Your Law Firm Needs an Emergency Go Bag — Here's What's In It

Welcome to Episode 22 of The Legal Intake Experts podcast! For more than a decade, Answering Legal has helped growing law firms ensure they never miss a chance to connect with new leads. Now, we're pulling back the curtain to share our best strategies for strengthening your intake process and turning more callers into clients.

Nick is recording from his dining room at half his normal volume, because there is a six-week-old asleep down the hall. What starts as a new-dad check-in turns into the most practical conversation we've had about preparing a law firm for the things you cannot put on a calendar.

Tony makes the case that the time to build your team, your tools, and your workflows is before you need them — and Nick admits he did not pack his hospital go bag until the morning his wife went into labor. From there the two get into what an “emergency preparedness go bag” looks like for a firm: an answering service you actually know how to reconfigure, intake staff you have trained and reviewed calls with, and marketing and intake systems that talk to each other instead of pointing fingers.

Nick also delivers a call-out to law firm owners who treat marketing and intake as somebody else's problem — the leads suck, the agency's fault, intake's fault — and explains why the single most common reason a firm cancels its answering service is a disconnect nobody bothered to chase down. Plus: whether you can steal a baby (you cannot), where a six-week-old lands on the dog development scale, and whether driving a Ferrari in reverse actually rolls back the odometer.

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

Topics Covered

• Why “build the plan before you know you need the plan” is the whole lesson — babies, deaths in the family, and everything else you can't schedule
• How Answering Legal's own partially-remote marketing team kept running when Nick stepped back
• Nick and his wife's infertility and IVF journey, and why he wanted to say it on the record
• Why an answering service is the natural first hire for a brand-new solo with a chaotic personal life
• Remote tools and workflows — and why being in an office is not an excuse to skip them
• What a State Bar of Arizona practice management attorney asked about how messages actually reach an attorney
• A concrete walkthrough: flipping your answering service workflows before you take days off
• Training intake staff by flagging and reviewing real calls — “what could we do better,” not “what did you do wrong”
• Why intake should not be the lawyer's job, and why the buck still stops with the lawyer
• The abdication problem: “the leads suck” with no feedback loop between agency, intake, and case outcomes
• Why “somebody will call you back” loses cases in 2026
• Answering services are a dashboard, not a set-it-and-forget-it tool
• The most common reason firms cancel: an unforwarded phone number and a conversation nobody had
• How to reverse-engineer a drop in signed cases

People & Resources Mentioned

• Nick Werker — co-host, Answering Legal
• Tony Prieto — co-host, Answering Legal
• Producer Joe — Answering Legal, Long Island office
• Christopher Earley — Earley Law Group; host of The Earley Show on the Answering Legal Podcast Network. Runs an entirely remote law firm and reviews sample calls with his intake team
• Ron Latz — LegalFenix; fractional CMO for law firms, referenced on marketing accountability and closing the loop between leads and signed cases
• State Bar of Arizona — practice management hotline attorney referenced on how answering service messages should flow to attorneys
• Slack — cited as an example of a tool that makes a partially-remote team work
• Google Ads, Meta, SEO — referenced in the marketing accountability discussion
• Ferris Bueller's Day Off — the closing metaphor on being an active participant in your own life
• Answering Legal — answeringlegal.com; 400-minute free trial linked in the episode description

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!

Sponsor

Sponsored by Answering Legal — 24/7 virtual receptionist service built exclusively for law firms. Learn more at answeringlegal.com.

Episode Transcript:

NICK WERKER 0:00

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

I thought we agreed we weren't gonna do the announcer thing.

NICK WERKER

Thank God because that hurts my throat. You do the intro.

TONY PRIETO 0:22

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

NICK WERKER 0:27

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

TONY PRIETO 0:34

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

NICK WERKER 0:40

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

TONY PRIETO 0:45

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

NICK WERKER 0:51

Welcome to the Legal Intake Experts Podcast.

TONY PRIETO 0:54

Let's dive right in.

NICK WERKER 0:55

[whispering] We are back once again on the Legal Intake Expert. I'm just kidding.

TONY PRIETO 0:59

I can't hear you.

NICK WERKER

Oh, did that not work?

TONY PRIETO

No, no, it was a joke because you were whispering, Nick.

