We've been fortunate enough to experience some significant growth here over the last few years, and we've been able to do that without having to see a significant marketing spend increase to go along with it. We were able to do this by really pivoting our focus and shifting gears from the mindset we had always had, which was more marketing. How do we spend more money on marketing? What do we spend our next marketing campaign on and really shift that focus to honing in on our client acquisition process and making that the best process we could and when I say intake, that's really the heart of what this is, is client acquisition. And while I can't sit here and, you know, promise that everybody watching this webinar is going to, you know, immediately see a 200% spike in sign cases by optimizing intake. I do truly believe that there are tremendous growth opportunities for each and every firm out there, no matter how big or small you are, purely as it relates to intake and optimizing and improving your intake departments.

Welcome to the 10 golden rules of internet marketing for law firms. Podcast featuring the latest strategies and techniques to drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into clients. Now here's the founder and CEO of 10 golden rules. Jay Berkowitz,

and this never gets any easier or more enjoyable to talk about. But the results were simply jaw dropping. Some of my law partners would probably describe them as bombing inducing even it was really just shocking. We used a company called legal intake pros. Johnny Smith is runs that company, and what they did is they monitor our calls, our leads. They watched our intake department from a distance, and watched their every move, their every step for a month straight. They tracked everything, and then they reported, you know, the detailed findings back to us. They also mystery shopped our firm and other firms, and ultimately put together a thorough analysis of you know, what our strengths and weaknesses were compared to other competitors. And what we ultimately learned from the audit is, again, pretty, pretty shocking that we were missing 18% of our incoming calls. Missed call percentages was something we had never tracked prior to this. We are now consistently in the 3% range and always trying to improve, but we were missing 18% of our incoming calls the month that we had that audit done. Over half of those missed calls were first time callers, and so we were constantly focusing on why our marketing wasn't working, and what we really realized is the marketing wasn't the problem. We were attract. We were spending all this money to attract all these leads to take action and contact us, and we were completely dropping the ball on being able to handle them. We just didn't have the infrastructure in place. A big problem for us was not necessarily us not answering the phone, but it ringing for too long, and callers eventually just abandon those calls and hang up if they're put on hold or, you know, left on hold for too long. And we also learned that there were a number of calls that that we, you know, track, that never made it into lead docket. And so we realized that a number of our leads were not being entered into the system, which is a huge problem. And so it, you know, it never makes me any happier to look at these numbers and talk about this and to think about, over the course of three, four decades, how much business we left on the table for people that were trying to get us to help simply by botching the intake process. And so in order to identify the friction areas at your firm, I think a great starting point is to have an audit done of your intake process. I recommend this to everybody. There's a number of companies out there that can do it, and I have yet to encounter one person that has come back to me and wasn't blown away by the results. Another thing that I really strongly believe it's worth investing in is hiring an intake optimization company. Making the decision to work with an intake consultant was one of the most impactful decisions our firm has ever made. We would have never known these problems existed. We would have never known our missed call percentages, but for diving into that audit and letting them help us fix these problems again, we work with legal intake pros. I think they're great. We still work with them, because we see such tremendous value in constantly improving our intake process and staying on top of, you know, innovations and advances in intake. They've helped us with so many facets of our firm in general, but, you know, some specific examples I can give is they've trained our receptionists, they've trained our intake coordinator. They've helped us create manuals to systemize those roles and to expedite the onboarding of those roles, they've helped us integrate our lead management system, lead docket, with filevine, our case management system, so everything flows smoothly between those two. I mean, they've helped us meticulously track all of our marketing data as well and make sure that's set up properly so that we can get an accurate ROI on those expenses at the end of the day. They hold us accountable. They hold our intake team accountable, and I view their role as somewhat of a fractional director of intake, essentially, and it's been a huge part of our success. Just a couple of examples of companies I am aware of. Again, we work with legal intake pros. Love them. I've also heard of a number of firms working with Carrie James on the intake side of things. I know there's a number of other really good companies out there that work on intake, but these are two that you know I feel comfortable mentioning, is good options that I think would be worth consulting with if this is something you decide is worth considering. So one of the big things that we've done with our intake consultant is focusing on improving our conversion rates. And if you're not sure what your conversion rate is, or if you're not tracking this, you are probably leaving a lot of money on the table. This chart just shows some of the improvement our newest intake coordinator has seen in her conversion rate since we started working with a consultant. And all of last year, she converted 60% of her wanted leads. And this year. Or she's on pace to convert roughly 80% of those leads, just pure, based on math and our average fees and the volume that she handles. You know, this 20% increase in her conversion rate should ultimately