In this episode of The Law Firm Blueprint, hosts Jay Ruane and Seth Price continue their series on the critical role of intake for law firms, joined by special guests Chad Celi of ChadGPT and Gary Sarner of ROI360+. They discuss the often-overlooked yet high-stakes world of client intake, revealing actionable strategies that can make a significant difference in the growth and efficiency of your firm. Chad discusses mastering intake tactics and verbiage to utilize. The panel also breaks down the challenges law firms face, from hiring intake professionals, to properly training staff, and explains how to address these issues head-on. From this episode, you’ll learn how to turn your intake process into a competitive advantage! Feel free to click this link to access Gary and Chad’s upcoming “Words to Lose, Words to Use” workshop on Oct 29th for more on mastering intake tactics!
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Hello, hello. Welcome to this edition of The Law Firm Blueprint. I’m one of to your hosts, Jay Ruane and with me, as always is my man Seth Price down there in the DC, Maryland, Virginia, headquarters of Price Benowitz and BluShark. But once again, we are joined by not one, but two, two fabulous guests today, Chad Celi and Gary Sarner, and we are continuing our conversation all about intake. And we couldn’t be more delighted to have two great guests to talk about the intake process in law firms. Before we came on the air, we were talking about some of the, the bad things that we have heard over the years in intake, but we’re gonna talk about the good things. So Seth, why don’t you take this away?
Sure, look, Gary’s seen the inside of a ton of law firms through through his radio and media agency. Chad, I think of you as like one of the more creative people when it comes to marketing and the interaction of humans with, with the world. So talk to me. What do you think some of the lowest hanging fruit is for law firms and lawyers when it comes to improving their intake?
Well, I think first to lay the framework and the perspective, I think many attorneys don’t fully appreciate the high stakes environment of intake. Imagine we’re in Las Vegas. It’s as if we think we’re playing the nickel slots at Circus Circus, when really we’re at the Wynn hotel, playing at the $10,000 a hand table. It’s a very high stake environment, and it’s treated, you know, with a warm body and a lack of preparation. I would say, as far as the low hanging fruit, that doesn’t involve getting into changing human behavior, follow up is the easiest low hanging fruit for intake departments, because it can just be dictated, that we essentially need to extend our follow up longer than what we believe. And it’s a very low cost, high return on environment, or high return on investment activity.
And so Gary, you get to listen to, and again, as a, with a media company myself, you know, listening to recorded calls is one of those things when somebody says, my phone’s not ringing, and then you sort of, and look, I’ve been on both sides of this. I’ve been the guy at the agency who’s upset that a law firm client isn’t doing it, and I’ve been the guy at my own firm where it’s not ideal at times. So talk to me. What do you, what are some of the biggest takeaways you get by listening to calls from across a broad swath of law firms?
You know? What I’ve learned is the two most critical pieces of the law firm environment. Number one is intake, and I’m not going to steal any of Chad’s thunder today on how that should be done, because that’s his specialty. And number two is great legal work, but like you just posed as somebody from the marketing side. Leave out your law firm. Generally, the blame is put on the agencies that law firms are working on when cases are down month to month, not looking year over year, month to month. And I believe there are a lot of law firm owners out there that are not inspecting what they expect of this, the most critical department, because without a case, you can’t do great legal work.
So Chad, you know, you’re always cutting edge and thinking outside the box. What I love about you, what are the things if somebody says to you, look, Jay and I have both been at that point in the time we’ve done this podcast, we’ve both had, you know, you know, meltdowns within, within intake, it’s humans. But what are some of the things if you sort of could say, if somebody said, hey, Chad, you’re now in charge. What are the- how do you move the chess pieces around to be most effective and get the most ROI?
