We React to LinkedIn's Boldest Legal Intake Posts

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 12, Nick Werker and Tony Prieto switch things up by reacting to LinkedIn posts from top thought leaders in the legal space. They break down insights on reviewing call recordings, measuring intake performance, improving client experience on the first call and why asking “How did you hear about us?” still matters. While diving into each post, they share honest reactions and explore practical ways law firms can strengthen their intake process without getting lost in endless data.

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

Special shoutout to Ron Latz, Bo Royal, Alay Yajnik and Cassidy Lewis for sharing thoughts about legal intake on LinkedIn and giving us great content to react to.

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 don't know if it's presented so much as owned. Am I owned by Answering Legal? Anyway, uh I am Nick Werker joined as always by my co-host Tony Prieto. Tony, how are you today, buddy?

I'm doing good. Uh, I'm looking forward to I always look forward to our our conversations on this podcast, but I am especially uh looking forward to today's because uh I finally get to do something that I uh love to hate, which is reaction content.

I've never done any reaction content and I also don't really love reaction content and you know me, I love Sleep Token and Sleep Token is something reaction worthy for people who have never heard Sleep Token. So, I tried. And there's people who are like…

Professional composer react sleep token.

Exactly. And they're like this is weird. And then it gets weirder and they're like what? And then it gets weirder and they're like this is great. But is it? I don't know. It's crazy. Um anyway, so we are we're switching things up a bit. Uh I did not curate any of these and I I really should not have looked, but I did look, but I don't I didn't read. I just saw who it was that we're going to be reacting to. So, it's a good curation of of topics that were picked by Joe, but I really shouldn't have have looked. And so, full disclosure, I do know who we're going to be reading from. Um, but I am extremely unpredictable. So, it it doesn't matter if I if I read it or not really.

We've got a bunch of um got a bunch of them. So, we're we're going to give sort of like uh I think uh you know, if we get into a deep topic and we can talk about it for sure, but like I think that the idea of like a flash an instant reaction would be good. Uh, but before we do get to them, I do have a question for you, Nick. Um what was what's your favorite social media platform and what was the peak time to be using it?

Oo, I'm gonna start eliminating them because I don't have the answer for this off the top of my head. I hate Tik Tok. hate it.

I can also I can also go first.

You go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Go go go go go go.

So, uh I have two answers for this as uh anyone from our marketing department would know from our daily questions of the day. I always have two answers.

Uh one is a copout answer which is my favorite social media of all time. Doesn't exist anymore. It was a very tiny niche social media platform specifically for people who went to my university. Uh, it was called Bored at Butler, which is the name of the big library on the campus.

Say that again.

Bored at Butler.

Bored at Butler. Okay.

Yeah. And it expanded. They had versions of it for other universities. The problem is the person who ran it graduated and um and he did not care to maintain it anymore. So eventually he closed it down. And the peak time to be using it of course was the time I was using it, which is senior year of college.

Uh, and the the other answer, the one that is like legible to the audience would be Twitter is my favorite. Uh, and I would say the best time to be using it was probably uh like 2014 to 2016. Uh, which is like when it was at was at its most influential in the culture.

Um, okay. I'm I've been eliminating them in my head while you were talking. I'm eliminating Tik Tok. I hate Tik Tok for a number of reasons. I don't even think it's good algorithmically anymore. It just shows me wild things that I'm not interested in. It's also an insane time suck and I don't have time to be sucked in. I hate Twitter. I used to be a lunatic and so I would tweet a lot in all caps because I am a lunatic. Um I would really say LinkedIn professionally, but it's just not as fun. It is cool, but it's not as fun. Instagram is fake.

That's cuz you're not posting like the guy who posts four reasons Yoda failed as a CEO.

Yeah. Well, he's much more creative than me.

He's having a lot of fun than you are.

Yeah. Well, that was really good. We should link that. Um, I'm not going to say Instagram because Instagram is fake. It's a highlight reel.

You're running out of social media here. The answer could also be you just don't like any.

Well, I do use them. So, I'm also going to eliminate Facebook because I also think Facebook is fake.

You don't have any left.

No, I have two answers for you. Okay. Because my number one, if I can choose this as social media, is YouTube. I love YouTube. Can you choose? You can't.

It's close enough. I think your other option is Threads, so I think it has to be YouTube.

Oh, no. You're missing one. Snapchat. Oh, I love Snapchat, dude. Snapchat, you can text, you can send pictures, uh you can have group chats, you can send pictures to as many people as possible without disturbing them as a group. It's just the easiest dissemination of funny stuff going on in your life that you don't have to worry about um like I don't know keeping up with. You just send like my dog is being hilarious in the morning and doing something crazy running around my backyard. You get a video and then we never have to think about it ever again.