equate to an anticipated, you know, revenue boost of over $800,000 for our firm. And again, these were leads we were already paying for we were already attracting to our firm that we just weren't signing up and just going from 60 to 80% you know, yields 800 plus in revenue for, you know, and the cost of doing that is just a small fraction of that return. Increasing per conversion rate has alone been a game changer this year, and we've done that with both of our intake team members, and, you know, we hope to eventually get them in the 90% range. It's much harder said than done. I think a lot of people think they're in the 90s, but I've found that, you know, there's usually a lot of leakage that they're not aware of in that scenario. So couldn't be higher on an intake company and everything they've done to help our firm. Second key takeaway I want to talk about is minimizing paralegal and attorney involvement in the process. This can be a difficult concept to grasp and somewhat of a hot topic for some people, because most attorneys believe that they are the best closers and that they should be intricately involved in the client acquisition process. And we found that that's simply not true, that trying to force attorney over involvement actually does the opposite and drags out the process and may result in even more missed opportunities and more leakage. I think this is the case for a number of reasons, one being that attorneys are just terrible at following up. For the most part, if an attorney is responsible for chasing a lead, or following up with a lead, and they make one phone call and that person doesn't answer, chances are that firm's not going to sign that case. They're going to move on and get busy and focus on something else. Attorneys are also extremely busy. It's very hard to get a consultation scheduled on, you know, immediate notice, and then oftentimes it results in that potential client being pushed out hours or even days. You know, from the time they call and they don't want to wait three days to meet with an attorney. They want to somebody to help them right then and there, whether it's a paralegal or an intake person or an attorney. They just want their questions answered. And this probably isn't news to anyone, but paralegals do not like doing intake either. It's usually not their primary job, and it's usually not their top priority. And if they're in the middle of doing something busy, it's impossible for them to ignore that bias and just shift gears and flip a light switch and focus on intake at the end of the day. If you're asking paralegals and attorneys to disrupt their day to day work and to start handling intake calls, signing that case is not going to be a top priority for decades. That's how we did it. We relied on busy paralegals and busy attorneys, and this resulted in significant leakage, poor follow up and, you know, friction every step of the way with our intake process. There are always going to be exceptions where you want your, you know, name partner to be, you know, having face time with a client and a catastrophic injury case or whatever the circumstances may be. But as a general rule, we found letting your intake people focus on intake, and let your attorneys and paralegals focus on what they do is the best recipe for success for us, and removing them from the process to the extent you can it has been a huge step in the right direction for our firm. Key number three is very simple. I joined a pilma mastermind group a few years ago, and one of the first things that dawned on me that was that everybody else was incentivizing their intake teams. And, you know, motivating your intake team with performance based incentives works. We do this a number of ways. We've got team goals where every intake team member receive set bonus thresholds if they sign certain numbers of cases as a collective group. We found that that builds camaraderie between them and doesn't necessarily result in, you know, the interdepartmental competition. We also have individual goals tied to their conversion rates, where, if they, you know, exceed 70% in a quarter or a year, they receive certain amounts of bonuses. And if they receive 80% conversions throughout the year, you know, they get a nice bonus at the end of the year. And so we found that that's, you know, highly motivated our team to perform. And we've seen a direct correlation with these incentives and the results you have to keep them hungry and motivated. Intake, in my opinion, is one of probably the roles of a law firm with the highest burnout rate. It's very difficult to keep people in that role. It takes a lot of time and energy and sucks a lot of life out of them, and so keeping them hungry, keeping them motivated, coming up with creative ways to incentivize them is key. Key number four, enter every single lead into your system. This sounds so simple, but so many firms screw this up. This is the big one that I think gets overlooked, that costs no money to implement. Simply put every lead that your firm receives from every case type, every marketing source, should be entered into a central lead management system. There cannot be. Any exceptions to this rule, the second you start making an exception and not enter a crappy lead, because, you know it's a bad case, and you know you're not going to follow up with them and waste the time to to enter that. You know more exceptions are going to follow, and eventually you're going to see your team starting to only enter wanted leads into the system. And I think it's just as important to have those unwanted leads tracked is it is the wanted leads crucial to know how many wanted versus unwanted you're receiving. It's crucial to know which of your campaigns are yielding unwanted leads, and if a certain campaign is resulting in nothing, but, you know, crappy medical malpractice leads, that's something you need to know. And if those aren't entered into the system, you're never going to have that accurate data capture. And this rule, again, it's so easy to take home and implement, but it does require 100% strict compliance. And I've heard some firms feel so strongly about this that if they find out that a single lead is not been entered into a system, it's a fireable offense. So I just think that data is so important, and that just shows you know how crucial it is, even though it may feel like a waste of time, as far as the big picture goes, it's crucial to to have an accurate picture.

