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[Music] welcome to the lex factor a lawfully good podcast where we'll brief you on the business of law so you can build a better practice and capture more billable hours hey everybody welcome to another episode of the lex factor it's your host lauren here and brad poble how are you guys emma said great how are you not talking to exactly you i'm talking about the audience out there all right we also have jared korea with us today he is the ceo of red cave consulting welcome jared hey thanks for having me i appreciate it yeah so good to have you here hey jared could you start off by just telling us a little bit about you uh sure yes um i'm a sagittarius um no let me start about that stuff [Laughter] i i'm basically a business management consultant for lawyers i'm a lawyer myself have not practiced law and anger in about 15 years and i help lawyers manage their businesses more effectively so helping with marketing technology financial management um and i've been doing that for about 15 years worked with about 4 000 law firms globally i've got clients i work with directly and then i also have partnerships with a number of bar associations where i provide consulting services for their members so that's what i do in a nutshell very good that's a lot was it hard to make that transition uh no practicing law i was never enamored with i know a lot of lawyers love to practice law but like my whole deal was um everything's based on precedent i didn't have the ability to be creative to the extent i wanted to so getting out of legal but still being legal adjacent was the right fit for me well that's awesome glad you made that uh move to use the creative side definitely me too yeah so today we want to talk a lot about how lawyers can really better connect with their legal consumers brad and i were talking about this before the episode him and i are both really big about consumer experience and you know i think that's something that a lot of people regardless of the industry they kind of forget about they don't realize that that consumer client experience is one of the most important things that you can easily foster yourself and and bring forth that good brand reputation that good experience and you know in turn keep bringing in new clients and new business or whatnot it's easily overlooked but i think it's one of the most important factors of any type of business uh totally i would think so like it's it's tough to think of like marketing when you're so busy running a business right because people often think about like i gotta push through this work and i have to take care of this well especially when you work off billable houses yeah and that's like especially true for lawyers because lawyers go to law school all they do is substantive work they come out and they're like all right i opened up this law firm so everybody's going to come to use me because i'm going to do great work and it was in my ivory tower and work out t constitutional law issues but then we get into running a business it's not like that at all right we said at that same time there lord we gotta we gotta mix this up a little bit we are i'm impressed and we just agree we are one so jared you know lawyers they have preconceived notions about uh what legal consumers want and legal consumers misunderstand lawyers in law practice can you tell us why yeah there's um there's a massive gulf between what lawyers think consumers want and what consumers actually want from law firms and so i work with lawyers a lot so like i look at this from the lawyer's side so if i'm an attorney and i'm doing marketing my strategy is usually what's easy for me and my staff because if it's anything that's not related to like the cases they're working on directly at that time they don't want to be bothered with it so what's easy for consumers and staff does not often provide a winning customer service experience for those consumers of law firms and those consumers of law firms are often left in the dark right like lawyers are not great at managing leads or even responding to leads like most of the time they don't even reply to leads they get i mean you might as well just take that money and light it on fire right so there's no process in place at all and consumers don't understand anything about working with a lawyer they're super confused about the whole process which is why they're calling you so they want somebody who's responsive they want somebody who understands the process they want somebody who can be a guide for them and if you contact a law firm and it's like dark until two months later when somebody gets around to calling you back you've already moved on and found somebody else who can help you so it's it's really problematic we were talking about that earlier today actually too i mean the majority of people out there that are looking for legal help they're googling they're searching for you they are proactively looking for you and if they find you they call you and you're not responsive you don't answer the phone you don't call them back in week you know over multiple weeks they're just going to move on to that next person on their list you know there's thousands and thousands of choices out there and you know the internet puts them all at our fingertips so if you're not there they're going to move on they're going to find the next person and you know something that you mentioned earlier to jared that spoke to me when you were talking about you know attorneys doing what was easy for them from a marketing standpoint i think the other thing to keep in mind too is no you you didn't go to school for marketing you went to school to be an attorney but what you need to think about is the fact that you know you're putting these ads out there or you are taking some time and you're spending good money to get marketing live out in the marketplace to bring in consumers but if you're not thinking the way the consumer thinks the potential client thinks it's not going to do you any good you know you need to think okay what does this potential client want to hear you know they want to hear that i'm going to be here with them throughout the entire journey that i'm going to listen to them that i'm going to fight for them as opposed to i'm just going to say in this ad what is easy for me to say because that's what i know that's funny i get a lot of lawyers that i talk to and the conversation conversation's always like well i wouldn't want that and i was like i know you wouldn't want that you're the lawyer you're not so start thinking about what customers actually want and you make