BluShark Digital 0:00
Welcome to the SEO insider with your host, Seth Price, Founder of BluShark, taking you inside the world of legal marketing and all things digital.
Seth Price 0:10
Welcome back to the SEO Insider. Today, I’m very excited to have Daniel Steinberg, the founder and CEO of Lawbrokr. in the world of SEO, it’s important to understand where traffic is coming from on your website. Many players start with live chat on their website, and nowadays, many people are using AI as way to enhance that. Daniel is here to explain how law broker fits into that puzzle to improve lead qualification. You know what a lot of people sort of like have, they think of like this piece of their website might have started off with a live chat agent, very often from the Philippines, that may have morphed, for many people, to an AI chat. How do you guys comport with that world?
Daniel Steinberg 0:51
Yeah, so we’re, we’re a secondary way to engage. So I think as the way that I think about this as a whole unit is there’s this, this verse of pre qualification and pre screening. That’s the world that we play into, your website is your core source of truth. It’s driving traffic. Lawbrokr acts as a conversion event. So there’s three core ways that a potential client might want to engage with you. And at the end of the day, you want to meet your clients where they are. So they’re either going to phone you, which everyone has, you know, a phone line, intake staff and everything in between. They’re either going to chat with you if you have a chat bot, or they’re going to engage with you on those big call to action buttons like schedule your consultation, free case review, etc, etc. Lawbrokr sits on those buttons throughout the internet to create a journey to help guide the client down a path of quiz like workflows, so that law broker can capture standard and repeatable data from your clients every single time.
Seth Price 1:52
How much? What would you say the percentage of people that use random buttons on their website versus integrations into like a paid social like, do you do both? Or is this really dedicated to just the the law firm websites?
Daniel Steinberg 2:05
Yeah. So unlike a, you know, physical chat bot that’s embedded on a Law Firm’s website, our hypothesis and thesis is that clients are finding you in a magnitude of different ways. So like you just mentioned, social posts, paid posts, Google My Business, Avvo, FindLaw etcetera, referral sources. So
Seth Price 2:23
So are you part of like a Google, Google My Business profile chat, where somebody could chat with, you know, when that’s available, that that’s for a Google business, a LSA chat, like, where do you-
Daniel Steinberg 2:36
So we, we’re not the chat function, we would sit where we’re a hyperlink would sit. So Lawbrokr a hyperlink. So think about, you know, pricebenowitz.com, Lawbrokr is a function of that, and that allows you to place Lawbrokr links anywhere across the internet. So again, that could be on Google My Business Profile, that could be on social posts, YouTube, TikTok, Google AdWords, landing pages, you name it, and that’s the structure that we take on to allow you to create a standardization of the way that clients engage with you.
Seth Price 3:11
Awesome. So you know, as you’ve gone through this process of giving people this opportunity, and look, I’ve seen it my own,myself, is that anything, you know, old school started off, wanted everybody on the phone, because that’s where we sold our business to, okay, chat’s there. I didn’t love the big stuff that popped up on a screen. And as mobile became more, you know, it was always the quality of the chats wasn’t great, but it was a necessary evil, as we’ve seen the AI chats come in. It seems that law firm’s willingness to work with some version of either a script and or AI, or whatever you want to call it, has gone through the roof in the last couple of years as we A/B test these things, talk to me a little bit about what you’re seeing in the marketplace as you’ve created these flows to bring people through in a way that used to be sort of foreign, because people before, if you ask somebody three, four years ago, they wanted that live, personal touch, and I think they’ve gotten a lot more comfortable with something that is outside of human hands.