that was awesome. And thank you so much. And congratulations on your success. I do have a couple quick questions and so. Sure, I always sneak in a little bit, and then we'll take questions from the entire panel at the end and take questions from the audience. Of course, you mentioned lead docket, and the lead docket software, and lead docket was purchased by filevine. Filevine is a case management system, and I'm sure many of you listening know that. But what's the role of lead docket? Like it fits in the middle. It manages the leads. Explain how you all use it and what folks should look for, you know, that sort of interstitial in between the call and the case management. Yeah, the

way I look at it, lead docket is your entire front end, you know, operations. It's where your marketing and your intake culminates and comes together. And in my opinion, once a contract is signed and once you have a retained client, that's when file vine comes into play, and that's when, you know, they transition from lead docket to file vine, and we start working their case. You know, using the case management system, for years, we tried to make file vine work for for leads, and it just created problems. You know, we had people in file vine that weren't clients, that were potential clients, we tried to enter marketing data into filevine. And, you know, at the end of the day, that's just not what it's designed to do. And so lead docket is where, you know, the first contacts made with our firm. You know, we have as many automations as possible so that that person automatically pops up in lead docket, and it keeps, you know, a tab on what, what the status of them is. You know, how many times have we contacted them? We have certain protocols in place where we will chase a lead, you know, within certain parameters, and make several attempts. And, you know, when we first started our intake team, Michelle used to just carry around a yellow pad, and that was our, that was our lead docket. And now any of us have real time access to see these leads at any point in time? And if she's out sick, you know, another intake coordinator can pick up on that lead and chase that prospect and try to get them in the door. So I view it as very much, you know, complimentary pieces that do different things from a front end standpoint and a case management standpoint,

awesome. Thank you. And one other question, you mentioned that you don't love listening to calls. It's a little painful, especially when they're not handled really, really well, imagine it's a lot easier to listen to calls now than it was two years ago, before your team got trained up in terms of your consultant, how many calls they listening to? What feedback do they give you? What's the cadence on the feedback? Are they? Are they regularly coaching your team?

They are so they meet every other week with our team and provide coaching. I receive copies of the scores if, if they're below a certain threshold, the team gets copied. If they're, you know, if they handle a lead extremely well, receive an extremely high score, you know, the the intake team or consultants will notify them and, you know, congratulate them on that. And if it's a less than desirable score, I'll take a look at it first. And kind of evaluate is this, is this really, you know, an us problem, or possibly, you know, a disgruntled prospect problem? And you know, kind of evaluate whether it's worth taking any further action. But they're routinely monitoring a number of calls for us. Every month, we get scorecards, you know, completed on those calls, and so we're able to keep a pretty good pulse on, you know, how things are going based on those scores. And you know, bring central also has some some automated rankings, where they can note that a call was favorable or unfavorable, and things like that. And so, you know, with all the kind of pieces to the puzzle, we're able to kind of keep a good pulse on, are they being as sympathetic as we would like them to be? And we, and we've even had, you know, consultants tell us that, you know, we've noticed a little bit of drop off, and some of the sympathy side, you know, with this increase in volume that they're now handling. And so I would like to think there's an end in sight, but for me, there's always going to be improvement opportunities and intake. And, you know, we're never going to get to a point where we're saying, this is content, this is working. We are just always going to be tweaking and finding ways to do things differently.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Don't go anywhere. Stick around. And I think I dropped one of the biggest things that I was going to talk about. Ben's actually agreed. He has a much longer version his presentation. He's agreed to join us at tgr live. So if you just a little bit of you know, really the hands on expertise from someone in house doing this for real. Not that the consultants coming up, these guys are awesome professionals, but Ben's going to join us at tgr live March 10 and 11th in Delray Beach, Florida. So without further ado, introduce Chad Kerby. And Chad's a long time you know law firm, marketing expert and business of law expert and partner Gary's with us today too. I think Chad's going to take the lead on the presentation. And these guys have developed a company called scalable, and it's a tool. There's sales training, you know, because Ben touched on a little bit, but like when a call comes into your firm, you've got to convert those calls, and there's sales skills to that. And. So they've got a sales process training software, and without further ado, Chad, welcome to today's webinar. Jay,

