Sales lead management for Legal

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hello everyone today we are with Eric Kaufman the CEO of lead Dockett and the chief operating officer of the Columbo law firm who has five lawyers across two states Eric has an unbelievable story I met Eric at the national trial lawyer summit in Miami and was really captivated by his story you know starting at believe West Virginia University on the software team you know that's where he gained a lot of his technological knowledge and skills and when he joined the Columbo law firm he actually ended up building a robust intake system for Columbo law which now has become named lead docket and today we're going to be going through all of the step-by-step ways that you can build an intake system into your law firm really not step by step just how can you solve this problem of intake in your law firm so this is gonna be an exciting one-on-one with Eric who is a genius on intake process so I will let Eric take the reins all right share my screen yep so Eric's gonna share his screen to bring you through a presentation on the law firm intake process this is it yeah so as bill said some years ago we were handling new client intake like a lot of firms do which is sheets of paper and we were managing these leads and doing a pretty pretty poor job at follow-up because our our sheets of paper would just pop up on the lawyers desks and a few years later we got we got really sophisticated and made our sheets pink so we thought they would stand out more among all the other papers on the on the desks of lawyers but what ended up happening obviously is we were losing cases right we were trying to manage leads on sheets of paper but the reality is leads need to be communicated with the way they want to be communicated with via text via email multiple follow-ups because anyone that's ever been through the process of buying a car you don't walk in and make that decision and make the purchase immediately and the same happens for legal services right it takes multiple follow-ups and that's why other industries do this and so because we didn't have any real information on what was working because we weren't tracking at any other other than a sheet of paper so we made our marketing decisions by sitting down with a glass of wine and making our best guess on what was working right so we're doing television billboards internet advertising all the different things that a law firm do but didn't really have any solid way to know what was happening as you could imagine that isn't isn't the best way to work and so the lawyers would do the follow-up by writing sticky notes out and kind of talk through trying to remember okay this is a good lead I want to follow up with them but it was there was nothing consistent right so there was no way to keep track of what leads needed to call back and remember to call people multiple times and probably most law firms had the same problem that the lawyers get a tremendous number of emails and so if lead is buried in the middle of their mailbox the chances that they're going to do a follow-up is pretty low you know I find that of course if it's a traumatic serious serious injury case and in there of course you're gonna do good follow up on that so lawyers always say well I get everything I want I mean they get a super significant case that they would really want to follow up on where they're losing the money is in the margins right it's the smaller cases the average run-of-the-mill cases that if they call them they don't get an answer they say oh I didn't want that case you did want it you just didn't do enough follow-up to assign the client so what other industries do you think a lot of car dealership and we choose the car dealership analogy because I think a lot of people been through this that they they go to the dealership and they talk to a salesman and the salesman continues to call them an email them and text them until they either make a decision to buy a car totally dealership to leave him alone but the guy that is doing that dealership that's calling you and texting you the guy's not a genius right he's using dealerships CRM software that's telling him who to call when to call and what to say for the best chance of conversion but if you think back a car dealership they might make five hundred dollars on the sale of a car and they're doing that level of sophistication and so just think a lot other things that you do if you go to a doctor's office they're sending you text reminders to remind you of your appointment and if you go and I was telling bill months earlier I have my daughter has a golden retriever which I guess means I have a golden retriever and so we take them to get groomed every few weeks and they send me reminders to let me know when a we need to show up that's a 45 dollar service right and these guys are doing automated communication and so let's let's just take a look at a graph here so the average client value for a dog groomer a dentist a car dealership and what is the average client value for your legal services right so you know in a defense practice it can be hundreds of dollars or maybe a few thousand dollars and a personal injury practice it could be seven figures and so as you can imagine it makes a lot of sense to use these modern communication practices and and lead follow-up because the potential revenue is just tremendous and I have a quick of a quick point on this I just had an insight as you were talking the funny thing here is when you look at this graph this kind of hits this really hits home to to why you had to solve this problem to scratch your own itch within the Columbo law firm is because you know you noticed you knew deep down you know with with all of these day-to-day services we do dog groomers dentists etc these people are doing follow-up here's why is because their transaction value is so low they can't miss any individual client so the funny thing is lawyers have gotten away with this because if they miss one hey I mean this is 14 - you know probably a hundred times higher value average case and it's a high margin industry so it's very fascinating to see this when you think psychologically why are dog groomers being more persistent with follow-up than lawyers interesting yeah well and like you said when I first got into this and understood that we were spending you know six and seven figures on advertising and really didn't have any consistent