Well, the- I think part of what’s happening is we’re trying to train people to become rock stars in intake. And I would propose the best strategy from a high level would be to hire rock stars to perform in legal. That’s the difference. So if you hire someone entry level with no sales experience, and you’re an attorney, and you don’t have sales experience, and you’re not listening to calls, you’re coming at it in a kind of from the, a one down position. So there needs to be surveillance. There needs to be an inbound sales culture. And I find that there’s a giant gap between strategic, high level concepts like control the call, be confident, show empathy. The challenge is, most people don’t know what to do with that. They don’t know what that means. How do you apply that? What does that look like? Tactically? Show me exactly what to say in what scenario. So a lot of my training is designed to be incredibly tactical on the words to lose and the words to use, because, again, people just don’t have the, I would say the experience sometimes to know what that really sounds like. I also notice from firms across the country, large and small, there’s two dangerous assumptions that law firms make about intake. Number one is that, essentially, if someone’s qualified, they want to sign up with you. When you go to whether it’s Price Benowitz or Ruane Attorneys, if we go to your website, it says free consultation, right? That’s the button that they click, okay, when you get on the phone. Essentially, what’s happening is we ask all our selfish intake questions to qualify them, and we literally will go right into closing. All right, let me send, send you this electronic signature, you know, to sign with us. It’s so assumptive. There’s, there’s very little actual consultation. So I think that’s one big opportunity. The other big opportunity overall is just the surveillance part. We assume that the protocol that we trained on, or what we showed them in the manual, or the script that we created, we assume that it’s actually happening in the department. So that’s another gap of when you actually listen to calls, you find that even if it was trained a certain way, or there’s a certain understanding or certain protocol for follow up, when you really look into it and peel back the layers or pull back the curtain, that’s not what’s actually happening. And there’s so many opportunities, and I don’t mind dissecting a few of them now, if you’d like to continue.
I actually want to follow up with that. If you don’t mind. You talked a little bit about, you know, making sure that they say what they’re supposed to say. How would you do that? I mean, in my office, what we did is we told them after, you know, after you get your sea legs, you can divert from the words on our script, but your KPIs are that you hit the five points that we require in every sales call. So, you know, because we’re fee for service, we have to get paid up front. We’re not looking just for a signature. We need to get cash in the door. So it’s a sort of a higher burden, I think, than than PI lawyers when you’re doing family law, trust and estates and and especially criminal law. But we said, look, we, I don’t want you being a robot, because I need you to be able to, you know, go back and forth with your, with, with the person on the phone, and maybe they’re freaking out about consequences, but consequences is part four of our process. You got to address those things right up front, otherwise you’re going to lose them as a caller. They’re not going to, they’re not going to engage with you. So we do it by way of five points, you know, and you get scored. Did you hit all five? If you hit four, you know, it’s workable if you hit two. Well, now you need remedial training and that type of thing. How would you recommend that a law firm sort of approach intake, because we don’t want automatons. We don’t want robots. I mean, I think some people might want AI doing this so that they hit this stuff, but people connect with people, and I think that’s something that better attuned law firms are recognizing and realizing that they’re able to put empathic people in those seats to drive the signing of clients?
Yeah, no, this is a great question. So one touching on scripting for a moment, nobody wants to talk to a robot. I mean, I never hear a request like, Hey, can you send me an AI bot that I can talk to instead of a real person? You know, they want to talk to people, to your point. And I get asked all the time about, Well, should we do a script? Should we not do a script? Here’s the thing. You know, everyone who is watching a movie or television show, those are all actors that have rehearsed a script so well they sound natural. And what happens in intake? There’s such a lack of preparation. I mean, I could memorize a script in 48 hours, any script you give me, and I’m not anyone special. The point is, we haven’t dedicated the script to where it’s in our blood. You’ve got to be able to breathe that so it sounds natural. So if you are going to do scripting or the framework, they have to be so comfortable with it that they can go off script and on script and be paying attention and listening. If you’re anticipating what you’re going to say next on the script, and you don’t know it that well, you can’t be present. You can’t actually be listening if you’re planning the next thing you’re going to say. So that’s, that’s one element. And I like your concept of, you know, four, five points, and giving them the framework and your Mr. System. So I know you’re, you’re probably a lot more organized and sophisticated than most. I would say one other low hanging fruit opportunity when it comes to the scripting is mastering the welcome. It’s how you start off in the first 10 seconds. So many people are looking for a magical phrase that happens at the close, but they’re not even thinking about how they opened. And the opening oftentimes, are you okay, if I touch on a couple tactical things for the open?