NICK WERKER

See, I joked and then you got me back, but I'm tired. Um, well, we are back once again on the Legal Intake Experts Podcast presented by Answering Legal. I'm Nick Werker, joined as always by my co-host, Tony Prieto. How are you, Tony?

TONY PRIETO 1:20

I'm good, but I'm really not the the focus here, right? Like I'm nothing has changed on my end. I'm I'm in my studio. But Nick, you've got obviously a new background. What you want to walk us through what's going on on your end?

NICK WERKER 1:32

I am at home talking much lower than I normally do. I'm a loud talker. I've been yelled at a lot in my life for being so loud. Talking very low because there is a newborn baby in my house. My wife and I are very blessed. We had a son. He today is six weeks six weeks old. So we're here.

TONY PRIETO 1:56

It's funny. I'm glad you clarified it was your kid, because all you said was that you had a newborn baby in your house. It could have been anybody's. You could have stolen it.

NICK WERKER 2:06

That's a good point. Uh, I have to tell you, from experience, it is very difficult to steal a baby. They have lots of things in place to make sure that you cannot steal the baby. They have so many things in place that if you accidentally lose the tag on your baby, they like shut down the hospital. This lady was telling me a story of how they had to ransack every garbage pail in the hospital while she was working there because somebody's baby lost their tag and they couldn't leave.

TONY PRIETO 2:32

So why don't you why don't you walk us through what what life has been like since D-Day six weeks ago?

NICK WERKER 2:41

What has life been like? Just busy. Just really busy. Like you don't know how much of your day you can't plan until you have a baby. I I'll give you one example. My wife is like, oh, like what time do you want to do this? And like who should wake up at this time? And I was like, that's none of that is gonna work. This is not worth discussing.

TONY PRIETO 3:05

Especially early on before the kid develops a schedule, you know.

NICK WERKER 3:09

Or eyesight or anything.

TONY PRIETO 3:12

I like to tell Nick um at what point in a baby's development a dog would be at. So at six weeks, a dog is just running around like a puppy. You can just pick them up and adopt them if you wanted to. Newborn baby, on the other hand.

NICK WERKER 3:26

Oh, I thought you were gonna give me the equivalent, like how much of a dog is a six-week old baby.

TONY PRIETO

It's like two weeks ago.

NICK WERKER

That's what I yeah, but that's what I was hoping you would give me. Like uh, like how helpless is a dog versus how helpless the baby is, and and compare, you know what I mean? Like a one-to-one.

TONY PRIETO 3:42

Yeah, no. The dog is is not independent, but uh it's running around whereas the baby. But this happens to everyone. I mean, everyone who's lucky enough to have a kid, and um, that includes many of our listeners, I'm sure, who can either think back to when this happened or look forward to it, or it's happening to them right now as we speak. And the thing is that it as and this doesn't just apply to children. There's plenty of events that happen that make things difficult to run your business, to do your job the way that you have been doing it up until this point. Um, and I think actually that what what Nick is doing now is a very it's a very good example of of what you could do, right? So uh when the baby was born, Nick took a week off and since has been working from home and balancing being a new father with his job, right? And we could talk about that one of the reasons why you're able to do that is because you have built a team, right? Who is able to support you and therefore the business in the execution of what the marketing department here at Answering Legal needs to do.

NICK WERKER 5:00

See, you're so nice. You're such a nice guy. I want to give one addition to what you said. Uh lucky enough to have a baby. My wife and I experienced infertility for a few years, and so this is my what do you call that? Representation's sake uh for anybody out there who is listening to this. Uh we have an IVF baby, which is great. All babies are great. Um, but if you're going through that, it's not abnormal. There's so many people that I tell that to, and they're like, oh, me too, and nobody talks about it, and you feel weird about it. So, representation's sake. I do appreciate the inadvertent compliment that you've paid me. So I am working from home. I am very fortunate that I can. My wife is on maternity leave, and so I'm doing the best that I can to continue to participate in all activities Answering Legal while also being the burp specialist, is I believe what I was called before my wife is over there. I like your really like softball lob setup of building a team. So, and I hear this all the time too. I know of plenty of people who are young in their law firm ownership career, or who have told me stories about when they were young in their law firm ownership career, who like a lot of that time, the origin story is oh, I left the firm that I was working at, or I graduated uh law school, and my wife was pregnant, and we were married for six months, and I had no money, and I had to do this, and I had to do that. Um and so my my lens is always painted. Um, and I think it's very funny that for that specific person, an answering service is perfect for you. That is the that is the entry-level just get up and go product that you need if you're gonna be completely solo, experiencing a very busy life where there's a crying baby, a person you care about, career, court system, clients, you name it.

