Unlock the Power of Online Signature Lawfulness for Businesses in Mexico

How to eSign a document: online signature lawfulness for businesses in Mexico

in this video we're going to cover how lawyers and law firms can sign up clients fast and free which is a killer combination in fact everything in this video is going to make everyone's lives a thousand times easier trust me i did the math and it came out to a thousand times exactly [Music] welcome to law venture my name is jared stone and i'm the owner of stone firm plc which is a law firm that is 100 virtual and the reason why i'm mentioning this is because the video you're watching in this very second is part of a series of content that's being released all devoted to virtual law firms if you're interested in going virtual or if you're curious on what that all basically requires and if you want to see how i started my virtual law firm for under 2 000 and how i only pay less than 125 bucks per month to keep the virtual law firm up and running then i recommend that you go down below and you check out the ultimate guide on how to start a virtual law firm so with this video we are going to focus on the most fundamental and foundational aspect to any law firm which is signing up a client whether you have a virtual law firm or whether you have a traditional law firm it doesn't really matter because in order to have a successful law firm at all you need to have clients and the best way to increase your essentially a conversion to turning potential clients into clients is to eliminate any resistance to eliminate any hurdles that those potential clients may have when it comes to getting signed up so in this video we're going to eliminate all hurdles that are out there we're going to make this extremely simple and extremely easy for all parties involved so let's identify the problem with a concrete example and the best way to probably do that is for me to just share my own experiences typically whenever i was in the process of signing up a potential client and what i mean by this is i've already talked to the person on the phone i've already had the q a and i've already determined that i can help this person and i'd be happy to represent them so with all that aside essentially what i would tell them is that i'm going to send them an email with some documents for them to fill out and return to me and that way i can get started on their case i'll be formally representing them and so what i would do in that situation is i would upload the documents basically the contract the medical authorization form and the intake form all on an email and then i'd send the email and asked for them to print it and then sign it fill it out and then scan it back to me i know what you may be thinking okay that seems simple enough you just print it you sign it you scan it and you return it i thought the same thing but experience ended up showing that most people they don't have a printer if they did have a printer it didn't work and a lot of people don't have a scanner and if they did have a scanner it definitely didn't work so what happened in a lot of situations was that people were forced to maybe use the printer at their office or maybe at a ups store or at a staples and then try and fill everything out there so they could eventually turn around and scan it from their office or a ups store or at a staples or office max or something like that and that just was a huge inconvenience for all these potential clients that i'm trying to turn into actual clients and so without actually realizing it i was putting these hurdles in place to where some people they were a little embarrassed that they didn't have a printer or a scanner some people may have been a little annoyed or a little frustrated with the process because not only were they injured but essentially their own lawyer or future lawyer or soon-to-be lawyer was creating more problems for them upfront and maybe one person in all the years i've practiced has essentially said yeah this is too much i'm out once i started recognizing the problem i tried to come up with the best solution and essentially the next step was for me to put a band-aid on the whole thing and what i mean by that was whenever i started signing up clients i essentially would give them two options one you can scan it back if you have a printer and scanner that ends up working or two you can print it and leave it with your treating provider and the rationale there was since i handled personal injury cases more often than not most clients are still treating with their doctor and because of that they're going and seeing their doctor maybe once a week multiple times a week but fairly regularly to where they can just go in drop off the paperwork and then they'd let me know and then i'd go visit the doctor's office say hi to the doctor maybe see if there were any other referrals they want to send me and then also pick up the paperwork bring it back and then scan it and then have that copy but then as more cases were being signed up i realized that i was having to spend more more time going and picking up the paperwork and even though it was nice to really be able to talk shop with the doctor sometimes the doctors were busy and so it basically was me being an errand boy at times and that wasn't the best use of my time especially as you know basically cases were coming in at a faster rate so i needed a more permanent solution that would make things easier for everyone but instead of just telling you what the solution is i would much rather show you that way you can see how simple and easy everything is so to do that let's go ahead and turn on the computer okay so we are on the computer and wow we just happen to be on the ultimate guide to virtual law firms i don't know how we got here but let's go ahead and head over to pandadoc i recommend that you sign up it's free to do so and once you are signed up you'll see the dashboard right here and once you're ready to sign a client up all you need to do is go ahead and find the document that needs to be signed or filled out and in this situation here is our contract that we want to be signed by this potential client soon-to-be client and so what you need to do or have in advance