Dec. 10, 2024

121: Secrets of High-Converting Law Firms: Proven Intake Strategies with Attorney Ben Leader, Chad Kerby, and Adam Reiman

121: Secrets of High-Converting Law Firms: Proven Intake Strategies with Attorney Ben Leader, Chad Kerby, and Adam Reiman

For our latest webinar I hosted an incredible panel of experts—Ben Leader, Adam Reiman, Chad Kerby, and Gary Musler —where we uncovered game-changing intake strategies that can revolutionize law firm conversion and client acquisition. From optimizing response times to implementing effective lead tracking and follow-up systems, we explored how firms can boost their conversions without increasing marketing spend. 

Ben shared his firm’s transformation journey, tripling case sign-ups by focusing on intake efficiency, while Adam and Chad provided actionable insights on leveraging technology, audits, and training for intake teams.

One standout theme was the importance of treating intake as a sales department rather than an afterthought. We discussed how tools like CRM systems, intake audits, and strategic follow-up practices can eliminate friction in the client onboarding process. If you're serious about scaling your practice and maximizing your marketing ROI, this episode is packed with strategies to streamline intake processes and secure more clients.

Key Topics

  • 01:45 - Introduction of the panelists: Ben Leader, Chad Kerby, and Adam Ryman, and provides a brief background on each of them.
  • 07:20 Ben Leader, a managing partner at Elrod Pope, shares his firm's growth from 165 cases in 2021 to 512 cases in 2023 by focusing on intake and conversion rates.
  • 09:02 His firm missed 18% of incoming calls, which cost them thousands of dollars, and how they improved their intake process to increase signed cases by over 200%.
  • 11:35 Reallocating funds from marketing to build an intake team boosting cases from 165 to 512 in two years, with 600 projected this year despite growing competition.
  • 12:51 Six key take aways that helped fuel 200% growth.
  • 15:49 The importance of viewing intake as a key pillar of the firm and investing in an intake team and software.
  • 16:31 The importance of investing in an intake team and intake software, and the need to track marketing data accurately.
  • 18:34 Transforming the intake process by implementing Lead Docket and hiring a dedicated intake manager, enabling us to track marketing data and make informed decisions for the first time.
  • 21:00 The importance of having an intake audit done to identify friction areas and improve the intake process.
  • 24:04 The benefits of working with an intake optimization company, such as Legal Intake Pros, to train staff, create manuals, and track marketing data.
  • 27:31 The importance of minimizing paralegal and attorney involvement in the intake process to avoid delays and missed opportunities.
  • 30:33 His firm incentivizes their intake team with performance-based incentives, which has led to increased conversion rates and revenue.
  • 32:58 The importance of listening to phone calls and using tools like Google LSA and CallRail to monitor and improve call quality.
  • 34:50 Eliminating bias and treating intake as the foundation of your firm's success transforms it from an afterthought into a powerful, cost-effective driver of growth and scalability.
  • 39:49 Breakdown on call audits - Regular coaching, call monitoring, and detailed scorecards ensure our intake team stays empathetic and effective, driving continuous improvement in client interactions.
  • 41:34 Chad Kerby introduces himself and his company, Scalable, which provides sales training and process improvement for law firms.
  • 43:28 A case study where he secret shopped 30 law firms and found significant friction in their intake processes.
  • 46:42 The importance of tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) such as lead conversion rate, average response time, follow-up rate, appointment scheduling rate, and cost per lead conversion.
  • 47:23 Focusing on reducing intake friction and investing in strategic intake improvements over marketing can significantly boost client acquisition and long-term firm success.
  • 50:57 The importance of having a strategic approach to intake and following up with leads consistently and effectively. Provide them with something of value.
  • 1:03:31 Adam Reiman introduces himself and his role at Legal Soft, where he helps law firms improve their intake processes with virtual assistants.
  • 1:07:42 His experience of working with over 200 law firms and secret shopping over 3000 law firms.
  • 1:08:37 The importance of having a CRM system and using it consistently to track leads and follow-up activities.
  • 1:10:59 The five-stage funnel of lead conversion and the critical stages that occur before a lead becomes a client.
  • 1:12:11 The importance of having a methodology for follow-up and consistently pursuing leads until they either buy, die, or unsubscribe.
  • 1:15:22 Have a sense of urgency with leads and to follow up quickly to avoid losing potential clients.
  • 1:18:44 Claims that apply his coaching strategies can improve conversion rates by 128% without additional marketing expenses.
  • 1:20:00 His team has secret shopped over 3000 law firms, with most scoring between 30 and 40 out of 100.
  • 1:23:42 The issue of paralegals being overwhelmed with new client intake, leading to rejection of potential cases.
  • 1:25:43 The benefits of having dedicated intake specialists who focus solely on their role, improving their skills through daily practice.
  • 1:27:15 Highlights the high burnout rate among paralegals and attorneys handling intake, making it essential to have a specialized team.
  • 1:28:31 The 3-2-1 format, where firms call, text, and call again for three days, then call and text for two days, and finally call every day until the lead responds.
  • 1:30:20 Identifying success with video messages and tailored follow-up messages, emphasizing the importance of timing and content.