Yeah, please do!
All right. So number one, and you guys may have heard of this, the number one word that everyone needs to lose is the word intake. When someone’s positioned as an intake person, you immediately lower authority and positioning. And this is a confidence game. Yes, empathy is important, but if someone’s not confident that your firm can help them, they don’t want to move forward, or they can stall and do nothing or look around. So how you answer the phone in the first 10 seconds? There’s a lot of opportunities. I’ll touch on a couple of them. So number one is the easy don’t be positioned as intake. You could be a case evaluator. You could be part of the consultation team, anything besides someone who sounds like they’re just going to take information down, right? So that’s the positioning. Number two, I would say. And this is going to sound a little nuanced and simplistic, but the first thing that you say when you’re answering the phone having a clarity of message so they can first understand that they’ve reached the right person that they were trying to reach, like the injury attorneys of you know, and saying the name clearly versus it being rushed and mumbled. And then another wonderful opportunity. And you guys might laugh, but a lot of times, people will say their name, yeah, this is John. I was in, you know, I’ve got some issues going on. Okay, what’s your name? And and that sounds super simple, but if you mess up someone’s first name that they just told you two seconds ago, you just blew your rapport. Okay, number three would be when people are calling you. They have one question in their mind, and if you don’t know what that question is, you don’t know what the answer is. So the one question that everyone is asking is, can this person help me with my problem? Okay, so what often happens? You know, firms across the country, we’re so, we’re so eager to go into our intake questions. I mean, we can’t wait to start qualifying them, right, so we miss the rapport opportunity and we don’t answer their question, which is, am I talking to the right person? Okay, so when you answer the phone, you want to give them confirmation that they’ve reached the right person. Yeah, this is John I was in an accident. Don’t know if I can get one of those consultations, or is there someone I can talk to? Right? They don’t know if you’re going to be transferring them to someone else. So if you are the attorney or you are the intake person, you can literally say, okay, I can help you. And I know that sounds so simple, you know, you’ve reached the right person. Or I’m a case evaluator, or I can help you with a consultation, right? That little nugget takes the pressure off their brain going, okay, great, I’m talking to someone who can really help me. And then you attach it to this is another critical point, a permission based question. Before you ask people 22 interrogation questions, right, which don’t build rapport, you simply gain their permission. Okay, Jay, would it be okay if I asked you a few questions to determine if we can help you, and then they give permission, and now you can control the call and answer your questions, but if you rush into okay, last name, phone number, in case we get disconnected, date of the accident, tell me what happened? Did you go to the hospital? All that it’s like, it’s so frustrating for the for the caller and the prospect, and it lowers rapport. So those would be a few little tactical things on mastering the welcome.
Look, great stuff. And I could, couldn’t agree more. And we’ve been hearing common threads of this throughout the series. Gary Falcowitz was talking about, you’ve come to the right place, all of that, but something I’ll throw out to both you guys and whoever wants the answer this, but as you’re saying that, some of what you’re talking about is sort of classic sales training, whether Sandler or one of the other programs. Gary’s been through a gazillion of these different organizations. One of the things I’ve struggled with is taking best sales techniques and then bringing it into this little bubble that we work in, whether it be the intake person or, let’s say, a lawyer that speaks to somebody later in that process, if that ends up happening. And struggling with there isn’t like an off the shelf, Sandler for law firm intake. So how to get the best of classic sales training into a team that very often is not hired for classic sales training, but rather empathy and other elements that you really need, particularly on the plaintiff side. How do you balance that and how do you get that training into people.