Daniel Steinberg 4:17
Yeah, very fair comment, and I think that there’s still validity in that, right? I think the human touch is incredibly important in a world of professional services. And, you know, competing with your competitors throughout, throughout the space, I think for us, the way that we envision it and share that, that passion with law firms is, how do you make sure that you activate a new channel of growth for your business? So we’re not going to replace the phone calls if people want to chat with you, we’re not going to replace that. But how do you start to elevate your business to create a more conducive experience that people are used to, that emulates consumer buying habits like purchasing something on a Shopify store, or Amazon or a TikTok and Instagram quiz, you need to essentially create and evolve in the way that consumers are engaging across every discipline, not just professional services, in order to capture that client growth in a much more streamlined way. So that’s where our business comes into play. But again, it’s all about activating that new channel of growth. If you want to get referrals, keep getting referrals. If you get phone calls, keep getting phone calls. How do we make sure that we replace those static contact forms that create bounce rates, friction and poor quality data for your intake teams?
Seth Price 5:40
I love it, because to me, that’s always been one of the weaker places, even design. I was always yelling at our team, like these, these, these forms, are just not very exciting. They’re a necessary evil. But they had not evolved. I felt like they were still back in 2010 they did not given you that pop that said, hey, there’s something more here, and that as you, as people, expect instant gratification very often, when you send a form in, you have no idea if it’s ever going anywhere. And the fact that there’s some sort of back and forth where there’s gamification or multiple questions gives you, you know, I use this analogy a lot. In hiring and in client acquisition, there’s a lot of sort of a dating analogy. If you walk into a bar and met somebody and said, will you marry me? They’d like, think you’re crazy, but if you have a drink, you have dinner, you spend some time with them, all of a sudden, there’s a relationship. And that, at some level, what I see you guys doing on a micro piece is having a mini relationship with somebody, where some questions are being asked, they’re giving information. There’s a back and forth at scale that you couldn’t possibly do with humans at that, or may not even be, wish to be. There’s not a desire to speak to a human. But that back and forth means all of a sudden, it’s something more than I found a site and I filled out a form, but that there’s some sort of, you know, dynamic interaction, which I think creates the beginnings. It’s not replacing the eventual human touch, but that there’s, it’s more than I found it. Here’s a form. Let me hope they call me back, but rather, with that back and forth, there’s some sort of depth, you know, minute as it may be, better than the static that we’ve been living with.
Daniel Steinberg 7:27
Yeah. And I think you raise a really important point, and part of the consumer journey and legal and why we’re tackling that space outside of, you know, my background at Clio and so forth is there’s this broken element of education within the legal space, as you know, you know, being a practicing attorney, I’m not, I’m just an outsider looking in. But when you think about the lack of education one of the biggest challenges, and why people don’t necessarily call and you know, 78% of them start their search on Google is a lot of them are unfamiliar, whether they even have a case, or if you can support them, or if they even have a legal matter right, they don’t know that there’s a statute of limitations on time range or jurisdictional based elements and so forth, because they’ve never engaged with an attorney before. So part of our platform helps allow to guide that client journey, to facilitate a better conversation on the back end to build that personal touch. So a lot of people will say, you know, well, I don’t want to replace my phone calls or my team calling the, you know, the individual. And what I say back to that is absolutely not. What you have to do is take the data that Lawbrokr provides you and create that sort of experience that makes them help, makes them want to work with you, right? And the more data you have, the more likely you can ultimately support their legal matter, or, quite frankly, tell them verbatim. Here’s why we can’t help you. Here’s how you can, you know, we can refer you out, or, you know, go to your local state bar and so forth.
Seth Price 9:00
Right. So I see two different ends of the spectrum. For somebody with limited numbers of calls they would want as much as they could in, in theory, straight to the phone. But one of the banes of every law firm’s existence is the quality of intake. I’m no, I’m not immune to that. I’ve had periods of time it’s great. I’ve had times it sucks. I’ve had periods of time where I thought it was great, it was meh. And so the thought that you are adding something, and we’re seeing this with AI more and more, where it’s not like you’re not going to have any employees, but if you could reduce the number and friction so that you, if you got rid of your worst 20% of potential calls in some way, so that your people could deal with the 80% that were there, you get to eliminate your worst performing intake person, me, or if it’s a single person, it frees them up to spend more time on the quality stuff. Yeah, you’re
Daniel Steinberg 9:56
You’re creating prioritization for them, like you just mentioned, right? It’s like. Do I focus my time now, and how do I make sure that the people that might be tire kickers or aren’t a good fit I deal with thereafter? Right? Because it’s speed to lead.