is the person's email and so if you're on the phone with them originally i do recommend that you ask while on the phone what their email is and make sure you take it down correctly in doing so we're going to take this email right here and copy it right here and the first name of this person is and it just so happens the last name is that so we'll go ahead and click continue here's our handy dandy contract and so in this situation it's just as simple as dragging and dropping exactly what you want and i'll kind of show you the fine details right here so the first thing with this particular contract is we want them to type in their name and so we want to make sure that they do so so we can make it required and obviously that's automatically selected here multi-line text we do not need that because they're just writing their name in order for them to get kind of the hint of what they're doing in this situation we want it to be extra clear so to do that we can simply type which is their name and then let's go ahead and add another content box signature and you can make it as narrow or as long as you would like again you can always click here for the properties it's required and you can assign it to the particular person so let's say you're a personal injury lawyer who's representing a whole bunch of people who are injured on a bus if you're all signing up under the same contract then you could essentially have multiple people signing their designated areas essentially and we're going to do something very similar like we did earlier and we're going to click properties multi-line text note done and then one final easy step this one properties make sure it's required and so because it is required that's going to our panda doc that is is going to require the person who's signing to fill out every aspect that you included in these fields and so if they want to skip maybe this first part they're not going to be able to at least they're not gonna be able to complete the contract without skipping it and so pandadoc will take them step by step through the process to make sure everything's complete and when it comes to completing things on our end the next step that i like to do is click send document and i do share via link you click generate links here copy and be sure to note that this is going to this particular address and so in this situation i'll go ahead and head over to my email i typically like to do something like that actually to make it abundantly clear that this is the hyperlink for them and then i add the hyperlink there contract recipients so let's get that email address one more time and then more often not if we're being hyper technical i'll go through a little bit of a recap of what i had already told the potential client of what all's in the contract and then also keep it short enough to where it's not overwhelming and but by having something like this to where it's just a simple click it makes it extremely simple extremely easy but if you are sending an email to multiple people make sure that it's clear who's clicking what to make sure that the link is associated with a particular person's email address that should be signing i think that made sense but you may need to replay the last like 10 seconds again in order for it to make even more sense but anyways let's go ahead and send this bad boy and get this person signed up so as we can see the email went through we have it right here and then here is the click here to sign the contract so i'll do just that so as you can see we have the contract name right here and then all we have to do is simply click start and type in the name click next signature we can use the one that panda dock has essentially adopted or we can draw which heck i haven't actually tried this feature so let's just go ahead and try it this is a little bit more difficult than i was picturing boom done then we'll finish the next step and the final step we'll go ahead and select today which is when this is being recorded and click finish here's what's really cool about all of this is as the potential client is doing well i guess client now is doing all the signing and filling out pandadoc is alerting me the lawyer of what all's happening in order for me to essentially stay in tune with where the client is during this process and this is extremely important so as we can look over here i have three new emails it has the view email this the completed email and completed by all participants and since it's only one person this one's a little bit of overkill but i love this feature it may be something to where you're like okay you know big whoop i'm getting three emails out of this but there are times where i've sent this document or a contract or a medical authorization form over to a potential client but i only get one email alert which is that they viewed the document then i wait 24 hours and if they haven't signed the document at that point i typically follow up with either a phone call or an email asking them if they have any questions if they have any concerns if there's anything i can address in order to maybe alleviate those concerns and more often than not actually 100 of the time thus far but knock on wood the client will end up saying well yeah i looked at the paperwork and then i thought this or i thought that um i don't know how i'm gonna pay for the attorney's fees or how this works or how that works then i just answer the question and i alleviate that concern and then the client will say okay i'll go and knock it out right now or whenever i get home i'll you know sign the document and then they end up signing the document but by having this extra alert feature of knowing when they view it that puts me a little bit on notice if there is any hesitation or if there is any potential concern so i can address it and now we can see the actual document itself at this point we can scroll and make sure everything is filled out boom boom boom and boom so all we need to do at this point is really just click download and save file and that way we have a copy saved and you can make sure it goes to the right folder or the right location that it needs to go to but let's go ahead and take a quick look to see what it actually looks like so