In this episode, Jim and Tyson will talk about client’s perspective. What clients see and hear about your firm and how they perceive it is essential to build a successful law business.
We, as attorneys and business owners, could benefit from spending a little bit of time brainstorming on how to make the whole experience of working with us memorable in a good way. Exceed expectations and benefit from it. Get referrals from satisfied clients.
Hacking’s Hack: This Blog. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/. Fantastic.
Tyson’s Tip: Simple. Sit down and break you practice into stages or phases from start to finish. Everything can be broken down into stages. Write it out, from point A to Point B, map it out. This is gonna show you deficiencies in your practice.
BONUS: Don’t get too fancy with your blogs. Just put something out there. Something simple.
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Transcripts: From Client’s Perspective
Tyson Mutrux
If you’ve gone through and you’ve taken care of your client from every step of the process, during the during unit, on your end, you’ve met their expectations on the before unit. And then you take care of them during unit and the after unit when you’re still sort of day in front of them. They’re going to refer all their cases to you because you’ve exceeded their expectation.
Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum liar, podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your phone.
Jim Hacking
Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m Jim hacking.
Tyson Mutrux
And I’m anti symmetric say Jamie, what’s going on? But I said my good man, how
Jim Hacking
are you? Good.
Tyson Mutrux
Good weekend? How about you?
Jim Hacking
Excellent. Excellent. So this week, this is what we’re going to talk about, we’re talking about thinking about our law practice our law firm from our clients perspective. You know, I think a lot of times, attorneys who are running, running, running around doing their practice, don’t spend much time thinking about how, what we do and what we say is received by the potential plaintiff for clients. And so I think a lot of times that we ignore how things are perceived. And we don’t really script out how our office looks when someone comes in, what response we give to them when they come in how we’re set up to welcome them into our office, how our support staff interacts with them, and then how we present ourselves to the clients. And I think that attorneys would be much better off spending some time thinking that through and I thought that may be a good topic for us to talk about today.
Tyson Mutrux
It really is a good topic. And it’s funny, because we’re gonna have Jill Nelson, in the near future, we’re trying to figure out what date she’s gonna come on. She is the founder of Ruby receptionist. And so by the way, she talks about as when people call in, you know, making sure you have a nice, cheery voice on the other end of the phone, someone you know, a warm body and actually answer the phone and they’ve got call scripts that they use that you usually provide to them. But really scripting it out from start to finish is a really, really good way to create that consistency in your firm. And I think if you think about it, sort of like McDonald’s, you know, if you go into McDonald’s, whether you like me eating their food or not, if you go to McDonald’s, they’re pretty much all the same, you know, the drive throughs are all set up the same. When you walk in, the lines are all set up the same, pay the same, you pick up your food the same way, you go and fill up your drink the same way. So it’s really, really consistent no matter where you go, especially for the people on the podcast, that are listening to podcasts that want to expand and grow. It’s really important, where if you have multiple offices set up, they should be set the same way they shouldn’t be set up differently, would make no sense you need to have the consistency. Yeah. And I think that for the most part, when we go into a doctor’s office or accountants office, or any kind of office setting, we all can remember instances that were bad, that were negative that we felt sort of slighted or put off. I think for the most part, what we’re talking about, though, is competing against average, and making things remarkable. And if we want to push ourselves to deliver a remarkable client experience, then you know, it’s fine to just answer the phone and say hello, hacking law practice this is Marwan How can I help you? And then to just go from there sort of in a rudimentary way. But I think that us as attorneys, and as business owners could benefit from spending a little bit of time brainstorming on how to make the experience memorable in a good way. So
Jim Hacking
I think that with any interaction with our firm, we’re always thinking about the frowny face, the average face on the smiley face. And I think that it’s a really tricky thing to get to the smiley face stage.