Yeah. Yeah. You can also send money which is really weird.

I have never attempted to send money through Snapchat,

But you can. I remember when they rolled that feature. I was like, why?

And also Snapchat filters are amazing.

Very popular with kids, too. You know, like a Snapchat filter is like a digital peekaboo for children.

Okay. So, I'm going to explain a little bit more about what we're doing because we know what we're doing and then it's going to show up on the screen. We're going to read posts from people who we respect in the space um on LinkedIn about legal intake and we're going to react to them. Do we agree? Do we expand?

Okay. Ron Latz uh good personal friend of mine uh wakes up every day at 5:00 a.m. and runs on Strava. And I just respect the crap out of this dude.

Anyway, he says, "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, which is funny. Audit intake. If prospects are calling and not converting, the problem isn't marketing. It tends to be what happens after the marketing's 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 potential new client 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 Oh, yeah. He abbreviated additional marketing spend isn't your biggest lever. It's your people.

I uh of course generally agree, but one thing that's funny is that he calls it a marketing optimization tool and then starts to talk about intake. But what we always talk about is like intake is this is this thing that sort of blends between marketing and sales. Um but of course, uh he's talking to attorneys and if you talk to attorneys about sales, they run away from you. Um, but uh, one thing that I think is really is is something that goes unsaid in this is that in order to record your calls, you need to be tracking them. And so, sort of a a step before doing this is get a call tracking software.

I think, and I could go on a whole tirade about this, personally, I am resentful at the fact that uh, marketing generates leads, right? I'm a marketer at the end of the day. Um, even though I work for a company that that focuses on legal intake, I am resentful at the fact that marketing has all the the data and that we basically have to go to intake or sales and present them with this data and be like, we got you these leads and they didn't become customers. Why not? And then also marketing does the work in order to fix that. And it's pretty what would you call that? It's everywhere. It's everywhere on LinkedIn.

Ubiquitous

Thank you so much. That's a complicated word but that's the word that I was reaching for enough uh it is ubiquitous on LinkedIn that most marketers are talking about intake and it's just like I do agree with it I really do but if you're talking about marketing it's like what is your marketing agency responsible for and then separate that right like what is your intake responsible for and who's responsible for it so it often boils down to the marketing agency to be like we sent you all these leads, you're blaming us for why you're not growing. And then they're the ones identifying that it's intake. Where at what point do we start educating the intake team?

And when we talk to Conrad and he uh about exactly this uh on Everything Except The Law, which is that that um you know, they're coming at it from the marketing agency side, which is they present here's how many leads we got you. And the uh attorney says, "Yeah, well, none, you know, x number of them became clients. That's not enough." It's like that's that's on you, buddy. Um and and that's something that that you know, uh Ron's talking to hopefully talking to the person who's responsible for this. Um whether that's the attorney, the you know, uh managing partner, whoever it is, uh and and trying to tell them.

The other the other thing about this is that you need the time. You record all these calls. you need to schedule the time to review them, to pull insights out of them. And you know, that is that is a full-time analytics job that you probably just do once a quarter, once a year to review uh your intake. I mean, we're not saying you should do it every day. That would be crazy. Uh but like, you know, Ron says that that firms at Crush are borderline obsessive about what happens on that first call. And that is that's intake is that first call the the the reception of the client making them feel like they are the most important person in the world at that moment. And reviewing your calls is a great pool to get to the end goal which is better intake.

I think the way that I would handle this is I always I don't know why in my head whenever I envision myself as a law firm owner I am a law firm owner I have a receptionist I obviously have an answering service um and that's it I have one staff member me answering service and once in a while I would say I would set the cadence to like once a month right because that's when I'm like reviewing the business I would go into my call tracking system and I would listen to uh calls that correspond to three to five successfully closed um yeah touch new clients and I would listen to what went really well and I would give that feedback to that person here's what you did really really well and um this person is still happy because x y or right whatever and then I would go into three rejected cases and see why they were rejected did the person who was taking the phone call not understand that this case actually does match what we need? Did they um politely uh tell this person where to go? Did we do an intake and refer them out? Like what's our process for these things? And once you understand the process, then you can kind of go down a rabbit hole.

The last thing that I would do is when someone starts misunderstanding where they're at in a certain process, like they're calling in and they're unhappy about where they're in with their case, I would review that initial phone call and see where I could set expectations better. That's that's the the real things that I would do. Obviously, if I had all the time in the world.