You have to beat it into them. Well, I mean, it just really requires some internal lead-leader. And obviously I offer intake training, so this isn’t, you know, an ad for my services. You need an internal person who cares, who’s has some level of surveillance, and oversight on a daily and weekly basis, and they’re the ones that can listen to calls and determine if anything is being applied. And hopefully they have some sales training. And they’re, you know, a sales director. So they’re, they’re building that culture. The culture has to be there that it’s like a no client left behind culture. It’s an inbound sales environment, listening to calls, reinforcing. And I would say probably one of the most difficult decisions an attorney or an intake director will make is realizing or acknowledging that someone that they hired who’s really sweet and really nice and we really like Joe or whoever he is, isn’t a fit for this position. I mean, again, kind of going back to what I said earlier, of you really want to try to hire rock stars from the beginning and then train them on legal. And I think what’s happening is we think we can take some entry level person as a warm body and like, we’re going to give them a sales book and give them a few pointers, and they’re going to become a rock star in three months. You know, another observation I would say about the culture and the staff, and this could be good news or bad news. It doesn’t matter if you have hair or no hair, if you’re a mother, if you’re a millennial, if you’re a Mexican. I’ve seen rock stars. They could be anyone, right? And that’s, kind of is reinforcing the point of, this is a confidence game. It’s not really about they need legalese experience or legal framework. It’s, you know, they need to have some of the softer skills, communication skills. They need some emotional intelligence. But number one, you want to hire a confident person, someone who’s got a little bit of a competitive spirit, they need a strong enough ego where if they get a challenge or an objection or pushback, they don’t just crumble. I mean, I hear plenty of calls where someone would say, well, need to think about it. Okay. Well, I’m sorry. Well, you know, can I call you back sometime next week. I mean, like we’re so ready to get off the phone and just let people go. I don’t know if I answered your question, but-
So, this brings it back. And we can throw this to Gary next, but I’m gonna take this personal for a minute. The reason my internet is down, and you mentioned circus, circus nickel slots before. I’m speaking at PubCon right now in Vegas, and I’m staying at the Luxor, which is like the armpit of the world, which is why the internet probably is going in and out. If I lose you again, I apologize. So I’m sitting here, literally heading to the Bellagio this afternoon for, together, so I’m following you. I’m following the Chad uh continuum. But as you walk into the hotel here, they’re well dressed people who are, you know, I was, hey, we’re, we’re, where do I go to the front desk. Don’t want to talk to me about that, they have one goal in mind. They’re selling timeshares, and it’s they’re armed, and they are not taking no for an answer. I watch them in action. They won’t talk to me because I’m not with my spouse. But the it is a different skill set. So Gary, as you’re looking at this, like you come from a classical trained background, you know, how do you engage? How do you sort of connect with somebody when you listen to calls for law firms? How do you sort of, when you want to coach people and sort of say, this is, I have all this sales training. I wish I could just put a 10th of it into your people. What are some of the steps people can do, from your perspective, as far as getting these best in class sales techniques into intake people
So first and foremost, they have to listen to what the prospect is saying and back to what Chad said earlier. I find intake departments are way too robotic. Now I’m going to pose this question to you, Seth, and to you, Jay, two attorneys that own your own firms, if you had to go down to your intake department right now, could you answer a call better than anybody down there?
I know in my firm, I couldn’t.
You couldn’t?
I could not do a better job with the, with answering the call and selling than my 2 people that are leading that department.
I have a different philosophy.
Seth, what did you say?
Basically, I would say, I know if I get a person on the phone, I can sell full cycle better as a one off. At scale is a different question, because if I had to do this all day, every day, that’s a different skill than like Chad has a really bad situation up on there, and I’ll personally close that one.
So my point here is nobody in intake. Let me rephrase that, most people in intake have no idea how the law firm really works, so there’s no training whatsoever about what lawyers actually do at the law firm. So I suggested to an owner of a firm who is having a really large issue with his department. And I said, if you went downstairs and how to answer the calls for two hours, could you do it? Says I could do it better than anybody. I said, When was the last time you sat down with your department? He’s like, I haven’t. So this Friday, he is spending two hours answering calls with his intake manager and his team, watching the two masters because the, you guys would not be robotic, you have real empathy, sympathy, which I think is a better word than empathy, because most people who work in intake have never been in a car accident, have never gone through what your clientele is going through, and most lawyers probably haven’t, but you’ve dealt with enough situations in your career to understand how to speak to somebody, the human element, and I think Chad would agree, is so important to any sales process, we were given two ears. Somebody called the firm. Listen to them. They will tell you everything they want, no different than in the advertising world. Seth and for me, lawyers tell us what their problems are, right? They’re not hard to solve. But if they feel they, that you’ve listened to them, you’ve heard them, and that you can provide a solution to help them, they’re going to sign up with BluShark or ROI, and it’s no different than the law firm. These people are telling you their problem. Now, they might not have a case. That’s a different story.
