Never Miss Another Case: How to Transform Your Law Firm's Intake Process

How can you transform your law firm's intake process to ensure you never miss out on a valuable case again? This episode of Life Beyond the Briefs is packed with actionable insights on optimizing client engagement for solo and small law firms, particularly those specializing in personal injury. Discover why the speed of your response can make or break your case acquisition rate and how bringing intake tasks back in-house can revolutionize your firm's efficiency. We'll also guide you on how to define a clear "buy box" for your intake team, helping them quickly identify the cases that are always, sometimes, and never a fit for your firm.

Mark your calendars for an event you won't want to miss: the Law Firm Bootcamp in Fairfax, Virginia, on August 1st and 2nd. This bootcamp is your go-to for boosting profitability without upping your marketing budget. Learn to optimize your client intake processes, leverage free tools like Google My Business, generate referrals, and dive into grassroots marketing strategies that truly work. We'll also reveal the critical metrics your law firm should be tracking, with some surprising insights that could change your approach entirely. Stay tuned for next week's update on how to grab your tickets. Have a fantastic weekend, and let's grow your practice together!

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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.

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Transcript

Speaker 0: 0:00

Hey friends, welcome back to another Friday solo episode of Life Beyond the Briefs. I also help run a company called Great Legal Marketing which teaches owners of solo and small law firms how to run better businesses. One of the things that they never go over very much in law school is the business of law and that area of education has taken off in the last year. But for the solo and small law firm owner there is not a wide variety of resources. There are some coaches who've frankly have never done it before, have never run a profitable law firm or sometimes any kind of profitable business before, who decided that lawyers were an interesting niche to coach. And then at the other end of the spectrum there are lawyers who are running high seven and eight figure law firms using sophisticated marketing TV advertising, radio advertising and huge dollar media spends, who have begun to put on their own kind of conferences and teach other people how to do it, which is great. But if you don't have the huge media buy to spend, it's easy to go to those things and get overwhelmed by all of the options. So we fit in, I fit into the sweet spot, which is if you are a solo and a small law firm owner and you don't have an enormous bankroll to put into the acquisition of new cases, try to teach you how to sign more cases without spending a ton more money. And that's exactly what today's episode is about is the change that we made in our law firm within the last I don't know six months. That has really leveled up the number of cases that we're signing, and that's what we've gotten really intentional about.

Speaker 0: 2:02

Doing the phones well, there's an evolution in law firm ownership from there's somebody at the front desk who answers the phone, who transfers everything to the lawyer, and the lawyer does all of the intake. And then at a certain point, the firm gets busy and maybe either the front desk does the intake or a paralegal does the intake. And then they discover the wonderful world of VA staffing and so we outsource our intakes to somewhere overseas because it's cheaper to do it that way, and what happens then, at least in my experience, is that lawyers who outsource their intakes overseas don't do a great job of the management of the intake person, and you will notice that your number of signed cases either is not growing or is not growing as fast as it was beforehand, and the gap between the number of leads and the number of signed cases begins to grow, and that is exactly where we were about a year ago. We're having these leads come in, we are not getting immediately back to them, which in the personal injury world is a problem, and we are seeing this large gulf between the number of leads that are coming through the door and the number of cases who are actually becoming clients. And so in today's episode, I want to go through what I've identified really is the four or five main steps to doing intake exceptionally well, especially in a personal injury law firm.

Speaker 0: 3:28

Number one is speed. I think this is underestimated. How important speed is to the acquisition of an injury case. Now, here's the thing. There's two categories of cases. There are folks who are referred to you by somebody else, either a lawyer or a doctor or a friend or family member. Those people will wait because they're not calling anybody else. They're calling you, and I've talked about on the show a couple of times how those people will check you out online, make sure you're a normal person, but really you have to screw up the intake and the client services process to not have somebody who's been referred to you retain you.