after downloading the contract i went ahead and opened it up with pdf expert by the way i do highly recommend that you check out pdf expert i have an entire analysis about why pdf expert is the best pdf app out there the biggest reason hands down is because it's a one-time super low payment versus a lot of the other major pdf apps that you've heard of require an annual subscription and over time that just financially doesn't make sense but this is me kind of going off on a tangent let's go ahead back into the computer back into the pdf and as you can see this is exactly how it should look based on the signatures and based off of pandadoc and then we also get a signature certificate which has the email which helps verify everything and it makes everything super kosher as you just saw it is extremely easy to use pandadoc in order to get your potential clients turned into actual clients by signing and filling out documents and it's returned to you instantly and you get the heads up notice which is fantastic when it comes to closing and here's the kicker doing everything that i just did is absolutely free on pandadoc i highly recommend that you use it i highly recommend that you make your life easier and most importantly i highly recommend that you make your clients lives easier but we're not done yet there's still one more step that i really want to walk you through and stress the importance of another important aspect to signing up clients has to do with the intake form aka the questionnaire and there are multiple reasons why the intake form is extremely important especially in my situation is because i strategically try and keep the initial phone conversation with potential clients to the bare essentials my goal with that conversation is one to establish a rapport with the uh person who i'm talking to to establish that connection and two to ask the least amount of questions possible to figure out whether or not i can help this particular person and the reason why i try and keep the conversation as short as possible is because i don't want to overwhelm the person i'm talking to because most likely they're going through something traumatic and most likely they are i don't know taking time off of work taking time out of their lives to give me a call and if they're calling me more often than not they're already interested in being represented and so if i were to try and turn around and ask every single question under the sun that i need information to including the small details like asking for claim numbers asking for birth dates and locations and addresses and times that's going to absolutely overwhelm the individual they're going to have to say okay one second let me go find this let me go find that i think it's this number i think it's that number can i get back to you it just isn't going to be a very productive phone call so that's whenever you want to start relying on your intake forms but the problem i ran into initially when it came to the print fill out scan and return was that a lot of people again didn't have a printer didn't have a scanner but then i would try and format and actually did format the pdf that i sent to where they could just type in their answers on the pdf document for the intake form but again they ran into the same printing and scanning issues and a lot of people even though i made it very clear that they can type their answers would always hand write their answers as well and that resulted in me not being able to read the handwriting or they would skip important information for reasons unknown and so i looked for a solution unfortunately i found that solution and once again i'm not going to tell you the solution instead i'm going to show you that requires us to turn on the laptop one more time okay so we are back in the laptop and look guys i'm not gonna even act like i left this page open i just want you to see how adorable our puppy is this is mabel and she is just extremely photogenic it's a little embarrassing about how she just makes everyone look bad in photos but anyways let's put that aside let's get out of instagram and go over to google forms now there's one thing i do want to say about this so google gives you two options here option number one is the free option the ultimate bond on the budget option which is that if you have a personal gmail account you can link your soon to be intake form to that personal gmail account i'm pretty sure that if you go the free route though you'll have some limitations on what you can do with your intake form you'll have to do a little bit of extra research on that because google's kind of updating google forms as it goes along now option number two is to simply use google forms that comes with your g suite account if you have a business account with google for those that don't know i highly recommend g suite it's what i use in order to have my business email address in order to have all the perks that come with g suite and this isn't a sponsored post by any means but if you don't know what comes with g suite especially at its affordable price then definitely go over and check out the ultimate guide to starting a virtual law firm where i break down exactly what comes with g suite and which tools you can use to go virtual but when it comes to the purpose of this video i plan on using my g suite account and creating this new intake form with the business account and so if you're maybe trying to follow along with a personal and free account you may see some discrepancies but that's more of a heads up and i doubt it's going to be too much of a limitation overall so the easiest way to get started is with a template and i recommend maybe trying to get oriented with google forms by starting with the template and at this point you're ready to go you're ready to start creating your intake form and if you want to start with the appearance of it then just go up here to customize theme and this is where you can upload a header image that connects more to your law firm there's obviously a whole bunch of different options right here that you can choose from or if you want to make it more personal you can upload a photo as well so we're uploading a quick photo and as you can see it gives you the option to