I’m going to challenge you, and I want Chad to jump in on this. If Jay and I, or you, when you speak to a client, you’re the founder. Founders sell differently. And Jay can sell differently. He’s Jay Ruane, than intake professional number four. And what I love about some of what Chad is talking about, and you’re starting to see this as you scale your organization. If it’s not you, how do you make sure that you get all the things we’re talking about at scale repetitive? That’s different than Jay, Seth, Gary, or Chad, when he’s, when he’s with his own organization as a founder, getting other people to do it at scale, with quality, without, without the cringe factor, all of those things. It’s a it’s a different skill set in one respect.
Chad, maybe you could help answer this. But what I see is intake people, or I really love case evaluators as a better name. They are hired and put on the phones, go to work. Let’s go!
Well, let’s assume that it’s not. There are best practices. There’s training. You know that there is a training program. You’re not put on the phones. Day one, I think, Jay’s, gone back and forth, and we go, we went as far as a month before putting people on the phones. I think we’re down to two weeks. But yeah, Jay?
Well that’s my question that you know, even if you hire an A player, how long does it take to get somebody you know, trained to be able to, you know, drive the car on their own. I mean, you know,
Jay’s not going to like the answer I always use..
It depends!
I’ll give you an unpopular answer.
You should be training on sales, you should be training on how the law works, obviously, so that they understand the life cycle of a case. I think if you’re going to be hiring people that are remote or overseas or outside of your general area, which a lot of people are doing. I think you need to describe the culture in your neck of the woods. I mean, you know, one of the best things we ever did is we did a training video for our intake people who are all remote, mostly remote, and we talked about what, you know, what’s the culture in Connecticut? It’s pizza, it’s Yankees versus Red Sox, it’s college basketball. You know, those are the things that are cultural touch points in my neck of the woods. That would be different if I was in Alabama or if I was in Oregon, you know. So, so you need to teach your people those things. But I’m just wondering, you know, is there a point that you could say, hey, look, you know, it should take you four weeks to get somebody really ready to go. It should take you because then the flip side to that is, at some point somebody’s not going to make the cut. When do, you know, look, they’re never going to be able to do this position the way they need to. Let’s exit them, you know, because you don’t want to keep investing in, in a bad apple.
Yeah, and this might be an unpopular answer. Ultimately, I think you should know whether or not they’re a fit for the position before they’re hired. I think people talk about hiring slow and firing fast, but don’t fully go deep into what that hiring protocol is. But as far as the training, I would say, from the calls that I’ve listened to over the years, and I’ve listened to over 1000, there’s 5% of the time that there’s actually a legalese legal question that’s really challenging for an intake person to handle, not saying it doesn’t happen. But I would just to put a number on it, 5% of the time. You should know within one month if someone should be in an intake position. Now, obviously, with training, some people have a little bit more robust training protocol, but if you should know within one month if they’re a fit for that position, because they’re going to continue to learn about your history and the law and some nuances of things. But basically you’re going to know, are they sales material? Are they a fit for this position within one month? And sometimes people, if like, if you were to ask a law firm owner right now or an intake director, okay, you’ve got four intake reps. Think about all of them. Is there any of them that, knowing what you know today, that you wouldn’t rehire for this position, you know, a lot of times people will have that answer already, but they just haven’t pulled the trigger, you know. But going a little bit more tactical into the training, I’ll give you a force multiplier. Some of the most important aspects of the call are the first 10 seconds, how it opens and then what happens after intake mode once they’re qualified? There’s this middle consultative section before you’re asking them, right? So you want to focus on what happens in the first 10 seconds, what happens for the next one minute after they’re qualified? And then how do you close, those three sections. And a force multiplier for your training program is, rather than playing 100 phone calls that are an average, 20 minutes long, you actually create a catalog of little snippets of 10 seconds of the open one minute, you know, handling this objection so you can focus their time where they can listen to 1000 great examples, rather than 100.