Yeah. I mean, it's a powerful tool. It just requires time to use it. And that's something that that Ron doesn't really talk about in the post um because he's trying to convince people to do it. If if if you're trying to convince people to do this thing and you say, "But it's gonna take some time. They're just not they're not going to do it." And I'm a resentful person who is just like marketing should get more leads and and they are good leads and you're just not converting them. But that's a that's a perspective problem on my part. So I recognize that.

All right. You read the next one. Yeah, I'm going to take the next one.

This one's from our our old friend Bo Royal at uh Pareto Legal. It says, “Lawyer, our intake is great. We're really on top of it, and I make sure I review every lead that comes through." And then he says, "What's your conversion rate on qualified leads by intake agent by practice area?" And then the lawyer hears cricket sounds. He says, "The Hawthorne fact is real and it matters for your law firm's intake. It's the phenomenon where people improve their behavior simply because they know they're being observed or measured. No new tools, no new hires, just awareness and transparency. That's why law firms that aren't tracking intake performance in a structured and transparent fashion are missing a huge opportunity. Um, no response time benchmarks, no call conversion tracking, no accountability for follow-ups, no quality control. If you're not measuring it, you're not improving it. Want to increase signed cases without spending another dollar on ads? Start by turning the light bulb the lights on. Light bulb emoji #lawfirmgrowth #inttakemanagement #legalmarketingclientconversion.

I love this and I love the way Bo structures his post. So my initial take on it is there's so much you can do to analyze your intake and there's so much you can do to have a process for everything and know who's accountable for everything. And that's why it's so important to review it is at the end of the day, you're sending out, I don't know, your intake team to just answer these incoming calls from people that they don't know. They don't know the the circumstance is always going to be different. There's always going to be some problem. Like, no one's going to come through with a perfect case and be like, I was hit by an ice cream truck. I was standing in the road yelling, "Please don't hit me." And he was like, "No, I'm trucking on. Ice cream's got to get delivered." Hits him. Uh like it's it's just a perfect open and shut million-dollar case, right? It's not going to happen. And ultimately, you have to train and trust your people. So the the whole like quantification of that to me is daunting.

I think uh I think the whole and and this is just my problem with it in general. I'm not saying that this is right or wrong. I'm saying this is my opinion of it is knowing your conversion rate on qualified lead by intake agent by practice area is is almost a little too far for me because knowing that could be really useful. But what's the odds that that case was capturable? Like did that is it all close and is somebody going to be better at closing one certain thing because maybe they have uh specific experience in that? I don't know. I think that's a little too rabbit hole for me and I'm the rabbit hole guy. I'm curious what you think about that.

Yeah, it's it's interesting because by agent tells you the performance of each of your uh you know intake specialists and what their what like what what their uh sort of like weaknesses might be and how you could or what their strengths might be, right? Um by practice area of course tells you what your firm's strengths are, right? Um, that's a good take. But combining the two, I I do think it's a little bit of a hat on the hat.

Um, there's I mean, there's there's benefits to making sure that each of your practice areas is represented well by each of your agents. But I think that you can kind of get there without that much granularity. Now, the core of what he's saying is still true. I mean it's it's it's along the lines of the previous post. I always think of it as as uh uh the Schrödinger's paradox uh which is the the quantum nature of reality that observing something changes it and human beings obviously have the same sort of psychological effect in this the software effect which is that that knowing that some someone knowing that their performance is going to be evaluated makes them perform better because they want to be good at their jobs.

And um and like I think the core of that is true and it relates to the previous post. You got to track your calls. You got to track your intake specialist. I mean he says response time benchmarks. That's something we as an answering service take very seriously. I don't know that you know we as an answering service we're uh you know answering legal specializes in answering for lawyers. We also answer the phone for our own business right. Uh, and so like do we need to analyze the effectiveness of those agents based on the lawyers calling in in what practice area? I don't think so.

Uh, I think that that it's much more important to know what your strengths are and niche down to those strengths, right? because the the you know if you're if you're a motor vehicle accident attorney and you specialize in very specific kinds of those then you don't really care if your intake team isn't experts at handling other kinds of of um cases.

I did nitpick and so I want to nitpick in reverse. I think the best part about this post is him calling out no accountability for follow-ups because it's so easy to want first-time close. And it's like a like a car dealership, right? You're going to make the most sales on people that you keep in the car dealership, right? You're your likelihood of closing somebody who comes back to a car dealership is so low or getting them back in. So, the first time closes are are like an easy way to look at how you're winning, but the follow-ups is you've already acquired that lead. the follow-ups is is like found money for me. So, I really like that part of the post is is making sure that your team knows that they're accountable for follow-ups, who's accountable for the follow-ups. Um, and like what your process is.

