RUSTY SPEEDY: [00:00:00] You don’t want to just assume they’re ignoring their responsibility. You know, some staff just have too many responsibilities. As a firm owner, you have to really prioritize that, Hey, this is a sales process. This is how we get firms to hire us. So you don’t want to fill up all your staff people’s time.
So it’s like, hey, anytime you’re not answering the phone, I need you scanning this, I need you drafting pleadings, whatever, a lot of times what your staff will do is think that’s a higher priority than setting an appointment. So you need to make sure that you shift that to their top priority. And then also you.
Welcome to Tech Talks, the ultimate podcast for law firm owners looking to revolutionize their practices through technology and strategic business management. Brought to you by 4iiz Systems, your trusted partner in creating custom software solutions and reports to ensure that everything works together seamlessly to drive your firm’s success.
Each [00:01:00] week, your hosts, Rusty and Sam, will dive into the world of law firm operations. exploring how you can leverage technology to streamline your intake and phone systems, improve your case management workflow, and maximize the potential of custom software solutions and insightful reporting. From working with hundreds of law firms across the country, we understand the unique challenges faced by law firms today.
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SAM BLACK: Hey there. Today’s episode of 4iiz Talks is all about those devices that hold the power to make your law firm’s bank account black or red. This is your phones.
RUSTY SPEEDY: We’re uncovering the number one way to make money without spending more money and how not to drop it all down the communication black hole.
SAM BLACK: From call scripts that turn inbound calls into sales opportunities, follow ups with prospects that didn’t hire initially, and the staff disasters we’ve seen before. We’ve got the scoop to help you acquire more clients.
RUSTY SPEEDY: So whether you’re a legal legend or a rookie on the phones, grab your headsets and get ready to dial up the laughs and the lessons. I don’t know how many laughs we’re gonna have, but.
SAM BLACK: so in the previous episode last week, we talked about the four game [00:03:00] changing questions that can help your law firm grow and be more profitable. So if you didn’t hear those original questions, you can listen to last week’s episode. But in this episode we’ll be diving into the first question, How do we get more clients? from working with hundreds of law firms across the country, we found the fastest way to make or lose money is through your phones. You’re spending time and money on marketing to get potential clients to call you. And then firms assume that once they’re on the phone, their staff knows what to do to get them to become a client.
RUSTY SPEEDY: there’s. Some other assumptions we see firms make about their phones and one of them is that everyone that calls in has their call answered. So the call’s not abandoned, it doesn’t go to voicemail. if it does go to voicemail that the person’s called back. Additionally, a lot of firms assume that the call is recorded into a system.
And when I say a system, I generally mean something like a C R M a customer relationship system like Salesforce., Keep, Infusionsoft, stuff like that. And that your staff is not giving [00:04:00] legal advice.
SAM BLACK: So we also see firms assume that their receptionist or phone agent’s conversation with the prospect is geared towards a sale or like a sign on the dotted line agreement. This isn’t necessarily the case. need agents to follow a sales and set an appointment or sign a contract to see the most success here.
RUSTY SPEEDY: Yeah. So if you were to measure your phones or perform something, call quality assurance on them, and you do that by listening to a recording of the call or reading a transcript would think your phone agent is doing everything you would do if you were trying to set an appointment. That’s not necessarily the case either.
SAM BLACK: in this episode we’ll be saying the words receptionist or phone agent a lot. And when we say receptionist or phone agent, we do mean someone working in your office or for someone only for your firm. This isn’t an answering service.
RUSTY SPEEDY: Yeah, so some answering service we know of Lex Reception or Smith AI or Call Ruby. [00:05:00] There’s a bunch of them. These folks aren’t sales agents. They’re meant to take messages while you are out of the office or you’re busy and you know, someone’s on the phone. And we’ve had clients in the past who try to use these guys in a sales role.
Trying to set an appointment. Now they can set an appointment, but it’s not a sales role where they’re gonna actually show up to that appointment. So also, these folks, or with these answering services, don’t know anything about what you do as an attorney. They don’t know the problems your clients are facing, so they can’t create a relationship with that lead.
And the leads aren’t going to see your agent when they walk into the office. So the person they talk to, they’re not gonna see ’em again when they walk in there. So these folks Like Ception, don’t get me wrong, they’re great at taking that message, recording it, and getting it over to your firm. So I’m not saying don’t use ’em, I think it’s a lot better than, you know, just going straight to voicemail.