Seth Price 10:07
Right. So back in the day when I would send a lead to a lawyer, or it was me way back in the day with a cell phone, 20 years ago, I would want to know, is this worth stepping away from the dinner table for, or is this stuff that could wait. And in a way, you’re doing this at scale, giving people an idea of what they’re dealing with. I know that for some of your clients, probably eliminating somebody entirely, if that pre vetting can get them out of the loop and keep them away from you, because you can’t help them. I assume that as you move into things like mass torts, where there’s massive volume of potential callers who think they may or may not. If you’re able to pre vet and predetermine it gives your intake a fighting chance, because if every person that had a potential thought of a case was touching your intake department, it would likely collapse, and very few people were good enough to scale it so that as you leave stuff, you know, in auto it’s usually pretty clear there’s an accident, or there’s not an accident, right? But as you move into the more eclectic areas, there’s often, like, if we could prevent in a way that doesn’t lose people, this is the other piece of this, right? So that, if you go back historically, I’ve never wanted to have many obstacles between getting somebody on the phone. And you know that, that, that you didn’t want there to be a huge moat I’m out of, and so that, as it gets more elegant, and it’s not something that’s obnoxious, you know, like the phone tree, right? Those phone trees are great until you get frustrated, start hittig zero and want to get the hell out, right? So, you know, you’re seeing stuff more and more with AI voice, you know, for example, I feel like what you’ve come up with is a more elegant solution, that if you’re in the digital environment already and comfortable with it, a couple of button clicks can bring you the gold and eliminate the stuff you really don’t want to be dealing with.
Daniel Steinberg 10:09
Yeah, it also creates, a lot of firms are consistently looking for ways to compete, right and have that competitive advantage. It’s a completely different experience when a consumer is shopping around and, you know, filling out a static form that you’re like, hey, I’m not sure what happened here, compared to someone actually clicking through, getting that follow up, seeing the automated sequencing and so forth, to then know that you know you’re taken care of. This feels warm and fuzzy, like things I’m used to.
Seth Price 12:00
It was the dating part I was talking about, like you’re asking the right questions. If somebody on a date starts being bizarro and saying things that don’t resonate, it’s gonna, it’s gonna end very quickly. And so the idea is, if you could theoretically give those touch points that you can, you know that you care about family, that you love, to travel, whatever it is, if you’re giving that back and forth, which people do at least, I’m old, so it was back in the day. It was a website. Now it’s an app. If you can somehow have those positive touch points to know that at least the deal killers aren’t there that, you know if you if you don’t want to have kids, and you’re able to know that the person you’re about to have dinner with doesn’t want to have kids, then you have a lot better chance. Now, there are exceptions to everything, just like in dating, you might find out that despite somebody answering wrong for whatever reason you still, and that’s true with law firms. It may be that in this process, you lose one out of 100 things. You know what? I would have loved to have speak, spoken to them, but the dirty secret is that if you had 100 of those phone calls coming in and had to screen them, you might not ever find that out. And so the idea is, if you can spend your intake time with the people most likely to have the need you can solve. It just exponentially changes, because half my podcast guests are talking about intake. It’s so huge. We had a whole series on The Law Firm Blueprint this, this summer with intake people. It’s impossible to do, and that anything we can do to get meatier stuff, because when you do that, you can pay your people more, because in theory, your conversion rate is going to be higher, and each of these things synergistically moves along that spectrum.
Daniel Steinberg 14:13
Yeah, and it’s interesting you talk about like conversion rate on the retainer side and things like that, because it’s all looked at a framework of a funnel, right? And you know, you at BluShark and so forth are reviewing this and analyzing this across all your customer bases, but you talk a lot about pre screening and vetting people out and so forth, and that’s part of the solution that we solve for but the other piece is when you create experiences that make it simplified for the user to engage with you and guide them down that path, it actually ends up bringing a higher amount of growth into your practice, but also with higher quality, right? So you’re removing the high volume poor quality data and replacing that with high intent and higher volume in that capacity.