Tyson Mutrux
That’s true, very true. And it’s really hard sometimes. And I think you really have to step back and think about it. And you’d asked this question before, you know, about, you’d asked me if I’ve ever had to hire an attorney. Right? And we kind of went through the process before looking up the the attorney on the internet and all that. If you step back from that, you think that okay, what’s the process that I’m expecting? If I’m looking for an attorney? Like if I go to the website, what do I expect? What do I expect to see? What information do I expect to get and then calling in to the actual law firm? What do I expect on the other end? So there you start thinking about it that way as the client, you put yourself in the client’s shoes, that’s going to give you one you’re going to do that step. And 99% of other attorneys aren’t doing that sort of thing. So you’re really thinking about limit further, but your clients when they call in, they’re going to be better served because you are you’re going to want meet their expectations, but to you’re going to go a step further. Are there, you’re gonna exceed their expectations. And that’s really important. I mean, if the end game and a lot of these is you, you’ve got to get that positive review, after you take your client do a really, really good job, that’s going to lead to more clients. It’s really tough these days marketing and competing with all these other firms. And if you’ve gone through, and you’ve, you’ve taken care of your client from every step of the process, during the during unit, and on your end, you’ve met their expectations on the before unit, and then you take care of during the during unit and the after unit when you’re still sort of staying in front of them. They’re going to refer all their cases to you because you’ve exceeded their expectations. And that’s really, do you think they should have a lifetime client value that we talked about before, that’s how this all just sorts can regenerate itself, you start to snowball as you get more and more clients from us yesterday, I was listening to Dean grazioso, these
Jim Hacking
recent talk of the Genius Network on the TEDx Talk podcast with Joe Polish and Dan Sullivan. And he was talking about secret shopping his experience, you know, so when he does his secret shopper, what he does is he asked them to just say one thing. How do you feel when you go to our website? How do you feel? When you raise your hands and get emails back from us? How do you feel when you decide to purchase a $20,000? product from us? How do you feel after you’ve purchased it? And you know, obviously, the secret shopper is using fake money, but he just wants them to sort of go through the process and each time asking them, you know, what reaction are you having to the assessment what you know, really drilling down and getting granular to the overall steps of each step of the experience. And he said that the feedback that he gets back on it is pretty remarkable that it really helps him tweak what it is that he’s doing.
Tyson Mutrux
That’s really going to what’s the question? And again, how are you feeling?
Jim Hacking
How do you feel? How does this make you feel? How do you feel when you call? How do you feel when you talk to our support staff? How do you feel when you arrive in the office? How do you feel when you sit in the conference room waiting for the attorney? How do you feel when the attorney comes in? How do you feel when the attorneys listening to you? How do you feel when you’re done talking to the attorney? How do you feel when you sign the contract? How do you feel when you spend the money? How do you feel when you leave and go home? Do you have buyer’s remorse? You know, I’m taking what he said and overlaying it across the hiring an attorney spectrum. And then I guess, how do you feel during the representation?
Tyson Mutrux
Interesting? Does he talk about the process of actually doing it? I mean, does he throughout the entire process? Is he asking them? Or maybe that’s how he does it? Or does he do after the fact
Jim Hacking
he’s a secret shopper to pretend that they’re the person and with him, it’s a much faster process, it’s, you know, listening to the webinar, you know, deciding whether to buy buying and then reacting to what you receive, and just sort of trying to put themselves in as much as they can into the buyer shoes.
Tyson Mutrux
Gotcha. Gotcha. Well, with yours with your clients. I mean, when they come to you, they’re very sure a lot of them nowadays are in fear. Right? I mean, is that that what you’re experiencing? While your clients are just having a massive amount of fear to feel like they’re a deported? Is that what you’re experiencing? Absolutely. I
Jim Hacking
mean, there’s all kinds of misinformation going on right now. I mean, the real news itself is scary. But what I’ve been talking to people about lately is in the immigrant communities, here’s what’s happening. So someone in America will say something like, there’s been some legislation that’s been proposed in Congress. And so the staffers will write the bill for the Congress person, the Congress person may or may not read the whole bill, they’ll get a summary of the bill, they’ll read the talking points of the bill, then we’ll go out and talk to the press. And then the American press writes a story based on what the Congress person said about the bill. And then that what the American press writes up gets summarized into sort of like soundbite II type articles, then those articles are translated back into the home country. And so they’re published in the home country newspaper, and then the parents or the loved ones of the people in the United States, read those articles. And then they call back and tell people hear everything. So it’s like a great big game of telephone. And things get really garbled, I had my law clerk, do some research on h1 B work visas, and there were literal articles written in English on American websites that were just flat out wrong. When I read the statutes that are the draft legislation. They completely contradicted what it said in the American article. So yeah, there’s a lot of misinformation right now a lot of fear. So yeah, anything that I can do, interacting with people to combat fear is good. And I mean, I like doing that just as a human being to alleviate someone else’s fear, but also from a lawyer client relationship. I think it really builds trust when you can help them sort of one thing I’m really trying to do is use accurate language and be very precise with what I say. And so I’ve really learned to talk slowly, I really learned to pause. I really learned to just let them talk and vent a little bit. And then I just sort of provide insight where I can without, you know, going crazy with, you know, too much detail or too much scary talk
Tyson Mutrux
my experiences with dealing with you or that before before the Uh, our new president, the mood is pretty was pretty positive. You’re helping people come here I think even whenever we were in BNI, together used to talk about how you are helping people come to the United United States and live the American dream, right? And now it feels like it’s shifted right? So now it’s shifted to your practice is more fear based, not from you, you’re not marketing. But before it was more of a happiness kind of thing. Now it’s more fear based. Because just the state of things have you had to shift and how you’re dealing with people I know, you said you got to, you’re sort of clarifying the statutes and all that kind of stuff, but do anything else, to change your practice to meet those clients expectations?