it's it's fantastic to be with you. But before I jump into what I'm going to share, I do want to just point out a couple of things. Ben. Ben was very humble in the way he started his presentation, but the content you shared, Ben, was absolutely phenomenal. And so I just want to make sure reiterate that everyone that was listening you started out with this phrase that I hope everyone wrote down, which was, remove the friction from intake. You know it, Ben, that's such a powerful statement. Remove the friction from intake, because Gary and I have the opportunity to sit front and center on law firms with law firms in their intake, and it's incredible to see how much friction there is when it comes to intake. You know, just a couple of weeks ago, I Secret Shop 30 law firms, and these were larger law firms, right? The law firms that a lot of people set up as the beam, you know, the light, the goal, and the calls Ben that the friction involved was, was painful and and I just thought, when you use that phrase, remove that friction. I thought, Oh, my goodness, I hope everyone's writing that down. And then you followed up Ben, and you said, I invest in them if as focused on intake as I am marketing. You know, that's it's interesting. You say that because a lot of people say to themselves, Okay, I gotta invest, invest more in marketing and marketing and marketing. In fact, Gary and I have sat down with law firms and said, Okay, we think you should actually invest less in marketing and spend more time here on intake. And then they go, No, I don't think, because it goes contrary to what they feel in their hearts. I mean, and Jay, everyone listening right now I could ask them, and if I could see their faces, I'd say, How many of you have ever thought to yourself, Okay, if I just invest more in marketing, I just best more in marketing. How many of you have thought that and yet ignore what Ben just shared and, and it's so powerful, Ben, and then the importance of tracking and and really have that training that's happening and calls that are listened to, and Gary and I, we have a solution that we use to listen to every single call and train daily, that that training, you know, Ben, obviously, is a big sports fan, As our Gary and I, and when we talk about training Ben, we'll, we'll say, you know, baseball players that are professionals go out before every game and have batting practice, right? And then the intake team, we're just like, hey, go do that. And there's not any sort of, any sort of practice. And so what you shared was absolute gold. And I hope everyone wrote took a lot of notes there, because the content was absolutely phenomenal. And so as as we jump into this, though, and what we do over at scalable is we really believe that there's only two ways to operate your firm, and that is strategically and opportunistically. And when I get up in front of and when I'm speaking at a conference, I get about say, How many of you know the two ways to operate your firm, it's strategically or opportunistically. Then I'll follow up with most people operate how? And in almost all cases, everyone's saying opportunistically. They're hoping everything happens, hoping everything works out. In fact, Adam Reiman, who will be speaking here in a moment, says, you know, hope is not a business plan, right? And so we have to be more strategic in the way we're thinking about things. So I'm just going to talk real quickly in the time I have about five specific KPIs that should be measured by your intake team now. Now Ben brought up the importance of tracking, making sure everything gets tracked, because whatever you track will grow. In fact, a good friend of mine says, Be careful what you track, because it will always grow right and if you're always focused on negativity, it's amazing how negative your life becomes. If you're always focused focused on positivity, it's amazing how positive your life comes. You know, especially as we think about gratitude, typically this time of year, when we think about being grateful, it's amazing how much we acknowledge that which we have. So we're going to talk for just a few minutes on what five specific things you can you can really track to grow your firm specifically as we talk about. About intake, and number one is this your lead conversion rate. Now, Ben talked a lot about how everything started to change when he really started looking at the lead conversion rate and having an understanding. I mean, think about it for a moment. We hear attorneys say to us all the time, and I'm sure Ben, you heard this too, people say, I close every deal I want, right? I close every deal I want. And you're like, really, do you know every deal you want? Well, yeah, yeah, every deal I want. Because I promise you, there are those that are slipping through your fingers. For example, when I referenced earlier, I was talking about I was doing the case study for those 30 law firms. Ben, imagine this for a moment. I called these personal injury firms. They were all personal injury firms. I called them, and I told them that I had just been rear ended by an Amazon delivery truck he was texting while he was driving. I was transported by hot by ambulance to the hospital. And every single one of those people, every single intake specialist, like, okay, one individual said, Oh, we want this case. We want this case right at the end of it, I said the same thing every time. Ben, I said, let me call a few more attorneys. And without fail, each intake specialist said, okay, okay. And I'm sitting there going, oh my goodness, I can't believe this. Track those lead conversion rates, and it will be game changing. I promise you, all the attorneys that were there in those firms were like, Oh, we close every case we want you wanted that case now. Once those law firms heard about what happened, they certainly had a different reaction that I won't go into right now. But number one, make sure you're you are tracking those lead conversion rates. Number two, the average response time. How many of you thinking to yourself, know that you could probably improve your average response time? Because the reality is, you improve your response time, you will improve KPI, number one, your conversion rate. It's crazy. Of all those 30 firms I call not well, I should say one did respond, and they said we're no longer going to follow up with you? So no one, no one followed up with me, no one. And I promise you, many of these firms are spending well over seven digits a year in marketing and and they, they didn't even respond. So KPI number two, your average response time. Number three, follow up rate, okay. Number three, are you tracking your follow up? Follow up is key, as I mentioned just a moment ago. Everyone said, Everyone said, Oh yeah, yeah. This is a great case. This is a great case, yet nobody did any sort of follow up. And Ben talked about why people don't follow up when everyone knows that it's something we should do. But he talked about it. He talked about it's just a lack of prioritization. You know, they have inefficient systems and processes. They just don't have the process in place. Ben's talking about his intake team leader walking around with the yellow pad. Okay, that sounds really great, maybe it doesn't, but the reality is, things were slipping through the cracks, and so Ben told us he's spending less money on marketing and increasing the revenue of the firm. How many of you would love to spend less money on marketing and increase your revenue? I mean, that's that's key, having those right,