Seth Price 15:00
And as long as it’s not going to turn you off. I remember when the chats first started, it was was popped up. They still, I still don’t love the big, big video chats. What they don’t tell you is what percentage of people get turned off and leave because ofthat invasive piece, if somebody is in a position where they’re asking for the information by hitting that button, they’re already going into that channel versus we don’t even get to that discussion. So the question is, if you’re going to be going to that form fill, what can you do that is not like, I’ll go to a negative version of it. I don’t, we get we get surveyed by everything, hotels use data, restaurants, resorts, cruise, whatever it is. And you know, it’s one of those deals where I’m good for two or three questions, but when it goes on forever, I’m just like, I’m out of here. Like, I’ll, I really wanted to support this resort. But like, Hey guys, enough’s, enough that, you know, it’s not my business, it’s yours. I’ll give you the feedback. If there’s s something wrong, I’ll let you know. But like, I feel like, what if, the more elegant and streamlined it becomes, the less of an impediment it is, and the more that you’re working with them towards a solution, rather than, hey, I’m just trying to do competitive research right now to find out all the information I can.
Daniel Steinberg 15:00
And it that’s, it’s an interesting point that you made, right? Because it’s kind of like pre sales and post sales, and there’s a big distinction between that in my world that I look at right? So our average question set that we’ve seen on the data side before people start to bounce and fall through is somewhere in the realm of seven to nine questions. It depends on, you know, the specific service offering, etc, that you’re looking at. And naturally, each firm has their own data sets so they can determine what that looks like, but you’re describing a world where it’s like, okay, I just had a great experience, you know? I just went on that cruise. I had a ton of fun. It was two weeks, but now I’m back at work, so don’t feed me with 10 questions. You asked me if I wanted to review, I’ll give you five stars, but then it makes you answer seven more questions. Like to describe your experience and why and this and how and whatever, and you’re like, post sail, I’m done. I was happy with that. Thank you very much. I’m off. Right?
Seth Price 16:26
Right, and if you’ve been on a cruise, it has gotten to the point where that is the currency. It’s gone from like a joke to literally the cruise director is spending five minutes of an infomercial. It’s like the only thing that mat – it matters more than a monetary tip, right, to the point where, so, okay, we’ve put that together, but that’s one thing. You spent a week with people, but you could have an interaction in a restaurant for an hour, or you stayed at a hotel where you barely talked to anybody, you got a room key, and you left, and all of a sudden there’s this barrage. So the idea that you can sort of quasi gamify it and be given the permission to give more when you want to or not, to me, I think that’s the future, which is, if you can somehow make it desirous rather than laborious, I think you’re going to get more out of people. And then at some point, somebody’s like, look, you can have you go down three or four questions and say, somebody’s like, look, I got nothing better to do today. I’ll answer all the questions you want, great. But separating that out so that the people that you want, who are the busy people who probably have the money to spend, rather than the person who was treated to the cruise who wasn’t making that buying decision. I’m making this up, but the idea is, as you can be more elegant and thoughtful about that journey, I think you’re going to get more, no different than with intake. You know, if you can get three or four questions from somebody that’s a lot of powerful information to pass forward.
Daniel Steinberg 18:34
You’re going to be a lot smarter, a lot more relatable. You can describe the situation, I think, like, it’s all cyclical, right? And it all, you know, I always say the review starts at the first click. So what’s interesting is, a lot of law firms focus on, okay, well, how do we optimize our time? One of the things that I see all the time on reviews for law firm sites and things like that, is like, you get a one star review, which isn’t warranted, but it’s because they didn’t pick up the phone, because they weren’t a good fit for them, or they’re like, hey, we can’t help you. And that bothers consumers, right? In our world, it’s like, if we can describe why we can’t help you, like, hey, you’re outside of our state, or, hey, your accident happened five years ago. This actually isn’t a legal matter. Or, etcetera, etcetera, you know, talking at, at, you know, agnosium here. But the point of the matter is, is that it also sets the client up for success, right? It saves their time, it offers them.