process it was I mean I'm a data and the data person it hurt it hurt and most law firms most law firms aren't fortunate enough to have a data person have their blood boil over stuff stuff like this right that's so so you know Columbo really unlike that and I so I think it first when I first got into this I thought it was just us right I thought that all the other law firms had this figured out and it was really just us so it you know I tried to find software to help and I tried all these other things and I realized that there was really nothing out there that did what I wanted and we'll talk about that a little bit later with it but how we actually got to this point how I ended up making a tool to solve this for our business was just I saw the bleeding and I saw what we were doing wrong and I knew we needed a better way to do it you know and the hard part of this is a lot of the they call it client relationship management tools that exist in the Salesforce of the world and fusion soft those sort of things they're designed to sell everything they're designed just for some guys selling t-shirts and another real estate agent and so they're vastly more complicated than you need for a legal service because they're designed to do everything I would say that it's it's kind of like Microsoft Word versus Google Docs right where dozen million things that people use 5% of and so just to do the most basic thing is I think pretty difficult in word it's because it's designed to do everything for everybody so anyway up let's let's kind of move on a little bit and talk about one of the areas that I think good law firm missed a lot of cases is what I call the chase right mm-hmm the chase process is about doing follow up with your leads follow up with everybody else and the problem is if you don't do proper follow up your leads float away that's that's kind of the analogy with fan with the balloons hmm so you want to do follow up with your email inquiries your telephone inquiries your web chats and if someone doesn't set an appointment with you to make sure you follow up because people will say you know I'm interested but I want to talk to my spouse and man you got a hot lead and what's gonna remind you to call them back to make sure that they're ready to move forward right you know people they walk out of your office and life happens or their kids sake and their husband needs something and the mob calls and four you know that they forgot about their consultation with your law firm and never call you back and so you have to have some sort of process to follow up on even people that don't show up for appointments things like that sending appointment reminders so that people that do schedule with you actually show up I don't think I would ever make it in this appointment ever if I didn't get the reminder call right how many of you you schedule an appointment six months in advance and I might put it on my calendar maybe I didn't but they call me and so I go right yep that kind of stuff makes a difference so with this slide I mean I could see people's gears starting to turn you know turn and thinking well this seems like a lot this seems like you know do I need an employee for each of these things do I you know how do I get an already busy receptionist to do these things I can I can already hear the objections coming in yeah so that that's really the power of the system right because if you have a system to remind you of these things frankly it makes your life easier as a lawyer because and actually one of one of our attorneys said this to me that before we had a system there life was always in chaos because they would contact leads and always be apologizing about how long it took them to call back and they always had anxiety about who didn't call back right but by having a system and a process everything is systemic and there's things don't fall through the cracks and you call a client back you're calling them in a positive light rather than an apologetic light and so I think that it sounds like it's a lot but really at the end of the day isn't because you know it needs to happen right the problem is you just can't consistently do it I mean you you know in your heart that you need to call back every lead multiple times if they don't answer the time you know that you know that right now we knew that before we had this you watch this part in this video right but you just you don't have anything reminding you doing that you know another thing that happens is when you refer to leans out to other phones and a lot of firms do this right if you're a divorce lawyer and you want to refer out an injury case or you're an injury lawyer you no wonder were threatened divorce case those referrals happen but it's very ad hoc right you send an email and say I talked to this person today but imagine if you could do a direct handoff you already collected all the details you have the address here the name of the situation and you could just send that directly over to your referral partner so one year throw a partner seize your phone name right so they're more likely to remember your name when they have a referral the other direction and if you refer a case out to them and they know you're keeping track of it they're far more likely to send you back a referral fee in the states that that is allowed and I'll tell you what I've seen firms that have increased their bottom line in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range just by adding referral tracking and so there's another huge revenue stream for your business just by doing something that frankly isn't that difficult but you don't have any reasonable way to do that on on sheets of paper in case you refer it out six months ago to remember to call back the firm you sent it to just isn't going to happen so there's a company called philosophy and so they did a research study on two three and a half million liens this is all industries and it's what they discovered is if you call potential client back one time there's a 48% chance that's converting and if you persist there's six tries that conversion rate goes up to 93% this there's a point of diminishing returns I mean you can see that you can go you know six seven eight nine times and increase you know from 93 to 97 percent but again when I find most firms are at the one attempt putting a process in place where you of being prompted to persist through six attempts makes it a gigantic difference in the number of cases