TONY PRIETO 7:19

It wasn't an inadvertent compliment, by the way. You you said it was inadvertent. I was I was very much being advertent with the fact that, for example, so so like again to to use Nick's uh uh story as an example, uh the baby was born about three weeks early.

NICK WERKER

Oh, three weeks to the day.

TONY PRIETO

And um I uh I knew that when uh the baby came, I would need to help coordinate the team and step into to this sort of uh uh role of making sure that we get through whatever time Nick needs without everything falling apart, and it didn't. Uh but um I did not know, I thought it would be three weeks uh from when it was happening, so I was not mentally prepared for what happened. So I when I came in on Monday morning uh and all of that was going on, I was glad that I was at least a little bit prepared. But um one of the silver linings for the way in which you and your wife had the baby Nick is that you were trying for so long, you had plenty of time to prepare for the this event. Um, you don't always get to do that, which is why you should build a plan before you even know that you're going to need the plan. And that starts with that starts with things like building tools and uh communication styles and stuff that will allow you to take a step back when life demands that you do that.

NICK WERKER 8:50

I really like where you took this being prepared, being able to make a plan ahead of time. I cannot take any credit for doing that. I mean, listen, we have a scientific date that uh we know we were, you know, at the starting point for, right? So you have nine months or 40 weeks with which to get your shit together. And we talk about this all the time. Oh, this is but we we also have so many systems in place that we would have to back that truck all the way up to explain how we get to where we're going. Um, funny story, I had not packed my go bag for the hospital until the morning that Katie went into labor. And she just like basically casually was like, Oh, I think I'm gonna go into labor today. Uh, you should really pack a bag. And I was like, oh, okay. And I very loosely like packed some socks, underwear, t-shirts, and shorts into a bag, and sure enough, uh, a couple hours later she went into labor. But we're talking about like the tools that you can set up in order to be prepared for a life change. And I think that that doesn't even matter if you're like expecting a life change or if you're just prepared for life and any of its I don't know, uh storms. So you keep keeping me softballs here, man. I'm I'm uh I'm underfunded as it pertains to sleep. Keep lobbying the softballs on these tools.

TONY PRIETO 10:15

Which is another thing that uh that's which is another thing that you you can't really prepare for, right? Is is not just the thing that happens, whatever it is, the new baby, but all of the uh side effects, the ripple effects that come from that. Um yeah, so you talked about an answering service. Obviously, we Answering Legal or an answering service, an answering service, it's a great tool to have when you have a baby because then your phone isn't ringing all the time, possibly, you know, disturbing you while you're in the middle of something at work or with the baby, or if you are um what I will gently phrase as a uh no, can't say that. Someone who has their ringtone on on their cell phone, uh, which I don't think I've had in since I got it 20 years ago, um don't want to wake the baby up. A uh an answering service lets you to do that, but it's not just that, right? Uh our team, again, we're kind of of using Answering Legal here as a uh blueprint for this. We are partially remote, right? Um uh Nick and Producer Joe work in the office on Long Island, and then the rest of the team uh is scattered around Florida. And so we have the advantage of having um tools like Slack, like uh workflows that work based on us being separate. That if you are someone who works out of their office a lot with your team, you might not think you need yet. But it's good to have those things. Um, you know, the Boy Scout motto is is uh wow, it's escaping me now, is be prepared, right? If you are I was gonna ready for this thing, you have the tools in in place, then when when you need to hit the button and start working from home to take help take care of the baby, it's not you know, and spend time with the newborn and bond with the child that you'll be able to press that button and just take the leap.