I could go rabbit hole on that and I'm not going to because that would be hypocritical.

Yeah. I mean there's so much f like you know even this he's talking about a granular level of data that is still the tip of the iceberg in terms of the rabbit hole if you really wanted to talk about sales development analyzing the performance of your sales development is like another rabbit hole that is accomplished with the same tools right so I gesture with a pen should put that down why I like that um like a profession that is just it's so capitalism to me is optimize the way that uh the person who I don't know uh at a certain point it's just like I really would focus and this is just me I would focus on making my my intake team empathetic kind knowledgeable and resourceful right I would give them all the resources that they would need.

I would be like hey uh oh I don't know who we should have reacted to this I want to say it was Kurt London who said uh he has a policy where if somebody on his intake team just wakes up and they're in a bad mood don't commit work cuz like You know what? I think that's cool. I don't know. That's just me. Anyway.

Who are we talking to? I think it was on I think it was Conrad. I don't remember now.

No, I think he might have said… yeah, I read it on LinkedIn and I was like, "Oh, that's such a good idea."

Let's let's let's keep going.

All right, cool. Cool. This one is from Alay Yajnik. I didn't read this one, so we're going to really live react to this because I'm going to stumble through my words, too. Okay. Alay Yajnik, who I haven't spoken to in a considerable amount of time. “The most mentioned person in one firm's Google reviews wasn't the attorney. It was the intake specialist. Oo, that's not a knock on the lawyer skills. It's proof that clients are telling us exactly what matters most to them. Wow. Okay. Here's the reality. Clients expect you to be a good attorney. That's table stakes. What they don't expect in parenthesis and what they'll remember and talk about is exceptional service that makes them feel heard throughout their legal journey. Think about it like dining out. You've been to restaurants where the food was great, but the service was terrible. What do you remember? The service overshadows everything. The same principle applies to your firm. And here's the kicker. Poor communication isn't just a satisfaction issue. It's the number one reason clients switch attorneys midcase and the number one cause of malpractice claims.” I didn't know the first part. “The firms that build lasting success understand that every interaction either builds their reputation or erodes it. The good news, unlike marketing algorithms or economic conditions, client experience is entirely within your control.”

I agree with almost everything in this post. Uh it almost sounds like uh a blog post that that you know uh one of us could have written. However, I do disagree with the dining out metaphor. I I knew you were going to I think with my stomach. Uh some of my favorite restaurants, dinner takes three hours. The service is terrible, but it's the best food you're ever going to eat. And guess what? I don't care. I'm going to wait 3 hours for my steak.

And so here's… I agree with you. And so I think the example is bad. I think the uh like the comparison between a restaurant and a law firm is bad because the dining out experience only lasts what uh an hour to two hours, maybe three hours if you're right. the process of you and a legal matter is way more than that regardless of what type of matter you're having. And so at any given point when somebody invariably what I'll say is pisses me off. Yes, I will start evaluating. But in the middle of my dinner, the likelihood of me not getting the food, yeah, getting up and but it has to be so extreme, right? like the waiter has to I don't know like I don't know cause a fist fight with me because if I go there and like Tony recommended that I go to this restaurant because it has the best fish tacos ever, I'm going to at least try the fish tacos regardless of the the waiter up into a a specific threshold obviously. Um and then maybe I'll make the decision never to go back. So I think the pertinent um comparison here would be do you want people to recommend your firm?

Yeah. Um not just like leave in the you know what I mean? Maybe I'm just an exception. Like I said, I think with my stomach and for me, it is simply a matter of uh analyzing the restaurant on service, price, and food. And if the food is really good, then the other two don't really matter to me. However, uh you're I what we're agreeing on here is that this is the wrong metaphor. Um hiring an attorney is hiring a business partner, um essentially for from the from the client's perspective. And you do not want… I I'm sure there are plenty of people listening to this podcast who have been in business with someone who straight up will not answer their phone when you call them no matter how important the thing is and that's an extremely frustrating experience. Uh and um I think one to be avoided.

And so the core of Alay's message is correct that like people are going to I mean we see this all the time in positive reviews for Answering Legal is people keep asking where my new receptionist came from. They want to talk to Stephanie again. And people love having a positive experience on the phone because most experiences on the phone are literally dehumanizing in that you're talking to a robot.

There's one review on the I'm pretty sure there's only one on Answering Legal about me and it says something to it to to the effect of doing business with Nick was great. He is the man and I think I don't even remember who wrote it but it was just like oh I made it to the the Google reviews page.

Yeah. Okay. Did I read the last one? Yeah, you read this one.