Seth Price 18:40
I think that’s huge. Sorry to cut you off, but to me, that’s huge in the sense that the negative review generally comes from the human interaction. You don’t see a lot of negative reactions from a bot that’s giving, because if it look, there are two reasons you get the negative reaction. One, somebody genuinely was flipping, which happens right, which hopefully this will eliminate. The other is, they don’t want the bad news. Yeah, and the, I would, I will take the odds that a website is, that a, that something amorphous is telling you no, is likely better than whatever your eighth most talented intake person is going to do to drop somebody off nicely. And so if you’re able to get to the point where you never, I mean, you’re doing some big stuff, I know, with the wildfires and stuff like that, and that, there’s gonna be a lot of people you can’t help. And if you don’t waste their time and let them know, hey, this is not going to be your solution, road to riches, you know, try somewhere else. You never get into that engagement that will lead to bad stuff. And to me, that’s very valuable.
Daniel Steinberg 20:29
Yeah, no, it’s true. That’s true.
Seth Price 20:31
Awesome. So what do you, so, as we wrap up here, what are you most excited about? I got what’s going on here, but what is in this space of the client journey, and the intersection between the marketing, the client and the sign up. If I’m looking down the road, everyone’s talking, AI, what is coming that we should be excited for?
Daniel Steinberg 20:52
In the space, or in Lawbrokr or both?
Seth Price 20:55
Whichever, however you want to do it.
Daniel Steinberg 20:57
Yeah, I think the space is really unique. I think there’s this big shift in focus on how people want to engage with law firms, and making sure that law firms are primed for success in that capacity and have digitized their practices beyond the scope of just a marketing agency and just a website, right. There’s so many different pieces in place that you have to have in order to make sure that you’re capturing the right types of clients in the right way, in a magnitude of different sources, right? I see people post all the time now that people are searching on Chat GPT for attorneys near me, and moving off of the Google world, like there are so many new sources of truth that might exist that you need to be if you want to capture the right types of clients. And I think that’s a really exciting function, because if you can’t get the the front end side of things working properly, and buzzing and humming the intake piece doesn’t really matter, because there’s no one coming into your funnel. And this whole focus around top of funnel growth seems to be a really hot topic. And you know, in your world, on the on the BluShark side-
Seth Price 22:02
No, no, 100%, so I to me, one the issue with top of funnel growth is that it’s overwhelming that wave could knock you out if you don’t have some barriers up, because you couldn’t possibly, its what the what the mass tort guys do. Free money. Everybody wants it. What is that barrier to protect the beach from just being consumed by that incredible tidal wave.
Daniel Steinberg 22:24
Yeah, so I think that space is super exciting. Obviously, that’s the space that we’re we play in. But I think every law firm that has now built their practices, or are building their practices, are really in tune to building the infrastructure of the back end of their firm. And you know how to practice on the practice management side, and you know how to focus on the document management side and etc. And what needs to start shifting is, how do we operate like other corporations and other industries in order to make a big splash and magnitude of how people engage with us throughout our world, and that’s missing on the legal side.
Seth Price 23:02
You landed the plane. It’s like, how can law firms operate like the rest of the business community, which always we’re, like, we’re different. We’re not really that different. We have media, and we want, you know, we want sign ups or new clients. So thank you so much for joining us. I can’t wait to see you, whether at tech show, I assume, if not, before?
Daniel Steinberg 23:23
Yeah, I’m sure we’ll see each other running around, as we always do. I’m not sure I have a crazy conference schedule, so I’m sure we’ll be bumping into each other shortly, and otherwise I’ll be, I’ll be coming down to Washington to see you.
Seth Price 23:37
I can’t wait. Thank you so much for your time.
Daniel Steinberg 23:39
All right, see you later. Seth, thanks.
BluShark Digital 23:41
Thank you for tuning in to the SEO insider with Seth Price. Be sure to check back next week for fresh insights into building your brand’s online presence. Episodes are available to stream directly on BluShark Digital’s website.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