Speaker 0: 4:10

The other category of clients are people that found you online. These are the people who found you through Google, lsas or pay-per-click advertising or SEO, and with these people, speed is just so super critically important. It really cannot be overstated how great of a job you have to do at answering their call, getting them on the phone with somebody who has authority to make decisions sometimes has authority to sign cases, but certainly can walk them through an entire intake and, on the other end, tell them clearly what the next steps in the case are going to be. Because when somebody has found you online and they've clicked on your either your ad or your website, if you don't provide that immediate dopamine hit of answering their questions, answering their problems, holding yourself up as the solution to their problems, they often are on to the next person, and that's exactly what was happening to us is because we did not have somebody answering our phones overseas, for whom speed was critically important, and so the number one thing I, in my view, that we did recently is bring that back in house, because I want somebody to be able to run kicking and screaming down the hallway when a good cases on the phone. That can get that case into the hands of a lawyer if need be, but certainly has the authority to make decisions about what kinds of cases we're going to take if a lawyer is not available. And that brings me to number two.

Speaker 0: 5:34

The number two important thing is your team needs to know what's in your buy box. And I call it a buy box because, for most of us who are doing auto accident work or personal injury work, you can clearly define what attributes a case that you want has. And many people who've never done this exercise think I know it when I see it. And there's gosh, brian, there's so many variables in these cases that I can never teach somebody else what kind of a case we absolutely want and what kind of a case we absolutely don't want. And while that might be true that you might not be able to teach somebody for a hundred percent to have them get a hundred percent accuracy on the kinds of cases that you want and that you don't want, you can get pretty close, and the way that you can construct this box is that you have your always, your sometimes and your never cases.

Speaker 0: 6:26

So for us, an always case would look like clear liability, rear-end crash, good property damage, immediate presentation to an emergency room, follow-up care with any kind of a specialist and then physical therapy, orthopedic, surgical, concussion care, whatever any kind of follow-up care. That is the kind of case that we will always take. A never case is a case where somebody has caused a crash, where they've gone three weeks where they haven't seen a doctor, where they just tell us that they're not injured. For those kinds of cases we're never going to take them and I can tell my team that and I can trust that 99.9% of the time. If they exclude a never case, it's not a case that we would have added any value to or that we ever would have wanted. And everything else falls into this sometimes bucket, and the sometimes bucket might include cases where liability is a little bit suspect and whether you take the case or not depends on the size of the injury. Or the injury is small, but maybe there's a drunk driving punitive damages component to it, and so you can educate your team on what the fringe elements are that might make you interested in the case and how we message that to the person who's calling so for an always case.

Speaker 0: 7:38

At our office we're going to take the information. My intake team is empowered to send a retainer agreement on the always case and we're off and running For a sometimes case. We're going to tell the client clearly what the next steps are. I got to go talk to the lawyer. I'm going to call you back by X time on X day, hopefully the same day, hopefully within a couple of hours. But we're clearly delineating what the next step is and we follow up with a text message. Why? So that somebody doesn't move on to the next step.

Speaker 0: 8:07

The thing is that as long as people know that there's some step coming for you, they're not going to move on to the next law firm. Mostly, listen, there are some people that are going to get off the phone with you and they're immediately going to call the next firm, but for the most part, people are going to wait until you either meet your first expectation or you don't. And if you've met the first expectation, like it's little things like that, where you're stacking reasons to trust your firm from very early on and you're making a promise and you're delivering on it that result in net more clients coming towards you. All right, so what are the other things that are important for somebody in intake to be paying attention to? There's what we call empathy and soft selling.

Speaker 0: 8:51

So we want to give our teams who are handling the intake number one you want to be hiring somebody who's empathetic, right? You probably don't want somebody who has a heart of steel answering the phones for people who are injured and looking for help. So let's assume you have somebody who's empathetic. Now you also want to empower them with the ability to soft sell your law firm, right, because here's what clients want to know. Clients want to know that you, at some point in the past, have helped somebody who had a problem exactly like theirs. So I want my intake team actively listening and responding while the potential client is telling the story of their case, so that we can turn around and say, oh, we just helped a client with exactly that injury and or we helped on a case against State Farm or man, we just wrapped up a case in that courthouse. Bet, the lawyer would be happy to help you on your case also, right, and this can be subconscious, but people are always looking for some social proof that you've helped somebody in the past who was in a situation just theirs.