those right processes in place, and then resistance to change. You know, Gary and I talk all the time that you have to train regularly. And we, obviously, it's scalable. We have a system in place that helps you do the role playing in the training so it happens regularly. So people have that type of experience, but you can't be resistant to that changed. And then people are frankly overwhelmed. You know, they're overwhelmed. So we go, we have attorneys that will come and say, Come check Gary, you guys are the best. There is come train our intake team, and then they don't want a system or a process in place, so then they just get overwhelmed. Because when I ask attorneys, how many of you love sales and marketing so much that you went. To law school. Guess how many attorneys I have raised their hand and say, Yes, I love sales. That's why I became an attorney. It doesn't happen. And so they become overwhelmed, and that's why, when you leverage scalable, it takes away that overwhelm. Then this and Ben Todd, I think this so well, there's misalignment in marketing and intake goals. We focus so much on those marketing goals, and yet let intake slip through the cracks. And then, of course, the communication barriers, they come into place. A lot of a lot of attorneys, I'm telling you, and I shouldn't say a lot, let me just say 99.9% of them in their follow up. When Gary and I do an auto audit of their follow up system, their emails consist of those that are doing follow up. Their emails consist of, hey, we're still here for all your needs. Please call us as though people had forgotten that you were a law firm, right? But once we switch that and we send them valuable assets, things, hey, there's something you should know about your case, and you give them value, you will be stunned. Our clients at scalable are stunned when they go, oh my goodness, people are actually reaching back to me. I'm like, Well, yeah, because your emails don't consist of, hey, I'm still here. Hey, by the way, I'm still here, you know? And so then I asked him, Are you following up? Yes, I'm following up with the powerful I'm still here. Well, no one cares, because everyone's favorite subjects themselves. And so when you are following up with them, they have to feel, Oh, it's me. Okay. This is all about me. Guess what? Ben? I know Ben does this Ben's. Ben's favorite subject is my favorite subject me, and that's has to be felt throughout the follow up. Now, KPI number four, which is critical, the appointment scheduling rate. Are you measuring this? Are you measuring what's happening? There? Are your leads taking the next step? Think about all of those calls I made to those firms which intake specialist is helping them make the next step? Because I promise you this, nobody is saying to themselves. Nobody is saying to themselves. I am bored today. I would love to call multiple law firms. Nobody is saying that people want the people have a problem and they want it resolved. That's it. They want it. They have a problem and they want it resolved. How many of you have had a problem, whether it be plumbing, you need an appliance fixed, and you call and you get a voicemail, and then you have to call someone else, and they're like, I'll get back with you, and you're like, I just want my oven fixed. I just need my faucet to quit leaking. Whatever it is. We make it we we make it simple, because there is a very real, true principle. It will not be put on my gravestone. But if I did have a quote, it would be, and that says this people, and it was Bertrand Russell said years and years ago, people would rather die than think. They would rather die than think. Nobody wants to think. They just want to make it very, very simple. So make it simple for them. In that KPI number four, make it very simple for them. How many of you know that you've made intake too complicated at times. How many of you know that you could have more clients? Convert, more PNCs, convert, if you made it simpler. I am convinced that Cheesecake Factory would be more successful if they would just shorten and make that menu smaller. People get sit down at a Cheesecake Factory, and if you've never been there, just, trust me, their menu is a book. It's a novel. And sometimes you just sit down there and you just get overwhelmed with, Oh, my goodness, all these choices. And then you make a choice, and then someone walks by with the different plate, and you're like, maybe I should have chose that. You know, we have to make it very simple and make sure you're tracking those appointments. And then lastly, that cost per lead conversion and Ben talked about this. Are you maximizing your marketing spend? How many of you have ever thought to yourself? I think this marketing might be working, or I hope this marketing is working, or maybe this marketing is working. I've talked to attorneys, and I said, What's this What's this line item? And they said, Well, we're doing this marketing over here. And they'd say, Oh. I said, Well, is it working? I don't know. No, well, maybe we should reallocate that money. No. Why it might be, you know, and that's how, that's how too many of us approach the our marketing efforts directly connected to lead conversion. So with that being said, as you really focus on those five KPIs. And as what Ben said, the importance of having an audit. Make sure you have an audit now, Jay, because of who you are in your community, anyone from that's listening to this webinar that emails me, chad@scalable.ai we will do a free intake audit for you. We understand what should be happening, we understand what works and what doesn't. So email me, Chad, C, H, A d@scalable.ai and just put audit there and that. Those you know, there are a few $1,000 audits, but we'll do it for free if you email me directly and just put audit there. So always, always great to be with you. Jay Ben, I absolutely loved your presentation. Email me and we'll do an audit for you so that you can start enjoying. Look at Ben. Look at how happy I'm just sitting there looking he's on top of the world. He's just smiling. Life is good. We want to be like Ben. We want to feel like that. He's just back there rejoicing in Clemson's victories, and now he rejoices in his law firm victories, because he took that crucial step of doing the audit. So email me chat at scalable. Scalable is on Gary's screen there. You can see how to spell it.ai.