Resources Mentioned

Books


Software & Tools


About Ben Leader:

Ben Leader, Managing Partner at Elrod Pope Accident & Injury Attorneys - Ben is a second-generation attorney who oversees Elrod Pope’s Intake and Marketing departments. Under his leadership, the firm has doubled its conversion rates and successfully resolved over 750 cases. His strategic approach to intake has revolutionized how his firm converts potential clients into success stories. 

About Adam Reiman:

Adam Reiman, Director of Law Firm Growth at Legal Soft - Adam Reiman has trained thousands of law firms across North America in growth and scalability. His “Legal Mastermind” sessions have become essential learning opportunities for forward-thinking firms, and his innovative strategies help create consistent client journeys that drive unprecedented growth. 

About Chad Kerby:

Chad Kerby, Co-Founder at ScaLawble.ai - Chad is a business strategist specializing in revenue growth for law firms. His innovative methods have empowered numerous legal professionals to implement systems that enhance their sales skills and achieve predictable revenue growth. Chad's expertise in building accountability and delivering effective client presentations has transformed how firms approach their intake process.

About Jay Berkowitz:

Jay Berkowitz is a digital marketing strategist with decades of experience in the industry. As the CEO of Ten Golden Rules, he has helped countless law firms and businesses harness the power of the internet to achieve remarkable growth and visibility. Jay is also a renowned keynote speaker and author, sharing his expertise at various industry events and publications worldwide.


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Transcript
Ben Leader:

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



IMFLF Intro:

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



Jay Berkowitz:

well, welcome everybody. My name is Jay Berkowitz, and today we're talking about intake, how to double your conversions. We've got an awesome panel. Some of you watch these webinars, and you've got feedback from folks that watch a lot of our webinars. I think we've had over 350,000 views on the YouTube channel. So if you're a big fan of some of the awesome panels we put together, you definitely want to come to tgr Live, which is our live event and basically the most talked about exciting content that we get on our webinars. We ask all those folks to come to our annual conference called tgr live. It's going to be March 10 and 11th. 2025, we're at the beautiful Opal Grand Hotel. I was just there this week with our team. We're checking it out, setting things up. We had a couple planning meetings. It's right on the ocean in beautiful Delray Beach, Florida, which is just in between Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, where our office is in Boca Raton. So Delray is just adjacent to Boca Raton. Anyways, amazing place, amazing people, amazing facility. We loved everything. Now some of the keynote speakers, Mike Morris, if you guys haven't heard of Mike, wrote the book fireproof $200 million law firm, and one of the first clients of Gina Wickman in the Eos system, the book traction. He's featured in the books, and he's going to talk about how he built a $200 million law firm. He's also going to sit on our EOS panel. We're going to talk about the Entrepreneurial Operating System. Andy Sievers is the founder of case status. They just won the best tech product at the recent Clio event. Andy's going to do a keynote for us. Going to talk about startups. Going to talk about technology. He's going to talk about how to service people once you have clients, and this great app they have for law firms. Jeff Hampton, famous on YouTube, over 16 million YouTube views, and he's going to talk about how to absolutely crush your practice with YouTube videos called YouTube secrets, as his presentation. And Greg Crabtree one of the best presentations I've seen this year. I mean, all these speakers are the greatest presenters that I see at all the conferences. But Greg talks about profit. I mean, what more do we need to know? And we're going to have a whole section on how to run your law firm, business practices, best practices. And Greg is amazing. You're gonna absolutely love what he has to say. So please join us. Information available at 10 golden rules.com and TGR live March 10 and 11th. 2025, so without further ado, let's talk about what we're here for to talk about today, which is intake and the reason why this is so important, and why I picked this topic in this excellent panel, is because Google's tracking. You know, like, you can't cheat anymore. You can't fool around with intake, meaning, how quickly do you answer the phone and do you miss any calls? Like this is an actual screenshot from the local service ad program and the Google screen local service ads like they're actually tracking the calls and they've our reps have told us, you only have 15 seconds to answer the phone, and if you miss calls, you're going to get dropped down in the local service ads. You know, everything I've seen with Google is when they set something up, like when they build something into their algorithm, it generally flows into their other products. So if you're not answering the phone on local service ads, you get dropped down in local service ads. Well, guess what? They're probably tracking you for Google Maps, and they're probably tracking you for general Google SEO. So if you all don't answer the phone, and you don't do a good job. And you miss calls. Guess what? You're going down in the Google rankings, and you're not going to show up as much. So this an instance where they missed a call, no indication of a return call. Here they missed a call twice. It's a wrongful death case. Come on, people pick up the phone. Here's one where the guy hung up because he was placed on hold for too long. So you gotta get this right. You gotta answer the phone. You gotta treat these people like, you know, the gold that they are, and that's what we're gonna talk about today. And you want these kind of results. I mean, this is one of our clients. They got 5600 users to their website. Everything's going up. Everything's in the green. They got 389 leads, and they converted 86 of them to signed cases. So we've got the pros here today. We've got the experts who are going to talk about how to do that. So without further ado, here's the panel. We got Ben leader, and Ben's going to go up first, followed by Chad Kerby from scaleable and Adam Reiman from legal soft so let me introduce Ben. He's a managing partner at Elrod Pope, their accident injury attorneys. And you know, here's why he's here. Okay, I saw an amazing presentation that Ben did about how they went from 165 cases in 2021 to 512 cases in 2023 I mean, that's like a 3x growth. And guess what? They spent less money on advertising and marketing. So the real reason that they perform so much better is they answered the phone better. They converted the leads better. They put a hell of a lot of attention on the intake process. So without further ado, and he's going to tell us how they have this amazing growth intake.