that you sign because again those cases you're getting in web forms web chat that you call back once they're still very likely to be a potential client so I have a point on this slide so I have a sales training University which lies dormant on Vimeo actually and one of the stats that I quote in the sales training course is that there's the study that I read said between eight the 8th contact to the 12th contact 80% of leaves convert now you're talking specifically of calls most people never would pick up the phone six times to call this study was done on pure contact which includes email social media touchpoints and phone calls so that so the stats are pretty pretty dang close to each other the the stat I'm referring to is that again eight between that eighth and twelfth contact with a new lead you're gonna get 80% of your conversions from that bracket of general contact so it's powerful to see how much more powerful phone calls are in this graph yeah and so he figures if you have the combination of up to six phone calls and then every time you call if you don't get an answer they get an ottoman automatic email and text message but it's neither 18 tenths yep you know over a period of days and so you know the chances are you're gonna get it the person has any interest whatsoever you didn't get a response in that few day period yep but just because they didn't answer initially or didn't respond to that first text doesn't mean not uninteresting they just don't have that they can't do it right this minute because they're not available at just as you are you know lawyers in general they want to communicate with clients how they want to communicate they want to talk on the phone right lawyers that advertise largely in email newsletters I guess it's some of this is a preference some of its age brackets yeah I spent a lot of your day an email but most your clients don't they want to be on their cell phone and text you back so and this is one of the biggest points I took away from you Eric the biggest point that stuck that that really hit home with me was that most lawyers want to communicate with their leads the way the lawyer themselves wants to be communicated with so everyone really let that sink in because that is the big insight here that could bring a couple extra six figures on to your bottom line that's right just by understanding that you know there's younger people who will be reaching out to you there's older people that will be reaching out to you one thing I always say to to my sales team is you never know where someone's dominant communication platform is gonna be for example there's leads I've gotten through Google Ads that never respond to my emails ever respond my calls and here's the funny thing some some people just love direct messaging on LinkedIn or Facebook so I'll add them on LinkedIn or Facebook and I'll message them go ahead look oh hey why didn't you reach out to me oh I emailed you six times like wait I don't check that stuff yeah let's talk you know you got it what's your self yeah so it's a perfect example of what you're saying Eric it's really amazing that I was recently interviewing for an open position my first ten people I called didn't answer the phone these are people actively looking for a job and they didn't answer their phone and so I was kind of frustrated about it and then the next day I just texted all of them and I got a response from from eight of the ten within five minutes no I'm going at largely these are younger people that I was working working toward yeah and if I was interviewing people that are senior paralegals that are maybe a little older they would have responded via phone or email and that would have been acceptable to them so you have to kind of just play you don't know what the person is how they're going to communicate you have to try all of them so I think the the first step is admitting that you have a problem admitting that the process that you have whether it's sticky notes or sheets of paper or email remembering in your email or whatever it happens to be that if you don't have a process you have a problem and so I I would say that this is really all about the process or you have to you have to develop a universally reproducible process and again none of this is that difficult if you determine that the right answer is when you get a lead you're gonna call them at least 6 times ok well now you have a rule right and let's put a process around that rule and as long as the rule is clear and people will work either you or the people that work for you know what the rule is then you can reproduce it and do it every time and so what what I know my own farm and some experience in other firms what doesn't work is trying to track this on sticky notes an email an excel file right I mean excel file certainly better than the sticky notes but Excel isn't helping you do follow up unless you're scanning through that excel sheet 25 times a day which is not reasonable and the other place that I see people and firms try to manage their leads is through the case management system in case management systems they you know they generally have some sort of intake tools but the thing is they they're not really designed to do case intake they're designed to manage cases cases that you've already signed up and so they're not gonna have the automatic follow-up they're not gonna have their the reminders it's not going to be a cohesive way to manage those leads and so I you know I see a lot of firms that they think that that's the right way and again I'll go back to the car dealership analogy that a car dealership has a sales team right the sales team you use a CRM like I showed and the whole time that's happening the sales team knows who you are but the service department doesn't write the service torment doesn't know any who the leads are very potentially gonna buy a car and at the time you purchase the car you get a record in the service department database that tracks your warranty your service record your recalls maintenance they're completely different systems and they're different people right so in any larger firm you're gonna have a sales team and then you're gonna have paralegals the managed case and firms I think fell a lot by trying to conflate the two and have the paralegals do new calling take and so paralegals it's a different skill set right they're trying to do help with discovery and do document generation and all these things related to managing