and then it’s like, “Oh, fame, fortune, and success will follow me. I’m going to be a celebrity lawyer. I’m going to be this, I’m going to be that.”

It’s just not the case. And then if you try to go out on your own and you hang a shingle, it doesn’t let people know that you’re doing things in the area.

And so this whole process of client communication and service is completely lost on a lot of lawyers who, for the first time, are taking their foray into private practice.

I don’t think that we’ve done a good enough job of letting law firm owners know — and lawyers know — that client service is an expectation.

Nick: Exactly.

Tony: I think people just assume that they’re going to come into a law firm and be like, “Here’s my legal problem. I will never speak to you again. Go solve it. Here’s money.”

Nick: Yeah. I mean, I think that if we do this podcast for 10 episodes or 10,000 episodes, I think every single episode we will say this: a law firm is a business.

If you have a car problem and you call a mechanic and they don’t call you back, you’re just going to go to a different mechanic. Unless you have an established mechanic.

But most people don’t have lawyers. Most people have not had to call a lawyer for their specific legal problems. And then if they have a different practice area problem — right, someone who gets a DUI and then needs a divorce — they might need two different lawyers.

So what we’re talking about here is just a mismatch of expectations.

Tony: Exactly. Where the client is reaching out and expects a response because they want to give you money. They’re expecting a certain degree of service with that.

At the end of the day, a law firm is a service business. You’re providing legal services, but it’s not that different. I mean, it’s very different from a mechanic, but at the very basic level, it’s about customer satisfaction. In this case, client satisfaction, client experience, whatever you want to call it.

And if you don’t pick up the phone, they’re just going to have a worse experience. Even if you call them back — which, as we can see, most people didn’t — even if you call them back, they’re still going to remember that you didn’t pick up the first time. And it’s going to stick in their heads.

Easy Wins for Firms

Nick Werker (Host): How can law firm owners and staff work to address the issues that Clio points out — right? Like this answer rate and then this response rate. What are some easy things, easy wins, that they can get to by looking at this problem and recognizing that they might be part of this statistic?

Tony Prieto (Co-Host): Yeah. So, I mean the obvious answer is to hire Answering Legal to answer your phone calls. But the next most obvious answer is to make sure that your phone calls, as much as often as possible, get answered — and when they don’t, to call the person back, preferably within 24 hours.

Obviously lawyers are busy people. They bill by the hour. One of the things that helps me get things done that might get in my way is I just plop them on my calendar.

If you lay out just like even half an hour a day to call back — first thing in the morning, right? When you’re tired, you don’t really want to look at a computer screen — you just call back the people who called the day before, overnight, whatever it may be.

And if you put it on the schedule and you only devote half an hour to it, you’ll be able to collect those clients. And it’s a time of day that you’re probably not working that much anyway.

Nick: So, I am of the belief — and I just saw my friend Doug Bradley post about this on LinkedIn (and if you know me, you know I love LinkedIn) — there’s like two ways to approach this, right?

No matter what type of direct response inquiry comes into your firm, there are so many things that you can employ that will at least begin a conversation with a prospective client.

The whole thing with people reaching out — if you don’t get any live answer at the first point, or you have one of those, like, phone tree things… what’s the dial-by-number directory thing even? I can’t remember the abbreviation.

Tony: Virtual response tree.

Nick: There you go. Like, people just hang up on those things. And then, say you get the missed call, right? And you’re like, “Oh, maybe this is a prospective client.” You don’t know anything about that. You’re going into that blind, calling them back.

And then what’s the likelihood that they’re actually going to answer when you call them back? That’s the thing I want to study with Clio, right? Maybe I’ll look into that. But the likelihood of you getting a response from that person — and them not having already moved on — is low.