Just don’t expect them to be the sales agent.[00:06:00]
SAM BLACK: Awesome. Thank you, rusty. So now we have that defined I’ll go into an example of some, cases. That we’ve seen. I was working with a law firm in Ohio whose staff wouldn’t keep track of people who were just calling for information So obviously this was a large number of leads. All their leads weren’t being recorded in their system because this particular law firm owner was depending on people to just do what they were asked and their staff weren’t recording these people. this was, would be up to 50% of their leads every single day that weren’t being called back or followed up on, or even entered into a system.
RUSTY SPEEDY: Yeah, and like Sam was just mentioning, followed up on, so we find that just because people when they first call in didn’t set an appointment immediately, doesn’t mean they wouldn’t if you followed up with them, especially via the phone. And so this could turn up to be another . 30 or 50% per hires as well.
I mean, 30 or 50% more hires for your firm as well. And so what they should be doing is they should be entering these leads. Even the folks just [00:07:00] calling for information into your C R M or even an Excel sheet, really. Hey, you know, here’s their name, here’s their phone number, here’s their email address and their actual address, if they’re doing a really good job.
SAM BLACK: So another thing that we see all the time with firms is that they know that they’re getting calls, but they’re unsure of how many abandon. And I wanna define abandon as somebody hanging up before somebody answers. So if people are calling you and they are abandoning, you’re unsure if you’re understaffed or if staff are just ignoring their responsibility to answer.
RUSTY SPEEDY: Yeah, and you don’t want to just assume they’re ignoring their responsibility. You know, some staff just have too many responsibilities. As a firm owner, you have to really prioritize that, Hey, this is a sales process. This is how we get firms to hire us. So you don’t wanna fill up all your staff people’s time.
So it’s like, Hey, anytime you’re not answering your phone, I need you scanning this. I need you drafting pleadings, whatever. A lot of times what your staff will do is think that’s a higher priority than setting an appointment. So you [00:08:00] need to make sure that you shift that to their top priority. And then also what does sometimes happen, and this is when staff maybe does ignore their responsibility to answer, is that they’ve already quit on you.
Right? We, we find that most firms or most phone agents have about a six month rule at most before they get burnout on the phones, and they’re just, they just can’t do it anymore.
SAM BLACK: And so speaking of staff and what they’re doing on the phones a lot of times we see firms that have no idea what their employees are doing on the phone calls or why they’re losing potential calls. Some of the recommendations we have here is having a voiceover IP phone system and making sure that you’re recording those calls.
That way somebody can go through, listen to any incoming calls or hopefully outbound calls that your agents are making and then scoring them from there. So we do have a 15 point. Scorecard and we’ll attach it into notes of this episode. But this goes through an 11 step process of what somebody should be doing [00:09:00] on the, or what we recommend somebody should be doing on the phones kind of convert them into setting an appointment.
RUSTY SPEEDY: Yeah. And so we have that scorecard. We have that 11 step process. Because staff sometimes miss setting appointments because they’re handling each call differently. So one of the things we try to implement are scripts, call scripts that are geared to be part of a sales process geared to get the person that’s calling in to set an appointment.
So one of the things we talked about in the past was a book called The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande and actually Burt gave a presentation on this you know, when we first got started. So we’ll try to put that up there on the podcast thing as well, so you can make that connection.
But they found that, these are doctors, surgeons. there were a lot of complications from different surgeries, and they found that if they implemented a checklist of the different things that they needed to do prior to surgery, during surgery [00:10:00] and after surgery, the number of complications went down significantly. So what we try to do with phone scripts is something very similar.
We wanna make sure we have a standard process that is geared to making them set appointments. And so the way that we do that, and the way that we measure that, is we wanna look at their set rate. Of all the people that have called in, who we identified them as leads, people that you could help, how many of them set an appointment?
So you’re just doing the division there, you get a percentage and that’s how you’re gonna measure it. And then we break that up into things called in pipeline and out of pipeline. So you’re in pipeline. This is the folks who call that first time, if it was perfect, they’d call in. They set an appointment, they show up, they hire.