Ben Leader:

Well, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Ben Leader, as Jay said, and I'm one of the managing partners here at Elrod Pope law firm. We're a personal injury law firm. We're based out of Rock Hill, South Carolina, which is essentially a suburb of Charlotte. North Carolina, we're just across the border and we're part of the Charlotte market. It's an honor to be with all of you here today. Thanks to Jay for having me and for Tim golden rules for putting this webinar on I'll be clear from the get go, I am not an expert. These other panelists are experts, and have some great advice to give. I think my role here is more of a what not to do role, and I hope you all can learn from some of my mistakes and some of our firm's mistakes to ultimately better your firms. But by no means do I consider myself worthy of being on the same platform as some of these other panelists. But several years ago, our firm painfully realized that we were missing 18% of our incoming calls. 18% of our phone calls were not ever reaching a live person on the phone. We know that this was costing us hundreds of 1000s of dollars, if not more, and today I'm going to go over how we figured that out and how we ultimately grew our signed case numbers by over 200% in that two year period. We've been fortunate enough to experience some significant growth here over the last few years, and we've been able to do that without having to see a significant marketing spend increase to go along with it. And we were able to do this by really pivoting our focus and shifting gears from the mindset we had always had, which was more marketing. How do we spend more money on marketing? What do we spend our next marketing campaign on and really shift that focus to honing in on our client acquisition process and making that the best process we could and when I say intake, that's really the heart of what this is, is client acquisition. And while I can't sit here and, you know, promise that everybody watching this webinar is going to, you know, immediately see a 200% spike in sign cases by optimizing intake. I do truly believe that there are tremendous growth opportunities for each and every firm out there, no matter how big or small you are, purely as it relates to intake and optimizing and improving your intake departments. Just to give a brief background on me, I was born in Rock Hill, South Carolina, I went to Clemson. I went to law school at Campbell, law school in Raleigh, North Carolina, clerk for a local circuit court judge for a year after law school, best year of my life, and then started working for Elrod Pope in 2014 as an associate attorney. And I currently serve as one of the managing partners. And in that role, I get to oversee the marketing and intake side of the firm, which I really enjoy. And I found out, you know, that's really what I'm passionate about. Some some lawyers love to be in front of a jury arguing a closing argument, but for me, I really do geek out over intake and optimizing our processes and systems and our procedures. And I've found that the business side of the firm appeals to me much more so than the practice side does a lot of days. The last photo there on the right is me standing next to my best friend, my mentor, who's also my dad. I've been very fortunate enough to get to work with him and get to learn the practice of law from him over the last decade. Brief background on our firm. We've got eight attorneys here. We've got around 18 full time staff members. We're in our 44th year of business, so we've. A lot of changes over the years, and we've somehow been able to to adapt and continue to to stick around. When I joined the firm in 2014 we were signing, on average, 165 cases a year, every year. Um, that continued through 2021 um, we were consistently right around 165 and during that that period, our success and our profitability often hinged on these large outlier settlements. We would have great years where we would have a seven figure settlement. We'd have terrible years when we wouldn't and there was really no in between. It was either times were great or times were terrible. And it was like, you know, many in the practice of law, it was just a roller coaster, and we were kind of just hanging on for the ride. But in 2022 something changed in that year, we went from 165 to 363 new cases. Notably, we did not increase our marketing budget at all that year. We actually pulled back some of those funds. We had had a failed marketing campaign the year prior, which was probably the best bad decision we ever made because it allowed us to say we already spent this money on a failed marketing campaign. Let's shift it over to intake and see what happens. So we reallocated some of the resources we normally would put towards marketing. We put those towards building an intake team. And this year, you know, we signed 165, and then 363, and then we went to 512, in 2023, based on those same measures that we took in 2022, to grow this year, we're on pace to sign 600 new cases up. We've continued to grow. We've got more competition than we've ever had before. A lot of national law firms are in our market now, but intake has really been an incredible opportunity for us to compete and scale at a much lower cost than I think advertising would take. So what I'm going to do here today is I'm going to share six key takeaways that I believe helped fuel our 200% plus growth over the last few years. And in order to do that, I think it's important to give full perspective and go back to December of 2021 just to take a snapshot of where our firm was at that time, like many small personal injury firms, COVID was a particularly bad year for us. I think no cars on the road for a period of time. You know, we felt the sting of that in terms of decline revenue and in terms of decline sign cases. And I want to say 2020 was the worst year we had had since I joined the firm, if not the second worst year over that eight year period. Unfortunately, 2021 was even worse for us. All of the trackable metrics we were tracking at the time, which wasn't nearly enough, were all moving in the wrong direction. We had a multi year decline in signed cases, a multi year decline in revenue. And most importantly, we didn't have any reliable marking marketing data to debase our decisions on. We had been in existence for 40 plus years as a firm, yet we had no marketing data compiled, you know, to guide our decisions. We had no idea what was working, what wasn't working. We simply didn't know our numbers at the end of the day, we knew we had good lawyers. We knew we had lawyers who had experience in the courtroom, knew how to try cases, knew how to work cases properly, and we honestly thought that was enough. And in our minds, we thought we were signing most of the cases that we wanted, and we didn't realize there was even leakage or missed opportunities. And we looking back, we could not have been more wrong about this. So let's fast forward one year later, December, 2021 things are very bleak. Been around 40 years, and I'm starting to have some sleepless nights in question. You know, are we going to be around still in two to three years at this pace? And 2022 we saw 120% sign case increase up to 363,