And then here’s what Doug Bradley was talking about, that’s my point. I know I’m long-winded and I circumnavigate myself. Somebody reached out to him — and he obviously deals with lawyers, so he makes these recommendations as well — and dude, you can set up…

Like if there’s a form submitted on your site, you just set up an autoresponse. But it’s not like an autoresponse like, “Hey, I see your message and I will get back to you later.” It’s like a dedicated thing:

“Thank you for filling out this form on our website. Inquiries about this — you know, we handle X, Y, and Z matters. You’ve come to the right place. There are a couple of ways that we can talk about your first consultation. Either you click this link here, schedule an appointment. You can wait for a call back. You can, I don’t know, do any number of things. These are my business hours.”

You can just list a bunch of information and give that person an opportunity to actually work with you. There’s so much that you can do that people aren’t even trying to think about, in terms of automation and giving a personalized touch.

So here’s the point of the LinkedIn post: Doug Bradley said this person was doing a bunch of SEO research for their law firm. They contacted a bunch of companies and it was all very generic. And they contacted Everest, which is Doug Bradley’s company.

And he sent them a very personalized thing. Invited them to jump on a Zoom call. He was the owner himself. He actually jumped on the call.

So if you’re a law firm owner in a smaller practice — which is probably who we’re talking to, who cares about this sort of thing — make the time, get on the phone call, let people know who they’re going to meet with. Set that expectation.

What do you think about that? Am I just rambling here?

Tony: No. No. I mean, we talk about phone calls A, because we’re an answering service for lawyers, but also B, because it’s the hardest thing to automate like that, right?

If someone sends in a web form, you can set up an automation to email them back. If they interact with your website, your web chat — the web chat will respond to them. And again, you can set up automations, tell them next steps, give them a calendar link to schedule a consultation.

There’s so much you can do on all kinds of intake — except phone calls. Phone calls are one of the hardest to do that, because people still, in this age of AI (maybe it’ll change), people want to talk to a human being when they’re talking voice to voice.

It’s still… the IVRs, voicemails, even AI receptionists are less successful than real people just because our ears are just attuned to natural human speech in ways that our eyes aren’t.

It’s one of those things where you can really plug as many holes as possible pretty easily on all sorts of intakes — except phone calls. Phone calls do kind of require the hard work of picking up the phone or calling them back. Or, of course, having someone handle your phone calls for you.

Nick: At least for now, until the saying becomes popularized that “I will have my AI agent talk to your AI agent.” But we’re not there yet.

What to Do Once You’ve Answered the Phone

Nick Werker (Host): I want to talk more about what you’re talking about here — the actual what to do when you’re actually on the phone, right? Like, you’ve done the right thing, you answered the phone, you got the scheduled appointment, you did what we’re talking about here.

Let’s dive into the actual intake process once you’ve established communication with the potential client.

Tony Prieto (Co-Host): Yeah. I mean, if answering the phone was enough, it would be a lot easier to solve. But people have certain expectations when they call a law firm.

They want to know, A) that they’ve reached the place they intended to call. They want to know, B) that this person will be able to help them with their issue and that the firm handles their type of case.

It doesn’t matter how much research they’ve done. Generally speaking, legal laypeople just can’t assume that when they call a law firm — even if it says they handle family law — it doesn’t mean they’ll handle their specific divorce case.

So, those are a lot of holes you can plug that don’t even require you to do anything extra. It’s just internal processes that you can adjust.

And I mean, we can get started on any one of them, but the first one would be just making sure that you have a process. Like an actual A to B to C:

• Here’s when someone calls.
• Here’s who answers.
• Here are the questions they ask.
• They enter it into a web form that puts it into your CRM so that you don’t have to do that manually.

And then you can access it immediately, categorize it, move it around throughout your various pipelines, and whatever else your workflow is once it’s in your CRM — which hopefully, you have a CRM.

Those are holes you can plug. If you’re doing these fly-by-night, “anyone’s writing anything down on paper” methods… you are missing out.

Nick: Big shout out — you sound exactly like Robert Williams right now of Elevamp. If you’re a lawyer and you need a CRM setup because you don’t know what we’re talking about, contact Robert Williams. Shout out to him.