All right. So, uh, to wrap up, let's get a quick one from Cassidy Lewis, chief marketing officer at Cooper Hurley Injury Lawyers, uh, was shared more towards the beginning of the year, but it but you know, it's it's a New Year's resolution, and hey, uh, anytime is a good time to check in on those.

She says, "And in 2026, your intake team is going to ask, how did you hear about us?" And then she whispers, “Please.”

Does this mean I react? Um, I love this and it's because I have a disdain for the attribution that that we go through, right? Like you choose what your attribution 20 60 20 uh last click, first click. I hate it. I hate it because if you are doing marketing like not just one channel not just if you are doing marketing I don't think that matters as much as the impact of knowing where your customers remember hearing about you.

Yeah.

So if the person says the radio and it it depends what you want to do with this information, right? I'm not going to even go down that that rabbit hole, right? you were considering turning off your radio ads because you're like, "Ah, I don't see the the the investment. There's no way to uh do a one to one direct attribution to the radio and I spend 20 grand a month on the radio." But a considerable amount of people are calling in and like, "No, I heard it from you on the radio." That's awesome.

Yeah.

That's awesome. That's the feedback that I'm looking for from my customers. And if you weren't asking that question on the phone and you weren't able to uh attribute that one to one or part of the customer journey to the radio, you would have turned it off. That's what I think.

There's downsides of course to everything. Uh we here at Answering Legal uh ask our customers, how did you hear about us? And the vast majority of them say Google. What does that mean? Does that mean they saw one of our Google ads? Does that mean that mean they found us our our websites on Google? Does that mean they were researching answering services and heard about us on Google on on a list on a different website? Think of it as a Google result, right?

But the and we we talked about this again. If you're listening to this, go check out the Everything Except The Law episode with Gyi and Conrad. Um the person says they heard about you on the radio, but the attribution says they clicked on a Facebook ad. Guess what? Both of those are super important because you need them to know about you to be able to trust your ad and click on it. Uh, and this metric will allow you to know, okay, are those bus stop ads paying off? And guess what? If people say no matter where they actually came in on, if they think that they came in on your bus stop ads, your bus stop ads are paying off.

I tried to do this exercise and then then I promise I will cut this short and I did not curate this list and and one that is coming up to me now is uh Ron Latz has been posting that he's traveling and when he gets in like an Uber he asks the Uber driver who the major players are in that city and why they're memorable to the to the the driver themselves uh like lawyer speaking wise and I was driving somewhere with my wife recently in the car and we saw a billboard and I went through the same exercise. I was like, "Oh, like if you I don't even remember what it was." And I was talking about John Morgan and I was like this as compared to John Morgan and she's like, "Who's John Morgan?" And I was like, "Oh, see like I I know John Morgan and like other people don't." And Gyi was talking about this recently, right? Like the people in the legal marketing space know John Morgan, but yeah, people like normal people who haven't thought about hiring a lawyer and aren't in this uh profession don't think about that. And I was like, "Oh, it's Morgan and Morgan." And she goes, "Oh, I've been married to you for seven years. I know who Morgan and Morgan is. I just didn't know his first name was John." And so I cannot go through the same experiment of asking uh my wife uh in comparison to an Uber driver because she is also uh fairly educated. So I thought that was funny.

Yeah. The control group control group is contaminated.

I always think of, you know, um, billboard ads. Uh, there's one here in Miami that just says, "Your wife is hot and then in small caps it says better fix your AC and it's for HVAC." Um, and things like that are the things that stand out. And I bet you everybody who speaks to those people says that they they found out about you on a billboard regardless of how they first heard about you because that's the thing that sticks in their memory.

That is so good. Your wife is hot. That is so good on so many levels, man. Okay. Um, that was a ton of fun. I imagine we'll do that again in the future. Uh, especially if this goes viral. Nick and Tony become uh LinkedIn post reactors.

Hit that like and subscribe button.

Uh, yeah. Keep coming out with those uh those intake takes and then let me criticize them based on what you care about my thoughts are.

Or react to our reactions.

Oh god, that's meta.

But uh before we go, uh we referenced Answering Legal a bunch in this podcast. I know I did. Uh so if you want to check us out, you can go to answeringlegal.com to learn more about our virtual receptionist service. And there's a link in the bio this episode to get started with a 400 minute free trial.

Thank you for being much better at self-promotion and sales than me, Tony.

I always have the plug.

You do always have the plug. Uh, special thank you to all of our listeners, watchers, uh, what do they call them on Always Sunny? Creeps. Creeps who watch.

I'm not calling you a creep, but uh, if you are, 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, and the Answering Legal YouTube channel.

Okay, cool. We'll see you next time, everyone.