a case so when they get a call from a new potential clients it's hard to get them in the zone to be sales ready right to be on and empathetic because they just want to get this demand out and so taking a new client call and signing up a new case is actually the opposite of what they want they're just giving themselves more work and so it's the same reason that the guy changing her oil doesn't try to sell you the car and the same reason in the morning the dentist themself isn't calling it would mind you if you're right there is a separation and so for for a successful phone or really any scale having dedicated person or people to do the sales process try to convince them new leads into working with the firm that is a different skill than the person that's the paralegal managing the case so frankly sourcing go ahead yeah and any modern business handles it this way right there's a there's a sales process and there's a client management process is it doesn't matter if it's the guy selling sweepers the guys selling cars are really anything they're they're different groups of people but lawyers law firms don't work that way generally smaller law firms especially they have paralegals porches you know very bad there are a lot of times it'll be the lawyer themselves which you know unless you're just a solo law firm that makes no sense to have a trained lawyer spending their time trying to convert calls to leads or calls the cases is a tremendous waste of time yeah so in some of the points I just want to really hit home here because you're hitting on some very important mindset shifts is owning the fact that case management is designed to manage cases ie maximize case value right whereas the intake process is designed to sell yeah I said it oh my god I said the word sell right sell legal services right and everyone's so shameful about admitting you know that they are in a sales job one of that one of the modules in that sales training course I was telling you about I really got a release to the public is that everyone needs to own that they are a salesperson in some way shape or form even if you're the lowest level employee in a company you have to sell your team members on your value and what you're bringing to the table sales is in the DNA of every person in any position in any company and people don't own that and another point I want to make is that if you give this to someone who is for example a high high hourly rate lawyer for example or a paralegal who'd obviously be a slightly lower hourly rate here's the thing sales is one thing yeah you need to have someone who has a sales mindset hands on the leads yeah I get it but here's the truth about sales if you want to do sales right there's some admin involved there's some back-and-forth there's there's some time wasted with you know putting together a proposal whatever whatever it is in in your business there's a lot of admin stuff and if you weigh down employees who are putting out demands and doing high-value tasks with you know maximizing case value they are going to abandon all of the admin tasks within the sales function of your law firm and abandon that extra follow-up call and abandon that extra administrative follow-up email to see if they need any edits made to the contract or whatever so it's so important to systemize these administrative functions of sales which can weigh down your team members who could have their time spent on higher value tasks absolutely so you know that said I'm just going to briefly show you how I dealt with the situation and I think I said earlier I looked at everything that existed I looked at the sales force and then all the other tools out there but I just I didn't think that our staff would be able to deal with that level of complexity we needed something simple because like I said this was all process is not that complicated and so anyway what we did is we built a tool that we didn't intend to sell we just build it for a law firm to solve this problem and aside from being able to track all the leads that are coming in from all of your sources right so that could be web chats websites the ones after hours calls direct phone calls and put those into a process that there are rules that when we have a lead that we're chasing we're going to call every four hours and we're going to send them this text the first time in this text the second time we will leave that scheduled we're going to send them a text an email with the appointment information the appointments in the future we'll send them a text the night before the morning of the appointment if we assign a lead to an attorney and the attorney doesn't respond in 30 min person took the call gets a task to check in with the attorney to find out we were waiting on all right all these places that they can fall through the cracks we built a process around it to make sure that doesn't happen the other side of it is to understand what is working from marketing perspective but we have to understand before spending X dollars on pay-per-click or X dollars on Billboard what is it turning into and so you need to understand your the metrics of what's happening right how many leads you getting where they coming from see the where they coming from it you want to be able to see for example on a map where your leads coming about so based on the address of the lead and this kind of stuff can help you decide where your web target should be where your billboard campaign should be and very few law firms have any idea where the leads and calls are coming from I think may have some preconceived idea that it comes in a certain town or whatever based on purely anecdotal information to be able to track things like how many leads have you gotten by each marketing source and how many leads you have those converted into cases or were the case values of those cases and all these are really valuable bits of information that can be derived by having a system with the information to know where the lead came from the outcome of the lead and what actually happened during the process for me that the things that really important that you track every lead and have a process to do it you have sales people to manage intake rather than having paralegals try to manage and take you need software to manage the process and you know leak docket is one there are others that are do similar things and if you had nothing implementing any of those are gonna make a difference to your business after you have