He talks about people and technology and process. People, process, and technology. That’s what he talks about.

So, let’s set the stage there. Say you’re a very small law firm owner. You’re solo, right? And you have a website. You do some sort of marketing out there.

There are people coming to the website, there are people calling you, and there are people filling out web forms or using the chatbot on your website. Or maybe they’re even walking into your building.

What’s your plan when those things happen?

What’s your plan for answering a phone call? What’s your plan for when somebody submits a web form? Now, maybe you’re not doing anything as sophisticated as what we’re talking about here, but you need to outline the ways that people can contact you — and what your plan is for when that happens.

So, to continue calling people out, if you feel victimized by this, let’s talk about solutions. Say you map that out, right? And you’re like:

“Okay, when a call comes in, I want to answer the phone, say this, and then… I don’t know. I need a script.”

Let’s talk about scripting.

The Role of Scripts in Client Intake

Nick Werker (Host): Let’s talk about scripting. I think people — before I ask you fully about this — I think people and law firm owners are hesitant to talk about writing a script because they’re like, “I want to have a natural conversation. I know what I’m talking about. I’m an expert in the law, and they’re going to come and ask me specific questions about the law.”

And I’m going to say: no, dude. They’re going to call you and say, “I was arrested for this. This is what happened. The cop was a jerk. It happened here. I’m so stressed. I’m going to miss work.”

Like — you have to address all of those things. How are you going to structure that conversation? You know what I’m saying?

Tony Prieto (Co-Host): I think of it a lot actually kind of like poker. So, first I’ll say this: nothing happens — almost nothing happens — without a script.

If you run into someone on the street and you say hello, sure. But even look at a reality TV show — they’re working off a loose script. Anything improvised, they have at least the very basic idea of what they’re improvising.

In poker, you always want to have a plan, but you don’t know what card you’re going to get. If you’re playing Hold’em, you don’t know what the flop’s going to be. You don’t know what the next card is going to be. You don’t know what the other people have.

You have to constantly be adapting your plan. But you still want to have that skeleton of: “Okay, I have this hand, I’m looking to upgrade it to this hand.”

In the same way, someone calls in — say you’re a criminal defense attorney — you know what they’re going to be calling about. They’re going to be calling because they’ve been arrested.

So you ask all the details you need. And the making it sound natural is up to whoever’s answering the phone. It’s not that difficult. It’s really just a matter of, “I’m sorry that happened to you. When were you arrested?” And then they take that information down.

Nick: Here’s what I love about your analogy — I love poker. And I used to have this friend who loved to throw a poker game. I know, illegal. Sue me. We played for like 20 bucks.

And I’m very, very competitive. So competitive. And I love to win at poker because this guy loved it so much. I just wanted to beat him. Does that make me a jerk? Maybe.

But who wins most often at poker is not the person with the best cards, right? It’s not the hand that you’re dealt. It’s the person with a better plan.

So if you know going into a certain situation what you’re going to do, or what the rules are — right? Maybe you’re willing to take a risk in this scenario, but say, for all my Texas Hold’em players out there, the last card is out and there’s a possible hand that can beat what you have, and all you do is give that person an opportunity to either call or fold… you’re leaving your situation up to them.

So you need a plan for what to do in that situation. Who’s going to win most often? The person with the plan. Otherwise it’s literally leaving money on the table.

Tony: I love you so much, man.

Nick: It’s the same for law firms.

Tony: I like to take it a step further and give tips based on amazing things that I’ve heard on the internet and what lawyers share on LinkedIn.

You can make the conversation as deep or as surface level as that person is willing to have it. Right? So if they call up and they’re not that concerned, then you don’t need to be overly concerned. If they call up and they’re really concerned, take the time and let them know that you’ve done this before, you’ve been in a similar situation.

You can’t guarantee results — tow that ethical line. You’re the ethics expert on that phone call, don’t involve me in that.