crop the photo in a way that works best with google forms and your photo as you can tell you have quite the limitations here in fact this is the photo that i used on my actual intake form and i'm not sure if i'm married to it but essentially this is what i ended up doing on the actual intake form so i'll click done here just so you can see the example and sadly i miss i missed the little gavel which is actually in the back of this video okay so the next step with the photo in place is to start really with your introduction we'll say stone firm pllc intake form or if you want to make it a little bit more i guess approachable to where it's like you know new client form or something like that do whatever you want to do and then always always always at least i think this be sure to be extra and abundantly clear on what people are doing so a great thing to do is to put instructions up at this header so that the person whoever's filling it out knows exactly what they need to be doing as they fill out this form and one big thing is to let the person know that they can always answer with a not applicable or i don't know because as you'll see there are situations where you can make information required and so even though you may want them to answer there may be situations where they simply can't answer it because they don't know and you don't want the person to freak out because they don't know and they think they should know so i simply have a little bit of a welcome message with mine and then that welcome message goes into a little bit of instructions and the instructions mention if something doesn't apply put this if you don't know say i i don't know why i stopped there i don't know and then there's a little bit of a send off that i have with my contact information to where it says contact me here and then it's you know it has a little bit of a signature right so most likely you're going to need your client's name and that's super simple super short here by the way you can change the color you can kind of change the appearance of it overall but let's get a little bit more specific so here we have the name you can change this to whatever you want it to be google will try and anticipate the answer or the the type of answer that you're needing and so if it was a describe what happened question then google will at this point in time i guess keep it short answer but there's times where google will go to paragraph which gives people the option to you know basically have multiple paragraphs in their answers and this is just your little sub uh instructions that i recommend that you always end up having so if you have name they may just want to put jarrett's in the answer um but if you want to make sure that their full name is included this is the best way to do that and then this right here is where you can make it required and if you end up wanting to just scrap it as a whole you can always do that and so let's let's just go ahead and move on as you can see there's email there's phone number what position you're interested in when it comes to this job application doesn't really apply to our intake form so let's just go ahead and start making changes here let's assume this is a car wreck and we'll keep this one extremely simple explain how the wreck occurred and then in this with these answers you can again go with a paragraph and that way they'll answer it and then they'll click you know if you make it required they'll have to answer it and one thing that at least in the personal injury world that i end up doing is asking for claim information so let's say the at fault claim number and then i'll keep this as a short answer and i make sure it's not required because there are times where the wreck occurred maybe the day before the person called me the day before they're filling this out and so they haven't set up a claim they want me to do all that that's fine and so in this situation i don't want them to be stuck on the required even though they could technically put the not applicable or i don't know or i don't have it i just don't want them to feel like they're you know not doing this correctly just simply because it's not required or there are times where the questionnaire at certain portions is tailored to let's say a passenger and not a driver in that situation certain questions are going to apply to certain people so i don't want them to have to answer every single one that may go down a different trail that doesn't apply to them so what's important here and i mean i think you understand the concept at this point is that you can have multiple sections and so with multiple sections essentially how this is going to appear from the perspective of the person filling out the intake form is they're going to only see section 1 initially and then once they've completed section 1 that'll take them to section 2 which will then go ahead and like essentially look just like this and what i always like to do at least in with my intake form is to make sure or i guess give a little perspective about how far into the intake form they are and how much longer they have to go so it doesn't feel like they're having to take the bar exam and answering all these questions that take the entire day and that way they there's a little bit of a of a finish line that they're going towards and there's a basically a progress bar that that they can follow along with but that's essentially it and i do recommend that you come over here and that's actually not not where i'm wanting to go go over to responses and then go to these three dots not those three dots and make sure you click get email notifications for new responses i think this is extremely important because just like with panda doc i want to have the convenience of being notified when somebody is done with either signing a document or done with the intake form that way i don't have to keep refreshing and looking to see if there are responses if the client is done so let's pivot a little bit because thus far what i've talked about when it comes to intake forms is basically having your intake form being sent to the potential client on the backend in other words you've spoken with the person you've essentially filtered out whether or not you