all the data you want to mind that data to help you make better marketing decisions because now that you've collected all this data you can do something with it the end of the day what did that do for what did that do for me as a law firm would that do so the first year we implemented this we signed up 30% more cases on the same marketing spend the second year we just got better at it we also increased our number of signed cases by another thirty percent so two years in a row 30 % case increase within the same marketing spend because we were terrible at intake and we didn't have a process and we were losing cases and like I said earlier I thought it was just us but I've been doing this now for five years and I've been in a few hundred farms and never work it wasn't just us everyone has this problem I find almost no fun that has any sort of real sales process as Boston's bill yes and guys I do want you to check out lead docket because this is a good solution for the problems that we went through in this video a couple a couple follow-up questions you know what we really went through in this video is the problems that are encountered we went through you know how how every law firm has a leaky bucket you know we went through the problems of having a paralegal handle sales activities in your firm we went through the administrative redundant side of sales follow-up I'm sure there's some some lawyers listening right now who have lost a paralegal or lost an employee that handled all their leads and then for two or three months you have to put on the salesperson hat if you can put yourself in those shoes like put yourself back into the time where you were handling every lead or some people listening are still doing that you'll have empathy for the how many redundancies exist in sales like literally sometimes I wish I had my sheet with me right now I was gonna show you a sheet of because right now I'm going through this and our company because we just got a ton of leads from from this event and I literally have them all written on the back of a big long piece of paper that I spent 15 minutes organizing this morning because I didn't have time to upload it into our CRM but that's really just my excuse I really did have time I just don't have the habit formed because I don't have a simple process behind it so so Eric you know I definitely want anybody listening to go checkout lead docket its lead docket com right correct cool and then they can get a demo of some sort we'd like to do a lot of demo because you really have to understand how the firm operates and you know generic demo doesn't really cut it I want to understand how the firm operates who handles the calls what are they doing today and to understand how we might be able to help awesome cool so in terms of the ideal firms you guys work with who would be who would be good for you who would not be good for you yeah I would say that it's gonna be advertising law firms right so those guys have either personal injury law firms mass tort law firms or even there's some criminal firms that are doing some sort of advertising and so when you're getting that volume of leads we know once you start getting I would say once you're getting more than a dozen leads a month you need a system and then if you're a solo and you're only getting a handful of leads a month that probably can keep track of it yeah once you get around you know twelve leads a month it starts to make sense to have a process yep cool where can people find out more about you just through the lead Dockett website absolutely leave dr. calm is the best place and then we can have a conversation and work through that the other thing I didn't really mention is that once the the cases are signed up in the docket anyway all the information can be sent to your case management system whether that's CLIA or practice Panthers valve I'm my advocate travel words whatever it happens to be we have integrations with most of the major vendors so that those leads can be sent directly over and at that point rather than retype in all the information your case management system it's already there you can continue to work the case because I figured there's some people would have that question about how does this get into my case management system right things that go there are the signed cases right so the cases go to case management leads stay in the lead system yeah and I remember when we were sitting at the table in that restaurant area and you you showed me some of this you were telling me about how you would mark you would be able to mark the leads by practice area type and quite quite a few other factors so that when it transfers from lead into your case management system you already know what type of case it is and a little bit of background info so yeah guys I definitely think you should take advantage of getting a demo of some sort for lead docket at the least gonna take away a lot from the perspective of what even is a well-oiled intake system I can tell you this Eric has worked with enough firms at this point I mean he was sitting on stage standing on stage both of the above you know at this event you know next to some people who I know Matt Morgan you were you were on the same stage as him of Morgan and Morgan and you know these guys are managing thousands of attorneys actually probably under a thousand right he's like 750 years already yeah but uh but regardless he's worked with all the biggest guys in the space he's taken it he's taken all the pain points from these big firms he's made it implementable for smaller firms and medium-sized firms but also for large firms that the key thing is if you're past that 12-lead per month mark you're definitely gonna get a lot out of talking to Eric about lis docket so Eric thank you so much for your time you know I'm sure people are gonna watch this like 10 times like they do a lot of my videos because there's tons of gems in it and you said a lot of really powerful things so thank you so much for your time thank you everyone for watching please subscribe to the SMB team YouTube channel to get real-time updates when we release breaking news I'm gonna label this as like this on the law firm intake process in 2020 also go to SMB team.com put your email in on our website if you're gonna get put on our daily value add email drip to get free legal marketing advice sent your inbox every day so thank you so much for your time energy and attention stay great [Music]