Jim Hacking
It’s interesting that you say that, because I think about that from time to time, and I think about good baseball coaches or sports coaches. And I think that the role of a coach is that when the team wins, and they sort of pull out an amazing victory, I think the coach’s job is to remind them that they’re not the greatest thing since sliced bread, that they still have other games to play, and they still have to work and do everything else to maintain the highest level. And then, at the same time, when things are bad, I think the job of a coach is to build the team back up and to remind them that things are better than they seem right now. Yeah, it was a tough loss. But we have another game next weekend. Let’s get ready. So I think that’s sort of my role, too, is that I just both ways, try to be the voice of reason. On the negative side, you know, now I try to get people to be realistic and understand. And in the old days, I think I was sort of trying to get people to be realistic. So I really just tried to be a voice of reason. And I think that all translates you to I mean, the people that come to see someone who’s been in a car accident, or were facing criminal charges, they have their own set of fears and their own concerns and their own pain points. And that’s where they’re coming to see you otherwise wouldn’t. And so, you know, always the clients don’t really care about hiring an attorney, clients just care about making pain go away.
Tyson Mutrux
You’re absolutely right. And just, from my experience, dealing with clients, it all has to do with the setting the expectations of frauds, you know what you can actually do with them. And the reason why I asked you that what I did is that when I read that book, pre suasion by Shel Dini, who had also written influence, it’s really changed my way of looking at things because the way clients view things and expectations can be set very early, just based on simple wording, or simple templates in your email, or simple. Simply going to your website and viewing certain certain things. It’s really interesting. And so now I, every time I create something, whatever sort of content, whatever sort of video, or we’ve created these new shock, and all packages for clients, there’s wording in these packets that I’ve given to them. And it’s funny because I’ve put a completely different spin on stuff where before, I didn’t give him as much thought to it. But now I know what new they’re going to be whenever they sit down and actually read this packet. And I really thought through all that kind of stuff. And I’ve tried to keep everything more positive, more of a positive spin. Because before you do have your boogeyman, right, you’ve got your insurance companies for me. And so some of the stuff from my content was more attacking them, right. And I’ve shifted away from that a little bit. And I’ve gotten more to, let’s take care of you. Right, let’s let’s make sure you get your medical care taken care of your medical bills paid things like that, which is less of the attack and more of the hey, we’re gonna support you, we’re here for you, that type of mentality. And I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback lately from clients about that, because it’s more about them, right. It’s not about attacking insurance companies, or I have plenty of videos out there for that. And some clients really liked that. But it’s not for everybody. So I have sat down and thought more about the whole process. And as you know, I’m big into Disney. So that made me think about the whole process from start to finish. So something else we’ve done, I may have mentioned this to you is we’re, whenever the new client comes into the office, we have the meet each one of our employees, it’s sort of a process, it’s kind of cool. That way, whenever they’re on the phone with them later on, they can put a face to a name, so the client is more comfortable talking to that person. So that’s something that’s also helped. So from start to finish, we sort of scripted it out, which has been really kind of neat, I can just tell that the interactions with the clients are much more positive.