NICK WERKER 12:12

I do feel so old that you were like sitting here talking about like, oh, like you're bonding with your kid, that and I'm like, Yeah, I really am. Like everything you're saying, I'm it's just actually true. It's still uh it's still so bizarre. I do want to talk about um like being remote and using tools because I don't even think that being in an office is a good excuse for not doing things online. Um, and I often find this so redundant, but I just want to give a special shout out to fellow Answering Legal Podcast Network host, Christopher Earley. Christopher Earley runs an entirely remote law firm. Um I think he himself like works in an office building, but he talks often about how he just hires remote employees. I don't necessarily know entirely how that works. I don't know how his business is set up, but you should ask him. You should go on his podcast and leave a comment and ask him. I'm sure he'd love to answer that question for you. Maybe I'll ask him myself and then we'll have him on here again. The thing that it will drive me crazy, but there's a huge building, and then there's some remote people, like you said, and some not that like I'll drive to the office building in the morning. It takes me 20 minutes to get there. I have a nice office, comfy chair, and inevitably somebody will need to have a meeting, and we'll need Tony on that call, or we'll need somebody who's working from home that day to be on a call, or someone's in New Jersey. I don't know. And virtually I will be on the same meeting as someone who is down the hall from me, and we will be on this stupid screen together, and it drives me crazy because it's like this could have been, I don't know, an in-person conversation. So, what Tony's talking about is these tools and also workflows, right?

TONY PRIETO

Yeah.

NICK WERKER

Um, we were just talking to the practice management attorney for the State Bar of Arizona about like how our service works, um, so that she can like better inform her clients, and we're working on some sort of deal for like a pass-through. Hopefully that works. If it doesn't work, who who cares? About like workflow and communications and how certain messages flow through. And she was very educated on how things should work, which I really love because I like the idea that law firm owners and lawyers and attorneys can call up. She works for this hotline, uh, call up this their their state bar and get advice on how to do these things. And she was so well educated on how this thing should work. So she basically asked me a question that if you are someone who is like us and makes proper recommendations for how these things work, is not a gotcha moment at all. It's almost uh like an exciting question to answer. So she asked us things like Um, when you send the messages, how do uh the attorneys or the people who are supposed to receive those messages get them? Right? So here's a good example. Let's say you are a law firm owner who's about to experience the birth of a child. You are gonna take a few days off, you have a small team, and you want to make sure that all new clients receive a consultation with Tony. Tony's Tony's the uh the trial lawyer, and he's gonna do all the consultations for an employment law firm. Um, people are gonna call in, they're gonna talk about wrongful termination, harassment, uh retaliation, uh all those sorts of things. Stolen wages. We're gonna talk about stolen wages. So you want your answering service. You want to call up your answering service, you're gonna call up Answering Legal and you're gonna tell them, hey, uh I am my wife's gonna be induced, because they usually plan that unless you go early in my experience. My wife's gonna be induced on Monday. Please forward all new client form transfers, patches, uh, whatever you want to call them, to Tony. He's gonna do all the consultations. If he doesn't answer, schedule them on this calendar and you flip all of your workflows, right, to to end up in the inbox of Tony, to end up on the phone with Tony, to end up with your administrator, to end up just tell everybody I can't get back to them and that they should call my good friend Producer Joe at the employment law firm down the street. We often trade cases because we love each other, and if one person is really busy, the other person handles the cases. Whatever your specific situation is, figure out the best way to make sure that things are covered and use the tools at your disposal. Or get an answering service, like Answering Legal. See, I I followed a Tony plug there. That was a Tony plug. That was a good one, in order to make sure that you can handle everything that life throws at you. That sounded like a like a candy bar commercial.

TONY PRIETO 17:02

Handle everything that life throws at you would be a great tagline for an Answering Legal commercial.

NICK WERKER 17:06

But I do feel like that's like an insurance company commercial. Although you can compare an answering service to an insurance company, albeit we do not deny claims, it's just uh it's like a if you need it, you hope it's there type thing. But I think insurance companies are evil. So that's me.

TONY PRIETO 17:22

People feel that way about lawyers and answering services as well. So, but of course, of course, the important part of this, right, is making sure that you do this ahead of time. For example, like in an ideal world, everyone would be able to take time off when their kid is born and um you know, close up shop, spend time with the kid until they can go to daycare or whatever, and then go back to work. Uh, we don't live in that world. Obviously, if you are running a law firm, you can't just close up shop because then, you know, who's gonna feed you need the money to feed the kid, right? Hopefully. Um, and so what you want to be able to do is look at this as um look at this as an advantage that you have in that you work in a field that doesn't require you to, you know, roll up to the factory and clock in for 10 hours of building cars. Uh instead, you can move things around so that you can experience both sides of life without each of them crashing in on the other, right? You don't want to be on a consultation with a client and then have the the baby crying in the next room, because then you seem really weird when you ignore that. You learn to ignore it as a as a new parent. You learn that, uh, well, my partner's got that. But for the person on the other end, you're like, aren't aren't you gonna deal with that crying baby?