Ben Leader:

and then we also saw an 81% revenue increase that year. Most notably, we didn't spend more money on marketing, and we actually did not sign a single seven figure case that entire year or resolve one. Sorry, that was the first time since I've been at the firm that we were profitable with without having a seven figure case two years later, December of 2023 year over year, we saw another 41% signed case increase and a 31% revenue increase. And these numbers, you know, are important statistics, but they're much more than that. They also represent hundreds of clients that we were able to help and millions of dollars to them and to our bottom line at the end of the day as a result of this growth. And so how did we do it? How did we manage to double our case sign ups without spending more money on marketing? I know that it sounds too good to be true. It sounds like it may have involved snake oil or magic, but it was really very simple, and it was all about eliminating the friction in our intake department. This was the one big thing without a doubt, that I would credit to fueling our growth over the last few years. So what I've got today is six key takeaways to help you remove the friction in your intake department. Many of you are probably already doing a lot of these things, and that's great. I'm hopeful that everybody who's. Of us today and watching this webinar may be able to walk away from this and have at least one or two key takeaways to take back and implement at your firms to help remove friction. At the very least, it's my hope that my presentation today will encourage everyone to view client intake and client acquisition from a different lens than most lawyers are accustomed to seeing it through. But the first key takeaway is an obvious one, you have got to be willing to invest in your intake. This was something we never did prior to 2021. Really didn't even have a concept of what intake. Was it. You know, prior to that, I now view intake as one of the key pillars of our firm. I view it as just as important as marketing. And so I think you have to view intake the right way, to be willing to spend the resources and the money that it takes to have a successful intake department, and you have to have an intake team. Want to give a quick shout out to my intake team. I believe you got to invest in an intake team and intake software. This is our team here. These ladies are incredible at what they do. They've been a huge part of our growth and our success. And I would not be sitting here today speaking on this webinar, but for how incredible our intake team is, and whoever your team is, they must be 100% dedicated to intake. A lot of people make the mistake of trying to put somebody in charge of intake who also has other roles at the firm, and I think that's a recipe for a disaster. You got to have somebody that's willing to eat, breathe, sleep, intake, around the clock, and make that their only job at the firm. And while this does come with a cost, I believe that it's the best return on investment that you'll ever see at your law firm. Good intake team members can make or bad ones can lose. Law firms more money than any attorneys realize. And in addition to having the right people in place, you have to have the right tools in place too. You gotta give them the tools they need to be successful. Prior to 2022 we had no intake team. We had no intake software. You know, our intake process was really just whatever attorney or paralegal may have been available on any given day to be forced to take a call they really didn't want to deal with, and it was just a train wreck at the end of the day, we had no tracking of our marketing data. We tried to use a case management system to do that, and it just wasn't designed to do that. So we brought on lead docket right as we brought on an intake manager to start our department. It allows me to make data based marketing decisions that I was not able to make before three years ago, I couldn't tell you where our cases were coming from. You know what was working? Well, what wasn't we just assumed, if we were spending money on something, that's probably where the cases were coming from. And now, at the click of a few buttons and lead docket, I can tell you, you know, we signed seven cases last month from our lake Wiley, Google, you know, my business satellite profile, or, you know, we got seven calls from our last quarterly newsletter. You can really hone in on where your leads and your cases are coming from. If you spend any money at all on advertising your law firm, I think you owe it to yourself to track this data and to track the return on that investment. Lead Doc is one of those things I just don't know how we lived without it. And same with an intake team. When we brought Michelle on to start our intake department, we were concerned that we didn't even have enough volume for to keep her busy. We felt like we were probably hiring before the need really arose, and we couldn't have been more wrong. Within a year, we brought Reese on, you know, another full time intake coordinator to help Michelle, just because we grossly underestimated, you know, the volume that we were receiving. So I think that they will be far busier than most people anticipate. They will lead docket if, even if you're not ready to hire an intake person or build an intake team, I still think lead docket is an incredible tool, and would highly recommend considering using it. I think it's very reasonably priced, just to show you a few things that that it does for us. This is just some screenshots that I took today. The chart on the left just shows our Google LSA ads and our sign leads year over year by signed up category. And so you can see the blue wave is this year, and you can see the improvement year to year, and you can really measure, okay, this is working. Well, we're getting a good return on this. You know, let's pivot and push more resources towards LSAS when they're working. The chart on the right just breaks down our revenue by our marketing sources. And, again, just gives you a good idea of, you know, which marketing pieces are driving your revenue. And it's not always going to be the same that are driving the most signed cases. And so I always find this piece very insightful to figure out where's our revenue coming from, which I think is much more important than where, where are our sign case volume coming from. So you got to have the tools and the people in place next. You have to have an intake audit done. I think this is a non negotiable. If you're attending this webinar, you're probably aware that there are companies out there that specialize in helping law firms with intake three years ago, I had no clue that that was the case. And if somebody would have asked if we worked with an intake optimization company, I probably would have laughed, just having no no idea what that even was. But if you walk away. From this presentation today and decide to do one thing that I talk about. I highly recommend having an audit completed. I think you can have a high quality audit done for several $1,000 most likely, and the return on investment just from that audit report alone will be tenfold. You know what you're investing for that just learning where these cases are falling through the cracks, and you know what other cases you may be able to capture that you're missing. We had an audit done in the spring of 2022