a great point about like what's happening with the referrals now especially during the pandemic right even before this all happened more and more people were doing their own independent research to find lawyers people are relying less and less on referrals than ever before so you really have to be present on the web and then you have to actually follow through on those promises that you make to people that you're actually going to be responsive that you're going to help them with the case like when they actually come in and become a lead and lawyers fall down on that continuously exactly and that's where that customer experience comes in you know you you nail the job you got their business you come in you start working on their case and then you deliver a terrible experience you know there's a chance you may not end up getting paid not that that's the right thing there's a chance that they could trash you on the internet that they could leave and go to at a different firm a different attorney to handle the case you know just because you're representing that client doesn't mean that your job is done you know you have to foster that relationship the whole time and we talked about this earlier brad and i in a meeting you know one of the best things to ensure that you have future business is that word of mouth you know delivering that good experience because people using something like legal services like you said earlier they're expensive you know they want to know that people are with them throughout the entire journey so the best place they're going to go is someone that they know or someone that they have heard of that has used that firm or that attorney and had a great experience right you know i i think about this experience you know this isn't the most happiest time in a person's life when they're reaching out in a lot of cases so they just like you said lauren they want that that helpful hand somebody that they can trust somebody that can really you know be there for them and like you said lauren word of mouth is important but due to the pandemic that we're in you know people are going to online they're posting ads which are reaching hundreds of thousands millions even maybe depending upon where it's at and that really spreads so you have to get out there you have to understand what's going on and i i really think that's so important right now yeah so and we talked about this a little bit earlier jared but really you know the number one concern with a lot of lawyers probably most lawyers out there is revenue generation you know they work off billable hours so that's where they need to focus their time but on the flip side legal consumers are obviously they can be very price sensitive you know legal services aren't always the cheapest so how can lawyers really do a better job do you think at talking price with those those leads potential clients and actual clients lawyers are often like in their own world when they run their businesses and that's just not lawyers that's like most business owners i have a hard time thinking about like how the rest of the world works so like i often tell lawyers like okay we're in the middle of this pandemic right like everybody's home all the time i got my kids in the other room right now so i go out and i buy disney plus right for seven bucks a month and i get you and a lot of other people and a lot of other streaming services i get literally like every movie disney has ever produced for seven bucks a month now as a consumer i'm like okay that's not very expensive there's real value there like i immediately know what the value is but when i go to hire a lawyer i have no clue what the process of law is and when a lawyer comes to me and says oh uh you want to get divorced great that's going to be 425 bucks an hour until when until the case is resolved then i'm starting to how long is that yeah and i'm like what am i in for here am i gonna pay twenty thousand thirty thousand forty thousand fifty thousand like that's a very dangerous place to be and if you look at the two things that legal consumers want the most they want information about the process and they want the ability to have some level of cost certainty and that doesn't mean cost certainty of the billable hour like they don't want to know how much you charge per hour they want to have an idea of the total cost of representation and lawyers are very unqualified to provide that information so they they need to be able to talk about that up front they need to tell clients give them some sense of what the whole shebang is going to cost because lawyers are very bad at doing that and consumers are so price sensitive and they've got these other comparison tools on the market just in their daily life i mean i can buy like eight streaming services tomorrow i may only use a lawyer once in my entire life so you got to get it right the first time and you got to be able to talk total cost which most lawyers are unwilling to do right i can definitely see that you know the legal industry yes overall the pricing on just things out in the market have changed significantly right you know one thing that i was looking at i know a little bit off topic but uh was even payroll when you start thinking about payroll i just saw recently that companies are now offering pay at the time like for example you could go in and say you know what i know it's not friday payday yet but i need some money right now and then go in and pay you yeah up to that point i've seen that being entered into new systems things like that so we have to rethink the way that we're doing you know pricing around things so you know jared how can lawyers do a better job at taking price and what other options are out there for billable hours i think um i think most lawyers are looking at hourly billing just because that's what lawyers have traditionally done and lawyers have a hard time breaking from tradition so if you're a consumer the problem is that that's uncapped right and if you're a thoughtful consumer you've seen things like la la right and all these tv shows where lawyers are driving mercedes-benz's and they seem to be doing pretty well so there's this perception out there that lawyers cost a lot of money and the probably lawyers are greedy too which you're battling against right so there's that piece of it and then the other part of the hourly billing structure that is alarming to consumers is that what it really does is encourage inefficiency right so if i work 10 hours i make more than if i work eight hours so what's my incentive to work quickly and be efficient the incentive is the opposite so if you're a