So Chad, I love that. By the way, is your offer available to non law firms like can you audit our intake as well?

It's, it's crazy, Jay,

I like the price. It's, I like that quick summary on what you said, because, you know, you mentioned a very similar version of what my coach, Josh Nelson talks about. And I actually found out that Josh got this from my EOS implementer, interesting, Gerardo. And Gerardo got it from Jack Welsh, but this is my version of it. What gets measured gets attention and improves. What gets measured gets attention and improves. And so you talked about the KPIs, like the key numbers, right? Gotta track, and you talked about tracking lead conversion rate. So I would add, you know, you got to track how many leads you get where they come from. So we track that like you, and we want to differentiate too, because obviously a referral is going to convert much better than right than someone coming from a Google ad, and SEO typically converts even better than the Google ads. But that's another level of detail

well. And what's important to note there, Jay, is that if the if you're not training, like, one thing that's important is like, yeah, go do it. Go do it. Go do it. You don't give anybody the path to be successful. They become super frustrated. And so we, we use what we call the daily practice partner, and it, you actually it. Role plays with the intake specialist, cool and gives them a score. And so then they can see whether tracking metric, yeah. And then they can see, okay, here's where I'm at. This is where I need to be. And they role play every day to a few minutes every day to become exceptional. And then they can progress along the path. And so it just doesn't happen by accident. The