Ben Leader:

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



Ben Leader:

Key number five is to listen to your phone calls. This is probably one of the most painful tasks I've ever done as a law firm partner. If you've never listened to your phone calls, you need to. If you've never listened to your phone calls, I guarantee you, you were leaving money on the table. It was an extremely humbling experience, to say the least. I learned how to how to listen to calls, and I came back and pulled up Google LSA, and started listening to calls for about 10 minutes, and, you know, again, felt like I was going to throw up. It ultimately led to us having to terminate employees. It led to us switching our call service and our after hours and overflow answering service. And we made some, some very big decisions, you know, based on listening to those calls and what we heard, we now rely heavily on call monitoring and quality control, and I think that's absolutely critical in today's world. There's three it's actually quite simple to listen to your phone calls. There's three easy ways of doing that. We pay an intake optimization company to do this for us. I've found this task to just be downright miserable and extremely time consuming, and it's just not something I can stomach. So we pay somebody to do it for us, and I think it's well worth every penny to do that. There's also several ways. You've probably got resources that you can do this yourself without having to pay anybody. One is through Google LSAS. If you log into the Google LSA account, you should be able to listen to those calls through Google, and that's how I did it. The first time was just listening to LSA calls. We also use call rail. It's an extremely useful tool and a great way to monitor and listen to your calls. You can track your missed calls this way. You can track your call volume and your call sources as well. There's all sorts of new AI platforms out there that will monitor your calls and even rate them and rank them and score them. There's tons of resources out there, and you can listen to your calls for very minimal amounts of spend. Call control matters, and you really never know you have an issue until you start listening to these calls, key number six, and the final key takeaway I wanted to mention today is to eliminate the bias. You know, this has more to do with your mindset than anything else, in my opinion, and there's so much bias ingrained into the practice of law, just in general, but in particular, into the client acquisition side of it. Intake isn't just answering the phones. It's the front line of your firm, it's your sales department, and my opinion, is the foundation of your firm's success. And if you treat it that way, the results are going to follow. If you're still treating it as an afterthought, you're leaving money on the table. I truly believe that optimizing intake is the fastest and most cost effective way to grow and scale a law firm. I know we're short, short on time today, and I'm standing in between everybody else and some some really great speakers who I'm excited to hear from. Please email me. Connect with me in any way you can. I'm more than happy to chat answer any questions anyone has. Would love to find a way to work together. I started by telling you all that you know, we missed 18% of our calls and left hundreds of 1000s of dollars on the table every year for decades, and today, we've grown over 200% since then, and we did that simply by focusing on what was already right in front of us, and that was our intake. Our growth didn't come from flashy ads or bigger budgets. It. It came from reducing friction internally, and treating our intake department like the sales department that it really is. Listen to your calls, track your leads, audit your processes. You'll be amazed at how many, how much untapped potential is already in front of you and already in the door at your law firm. As I mentioned, we operate in the Carolinas, we would love an opportunity to work as CO counsel on any personal injury matters in the Carolinas. Would love to connect with anybody who's got any questions from the webinar. And thanks again for having me, Jay, hope everyone was able to at least get something of value from this today. Ben,