lawyer you and lawyers are starting to do this already start thinking about different ways to price things right if you're going to do hourly billing you can start looking at things like limited scope representations right so you break out the representation into components a b c and d and maybe you only sign the client up for part a and say okay a is going to cost this we're going to get to this point if things are going well we can continue working together and move to part b if they're not we can move off of the relationship if you're not satisfied that allows more freedom to the lawyer and the consumer and that also reduces the price for each segment so it's not as large amount of money that they need to pay up front right the other thing i've seen lawyers do is apply risk callers so for example you can tell a client like i'm going to charge you by the hour and i'm going to guess that this case is going to cost us like twenty thousand dollars to resolve um if i come under my hours threshold then i get a bonus right but if i go over i'm still gonna finish your case for you but you're gonna get a discount on every hour i work after i've charged you twenty thousand dollars and you're seeing lawyers do things like subscription services as well um this works particularly well in like a corporate council practice so you say hey i'm charging on a monthly basis and there's gonna be these rails around this subscription but now you've got a fixed cost like i was a software company and you know what your billables are going to be every month and i know what i'm going to do largely for you each of those months and that's appealing to lawyers potentially as well as consumers and then i've also seen lawyers start to sell products you know companies out there like that sell legal documents specifically like lawyers just haven't done that it's not like they can't so i think re-envisioning billing and getting this notion of like how do i convey to clients to consumers a total cost of representation in an effective way that's probably how law firms are going to win a lot of business in the future and law firms that don't adjust are going to lose clients yeah i think it's a great point and you know across the board everything is changing you know how many conversations have you had about just working from home or what covett has done to the workforce the work environments and how things are changing in that aspect it's not just about that it's it's everything looking at the whole picture everything's changing you know it's just like 10 however many years ago when the internet obviously more than 10 years ago came about and just life had to change you know things are changing things are constantly evolving people people are working from home more people are becoming more price conscious things like that so you really got to look at the whole picture and see how it affects your end consumer in all ways yeah absolutely so and what i like to jared you give really good real life examples i know it's easy to understand i just want to sit here and listen to you explain them but i'm like oh i have to work i have to talk back to him i watch a lot of streaming as you can tell right jared could you teach us now about tell us the story jared just uh real quick before we you know go on to the next topic i was curious you know the different billing options that you recommend when when firms have tried that what did they see from you know the number of clients the number the brand changed did they see a significant increase how long do you think you have to start you know i make that change today how long until that starts to increase the revenue or the brand gets out there that this positive experience yeah when do you start seeing results well i think i think two ways right like you've got existing clients who are like oh this is a pricing option now i like that much better than what we were doing before and in some cases like let's take a subscription for example you may be able to charge more in total on a subscription if you set it up correctly and when i talk about all this stuff like the idea for the lawyer is to provide a cost sensitive cost certain solution to the client but as a lawyer you're now closer to selling value not like a price right so if you're selling on price it's kind of a race to the bottom if you're selling on value then you can charge more as an attorney so there's a big advantage to that as well so for existing clients you may be able to move them over to a system where you get you get more value out of it and they get more value out of it that's a win-win but then for new consumers like i think you make a good point is that it's going to take a little while for legal consumers who are already aware of your brand to know that you're doing something different so this should probably be yo to a marketing campaign right this is something you should be talking about because as we said before like consumers are not very aware of what lawyers do what they charge so if you're able to say hey i offer subscription pricing options and you hammer that into the heads of consumers over time that's going to be really appealing as opposed to those law firms that don't but it's going to take a little while for that messaging to get into people's heads it's probably going to take like six months to a year to actually get real benefit out of that from new consumers yeah and like you said it all comes down to the marketing not only does it have to get through to them but you need to break through that noise just to get to the consumer in the first place so you know you could have four other firms in your your geographic area that do the same type of work that are in the same practice area so not only do you have to make your consumer realize that you have this new pricing structure you got to beat out all your other competitors just to get to your consumer in the first place right and like this notion of value is important too so you guys like stories i get a good story for you so like oh yeah i tell the story of like um there's a nuclear power plant right and it's in meltdown and the nuclear power plant uh personnel call like this repair person they're like hey the plant's in meltdown what do we do this guy comes by he's got his little bag he comes down to the reactor he takes out a screwdriver turns the screw a quarter of an inch to the right everything settles down he leaves two months later the nuclear reactor folks get a bill for like ten thousand bucks and they're like you were here for like two minutes why are you charging us ten thousand dollars and he says well um