So generally what we see as far as a set rate for those in pipeline calls is at least 50% is what you wanna shoot for. It can be as high as 80%. We’ve seen people get that kind of success. Those out of pipeline ones. Those people that didn’t set an appointment when they first called [00:11:00] in or they didn’t show up to their appointment or for whatever reason, didn’t hire, we find that if you call them back somewhere between 30 to 50% of those folks are gonna answer or get into a little bit more about those next, as we talk about outbound dials,
SAM BLACK: Definitely. So outbound dials are to your unconverted leads or as Rusty mentioned, the out of pipeline. So people that didn’t set show up to their. Appoint or then hire you. So I did work with a, law firm in Virginia that actually shut off all of their marketing right when Covid hit, which I do not recommend, by the way, but that’s a different story. But they kept their law firm going just by reaching out to these unconverted leads that they previously weren’t reaching out for. So they turned off their marketing for about two months and kept getting their gold number of hires from just Outbound calls to people who had already reached out to them and hadn’t converted previously. So how do you do that? Normally [00:12:00] rules of engagement, and this is to either buy, die, or unsubscribe. So Richard James, again has kind of coined that to these people back. So normally we’re recommending at least 50 to 80 outbound dials per day, per phone agent, and then calling them three times in that first day. So normally if you’re a level two or a level three firm, you have staff that are dedicated to making these outbound dials. And this is the point where you would be setting these goals for each agent. so new leads, like your web form submissions or lead sources like Nolo need to be reached out to as well. And this would go into that 50 to 80 Outbound dials per day per agent.
RUSTY SPEEDY: Yeah, and these are the folks you wanna make sure get called back really, really quickly. We find that if you can get with get ’em back within five minutes, they’re much more likely to answer. But you also wanna try to get them three times in that first day, because during that first day is the day where their, you know, what we’ll call their pain is the most, where they really wanted to reach [00:13:00] out to you and talk to you.
So if you get up with them that day, they’re more likely to engage. We also find that when you are dialing these people, These outbound calls, making these outbound calls, sometimes between 18%, I would say is the standard. You’re gonna have about 18% of the people you call answer the phone, and you’re killing it if 30% of those people answer the phone.
But one thing that we do find is that people game this system. So, like Sam was saying, you know, 60 to 80 calls, 50 to 80 calls, something like that is the number of outbound dials you’re looking for. So I worked with a firm in New Jersey who had a phone agent. Their job was to make outbound calls.
They actually did look at it very regularly to see how many outbound calls they were dialing or making, but they were gaming the system. So they were actually making calls to. If you’re old enough to remember this, then I am movie phone. So it’s a service you would call to see, you know, what movies were playing where, and so that’s what they do.
They just call movie, phone, pretend like [00:14:00] they were calling a client. So one way that you can tell that that’s happening, if your staff are saying that a hundred percent of the people that they call are answering a phone, and again, that’s something you look at with your VoIP system to see if that’s happening.
But also you think they might be gaming the system if they’re saying only like 5% of the folks that they’re calling or answering the phone. And that’s because you start getting into those things like how successful are they at setting an appointment? So those people aren’t necessarily recording everyone who
They call that doesn’t set an appointment.
SAM BLACK: And just so you guys are aware, the industry standard that we normally see is about 18 to 30% of people answering the phone, depending on practice area and everything like that, but about between 18 and 30%. so once you have someone as your client, how do you keep them?
RUSTY SPEEDY: Yeah. So this one is kind of important, not something that everybody thinks about but you know, They say that client communication is the key to avoiding malpractice [00:15:00] complaints. The American Bar Association actually came out and said, this is the top reason that people get bar complaints.
They’re just not talking to their clients enough. They’re not giving them updates on their case. you can avoid this with
SAM BLACK: Relationship calls,
and we’ll be going into this a lot more in episode three or next week’s episode. this is how to use your phones to ensure that a monthly call is happening, and if they don’t answer, what happens again, that 18% only answered. And then how do you know that somebody answered and what that conversation looked like again?
RUSTY SPEEDY: Yeah, because there’s a goal for these types of calls as well, right? You wanna make sure that these people are happy with your firm, they’re highly rated, they’re gonna give you a good review. So that’s another really good reason to do that. So at far as we kind of got our start here, we started with the phones.
So what we did was we created a system and a software that people used to follow those scripts, to give them the metrics they needed to make sure they were [00:16:00] being successful. So like Sam said, we’ll be diving into how you to use your phones to best maintain that consistent contact with clients and how you can generate more revenue by doing so in the next episode, which will be about
SAM BLACK: So next week’s episode will be about making more money and and how to get profitable for your law firm. So you can see all of the show notes from today’s episode as well as more episodes on for eyes.com/podcast. or if you’d like to submit some questions, we might talk about them in future episodes. Or provide some more resources to answer them, or lastly, you could hire us and we will do it for you and come up with a solution that way.
Thank you for listening to this episode of the 4iiZ Tech Talks. I hope you learned some actionable strategies to attract more clients and grow your law firm. Remember, consistent small wins over time lead to massive growth. Try implementing just one tactic from this episode and see how it goes.
We’ll be back next week with more strategies to take your law [00:17:00] firm to the next level.