Speaker 0: 9:58

The other thing that you want your team identifying and I don't mean for this to sound harsh, but is identifying the pain point, and different people are going to have different pain points. It may be the insurance company is always calling me. It may be the insurance company has never called me and I want to make sure that somebody has taken care of my case. It may be that the medical bills are stacking up. It may be that they don't want to become an expert in auto injury law and so they want somebody else to take this case off of their hands. Could be any number of things.

Speaker 0: 10:25

Now, there's a couple ways to figure this out, but I'm a big fan of just asking hey, you were in a crash a month ago and you've been dealing with the insurance company. What would you say like your one or two biggest gripes about this process have been so far? And then, whatever they say, we're going to be responding with oh man, our lawyers are so good at handling exactly that problem, and here's what I think they would do in your case. And in order to do this, you've got to empower the intake team by teaching them exactly what you do in every one of these cases. And again, for us, for auto accident law, while every case is different and unique, they all kind of rhyme, and so the things that we do in an auto accident case are basically the same from a process standpoint in almost every case, and so the team can be taught what are the 95% of things that are going to happen in every case and how can we use that as social proof for somebody who's calling a lawyer for the very first time to put them at ease, reduce the barrier to them hiring you and hold yourself up and hold the firm up as the right solution to their problem.

Speaker 0: 11:31

Because the reality is well, we have advocated for many years. You should talk to three lawyers. You should see which lawyer is the best fit for your case. Almost nobody does that. Probably one in 20 clients that I talk to has actually talked to any other lawyers about their case, and if they have talked to another lawyer, it's more likely that another lawyer has rejected the case than that they are vetting an otherwise good case through three law firms to see who will be the best fit. And so, while we advocate all the time, you should talk to somebody else. Make sure that they're a good fit. You want to be really comfortable with the lawyer. Make sure that we are a great fit for your case and that we are aligned. Almost nobody is ever going to do that.

Speaker 0: 12:13

So the last part and I'm really big on this part is making sure that there's a very clearly defined next step before we get off the phone. It's going to be one of three or four things I'm either going to send you a retain and I'm going to follow up with you in three days if I haven't heard back from you or if you haven't signed it, or I'm going to put you in touch with one of the lawyers on the case, or I'm going to talk to the lawyer about the case and call you back by exactly this time, or it's. I don't think we can help you, but we're always moving the case forward to the next step, because if you just are out in the ether saying, okay, we'll follow up with you, or wait to hear from you, or something like that, and there's no clearly defined next step, then the client or the potential client can go off of the path and can talk to somebody else and maybe we'll hire somebody else, and usually if they do that, they're going to ghost you. Most people will not call you back and let you know that they've hired somebody else. It's just a truism.

Speaker 0: 13:05

The last part is client follow-up. For the people that do ghost you, I would commend this to you Once every three months, and certainly once every six months, have your team go back through the list of people that ghosted you the people that didn't tell you to stop calling, people that didn't tell you that they hired another lawyer, and people that you did not reject and just call them back and see what happened. 10% of those people will still have a legal problem that you can solve and 10% of those people will hire you to solve their legal problem, and you would have missed every single one of those cases if you just assumed, as many lawyers do, that they went and hired somebody else or that they handled the case on their own. I hope that this episode has been helpful to you. What I found after decades of working in and with law firms is that your problem often is not acquiring more leads. The highest leverage and highest ROA problem that you can solve is the leaky bucket that is your front desk, and if you can solve for that, you will have a much more profitable law firm because you wouldn't have spent any more money on marketing and you will have more clients.

Speaker 0: 14:12

Last thing I'll say before I let you go for the weekend is that we're hosting in Fairfax, virginia, august 1st and 2nd, a bootcamp on exactly this how do I add more dollars to the bottom line of my law firm without spending more dollars in my marketing section? We're going to be talking intake, we're going to be talking all of the free things you can do in Google my Business. We're going to be talking referrals, we're going to be talking grassroots marketing and we're going to be talking about the most important numbers to be watching in your law firm, and I bet some of them are going to surprise you. The website for that is almost finished. Stay tuned. Next week, I bet that we will have a new mid-roll ad that will tell you exactly where to get tickets for that. I promise you, if you are operating a solo or a small law firm, this will be the best, most tactical conference, a seminar, that you have been to in years. So stay tuned for that and have a great weekend.