for my time it was ten dollars uh the rest is knowing which screw to turn in which direction and i think lawyers don't often think of their practice that way but like they have a very specific skill set that people don't have and in many cases can't even access because they're not licensed attorneys so if you can be the person who's like talking to people about pricing in a coherent way while also expressing your expertise you can really charge for value and attorneys are often racing to the bottom in terms of pricing instead that's a great story i try thank you that yeah no sorry brad's pointing at me i don't know i'm just kidding brandt's pointing a lot i don't know if i need to like work on a nuclear reactor i don't know he's like that's your calling right there um but to further what you were saying a little bit so we talked a lot about pricing but i think there's another area where consumers have a lot of concerns and a lot of questions and that's the legal process in general um honestly it may be a little bit more confusing than the pricing itself so and i think that's another area where lawyers are a little bit more reluctant to dive into the actual process with potential clients so i mean why do you think that is besides the obvious and how can you really tackle that knowing that your your potential client needs to understand the process because they have concerns they're dealing with something that may not be super positive and so they they need to understand more yeah so i think there's two reasons why two reasons why lawyers don't want to talk about the process one is they have all these ethical concerns right being a lawyer is not like being like owning a convenience store you've got laws you have to follow you've got specific ethics rules for your business that you have to follow so i think lawyers don't put information out there because they don't want to be giving clients advice right but when you think about it when you talk about the process and you're marketing on that part of your practice you're not speaking to specific issues that clients have right and then you can add disclaimers to things like how many lawyers have websites that say this is not legal advice right um just reading my website doesn't constitute an attorney-client relationship like you can disclaim the heck out of this and you can do that in any level of lead interaction right you can do that at your website you can do that when somebody sends you an email you got a footer on your email that talks about your disclaimer um there's no point in time if you've managed the process correctly where a consumer doesn't know that they're not a client of the law firm so that's the first thing like i think the ethics stuff is overblown the other piece of it is that lawyers have relied largely on advice from other lawyers about how to sell and other lawyers are terrible at selling so what they've been told is like you know just give people a taste right don't tell them what you're gonna do because you want them to hire you to do that but again the problem is that that's a lawyer perception not a consumer perception consumers have literally no idea what lawyers do so i often tell the story of like i i got my toilet slide right i call a plumber to the house the plumber's like out of everything i know i want to know this out of everything you were gonna say next out of your mouth i did not expect that to come out that was not where i thought you were going to go is that the story or do we need to take a break this is the plumber's story so like the plumber goes to my house and we're sitting in the bathroom and he's like hey like these are the 19 steps i'm gonna take to unclog your toilet i'm not gonna be like oh awesome thanks for coming i'm gonna go do that myself now no way i've hired the plumber to unclog my toilet because i don't want to do it it's the same thing for lawyers like if you've got a consumer in your office and you're like hey like this is going to be a litigation claim here are the 19 steps make it sound really hard they're not going to be like hey thanks for the advice i'm going to go to law school get a degree prosecute this case myself and i'll be back in a decade when i've when i've solved this for myself there's no way like the more process you can apply frankly the harder it sounds the more likely they are to hire you because there's two types of consumers who want legal services there are those who want to hire a lawyer or there are those who are going to try to do it themselves and the ones that want to hire a lawyer they really really want to hire a lawyer like i really really want to hire a plumber and i know that lawyers don't like to be compared to plumbers but like i think the analogy is apt and that like people don't want to deal with this stuff so they hire the lawyer to be their guide to solve the problem for them and the more you can talk about process the more likely it is that somebody's going to hire you frankly yeah i think that's a great point i mean that's the same reason i got married so i don't have to do stuff that i don't want to do anymore you know he's listening to this right he doesn't support my podcast ventures wow no but it is a good point especially with law that's something that it's not like hey i'm gonna try to this toilet myself if not i'll call somebody this is like this could be your life this could be a lot of money that you may end up paying as a client so it's not as common for them to go to an attorney get all those 19 steps to understand so they can do it themselves they're going to have you do it because there is a lot on the line here yeah which even adds urgency so right you know i'm hearing you uh tell the stories jared i do love them uh but uh you know it's it's so interesting to me it's almost backwards or upside down whatever term you want to use there though you know you talk about racing to the bottom for the you know are you competing on price are you competing on value the more value you bring obviously that's what i want as a consumer i want that value i'm paying for that value bring it uh in addition to that you talk about let's get out there let's tell people the process let's let's be engaged the more you tell them about it it's you know they want your service so it seems like that law firms are doing the exact opposite in every step of the way of what should be done to increase those prices to bring value to the customers to really drive the business it's it's just backwards you know it's just so interesting to hear you talk about it yeah you're absolutely right on all that stuff um and i think i think lawyers