Jay Berkowitz:

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



Ben Leader:

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



Jay Berkowitz:

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



Ben Leader:

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



Jay Berkowitz:

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



Chad Kerby:

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



Chad Kerby:

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



Jay Berkowitz:

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



Chad Kerby:

It's, it's crazy, Jay,



Jay Berkowitz:

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



Chad Kerby:

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



Jay Berkowitz:

other thing that that you said is you said, and I've heard this 1000 times. We close not like 97% of all the deals we want. You know, you pointed this out, and Ben pointed this out. The big flaw in that assumption, and it is a completely flawed assumption, right? Most of the firms that we just get started on this process, is that Ben quoted, they had an 18% no answer rate. I showed you calls that are were not answered, multiple calls that were not answered hang ups. So assuming what if you have 18% no answer or missed calls, you have 5% people are on hold too long and they hang up. You have calls that are incorrectly attributed as good calls, because we all have heard those calls where the intake person just drops the ball in a great case. So the attorney assumes they're closing. 97% Yeah, when it gets to him, he closes. Second data point, average response time. Third data point, follow up rate, follow up rate, question on that for personal injury, if someone doesn't make a decision, like, if you can't, you might be able to DocuSign. Like, if you can sign them while they're on the phone. Obviously, if it's a big case, you probably want to get out to them immediately, like all the New York guys, immediately. Send their investigator in a black car. Like, that's the New York thing. A lot of attorneys like, drop everything in big case and get out to the hospital or get out to see the see the prospect. But what is the follow up rate in personal injury? Like, how many people typically you can't close on the phone, and how often should you follow up?



Chad Kerby:

Well, you you follow up consistently until, until, as Adam Reiman would say, they either buy, die or unsubscribe, right? You're constantly following up now. Now, Jay, let's go back real quickly, and I, and I know we're short on time here, but it's how you are following up. It's how you are following up. Gary. Gary, the co founder of scalable, is the best copywriter I've ever been around, and I've and I've been in these waters a long time, and the content he sends makes people want to engage with you. The in as I referenced earlier, Jay, so many attorneys are following up with the Hey, I'm still here, right? And that's just not gonna do anything. Or do you still need help? You know what? What does that mean? Right? But Gary creates emails like, hey, there's something important you should know about your case, right? And people are like, wait, what? What should I know about my case, right? And it's content that we strategically build out for firms to where it's not just that you know less, not very valuable information. And by the way, attorneys feel good that they're at least doing something. And by the way, I shouldn't discount that, because the fact is, at least they are doing something, at least they're doing, hey, I'm still here, but they're missing hundreds of 1000s of dollars by not doing it the right way.



Jay Berkowitz:

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



Adam Reiman:

guys. Scott, I'm so happy to be here. And if I had to list the number of times I've batted in the batting order after Chad Kerby, I'm telling you, it's like hitting, hitting. It's like, who hit after babe. Ruth, so the great thing about Chad is he's definitely passionate about the industry, about legal. He and I have been on the road for years together. It's so great to be back together and Ben, the story that you told about your law firm is one that makes a guy like me, get a tear in his eye. What you the the activity that you've applied to intake, which is the most neglected part of every single law firm. It warms my heart because so many of your colleagues in the industry, they struggle with you know, why is the firm down the road, down the street, doing so much better than I am? And the reason that they are it's not because they have better lawyers, guys and gals. It's because they have better processes at the end of the day, processes rue the day, and Ben has narrowed it down statistically. And I'm going to dive into the weeds here with my deck and kind of share what I've been doing for the last 12 plus years in the industry. Alright, intake, fundamentals. This is a course that I've been teaching since 2012 I've been in the business since then. I am currently the director of law firm growth here at legal soft, our company is the hub of our company at legal soft is we provide virtual assistance in the legal space. And right now, we're at about 800 law firms, and we have over 2500 virtual assistants placed in these law firms, and we can place anything from legal assistance intake staff on all the way through to case managers, document collectors, up to virtual paralegals and attorneys, and that's the hub of our business. I'm the director of law firm growth, and ultimately, I'm responsible for helping law firms grow. I've worked in over 200 law firms all across the country. Name the practice area. I've seen it and been involved in it as a coach. I facilitated a mastermind program for about five years, ironically, with Chad Kerby in another life, and I created an intake Fundamentals course that I've talked to over 1300 law firms, and I personally, as part of my team, we've secret shopped over 3000 law firms, so I've really spent the bulk of my career looking into intake and treating it the way that it should be. It is the most critical part in a law firm, and it's also the most neglected right lawyers. Simply, simply bury their head in the sand. They take that strategy. They assume that things are going right. They don't do a deep dive like Ben has done is in his firm where he's listened to call recordings. He's tracking leads right. The firm sounds like they live by a motto of, if it's not in lead docket, it didn't happen. These are the things that I preach as a as a coach, and when I do an intake analysis on it as an outsider, these are the things that I look for. These are the things that I preach, right? If you have a CRM, use it. If it's not in the CRM, it didn't happen, right? If it's not in your software. And so this is a these sort of an overview of the eight week course that I've been teaching for more than 10 years now, to those 1300 law firms that I mentioned earlier. And these are the different topics that we cover. I won't dive too deep into it, but there, there has been some conversation a little bit earlier, Chad had mentioned that what they they look at at scalable one of the things is the chase, right? What are the proper steps to following up with leads? How many times do I have to follow up with a lead? And Chad's right philosophically, and what I've always coached is you pursue leads until they die by or unsubscribe. Otherwise, you're not doing it justice. Now I can tell you that 93% of all of your leads will convert within the first six touches, but there's a science to those six touches, right? What do I do? What do I say? What's the format do I call? Do I text? Do I send a courier? There's a method to the madness, and that's one of the things that I teach in my intake Fundamentals course. I do a whole class on that. What are the best practices, right? And so lead conversion, 101, this is, like day one stuff that I teach in my courses. What's the definition of a lead? If I ask 10 law firm owners, what, what? What is your definition of a lead? 95% of the time, they're going to say, well, we got 100 leads last month, but we really only wanted 20 of right? We're we're pre qualifying leads before we're even stepping up to the plate. And that's not a reality of what we should be doing. For purposes of calculating lead conversion, you have to start at the top of your five stage funnel. A lead is a lead is a lead. If you are a personal injury law firm, and someone calls you and says that they have been injured, that is a lead, if they're a referral, that is a lead, right? So we all there's a lot of pre qualifying that goes on in the legal space, and for purposes of calculating lead conversion, you just can't do that, you just can't do that, or your data will not be accurate, as Ben will attest to, right? Ben shared his great story about his law firm and the way they've just they've got that hockey stick growth going because they've dove into the data. So how good are you at conversion? Right? This comes up all the time. Law Firm owners tell me all the time that they're supremely good, they're Primo. They're top of the food chain when it comes to conversion, but most of the time they're off the mark, and it's because what law firm owners don't realize is that their law firm has a five stage funnel, and at the top of that funnel are leads. Second stage of that funnel are appointments that were set or docusigns that were sent out in this world today. We have to, we have to include that DocuSign piece right. Third Level is how many signed up at the console, or how many signed up when we sent the DocuSign out, right? And it goes on and on and on. What happens is, law firm owners only remember the good ones, and so they hyper focus on, well, you know, we do a really, really good job of converting leads, because they only remember the good ones. And what they don't realize is that there's actually three really critical stages before someone in the firm, someone actually consults with that person. There are three really, really critical stages that go on before that even happens. But of course, if I ask lawyers, they all, they all say the same thing, we do a flawless job at conversion, because, again, we only remember the good things and then the fifth stage, which is a little one at the bottom, that's the follow up. Chad Kerby was talking about it earlier. What is your methodology to follow up? I'm going to share some crazy data with you guys today that will blow your socks off. Fix your follow up. You're going to fix your your revenue been attest to that fact, and these are some things to think about after we get off today. I won't put you through your paces right now, but think about leads. Right? How do you identify if they're qualified or not? What are the issues that you consider? What are the questions that you ask? Do you have standardized questions or scripts that you coach your people on right and ultimately, who in the firm makes the hire no hire decision. These are just the thought question for you guys to think about after, after we get off today. Now we're going to get into the weeds. Number one, there's got to be a sense of urgency with leads. Why is that? As. As some of the other panelists said today, we know for a fact that potential new prospects in the legal space are calling five to seven law firms to get someone to take their case. Also keep in mind all the good leads go first. Okay, all the good leads go first. I don't know, Jay, probably multiple times in your career as a guy that's that's done some marketing for law firms, you'll get a phone call from a law firm owner that says, hey, the leads that you're generating for my firm are not very good, right? I always ask this. The first question that I ask is, how long does it take you to follow up with a lead? Keeping in mind that voicemail is where leads go to die. If you leave them, if a potential new client leaves a message with your firm, good luck. You're going to be chasing that lead right five to seven law firms, so you've gotta have a process in place like Ben was talking about, with an 18% call abandonment rate, right the in just so you all know, somebody had asked this question earlier. Call centers in the US strive for a 1.5% call abandonment rate. That's what they strive for, 1.5% anything higher than that is considered a negative in the call center industry. So Ben was sitting at 18% Obviously he's not doing that today, but you can see how that there's a huge gap between 1.5% and 18% so they addressed it in Ben's firm. And look at the results right. The number one factor in lead conversion, as you can see on this slide, is speed to lead at the end of the day, no matter who you talk to, speed to lead is the number one factor in lead conversion. You have minutes to convert a lead, as you can see on this very simple chart, if you're waiting 24 hours to follow up with a lead, an initial lead that came in that you haven't spoken to, your conversion plummets to just 17%