We actually use that for our training follow up, which is not to listen ness- to a 10 minute call, but jump, use the little mouse and
Yeah, great.
[inaudible] along. I, it’s something you said, was reminiscent. Gary could probably agree, from our 20s dating. There was a concept like, you know, someone would say, you never know, you go out on a date,and the person like, believes in witchcraft you know, like you never know, and then sometimes you know. And my question is, is that? Do have you found if you crowdsource, and Gary, could feel free to answer as well. When you look at people who come into a firm, they, they they’re hired you, you have the best of intentions. You know. You train them, they’re not getting it quickly. Do people come around and need longer? Or is it you either get it or you don’t get it? What’s your thought on that?
Go ahead, Gary, if you want.
Well I was just going to say that depends on if the training were up to par, and did they do test calls internally with the manager going through different scenarios. I sat in an office with a new client, and they told me how great their intake department was. I said, super. Let’s make a call now. Slip and fall in a Walmart. I’m on vacation in your city. I have not seen a doctor, but I have a report from Walmart that the incident happened, and I’m watching the owner’s face as the person on the phone says we’re going to refer you to Joe Blow. How do you not, where was the training? What? Where did it fail? So if there’s practice like I know if I’m going to make a presentation to somebody my entire career, 38 years. I have done it in front of the mirror over and over and over. I don’t need a PowerPoint for the presentation I’m making. I don’t need, as Chad said, before the script should be known, the ability to listen to what they say and pivot, you could learn that in the two weeks of training by asking questions that might be posed on calls. You shouldn’t, in my opinion, you should know within a month, two weeks of training, two weeks on the calls, they either get it or they don’t.
Yeah, there’s one incredibly valuable metric that I want to share that I think is relevant to this part of the conversation. I feel very few people track this. A lot of times, people are asking, what’s a good conversion rate? How do you know if they’re converting at a high percentage or the right percentage or the best percentage? And there’s so many variables in each different market, so you have to focus hyper local. Okay, so the metric you want to look at, if you’ve got a team of people, is the delta between your top performer and the bottom performer. And I call this the 5% rule, okay. And this might seem very narrow, but you don’t want the delta between your top performer and your bottom performer to be more than 5% so to answer your question about or, Seth, about, well, am I going to know? Can you really do it? Can they come around eventually? Yes. The bigger question is, can you afford it? You, people are trying to save $8 an hour, and they’re losing $10,000 a week. You can eventually bring anyone around if you try hard enough with enough training and enough reinforcement and enough encouragement and all that stuff. But it might take two years for some people. You can’t afford that because you’re spending so much per lead, and the value of these cases is so high. Okay, so, yeah, you’re going to spend another year because this person has a positive work ethic, and they’re showing up every day, and they’ve got a nice smile, but literally, you’re losing $10,000 let’s say you’re losing a case a week. Okay? Do you want to keep training them? I mean, it’s, again, the high stakes environment where it’s just like a professional basketball team. You need the best players on the court. If they’re not performing, you got to replace them, move them around. They’re probably great in another seat, but that might sound harsh, but I have so much respect for the marketing dollar, this needs to be addressed.
I got two final questions. I’ll throw it back to Jay to wrap up, but my first question is, what are your thoughts on scripting versus talking points versus, what do you think the best practices are when you know, is somebody, somebody getting prompts, or do they need to have it in their DNA, as as Gary said, and be able to sort of audible without anything written in front of them?
I’m sorry. Were you asking me or Jay?