Jim Hacking
That’s when they hire you, they meet everybody or when they come in,
Tyson Mutrux
when they come in. I sort of treat them one of the same it’s very rare that they come to the office and they’ve not they’re not gonna hire me. Actually, somebody started doing this it’s not been an issue at all. I mean, I I can probably count on one hand, the number of times where someone’s met with me and not hired me to partner with personal injury is I think what they come in they’re usually gonna sign the contract and they’re not having to dish out money so it’s not hard for them to put their name on the contract. So it’s usually not that big of an issue. So yeah, but yeah, when they come in for the initial consultation when they sit down and Angie sits down and she acts and obviously this doesn’t count the virtual assistants to do a bunch of work back end but Angie sits down she does the the pedigree information Since it’s very quick, then once she’s done, Calcio come in and do a lot more the case details and get a big rundown from them, that what happened, we have a lot of questions that we asked. And then I come in, I go, I clarify some things I read through what has been written down, then I go through the contract with them. So they’ve met with each one of us. And so they feel much more comfortable, because I’ve had people in the past where they won’t talk to Kelsey, or they will talk to Angie, because that’s not their attorney. They’re very paranoid about who they talk to. And this is gotten rid of some of those concerns.
Jim Hacking
It’s interesting, you know, what got me thinking about this topic was, I was remembering an early episode of I love marketing, and they had Dean Jackson on there, and they were talking about sort of, there’s the things that go on onstage, and the clients are seeing what’s going on on stage. And then there’s all these things backstage, that sort of make the onstage work. And so what are each of the little steps that we have to do to make the onstage performance as good as possible? You know, like, if, as a side note, we’re taking our whole firm this week, we’re all going to go see To Kill a Mockingbird. On Thursday night, we’re going out to dinner. And then we’re gonna go see To Kill a Mockingbird at the rap. And, you know, so with that play, there’ll be stagehands who have to run all the props out the actors off to get in their places. And in order to really wow the audience, everyone’s got to remember their lines and do things the right way, the lighting has to be right, the sound has to be good, the seats have to be comfortable. And so they encourage us as business owners to think of the same thing like how do we micromanage? How do we get down to the nitty gritty details to really make sure that each step of the process that things are being done correctly each time and, and that the experience is uniform each time and I think that your approach and scripting and I think that’s probably
Tyson Mutrux
really helpful. No, it really has been something else we’ve been doing, or we’re going to start doing. We’ve recorded interviews, I’ve interviewed both Kelsey and Angie, and I’ve sat them down and actually had the camera on that last question. And I’ve had it edited by the dish. And it’s going to the first week, we’re there to get there to get a bunch of emails from us, but they’re going to get one from us that is each day, a video from each of us introducing themselves, just in case, you know, they weren’t that day there that day, whenever the client signed up, whether it’s introducing themselves, saying what they do specifically for the firm, and how the clients can help out with their case, things they can do with their case to help out. And I anticipate that that should help quite a bit to that’s going to eat some more of their concerns, and also answer some more their questions. And it’s also gonna help us because we’re giving them advice on what things that they can do that are very specific to help us out with our case. So let’s test that out and see how that works as well. Cool. So
Jim Hacking
I think we given some good things for our audience or listeners to talk about, have you made any other strides or progress along these lines of trying to not just the initial experience, but during the representation? I know that you we’ve talked on the past about how you’re really good about maintaining eye contact and the during that how would you talk about what you’ve scripted during the during unit?
Tyson Mutrux
Oh, gee, I can talk I can roughly talk about everything. It could it’s very detailed, but part of it is for our benefit. And part of it’s for their benefit, the big thing for their benefit is continually staying in front of them, right? Because with personal injury, there’s these big lols. And so we are constantly sending out letters and emails that they get. And just in front of people are just now starting to learn from this or listen to this podcast. My whole during unit is inside of Infusionsoft. So it’s automated. And so you have to go from stage to stage to stage to stage. And once one stage is met, you go to the next stage. So for example, first stages is intake. And so once intake is done, and the client is still treating, then once treatment has completed, is a trigger something else where you requests, all the medical records and records are being requested to this point. But once the person has completed treatment, that’s a trigger to get the rest of the medical records that we do not have, then you get to the next stage. Once those records are in, we sent out it’s the demand stage. So you mark the file is records completed on demand. So the demand is generated. And our demand is pretty much already generated the way it works. And so we just had to plug in some numbers and things like that, once that was done.
Jim Hacking
So those are all things that the clients wouldn’t necessarily see. I was wondering more about the things that you do, because you’re really good about notifying the referring attorneys and notifying the clients as each of these steps happen. Is that all right?