NICK WERKER 18:44

Um usually goes if it's a prolonged cry.

TONY PRIETO

It is. Do you need help with that?

NICK WERKER

Yeah. I do you you bring up a good point here about like being in the other room, right? And I think in order to like get away from the whole like baby thing, whatever, um we we I don't think we discussed this at large on the podcast yet, is like training your staff to handle the intake responsibilities. And I actually deal with this a lot. Uh recently I had a lawyer text me and say, uh, does Answering Legal do any uh trainings on dealing with irate callers was the terminology that they used. And I said, Do we do any trainings? I was like, We do trainings internally, but like, is are you asking me because like somebody mishandled a call? Like I was kind of curious as to why it was happening. And uh the lawyer explained to me that the person on the phone got really upset, and I was kind of like, I I don't think you should take that case anyway, if they're gonna like mistreat your team. But it did open up this door for me that like uh they want continued education for their their team. And I raise this as a flag, right? That we're gonna work on it, and we do kind of work on it that I was like, hey, check out this podcast, it has ridiculous thumbnails on me and my colleague. I don't know if he did. Um but again, I'm gonna shout out Chris Earley. Chris Earley meets with his intake team all the time and listens to some phone calls or some sample calls, and what you can do is have your I don't know, person who answers the phones, whatever title you want to give them. Intake specialist is what I think you should call them. Flag some calls, be like, hey, this call went really well, you should listen to this. Hey, this call didn't go so well. I they sounded like they had a good case, and then they like kind of hung up on me. They like rushed me off the phone. Let's talk about this and see why this didn't become a consultation. Um this person never answered when we called them back. Why did they not answer when we called them back? What was our response time? Right? And if you start to reverse engineer this I don't know, what do you call it? These patterns. Patterns is a good word. You can start to say, like, hey, when you explained this process to this person, it wasn't super clear, and they had a bunch of questions about it. How can we explain this in a better way so that they understand the uh what's gonna happen? Is that right now we're just gonna ask a few questions and get some information. This way we can call you back and talk about whether or not the evidence that you have rises to the criteria for an actual claim or if getting fired really sucks.

TONY PRIETO 21:31

Absolutely. I mean, we we don't talk about this a lot, and and we probably should, um, but we do always mention that intake is not it at the end of the day, um, intake should not be your job. The lawyer listening to this. The buck stops at you. Uh, eventually you do have to decide whose job it is. But if you're the one who is fielding you new client, uh new client. Client calls and intake calls because you're the only one who can tell, okay, uh what is a good, what does a good case look like, um, you're going to run yourself ragged on that. And if something like this happens, you're just not going to be able to do that. And that's one of the reasons why, unless you are a true solo uh and you're the only person that you have, and even then you can outsource those things, right? Um, we can do, you know, an answering service can do some um lead qualification, as it were, uh, or at the very least, summarize something so that you can look at it and say, okay, is this qualified? Is this not? Does this person have a case? But um having support, having a team who can do that for you and training, it will require you to do some training. It will require you to do some reviews of calls where uh let's say there was someone who, when you reviewed the case later on, you thought they had a good case. Why did they go with someone else? You can review the call. And the important part of that, um, and I can say this as someone who has worked the phones, is to uh always not take it as a what did you do wrong, so much as a what could we do better? And in some cases, it's obviously impossible, right? Sometimes you're just going to have someone who one of the disadvantages, let's say, of working in the law is that you are very often going to run into someone on their worst day of their life. Um, and those people should be afforded some grace because they're going to be perhaps irate or upset on the phone. Um, but there is obviously, like you said, there's a limit, and that person eventually should be able to bring it in and make make sure that they're not being uh unnecessarily cruel to someone on the phone, but you can, and and I think this is this is again, we're talking about preparation here, because you can hopefully, uh, you can plan ahead for something like a baby. You can't for a death in the family, right? When someone dies, um, got this got really dark. But you often like um my, you know, when my grandfather died, my mom couldn't go through all his stuff. So it fell to me and my father. And we had to take time off of our jobs and go through an entire house full of stuff and and like what are we giving away? What are we donating? Who's going to want this? And you can't be prepared for that. We okay, sometimes you can, but sometimes you can't. And so having these, you think of them as emergency preparedness go bags of of like workflows and stuff like that. Because there's ways that you can can transform your firm for the better now so that you're better off doing that. And what you're better off when something like that happens. And one of those is train someone on your team to do intake, to do qualification, to analyze whether or not this is a good case for your firm.