can handle that person's case whether you want to handle that person's case and they've survived that little filtering process through the phone call and now you want to get that person signed up that's on the back end i also use intake forms on the front end as well what i mean by that is if you go on my website you won't see any contact information on my website no phone numbers no addresses this is i think highly unusual for a law firm but this is what i've decided to do the reason for that is i don't want salespeople going on my website finding the phone number and calling the office line non-stop over and over again to where it's just burning hours burning time it's not a very effective use of my time and what i've also realized working for another firm before going solo is that even if you make it abundantly clear on your website the kind of cases you handle in the kind of cases you don't handle people will still give you a phone call hoping that you'll make an exception for their particular case and unfortunately that just isn't a very productive use of time either and that can actually really build up because it's surprising how many people will still call the law firm even though they know you don't handle the particular case and then that just gets messy so what i end up doing in my particular situation and we can flush this out in more detail in another video about how i put these systems in place on my website is that i use a questionnaire that ends up funneling into the intake form that we were kind of making in this on the laptop and with the questionnaire maybe is like four or five questions and then those four or five questions i can tell whether or not i'm interested in the case and what ends up happening is based on the answers each answer takes that person to a particular response and the response may be sorry i don't handle this sorry this is why i don't handle it or if i'm interested it's like hey fill out this questionnaire and somebody's going to be in contact with you very shortly um and then some other you know extra information as well and so in that situation the questionnaire or the quiz ends up funneling to this intake form to where the people who are answering and filling out this intake form are high quality cases those are cases that i'm definitely interested in and that gives me the information up front for me to then follow up the email notification that comes from google forms to that person with a phone call and then we essentially are doing almost the reverse order of what we've already talked about but it's still equally as effective okay that was a lot just to boil it down to the simple fact that you need to check this box to make sure that you get email responses and to make sure you're not having to refresh google forms every five minutes to see if there are new cases okay so let's make the benefits of google forms extra clear by touching on them and i'm going to be honest with you i didn't write down these benefits i'm just kind of winging this so i'm about to start listing things off and i don't know how many benefits there are going to be but one it makes it abundantly clear what the answers are and that was a big pet peeve of mine to where i couldn't read somebody's handwriting it was just like uh what what were you thinking two it eliminates the issue involved with printing and scanning three it honestly it looks professional it gives your law firm a very professional feel especially if you customize it with pictures of you and or your law firm four it makes sure that people fill out things that essentially is required or is important i can't tell you how many times people skip very important information and i have to go back to them and ask for that very important information but with google forms you can check the required box makes it super simple five very cost effective whether you're going for the free option or if you're going for the g suite option you're going to get extreme bang for your buck or i don't know what the phrase is with i'm balling on a budget we'll say bond on a budget for free i think we're on six it is super efficient when it comes to getting email notifications automation is key especially with a virtual law firm especially for solo that's a big plus and i can't think of seven right now but if i think of a seven and any other numbers i'll put those in the comment section down below if you find out any benefits that i haven't mentioned leave those in the comments down below i'm not done with this video typically when people start talking about comments they are wrapping the video up but there's one drawback i have to say when it comes to google forms which is that whenever you look at the responses and you're like okay clients all done they're signed up let's go ahead and print this so i have a paper record or a digital pdf record of their responses that i can refer back to google basically got real lazy because whenever you save as pdf you essentially no longer have the customization you no longer have the colors you no longer have the theme instead you essentially have a white page with a black box and or i'll say a box with a black line around it not a full on black box and then you just have your text and it looks really honestly um generic and so there's nothing special about that and make sure whenever you do save as pdf at least you know to date the best way to save as pdf the google forms answers is as you couldn't tell earlier landscape and not portrait but typically what i end up doing is taking the information that i end up saving putting it on the client's excel file that way i have all the information and it's auto populating other things as well but just a little food for thought when it comes to one drawback okay so that sums up this video if you have any questions comments concerns or ideas for future videos that you think will be helpful not only to you but to other law venture community members and subscribers then let me know in the comment section down below and if you made it this far be sure to hit the like button i think it's right over there and if you haven't subscribed come on get on it man my texas twain came out there alright i'll see y'all in the next video