But one of the best things that I heard was — this was about a personal injury firm. Somebody called in, they had an injury. Instead of saying, “Oh, are you in pain?” and the person goes, “Yeah, I’m in pain, this hurts,” or you get the really over-exaggerative person who says, “I’m in so much pain!” —

The way that you can get to the heart of it is by asking more clever questions, right? Like: “Is there something you can’t do right now that you normally need to do?”

And that’s usually the heart of the problem.

The Importance of Asking the Right Questions

Tony Prieto (Co-Host): That’s usually the heart of the problem, right? Say somebody’s out of work. My friend is a really good example. He is a steamfitter. So he welds giant pipes — he shows me these pictures all the time, it looks crazy.

And he has back problems from being contorted in all these places welding pipes. And if he were to go to a lawyer for like a workers’ comp thing — because I think he has — and they asked him, “Are you in pain?” he’s an old-school tough guy.

We live in the same neighborhood. And if you ask him if he’s in pain, he’s going to be like, “No, it’s not that bad.”

And then the lawyer is going to think, “Well, maybe I don’t need this guy as a client if he’s not that injured. This isn’t a good case for me.”

Right? But the question you ask instead of that is: “Are there some things you can’t do now that you used to be able to do?”

And the answer is like, “I can’t go to the gym and exercise because my back hurts. I have trouble getting up the stairs and I live upstairs. I have an elderly dog that I need to pick up because his legs don’t work, and I have trouble bending down and picking my dog up.”

That’s how you get to the root of the problem.

So if you’re focused on answering these super surface-level questions like, “Where were you arrested?” or, “What happened?” — you’re not going to get to the root of the problem, and you’re not going to inspire confidence in this person.

So I like to talk about stuff in that sense.

Nick Werker (Host): Yeah. And like, we’re the legal intake experts, absolutely. But you are the expert at your law firm. You’re the only person who can design these questions in a way that will really get to the core of: “Is this a good client or not for you?”

You’re the only person who knows that.

And so, at the end of the day, it does have to be you designing these questions. But that doesn’t — it might sound like work, but it really isn’t.

You just have to reverse-engineer your client profile. You have to say: “Okay, I do trucking accidents where there are major brain injuries,” or stuff like that. Then those are the questions you need to ask:

• Was this accident involving a commercial vehicle?
• Was there a brain injury?

And then you can get even further into that with:

• How traumatic was this brain injury?
• Is there a role you can no longer perform?

Like you were saying — with brain injury, it could be literally anything.

It’s really a matter of you doing that. But you’re also the only person who can do it, and you’re the only person who’s going to do it as well as you can do it.

The Value of Legal Intake

Nick Werker (Host): So, I’m going to say something really selfish. Tony, we’ve known each other what — four or five years now?

Tony Prieto (Co-Host): Crazy. It’s been three years.

Nick: That’s it?

Tony: Yeah.

Nick: Well, I feel like I’ve known you my whole life, so take that as a compliment.

And so, when the prospect came up of us relaunching the podcast or doing something different, the prospect of us yapping together for like 45 minutes to an hour at a clip is very enticing to me. So I’m already having a lot of fun.

Hopefully our viewers are starting to buy into what we are saying. And I think that we should talk about this:

In 2025, law firms really don’t have a choice but to buy into this legal intake thing. There’s so much happening right now, and sloppy intake is just really costly.

So can we — I want to shift the focus for our first episode into this: intake is so important because it’s the same thing as when you try to go buy something that has really good marketing, but the checkout page doesn’t work.

Or like — this is why Amazon is so successful, right? There’s a seamless way to purchase what you want to buy. And people spend a lot of money with one click.

Tony: Dude, I love it so much. But I hate it so much because of the ramifications on my bank account.

Nick: What’s your thoughts on law firm owners, and law firms in general, who spend all this money on marketing campaigns — maybe they’re getting really good inquiries and they don’t even know it because they don’t have these systems we’re talking about in place?