NICK WERKER 24:58

That was sick. A go bag for your firm, emergency go bag. You said um, or at the very least, and I was like, oh, that's from the intro. Or at the very least, shore up their intake process. And I was like, oh, cool. So you did a signature thing. I am gonna do a signature thing, I am gonna call out law firm owners. Here's my call out. Many, many, many of the law firm owners that I speak to do this thing where they know something is important. Let's I I always use the the example of marketing, right? Because I do marketing and I know about legal marketing. So it's very, it's a very easy example for me to speak to. Law firm owners will say, Oh, like marketing is is is so important. We need case flow. Um, we need leads, we need to make sure that our like they'll say they'll they know buzzwords too, right? A lot of people will say, I need brand awareness, I need Google ads, uh, should I be running ads on Meta? Should I be posting on social media? How do I do SEO? And those are all really good questions, right? And when they get the answers to those questions and they implement them, they abdicate all responsibility. And what ends up happening is that this marketing agency, and this is why I'm I'm really good friends with Ron Latz too, and he's a he he talks about this all the time. They get a marketing agency and the leads start coming in, right? And they say, like, okay, things look good. Leads are coming in. They send me a report, the green arrow is going up. But when that same agency asks, how are the leads? Are they converting into new clients? Are you sending that information back to the marketing agency? And what what I think the mindset is, is that it's not the law firm owner's problem, right? It's the marketing agency's owner to produce the leads. It's the intake specialist and the answering services job to convert them. It's not the lawyer's responsibility. And I am here to tell you that that is the absolute worst thing that you could do to your business is decide that that is someone else's job and responsibility. Because, and you say this all the time that the buck stops with you. I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with marketing agencies, law firm owners, where the disconnect is um, well, they send me all these leads and all the leads suck. Do they know the leads suck? Have they said one-to-one that the leads that suck, supposedly from you, are coming from this source? Okay, have you had a conversation about that? What about intake? Is your intake just not converting them? Are you involved in your intake? What is your intake process? And it looks so oftentimes to me that there's such a disconnect there and such a disconnect between intake that the leads are, let's just say you're a personal injury firm and you do car accidents. So many people are gonna, I don't know, find out if they have a case for a car accident. Somebody gets an idea in their head that they could get paid and compensated for the thing that they went through, they're gonna find a law firm. They come to your law firm, and intake asks them a bunch of redundant questions and says, somebody will call you back. I see this all the time. Somebody will call you back. What do you mean, dude? It's 2026. I am not waiting by my phone, waiting for a call back. And I gotta tell you, no one is. They want an answer or they want to know at what time to expect a call. Do you know how many spam calls there are right now? It is absurd. I don't answer my phone. I have an answering service too, but I really don't answer my phone. So this whole thing of you thinking like, oh, it's intakes problem, it's marketing's problem, and you don't have those systems connected to feed. Okay, these leads from this campaign, right, on Google Ads, are doing really good. Personal injury lawyer near Tony is crushing it, dude. The match rate is super high, the cost per case is super low, our case flow is good, our rolling three-year contingency fee is feeding back, everybody knows what's going on. No, you can't just say no. You can't just say the leads suck, and you can't just say that you know intake is good. You can't.

