The Secret Plan To Launch Your Firm Into 2024: Intake

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

Do you need to reevaluate your firm’s intake process? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, Jim and Tyson discuss ways to improve the intake process, which is part of a series aimed at preparing law firms for the upcoming year.

The intake process is a very important part of the client-lawyer relationship. This is when a client is first coming on board and it is used to see if a lawyer will take on a case. Jim shares how lawyers should spend time looking at their firm’s process and focus on analyzing how fast or slow it takes for a client to sign up with the firm. Speeding the process up will ultimately lead to more money.

Another part of the intake process is focusing on the sales aspect of it. Make a list of the common objections and questions that you receive in your intake process and then address them as you are marketing your firm to potential clients. An example is while on the phone speaking with someone who would like to take some time to review a contract, have the intake person ask if there is anything that needs to be addressed on the spot. This cuts out the need for someone to call back asking for more clarity. As firm owners, you have a wealth of knowledge that your intake staff might not have. So writing down responses to those commonly asked questions for your staff to have as a script is a great way to ensure more clients are coming through the door.

Listen in to learn how to improve your firm’s intake process!

Episode Highlights:

• 00:56 Discussion on evaluating the firm's intake process
• 2:47 Exploration of common objections during the intake process
• 5:08 Importance of providing information about the firm's background to enhance credibility

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Transcripts: The Secret Plan To Launch Your Firm Into 2024: Intake

Speaker 1 (00:00:00) - Today's episode is day two of a five part series to help you launch your firm into 2024. Each day this week, we're dropping a new episode to guide you in setting up your firm for next year in one hour per day. If you haven't listened to episode one, go back and listen to it first, then come back here. Today's hour will be spent on intake.

Speaker 2 (00:00:20) - Let's go run your law firm the right way. The right way. This is the maximum Lawyer podcast. Lawyer podcast. Your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson new tricks. Let's partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.

Tyson Mutrux (00:00:45) - All right, let's move on to the next one. Let's talk about intake Jimbo. So this is the 27th. So December 27th it's Wednesday. It's your time to take action on intake.

Jim Hacking (00:00:56) - So with intake you definitely want to spend this hour looking at your process and figuring out how fast or how slow does it take to sign up with my firm, I would spend the first ten minutes looking at the last five cases I signed up, figure out when did this person come into our world? How did we reach out to them? How long did it take for us to reach out to them? What message did we send to them? How easy was it for them to talk to somebody who knows how to sign up the case? How did we gather the facts about their case? How fast did we send them the contract? How quickly did they sign it, and how quickly did we either start to get paid or start to work on the case? You really need to speed that process up.

Jim Hacking (00:01:39) - Every time I've sped that process up, we've made more money. So we've we've gone through, identified the places where there's friction, the places where it's bottlenecked. I used to have this long, complicated process where someone in the office would talk to a lead. They would say, yeah, this guy needs a contract. I would go find the most recent similar contract. I would change the names. I might make some mistakes. I would send them the contract, they would sign it. Then we'd have to physically open the file. We'd have to open up the matter and file line. And then in QuickBooks, now that's all automated. So somebody signs that contract in which they receive while they're on the call with us. Once they sign it a matter is open in QuickBooks. It matters open in file line. Those get created automatically. An invoice is generated, a payment link is sent. They can make the initial payment and authorize us to charge their credit card for the rest of the of the legal fee.

Jim Hacking (00:02:35) - It's all very automated and very, very quick. So I think you'll learn a ton by assessing how you've done on your recent contracts and where things are slowing down.

Tyson Mutrux (00:02:47) - So the thing I want to talk about when it comes to intake is it relates to what you're talking about, is focusing on the sales part of it. And you could in that one hour, you could easily come up with a list of the most common objections that you get and address those through sales techniques and give your people on the front lines ways of answering those. For example, one of the common things we we get is because we send the with the contract right over the phone like, well, we're while we're talking to them and they say, well, you know, I want to review this, I want to review this. Okay, well, I completely understand that you want to review it or is there anything specific that you're looking for that I can address right now that we can I can answer those questions for you, and maybe they'll give you a couple things and you address them and boom, there's no no more need for them to, you know, have you call them back.

Tyson Mutrux (00:03:34) - Because if you if you let them off the phone, you know, the chances of them hiring you drops quite a bit, doesn't mean that they're not going to hire you, but it does drop quite a bit if you can keep them on the phone, get them while they're on the phone. It's it's going to increase. That conversion is going to speed things up like Jim's talking about. So that's what that's what I would focus on during that time is coming up with a list of those scripts for your people so they can address those objections. And I wouldn't have them read from a script, but it does give them a general idea as to how to respond things. We were actually, you know, working on that today on a few things. And we we stole an idea from Jim that he told me about a while ago is where you were talking about how you all are doing your, you know, trainings daily. Amy's been doing trainings with, uh, sales techniques, uh, with our, with our cares team on a daily basis.

Tyson Mutrux (00:04:25) - That's been really, really effective. So you can come up with that script, those scripts, those those objections and those responses to those objections easily within that hour, uh, that you could do. And then also, I would recommend testing your phones whenever you're, you got that time off, too.

Jim Hacking (00:04:41) - And make no mistake, as good as your intake specialist may be or your people talking to leads may be, they're never going to be as good as you or as comfortable as you, or have the wealth of knowledge that you have. So to the extent that you can get the things that you say when facing an objection out onto paper so that they can learn them, it's just going to be invaluable because that's going to allow you to scale, and that's going to give you the leverage you need to to grow your intake team and grow your firm.

Tyson Mutrux (00:05:08) - Yeah. And steal a steal a page out of the ultimate sales machine book where give them information about your background so they can say these nice things about you too, because that's another way of boosting the ability to get the sale is you.

Tyson Mutrux (00:05:21) - They you know, Jim, he has handled tens of thousands of immigration matters. I don't know what the number is, but, um, he has argued in front of the eight Circuit Court of Appeals, the, you know, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, he has won X number of cases. He just had a case last week that he won in front of, you know, the Seventh Circuit, like things like that, where you you give them a list of things that they can say that just, you know, boosts your. Your credibility to that, to potential client.

Speaker 2 (00:05:49) - Thanks for listening to the Maximum Lawyer Podcast podcast. Stay in contact with your host and to access more content. Go to Maximum lawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.