Identifying and Fixing Intake Leaks

Tony Prieto (Co-Host): When you’re talking about marketing, there are often leaks, right? Or targeting. Maybe your marketing company — if you’re outsourcing your marketing — maybe they came up with an ad that didn’t quite work, and you lose money that way.

Those are leaks in your advertising budget, but they’re part of the spend. It’s a trial and error process. Eventually, you get to a point where you’re very efficient with it.

Nick Werker (Host): Intake is a leak. If someone clicks on your advertisement, they convert, and then they talk to you — and then they do not become a client — you have spent a lot of money acquiring that client and gotten nothing out of it.

Now, that happens. Of course. You can’t get everyone. Not everyone’s a good fit, whatever it is. But it’s also a leak that is entirely under your control.

So much of marketing — and Tony and I would know this because we are marketing guys — is just how the person who is looking at your marketing is going to interpret it. You can make great guesses (it’s why Tony loves psychology), but you can’t know for sure.

On intake though, you can absolutely control that. You can’t say, “Okay, every single person who calls is going to become a client.” But you can look at where those fall-offs are, and you can start to plug those holes. And you will find that you are wasting a lot less money when you’re spending money on marketing.

Tony and I talk all the time, and he knows without me saying it — I’ve gotten really into Malcolm Gladwell. And if you haven’t read Talking to Strangers, you really should, because it’s about how we fundamentally misunderstand each other.

So let’s talk about how we misunderstand intake, right?

It’s a good assumption, based on how large these legal CRM companies are and how consolidated the market really is, that a lot of people have a CRM. Now, I’m not saying you’re using it correctly — I’m saying you have it.

What I suggest is setting up some sort of reporting.

Even if, right, let’s start at the beginning: set up something anecdotally. You know in your head that Joe called your law firm last week. You’re a personal injury attorney. He called your firm, he had X, Y, and Z happen.

You spoke to him, and despite doing such a good job at answering the phone or calling him back, you have not heard from Joe. Why have you not heard from Joe?

And then you can get into the CRM. This is why it’s important to know your numbers. Shout out Craig Goldenfarb.

What is the likelihood — and where is the drop-off — that a client occurs in? Is it the initial call? Right? They call in, you talk to them, and you’re like, “Hey, great, we’re going to do X, Y, and Z, here are the next steps,” and then you never get them to do that. What’s broken about that handoff?

Or they make it all the way to the retainer, and then you send them a retainer or it’s time to pay — and then your pay rate is horrendous. And you’re like, “My marketing got me a perfect fit for my firm. We had this great conversation. I sent them the thing. Why aren’t they paying?”

Then you can reverse-engineer where your leak is.

One of the best examples I heard of this — I’m waving a pen around like a crazy person — oh, what was it?

The firm was getting all these leads from a marketing agency, and the marketing agency was like, “We’re crushing it, we’re delivering these conversions.” They were in the CRM, they were qualified leads, the intake team was talking to them, writing down on the form that this is all qualified.

So how come none of these are becoming paying clients?

And so my friend hopped in, looked at it — and the follow-up email, where you hit that “You spoke to the person, here’s the next step” — that follow-up email was turned off.

So nobody was getting the next step.

And it’s like — you have to be looking at these things with intention. What is the process? How do you look at the process to address these problems? You have to know how you’re going to get somewhere, right?

I’m a big process person. I just read Ben Bergeron’s book. I talk about this all the time.

It’s like the Nick Saban / Bill Belichick philosophy: you go in and at the start of the season they ask Belichick, “You’ve got a really good roster this year. Do you plan on going to the Super Bowl?” And Belichick’s like, “I’m just trying to get through training camp.”

You’ve got to be focused on the process itself. You can’t be goal-oriented.

If you know every step of the way where you’re trying to go, that’s how you identify where the holes are. Right?

So if you’re focused on training camp, preseason, regular season — at no point are you talking about the Super Bowl.