No, the two of you guys, like meaning in your in your experience, is the better practice written scripts that somebody internalizes. You’re saying exactly what you want done with the empathy and the, the, the different points that you want with objections, etc, versus just talking points that you want people to hit, what’s your what you’re feeling as abest practice?
I feel like the best practice is scripting things out, but I would say the caveat is, how they’re going to internalize it is they need to understand the psychology of why people are making comments or what they’re asking, and I’ll give a specific example in something tactical, right? There are many opportunities to include social proof, you know, making you appear more popular than potentially you are, right? So if someone says, yeah, do you guys have an office in Maryland? You know, they’re seeking confidence. So instead of giving them the literal answer, no, right? Or like, sometimes that happens, you could say, oh yeah, we do a lot of cases in Maryland, right? So just by adding the word a lot and understanding you’re trying to show social proof, but there’s so many examples, again, the psychology of what’s being said. So scripting, you don’t want to sound robotic, but that’s just a matter of preparation and training and rehearsal where it becomes so, so natural, yeah, so I guess that’s my answer.
Gary, what about you? Your, sales is in your DNA, but as you bring team members on, it gets a little different, because you’re doing relationship longer cycle sales, but when you look at intake, what are your thoughts on scripting versus talking points?
I like a script for them to understand what they need to do and in time on their own with their manager, bring it to points that they need to get, because the more you become a trusted advocate of the callers and less robotic, the higher the probability to sign the case. Now you’ve been to a million masterminds, many more than I have, and people talk about the cases that they want all from intake, and they have a closing ratio of 95%, that’s you’re at the top of the game. But how many cases did you lose that you should have wanted? And that’s where the disconnect happens, and that is from lack of training of these people that are taking the calls. You probably have in your office, if somebody mentions the word death, that it goes to a lawyer immediately, right? Why?
In my office its because I had killed them.
HA! But, but why is that that’s more important than signing up the case. That might be 150,000 I don’t. I don’t understand the training. I don’t. I’ve never sat in on on intake training myself at any law firm, but I’m going to ask to do that and see what they do. Chad, you’ve probably trained a million.
My final question to you is, where you go? Where is the the best pickings? You know, they’re, you know, do we want people who have worked at a Verizon store? Do we want people that have, you know, that are customer service centric. What’s the balance? Because if you go get the guy who’s selling timeshares at the Luxor, it’s not going to end well, and if you get somebody with no drive, it’s not going to end well, what’s that happy medium?
Yeah, and I think you hit the nail on the head there. It needs to be happy medium. I would say what’s happening as far as an industry, generalizing, is we’re leaning too much towards customer service and and, you know, they’re a sweet person, and not enough confidence. It’s like this person needs to have conviction in their voice, right? And that’s very difficult to train. So I would say a competitive spirit. You know, people that have played sports, people that have had sales experience because they’ve been exposed even to the concepts of, you know, not arguing with a prospect and following up. So as a foundation, I would say, hiring people that are athletes, military, previous sales experience above and beyond. Oh, this person has something on their resume where they worked at a law firm before. So just to give you the short answer, I would lean towards more competitive. But let me give you one tactical thing, if we believe that confidence is important, something that you can do in an interview. Okay, so how do you know before you hire someone if their ego is strong enough to be a salesperson, like, what are you doing in the interview to test that right? And you can actually check the ego. So this will be a short version, but if I said, you know, Seth and I have been in an interview, or Seth has been interviewing with my firm for an hour, and I get to the end of the interview and I say, Seth, well, you know, based on what I’ve heard, I don’t know if you’re a fit for this position, right? I’m checking his ego now. Either Seth can go, oh, well, I’m sorry I wasted your time, okay, bye. Or he could say, Well, tell me more about that. You know, I think I’m great for this position, right? It’s giving a demonstration of what’s going to be required when they actually get on the phone. So, you know, obviously I’m a huge fan of role play, but that’s a tactical example.
Very cool. Jay, you want to bring us home?