could fix this largely but most law firms are still not consumer-centric but those that are have just a massive massive competitive advantage so one other topic that we wanted to talk about is law firms and how they must engage with consumers you know when the consumers are out there they they need somebody right away they need to reach out they need that assistance how how do those law firms work to reach out to you know to those consumers those leads to make sure that they're there to be the ones that help them out yes i think there's a couple things that law firms need to focus on so the first is speed right um there was a study that came out a few years ago from fine law that essentially said like 90 of the time if a law firm engages a consumer they're gonna keep that appointment essentially with the law firm before they call anybody else which is just a massive advantage so if nine out of every 10 times you engage with someone and i'll talk about what engagement means in a second they're going to give you the chance to sell them before they go to anybody else that's great you've got the field right that's your opportunity to convert somebody that doesn't mean you're going to convert 100 of the time but it gives you the opportunity to have the first pitch which is really valuable so engagement is essentially like when somebody comes to your site because i think we're talking mostly about online leads at this point can they take a next step right can they have a conversation at some point with someone right or something right like most law firms will try to push somebody to a contact form right but 50 60 70 percent of the time law firms aren't answering those contact forms so is there a way for the person who lands on that website to have a conversation if it's not with an attorney if it's not with a secretary is there a way to do that through a virtual receptionist service is there a way to do that through a calendaring tool like wouldn't it be great if i could go on my attorney's website and just book an appointment for a consultation with that an attorney right that's really helpful that's a next step that's an engagement live chat chat bot services right like can we go down that road and have an interaction that's not something that a human has to do something that's automated so you as a lawyer can still do what you want to do which is sit in your office manage your case files and then you've set up these systems in place where you're engaging clients you get the first byte of the apple to convert them and you as the attorney just have to have that selling conversation you don't have to do the initial engagement piece if you can do that as an attorney at speed because something like 85 of uh potential legal consumers want to hear from their attorney within 24 hours then you've kind of mastered the game and then after that if you can also add like a nurture sequence of some kind so a lead comes in you set up a client journey where they can get email follow-ups if you don't follow up with them via phone for example that's another helpful way to kind of push those leads down the path of conversion so if you can engage you get to have the first conversation and then just remind people that you continue to exist and continue to be an option for them and you'll convert way more leads than the standard law firm which is basically not responding to leads 50 of the time and just lighting cash on fire in a big pile [Laughter] yeah and you're not doing this just for the consumer you're doing it for yourself they're getting what they need but you're also getting what you need you know you're saving time you're able to work more on those cases build more hours and they're getting the initial experience they want from you and your firm everybody guess what they need it's a huge win-win happy story and a show yes nice talking to you no no we we do like to leave our listeners though with some advice maybe another story not to put you on the spot but we do like to leave them with a little something what advice do you have out there for them if you could narrow it down get you know with a story set of advice something like that now i feel a lot of pressure to have a good story and i don't have one let me say this i would say start small right so we talked about a lot of concepts during this podcast but here's the first thing i would do is like put together a roadmap for client intake right so what happens when somebody lands at your website what steps do you take to try to convert them and then run that roadmap by someone who's not an attorney and see what they think about it run that by somebody who's 20 run that by somebody who's 60. and then kind of build that roadmap out test it in in the wild right with non-attorneys because attorneys end up talking to themselves a lot which is not productive because they all misunderstand legal consumers so build that out and then start to fill it in over time like okay i need this mechanism to be able to engage people better i need this mechanism to allow people to schedule appointments with me that's not going to eat into my time when i'm working on substantive things like do that as a first step even if it's on a piece of paper even if it's in a word document and i think that'll get you down the road of starting to think about consumers and what they want out of legal services and ultimately getting yourself more conversions i know that's not a good story but that's where i would start no it's great advice it's great advice no it is and i don't think it's necessarily legal industry specific i think it's great advice um really for anybody yeah totally jared i think we want to have you back sometime i think this is a really good episode and um i'm inviting you back on the air so you can't say no because if you say yes and don't show up i'll just replay this and jared you said yeah sorry i'll do it i promise okay great sounds great all right no but we we really did i really enjoyed having you on the show today i think i speak for brad as well and all the listeners this was a really great episode and lots of real life examples that i think just puts everything in a easier place to digest and take those baby steps that you talked about yeah absolutely that's great yeah i would love to come back on you guys have been great thank you too thank you so much and um everybody tune in for the next episode of the lex factor hope you enjoyed today and we will see you later thanks for tuning in to the lex factor lexicon takes care of business so you can take care of law learn how to build a better practice at lexiconservices.com you