If you’re talking about marketing, phone calls, web forms, intake, follow-up — and then obviously the ultimate goal is to get payment — where in the process are you lacking in order to convert?

We’re talking about money here. Who cares, right? You need a profit. You became a lawyer. You invested a lot of money. You need money.

I’m sorry — you’re not going to help anybody if you’re not making any money.

Tony: Yeah. I mean, like we talked about earlier, leaving money on the table.

It can be as simple as setting up stages in your CRM that tell you where in the lead-to-client pipeline a certain lead is.

And then when you see the numbers in one pipeline just go up and up and up, you realize, okay, there’s something happening here.

You look at what your process is in that area, and hopefully you find something as easy as the follow-up emails turned off. But usually it’s going to require you sitting down and thinking about it.

But here’s the thing: if you didn’t want to solve these problems, you wouldn’t have become a law firm owner. You could have gone and worked for another law firm. But you wanted to start a business — and this is part of running a business.

And honestly, I think it’s fun. But that’s why I’m in marketing. I like to look at these numbers and try to figure out where the disconnect is.

Nick: You are a huge data nerd.

Tony: Yeah, you’re definitely a bigger data nerd than me. I like data, but you look at data and it’s like — yeah, brother.

I’m more, like you said before, I like the reasoning behind things. You know what I mean? So the data informs my decisions, but I’m like, “Why?”

Improving Client Experience

Nick Werker (Host): So let’s talk about this. Because the whole CRM thing I want to address — if you’re listening to this in a clip or a short, or you’ve gotten this far in the episode and you’re like, “Everything they’re talking about, I really want to do it, but I don’t know who to talk to — because these guys just do answering services, right?”

And like, “I have an answering service. I do this. Maybe I’m a customer. And I want what they’re talking about.”

Send us an email. Nick@answering… [email protected]… obviously no, you’re [email protected]. We’ll put it in the description.

There is no exchanging of money, nothing like that. There are people in our networks that we work with, that we know will do a good job, that will set you up with these things, get aligned on your goals, and point you in the right direction.

Right?

I do want to ask you this — because I feel like we’re talking about money, and leaking leads, and stuff.

So how can… because we talk about this all the time. We’ve been saying this is a huge buzzword for years: a client-centric law firm.

How do you invest in the client experience? Why is it important? And how is it going to pay off long term?

Tony Prieto (Co-Host): This extends beyond intake in a way, in that the client experience involves everything from when they first contact you until the matter is resolved.

We’re assuming here that you all do good legal work — that’s a strong assumption. But you can’t guarantee results.

What you can guarantee is that the person who hires you will not be miserable the whole time while their legal issue is being solved.

Now obviously sometimes it’s a very sensitive issue — like a divorce — and those things are emotional. But your part of it doesn’t have to be difficult.

You can make it easy for your clients to get updates on what they need to do next. You can send reminder emails. You can send update emails.

Clients usually want to talk to you on the phone because they want to hear your voice. But all of those things are going to pay off.

And it sounds grubby to talk about it this way, because we’re talking about people’s emotions and their legal problems. But it is a business, right?

At the end of the day, you want those people to leave you a good review. You want them to tell their family members, “Man, this attorney solved my problem. It was so easy. It was pleasant.”

Or, “Hey, you know, they didn’t solve my problem, but they made it easy the whole way through.”

Nick: There are so many implications. We’re going to talk for like 37 hours about this. But I have a snap question for you. I just thought of this, I want you to answer. Don’t even think.

Tony: Okay. Rorschach test. Gotcha.

Nick: I love Rorschach. Rorschach’s journal, October 12th, 1985. Dog carcass in alley this morning. Tire tread on burst stomach. The city’s afraid of me. I’ve seen its true face. I can’t stop.

Um — snap question.

What’s more expensive? Losing a lead to bad intake or investing in 24/7 answering service coverage upfront?