Yeah. So, I mean, this has been really interesting for me, because I think, you know, a lot of people are talking intake in the legal space lately. Obviously, we’re doing it with this series, but I think you bring up something that is really sort of missing. We always talk about training. We talk about scripting. But I think really starting with confidence is something that never gets talked, and I mean, I made a note to myself to on my weekly meeting with my, with my leadership team. Hey, are we speaking with confidence when people call in? Hey, you’ve called the right law firm. We handle cases like this all the time, and I know we can help you. That’s a that’s three sentences that you should be saying at the beginning of every call, because you’re going to allay any sort of anxiety that the caller has. You’re going to position yourself as the person who can solve it. But it kind of goes back to the Jordan Belfort you know, you want to, you know, show your knowledge. You want to be amazing, you know, that type of thing. And I think maybe with the scripting and with all the talk, people are getting away with it, which leads me to my final question, and it’s, it’s, where does AI come into this? As everyone’s saying, I need to get AI doing my intakes. Is AI going to ever be able to replicate a human to human connection at like the worst part? I mean, let’s face it, if you’ve been in a wreck, if you’ve been arrested, if your family life is imploding, do you want to talk to a bot or do you want to talk to a real person? I think there’s great opportunity in the AI space to help you in your office, but at the core function, I mean, people connect with people, right?
People matter!
Yeah.
People matter. They’re hiring a lawyer. Whether it’s because of marketing, it’s because of reputation, or referral. They want you. When they hire your firm Jay. They think and believe they’re getting you. When they hire Price Benowitz, they think they’re getting Seth Price or Mr. Benowitz, that’s what they believe. So, like you just said, you called the right place. We’ve handled so many of cases or incidents like this. I’m here to help you. I’m here to help you. Help, people want help. They just don’t know that they want it, or they don’t know how to ask for it. Hey,
Somebody told me once the difference between help and sell is only two letters. And with that, we’re going to end this session of The Law Firm Blueprint. Thank you guys so much for being with us. Chad, Gary, really great talking to you and talking about all things intake, but that’s going to do it for us. Of course, folks, if you want to take us along with you wherever you go, you can download The Law Firm Blueprint podcast, wherever you get your podcast, and be sure to give us a five star rating on your podcast app of choice. Wait, there was something we wanted to talk about exactly.
Exactly, Chad Gary, if people love this, I hear there’s more of this. Where can they go for more? We’ll put it in the notes as well.
So I met Chad couple of weeks back in Phoenix at one of the conferences. We just hit it off. We had lunch, and it was really Chad’s idea, because I work with so many law firms and talk to law firms every day across the country. And Chad understands this whole intake issue better than most there. There’s several pros out there, and he had this idea, let’s do a webinar without any selling. Nobody’s going to be selling anything. We’re going to be doing basically what we did here, a lot deeper on what should be happening. And I think this whole conversation today probably gave Chad some more ideas as to what he can do when we do this webinar on the 29th of October in less than two weeks.
And it’s a private workshop, though, so if you want to attend, you have to know Gary.
It really is everybody. So I guess that that doesn’t really limit anybody.
So folks, what we can do is we can get the sign up link, and we can put it in the show notes. We can post it in The Law Firm Blueprint Facebook group. If you’re not a member of the group, you definitely want to join and be sure that you can get the link that way. Seth, we also run our shows live on LinkedIn. So can you put it as part of your comments in the when, when we broadcast the show? Because I want to get as many people to follow through with this as possible, because I think you know, taking a couple of hours away from your practice and doing deep thought on your intake can only make it better. And now I mean, to do it at the end, at the end of October is great, because you have the time before the end of the year to really get yourself lined up, fired up, and ready to crush 2025 which is what we want everybody to be able to do. So I think that that would be phenomenal. So folks, that’ll do it for us. There’s something you gotta do on October 29th and that’s attend the webinar for sure. You can get us in our show notes. You can get us on our LinkedIn as well as in the Law Firm Blueprint Facebook group. But that’s gonna do it for us for now, for Gary, for Chad and Seth, myself. Thank you all for being with us, guys, thank you for being with us. This was phenomenal. I appreciate everything that you’ve done. Bye for now!
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