TONY PRIETO 29:17

In the same vein, um, that's sort of true of a lot of your of your tools. The um the dream, of course, is to find a tool that will run itself. And those are pretty difficult to find. Using an answering service as an example. Uh, Nick talked about how if you're going on vacation or you're having a child, you can call your answering service and say, hey, I want all of my calls forwarded to you know, my referral partner or to my um, you know, my other partner or whatever it is. But that is an active step that you need to take. And a lot of people sort of erroneously think of answering services as just like a set it and forget it kind of tool, whereas it's really like a dashboard, right? Where like uh on an on an airplane, there's a bunch of switches you can flip. And it's all about finding what your autopilot should be. And then when you need to make certain adjustments, you flip a couple of switches and make sure that the tool is working for you. And that's true of things like marketing um and and and many of the tools you're going to use uh in terms of turning callers into clients, is um you're gonna have to at a certain point, right? And and this is kind of what you sign up for when you own a law firm, is you step away from practicing the law 100% of the time, and you start running a business 30, 40, 50% of the time. And um it's easy to say, that's not my job, that's the marketing agency's job, that's the answering services' job, but they do exactly what you tell them to do. And unless you tell them, hey, I need better leads, this is why the leads aren't converting, or unless you tell your intake people, these are the questions you need to ask. You need to make sure that instead of just saying you call someone, someone calls up and says, Hey, I was in a car accident. And the first question is, are you a new client? It's like, I don't know. Tell you tell me, is my name in the system? If my name's on the system, let's just skip that question, you know, using the intuition of a human being to say, okay, this person was in a car accident. They're probably hurt or distressed or angry. Let's just get their story out, make sure that we get their name and their contact information and make them feel like they are already working with someone instead of filling out a form.

NICK WERKER 31:53

Do you know what me and you, Tony, for our audience are doing here right now? Tony, Tony is very good with data. Very good with data. And so when you work with a person like Tony, you want to give him access to all of the data because he can look at it and he can extrapolate insights. One of the insights that Tony has identified is that the reason that law firm owners cancel their subscription with Answering Legal by and far is that a mistake will have been made. Now, if you just write that as a line item in why a subscription gets canceled, it looks like, oh, an operator error occurred. But that's not often the case. And I encourage you, if you're listening to this, to read some of the reviews and responses on the Answering Legal reviews, right? We have them on the site. What ends up happening is that something say you get a new phone number, you start advertising a new phone number, and you don't know that your phone number automatically, when you purchased it, is not forwarded to Answering Legal. And you will call up and you'll say, Well, you guys aren't answering my phones. And the person who you're speaking to has no idea that the context that you're talking about is like you're you you purchase a new phone number and you put it on a billboard, no one's answering it. They will say, Well, there's just no system outage. I'm looking at all the calls that are coming have come into our system. We answered them under 10 seconds. What are you talking about? Right? And you'll go round and around and around on this thing until we get fired, and at some point somebody discovers, usually me, that uh there was a total disconnect all along. So, Tony, what are we doing here right now? We are spreading information about how to conduct business with an answering service, educate people on how their phone systems work, educate people on how their intake should work so that they can better utilize our service and make changes to their business that they can capitalize on. And uh, you said something else that like struck a real chord with me. What else did you say? Oh, dude, it's so gone. I hate that I do this all the time. It's baby brain. Here's the here's the here's the thing, and then and then we're gonna start a new episode, right? Because we batch these episodes. Is you have to look at your system and identify the problem that you know is hurting you, right? So say you have an intuition that the amount of cases that you signed is down, right? That's your you know that. You see the number, right? You're used to signing 20 cases in a month and you signed 12. And you're like, wow, I'm down eight cases this month. That's not good. Our case volume decreased last month, too. Um, it's been down for a few months, right? You get this idea in your head and you start looking at how many you've signed. Well, who do you go talk to? You're gonna go talk to two people, right? You're gonna talk to the marketing agency, you're gonna talk to your intake person, you're gonna feel around the firm on who's talking to the clients, and you're gonna start to get a general sense of the disconnect, why things are happening the way that they are. And what you can do is say, Oh my god, I think we made this change. We made a we made a mistake. We took a phone number and didn't make it ring in our office. We put this billboard up and it has a typo. Uh, we broke the website, the website's been down for two weeks and nobody knows. We got a bad Google review, right? You you have to pay attention and you have to be the one responsible for the business because I can tell you with certainty that your marketing agency is not sitting there reviewing your internal case metrics unless unless their contract is is tied to case outcomes, which a few of them are. Um, but the law firm owners who want to do that are few and far between. You are responsible for your bottom line numbers. You can fire that agency if they're responsible, but you're responsible. And so if you get hit in the wallet, reverse engineer it. And if you have a complicated problem that you want two investigative marketing minds to review, one of whom is in Miami, the other uh is in what is like an open space dining area slash I don't even know what you would call this room. It's just a dining room table when it goes outside.