Tony: Losing a lead to bad intake. I mean, if you’re just talking about opportunity cost, let’s just say it’s someone who calls your firm, no advertising necessary, they got it from a referral, whatever it is.

Even if it cost you $0 to get that lead in the door, if you lose it, you are negative the value of their case.

Investing in 24/7 coverage — whatever it might mean — means that you get even one case. Most law firms are operating on several thousand dollars of an average price per matter. That is going to pay for itself just on one case.

Now, you multiply that times 10 cases. If you’re one of those product-centered law firms where you turn out wills, even if it’s just 50 bucks a will, if you need, say, $500 worth of 24/7 coverage, that’s just 10 people who call you whose phone call you would have otherwise missed.

It’s very hard to measure that, but you will see it in your bottom line.

When Intake Gets Blamed on Marketing

Nick Werker (Host): I was just talking to Kevin Daisy on the Managing Partners podcast. We both commiserated about one thing.

He’s on the front end, right? He generates the leads, and the leads go to the law firm. And the law firm gets the lead, and then it doesn’t become a client. And they go back to Kevin Daisy at Array Digital and they say, “The leads are bad.”

I have a similar problem. Somebody will come to us, they’ll say, “I totally understand, I need this, I need that.” And then they do a free trial with us.

And at the end of the free trial, they’re like — let me back up. We say, “We caught you 10 new clients in 14 days. X amount of messages, X amount of time.”

And they’re like, “But none of those clients converted.”

And it’s like, both of us want to just bash our heads into the wall because it’s like — we didn’t have any control over here. I’m squeezing something, I’m going to break it in my hand over here, but we have no control over what your internal process to convert that person to a client is.

And so, you’re blaming the marketing company, right? That might be doing a great job and bringing you dream clients. You’re blaming the answering service that captured the lead for you, right? And made sure they didn’t go to another firm.

But you’re losing money and blaming somebody — and you don’t even know. You know what I mean?

So that’s what gets me so pumped about doing this stuff, is that we’ve been in this for so long. Why not talk about it and have a fun time?

Tony Prieto (Co-Host): Yeah — all that stuff.

Nick: So I do want to say this. I can’t stop thinking Rorschach. I’m excited. I won’t bring it up again. I won’t derail.

Tony: Don’t do it.

Nick: So bad. My wife hates when I watch that movie because I watch it probably every year. And then I do the Rorschach voice and she’s like, “You will sleep in a tent outside.” She actually threatens to make me sleep in my tent outside — which is not that big of a threat. I like my tent.

Tony: The Bane is my version of that.

Nick: Your Bane voice is really good. Give me one.

Tony: No, no, no. Another episode.

Nick: Yeah, yeah. We’ll leave that as a teaser.

Tony: All right. Good, good, good.

Conclusion and Next Steps

Nick Werker (Host): So I just want to say — I know we referenced ourselves, Answering Legal, a lot. It’s because we believe in our solution.

But I just want to let everybody listening know that if anything we said resonated with you, you can head to answeringlegal.com to learn more about our virtual receptionist service.

There’s also a link in the description or bio of wherever you’re listening to this episode (or watching this episode) to get started with a 400-minute free trial.

Everything that we talked about, mentioned — or if you just want to get in contact with us to talk shop about any of the stuff that we’re addressing — I swear I will nerd out with you bad. Like, I love talking about this stuff.

And I want to thank everyone who’s watching this episode, no matter when you’re watching it. It’s always fun to start a new project and it’s great to have an audience.

And I promise you — we will keep pushing these out if you like them. Or even if you don’t like them, because Tony and I… I thought of five things just in the last topic we talked about that could be entire episodes.

So we’ll be here for a very long time, and we will be talking for a very long time. So we might as well record it and try to be useful, because the meaning of life is to try and be useful.

So, please join us for the next episode of The Legal Intake Experts.

All episodes of the show can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and the Answering Legal YouTube channel.

Tony Prieto (Co-Host): We’ll see you next time, everyone.