Awesome sauce. Well, thank you so much. As a great share great content, and without further ado, I'm gonna introduce Adam. So Adam and I met relatively recently, but we've been on the phone a couple times, and he was interviewed and on our 10 golden rules Internet Marketing for law firms podcast, which you can find on on our also on our YouTube channel, or on all the iTunes and pod bean and all the favorite podcast channels. So Adam, Director of law firm growth at legal soft, and legal soft is a staffing company, but Adam's like the business coach, so he comes in and super passionate about improving your intake department, super passionate about helping you figure out your business processes for a law firm. So without further ado, Adam hit it. Thanks

was awesome. Thanks so much. And one of the things they tell us in, you know, public speaking is tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them. And I think, you know, this was a really good, great example, where you guys heard, you know, you heard from someone who's really doing it. You heard from two experts. And we heard some really consistent themes, right? We heard answer the phone. We heard, hey, guess what? You don't actually answer the phone as much as you think. And then we heard you don't actually convert as many calls as you think. You don't actually have your processes dialed in. And so, you know, we heard, do an audit, take advantage. The guys offered to get all free audit or test call, definitely take advantage of it. And by the way, no, I didn't even tell you, hopefully, many of you know but 10 golden rules we do internet marketing for law firms. And the reason why we think this is so important is that we have seen so many times where we drive an increased number of calls, an increased number of leads, and the firms don't convert at a high enough percent, and they're not satisfied. So I have a couple more questions, and then we got a bunch of questions that have been coming in from LinkedIn and coming in on the chat. And if you're on the call with us today, please don't hesitate to either drop a Q and A or drop a chat and a question for the panel. So one thing I wanted to talk about, and we didn't address this directly, but I've heard this, if not 100 times. I've heard it a dozen times that a lot of firms, the intake department is run by the paralegal, and the paralegals are super busy, and the last thing they want to do is sign up yet another client. And we even face that in our company, like we had to develop an intake process, an onboarding process, because our account teams are typically busy. You know, the last thing they wanted to do was worry about, like figuring out access and Google codes and all this stuff. So when we do that, we have a separate group that does the onboarding so that. Because there's, like a natural rejection of new business. So the paralegals are rejecting deals. So who wants to take this one? Let me give it to Gary first, because Gary didn't get a chance. Yeah, go, Gary. Gary. Who should answer the calls? And what's the difference between, you know, lawyers and paralegals taking the calls and professional intake

folks? Yeah. Well, thank you. You know, I think we're all loving Ben. Today, I took over four pages of notes on the brilliance that you dropped, and I I really like what Ben said, and it's something that, you know, we we preach as well, and that is, it should not be the paralegal, and it definitely should not be the attorney. You know, we spend most of our focus making sure that well, the law firm kind of operates like a well, almost like a professional sports team, where the attorney is both the owner and player coach, and what we want them to realize and see is that you need to have specific players for each position, and we want to train to that so much like Bennett shared early, we're ardent believers in making sure that the intake specialist or the sales team has one focus, and that is to do that that job, that position, whether it's intake or sales, and really focus on, as Chad had said earlier on, practicing every single day so that their their skill sets can can get better and improve. Because, listen, you know, professional athletes aren't practicing every day because they have nothing better to do. It's, it's building those habits inside, and so that you can do these things without even thinking. It helps cut down that other part that Ben had shared earlier, and that that's the fact that it's just a high burnout position, right? So you have to make sure that they're, they're comfortable, and so really, just specializing and focusing on