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, and I’m gonna I’m gonna get to that in a second. I just want to give them a basic overview of how things work. So then once the Demand send we get an offer, then it’s another sequence. So during each one of these stages, for example, you said the referring attorneys an email and a letter is fired off to the referring attorney. So they’re fully updated on what’s going on with the case. Because what these personal injury cases, they’re going to want their fee at the at the end, they want their CO counsel fee. So they’re gonna want that. And that way, they’re not calling me for an update on the case. And someone like you trust me, so you don’t care. And so but some, some attorneys don’t know me that well, that maybe they heard me from the podcast or whatever. They don’t know me as well. So it’s good to keep them updated, to know what’s going on with the case. And then what clients are in each stage so that they know something is going on. These letters in these emails are going out. And we also do these voice broadcasts where they’re Infusionsoft. So when the demand is sent, a voice broadcast is sent to them, I don’t make the phone call. It’s automated. And it’s a, it’s my voice, letting them know that the demand has been sent. And that we should ever respond in a couple of weeks. And I had to keep it kind of vague, because sometimes I changed the deadline that I put, I’ve been using 10 Day deadlines, but sometimes I extended out to 14 or 30, depending on the circumstance. But I usually say a couple of weeks, and then it leaves them a message that they don’t pick up. So that’s one of the things where they’re they’re constantly getting these updates. And some clients will call like, Hey, I got your voicemail. Thanks for call me any phone case. So it’s kind of cool, because I think actually call them when I really didn’t. And then even during these dead times, there’s these lols letters will still be going out and emails will be going out. And they’re just sometimes they’re just generic where the says there’ll be a med update letter where we’ll ask them, if they’ve gotten any additional treatment, they may have told us that they’ve completed treatment. But just to let us know, if they’d gone to had gone back to a doctor, just basic general letters like that, where we are constantly in front of these people, and is never changing. And so they’re not going to forget who their attorney is. We talked about it in a previous podcast, you don’t want to be the the attorney that would clap, forget your name. So we’re constantly in front of them and constantly updating them. So from their side of things, or they’re getting inundated with all these different things. And that looks like even though there may be a loan the case, it looks like we’re just we’re papering the file and doing a bunch on it whenever in reality, sometimes we’re just not because we’re waiting for them to get done treating or whatever it may be.
Jim Hacking
That’s fantastic. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear about this. I needed to do a lot more. That’s, that’s great. You’re doing that. I think we have run our course on this week show. It’s probably time for Tyson’s
Tyson Mutrux
to. Yep. Alright, so the tip this week for me is just pretty simple, right? If you’ve not done this yet, sit down and break your practice into stages or phases or whatever you want to call it from start to finish. So they can be very, very simple. I went over today what my most of my stages are for the personal injury stuff, whether you criminal way you do whether you immigration, estate planning, everything can be broken down into stages. And don’t think that your practice is unique and that you can’t because you’re fooling yourself sit down and actually write it out. physically write it out, put it on the computer, from point A to point Z, right from start to finish, and map it out. What’s your process look like? That simple exercise right there is going to show you some deficiencies in your practice. And then that’s going to be the the bedrock for really a foundation for scripting out your practice. Okay, what can I do here? What can I do here we’re trying to do here, from the clients perspective, to to make them feel more comfortable, or make them feel more competent me, whatever it may be scripted from start to finish it, that exercise is going to take you 10 minutes, it really is you sit down and you really break down your practice and from start to finish, what are the different stages? What are the triggers to to go into the next stage. That’s a little exercise that’s gonna help you quite a bit. So that’s my tip of the week.
Jim Hacking
Fantastic. For my hack of the week, I’m gonna go back to where it all began. And I got a great email today from Seth Godin, I get great emails every day from Seth Godin, I am encouraging everyone to sign up for his very simple blog, he blogs every single day. There’s no bells or whistles, no lead magnets or videos or anything. It’s just blogging each day. Sometimes they’re very short, but they’re very powerful. Always good things to think about. I love today’s post. And so I really encourage everyone to go to it. If you type in Seth and Google, he comes up first. So Seth godin.com is where you go to get those and I think that you may don’t read them all every day. The ones that you do read are
Tyson Mutrux
fantastic. good piece of advice right there just alone is don’t get too fancy with your blogs. Just just put something out there. Just sit down even if it’s 120 words, do we do that all the time with our 40 characters with Twitter, you know, just just sit down and put something out there. Don’t Don’t try and put fancy gadgets or pictures or videos and stuff like that and do what he does. And then just do something simple every day. Mr. Tyson will talk to you next week. I meant to talk to you. We’ll see you