Adam Reiman:

okay, let that soak in a little bit. This is the reality of the industry that we're in now. When it was legal for law firms to start advertising, the whole game changed, unfortunately, right potential, new prospects. PNCs believe that legal services are a commodity item. Again, I hate to say that, because they're not. We all know that no two law firms are alike in the way that clients get results, get treated, etc, etc, but at the end of the day, it is a full contact sport, and you have minutes, not hours, not days, to respond to a lead before they start to get really, really cold. Okay. Velocify. This was a study that I participated in. We looked at three and a half million leads, and these were, this is what came out of months and months of call tracking, call recordings. Speed to lead is the number one factor, and it has been that way for more than a dozen years in the industry, right? So fix your processes, and you'll sign up more clients. Okay, here's a little quiz question for you that'll kind of knock your socks off. How long does it take for the average law firm to call a prospect back. Now, I want to start by saying, if I ask 10 law firm owners, eight of them will tell me, we call all of our leads back within 24 to 48 hours. Okay, so think in your head, how long does it take the average law firm to call a prospect back, it is 3.6 days. It takes 3.6 days for the average law firm to call a prospect back across all practice areas in the US. Let's scroll back really quickly to this. If you're waiting 3.6 days to call your leads back, you may as well not call them, because, as you can see, guys and gals, your conversion is less than 17% after just 24 hours, law firms are waiting far too long to call a lead back. Mind blowing right 3.6 days. So who's left at 3.6 days? Who's left? Clients that have called 10 different law firms. Someone slipped and fell in a Taco Bell. There were no witnesses. They didn't file an accident report and they didn't go to the doctor. That's who's left after 3.6 days right? Remember all the good leads go first. Everyone wants to hunt whales in this industry, and it doesn't matter what practice area you're in, but we're going to use personal interest. Since Ben is here, whales are sedentary creatures. They move very, very slowly. So you cannot bank the future of your firm on whales. Whales are amazing. Look at Ben's dad. He said we didn't have any seven figure cases. Last, right? Those are would be considered whales in his practice area. There are very, very few of them, right? But if you're waiting 3.6 days or more to call lead back, you've gotta fix that process. And that's one of the things that I do as a coach when we dive in. So what Chad does is what's Ben is already applying in his firm, which is, is overwhelming. This is the secret shopper report card. Me and my team have secret shopped over 3000 law firms. And Chad was talking earlier about Cheesecake Factory. What I coach as a coach is In and Out Burger. I don't know if you're familiar with In and Out Burger, but if you've ever been in one, it is simplicity. Simplicity rules the day. Chad was talking about it earlier. We make it so hard for potential new clients to do business with us. Keep it simple. Boil it down to these 10 factors on intake, and you will sign up more clients than ever before. Look, Ben has been as a testimonial to this, if you apply some of the tenants that I've just coached here today, you will improve your conversion by 128% simply by applying some of these things, and you will not have to spend one more dime on marketing to get it done. Ben talked about it earlier. They didn't spend one more dime on marketing, and they had massive triple digit increases two years in a row, and it's not a fluke. It's because he looked at the overall leads call abandonment rates. They just made tweaks one bite at a time to get to that level of perfection. Here's the amazing thing, 3000 secret shopper calls and counting that we've done in my career. The average score on 100 point scale is somewhere between a 30 and a 40. Law firms have consistently scored between a 30 and a 40 in the 3000 plus secret shopper calls that me and my team have done, thankfully right for us. It keeps us in business, but it's the numbers have not changed in more than 10 years. Okay, not, not one iota. Okay. If anybody's on today's call, and I'm just going to extend it just to the folks here, and I know Chad extended a an audit as well. If any of you would be interested in either a complimentary strategy session to talk about some of the best ways you can grow and scale your law firm. I'm more than happy to hop on a complimentary call and or if you'd like me to secret shop your law firm and share those results with you. More than happy to do that so that we can help you start getting on the road to fixing your follow up, fixing your intake, signing up more clients than ever before. Oh, and not having to spend any more money on marketing to get it done. Ben is a testament to that today, and that's my phone number. Adam@legalsoft.com I am looking forward, hopefully to hear from some of you today. More than happy to provide you with that, and I will now hand it back to the big guy, Adam, that



Jay Berkowitz:

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



Gary:

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



Jay Berkowitz:

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



Adam Reiman:

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



Jay Berkowitz:

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



Gary:

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



Jay Berkowitz:

what do you guys do? What's your



Ben Leader:

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



Jay Berkowitz:

guys. Well, we're right at time, so I want to thank you all for being here. Everyone's contact information was shared. If you all are watching this on YouTube, just rewind and hit the time slot. Thank you all so much for being here, guys. Thank you so much for your time. This was invaluable. I'm sure we'll get 10s of 1000s of YouTube views. And everyone, please take action with this stuff. It's gold. Cheers. Everyone. Bye, bye. Thanks



Unknown:

for having us. Thanks guys.



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