on that one one job is, is having best results. That's great. I

was going to just dovetail off of Gary. That's great feedback. Gary, that's spot on. I was working in a firm in the Midwest, personal injury firm. They had a team of six paralegals that they had doing intake, and the law firm owner felt that was a point of of friction, as Ben talked about earlier in their firm. And after doing a deep dive into the call recordings from that group, we found out a couple of really interesting things. One, when the phone would ring in that queue, the the paralegals essentially would dive under their desk to avoid having to having to take those calls, why? And Ben touched on it a little bit, but it's even more than that. Listen, paralegals are the lifeblood of a lot of law firms. In fact, my wife's a lawyer, and her paralegal was our maid of honor and our wedding but I could tell you, my wife would not have her paralegal doing intake because she paralegals just view it as new clients is more work, right? The only one making money off this new client is Ben, over here, right? Jane, the paralegal is struck, is struggling to pay her bills, or, you know, really frustrated. It's more work, right? So at the end of the day, getting paralegals out of there, plus it's, it's not a natural, they're not naturally sales people by trade, and so the intake role is specialized. When you get to 100 leads per month, you need to really have an intake specialist that does just intake and follow up. That's it, right? The great point, I've never heard

that number. We got a question from Mohammed, what's the best form of follow up with automation, text, email, calls, or a combination of all three. And I'll mention something I heard, and maybe you guys can validate it for me, because we have, you know, market data, but we don't have the amount of data you all have. I've heard of the 321, format, so a lot of people will for three days, will call three times, text three times, call three times. And what, what you have to do. A lot of times we all do this. Now there's so much junk that comes through your cell phone that you know you call, then you text and you say, Hey, this is Jay calling from the 10 golden rules firm, or this is Candice calling from the pope law firm. And I'm going to call you again, so please pick up, because I'm responding to your inquiry. So you do three, that version of three for three days, then you do the call and text for two days, and then you do the one you call every day until someone kicks you out, or maybe you give up at three months or six months. What do you all think you know? How would you answer Muhammad's question in my my theory,

you know, Jay, I think the thing that I would share most is that you really have to take a look at the practice area, because it really does depend on the practice area. And I'll give you just one example before we open it up to the others. But you know, family law happens to be one of those practice areas where, you know, you probably would never really stop, or it should be. For a protracted period of time. Because, you know the habits of somebody seeking a divorce attorney, as we all know, they in the heat of the moment, they may reach out to a divorce attorney, and then, you know, how many times are they going to reconcile and work things out? And sometimes that can go on for years and years. So while the way that you follow up with somebody who's been in your system like that. And kudos to Ben saying how important it is to keep everybody in there. Because while we're not going to be as tenacious with the schedule that that you suggested, you want to certainly stay in front of that person until, as Adam had said, Buy die or unsubscribe, but certainly criminal, I think we can all see there's a, you know, a time urgency there, and same thing with personal injury, so it varies from practice area to practice area. And

what do you guys do? What's your

cadence? Yeah, so I think email out of the three you mentioned has probably been the least successful for us this year in terms of, you know, the chase process. One thing we're really leaning into now is something Chad touched on earlier, which I think is spot on, is, what is that follow up message that you're sending for a year and a half we had the we're still here type message, and, you know, I just don't think that's very effective. And so now, actually, after this webinar, I've got to go film a bunch of videos. You know, we're really leaning into the more of the graphics and more of the videos, and tailoring video messages to specific case types, to specific demographics, and really just trying to think outside the box a little bit. You know, are they more likely to click a video, you know, Link, than they are, you know, just read a text message, but for us, a combination of the calls, and I think the text messages and really nailing that message is what gets us back in the door, more than anything else, and also the timing of it. You know, if you call somebody and they don't answer at 930 in the morning, and you call them at 930 the next morning, they're probably not going to answer again. And you know, there's certain people, we found that if we hit them with the chase messages at 6pm instead of, you know, 930 there's a higher likelihood they're going to pick up and, you know, respond. And so I think, really, you know, thinking outside the box on what that message is, and then, you know, really controlling when they're getting it, and not necessarily doing that the same way, the same time. Awesome,

for having us. Thanks guys.

Thank you for listening to the 10 golden rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast. Please send questions and comments to podcast at 10 golden rules.com that is podcast at t e n, golden rules.com you.