TONY PRIETO

Yeah.

NICK WERKER

But it's not a room. There's no walls, there's just this wall.

TONY PRIETO

It's a dining room. Don't worry about it.

NICK WERKER

I don't like it like that.

TONY PRIETO

It could be a breakfast nook.

NICK WERKER

I don't really eat breakfast here. I would like a breakfast nook. Does anybody have that?

TONY PRIETO

Uh yeah. That's a thing.

TONY PRIETO 36:48

Yeah, absolutely it is. It's like a very sunny place where you can enjoy your breakfast with the the morning sunshine.

NICK WERKER

Is it like a diner booth?

TONY PRIETO

Yeah.

NICK WERKER

I like that.

TONY PRIETO

Yeah. As a final thought here, um, there's uh an attorney we work with who calls me when he has a problem. I love this. He wants that he I uh that he wants to solve with the service. Um, because we had worked with him on on filming a testimonial, and I'm his point of contact for for the service. I love talking to him. Every time he calls me, it is the highlight of my day. The last time he called, he talked about the World Cup. And he asks me a question. I I tell him whether or not it's possible. And then in terms of setting it up, I point him towards support because those are the people who who implement things. Um, what he has is what I would call an active participation in his law firm. When there's a problem with uh his answering service, he calls the guy he knows who can sit, who can tell him point him in the right direction to fix it. And there's a lot of of call them teen movies from the 80s and 90s. I'm thinking of like Ferris Bueller's Day Off, that are about learning how to be an active participant in your life. Because when you're a kid, life just kind of happens to you. And part of becoming an adult is like learning how to step forward and do that. When you have a kid, you actually do the opposite. You kind of step out of the rest of your life to become an active participant in this new life forms life. And in order to be able to do that, you have to have done the work ahead of time. In order to be able to step away from this thing that you built, because the ideal situation is to be able to step back, not disappear, but just sort of step back. And the machine that you've built full of wonderful people will run itself with a little bit of, you know, steering at the rudder. And in order to do that, you have to first be active in setting things up so that then you can take a more passive role when life demands it.

NICK WERKER 38:49

That was beautifully said, and it was a perfect plane landing, full circle moment for the episode, and I am about to ruin it with my insight. Are you ready for this?

TONY PRIETO

Hit me.

NICK WERKER

In the movie, Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I can remember being a kid watching this movie, and Ferris telling his friend, is his name Cameron? I think so. I feel like it's Cameron. Anyway, Cameron, uh, they if you haven't seen the movie, spoiler alert, they steal Ferris' friend's dad's Ferrari and they drive it around on Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and they get it back into his garage, and Ferris says, We're just gonna drive it backwards to roll the miles back. And I remember being a kid and thinking to myself, is that gonna work?

TONY PRIETO 39:37

It didn't work. No, but on those older cars, you could take a drill and put it into the odometer and put it on reverse and reverse the odometer that way.

NICK WERKER 39:46

I know many people who still make a vocation of rolling back odometers, digital odometers.

TONY PRIETO

Digital odometers.

NICK WERKER

Now that's a science. That's uh not something that we're gonna cover on this podcast. Are you signing us out? How do we sign out of this thing?

TONY PRIETO 39:59

I think it's sort of the opposite. Things that aren't scams. Speaking of things that aren't scams, we talked about Answering Legal a few times today during today's episode. So I just want to let you know that you can go to answeringlegal.com to learn more about our virtual receptionist service and click the link in the bio of this episode to get started with a 400-minute free trial of the service.

NICK WERKER 40:16

Thank you for rescuing us and landing this plane successfully, which was a marketing department question of the day. Do you think in an emergency and having full uh communication with air traffic control that you can land a plane successfully? I said yes because I am a cocky idiot. But thank you, Tony, and a special thank you to all of our listeners.

TONY PRIETO 40:38

Be sure to join us for the next episode of Legal Intake Experts. All episodes of the show can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and the Answering Legal YouTube channel. See you next time, everyone.