From Lead to Signed Client: Where Law Firms Lose Prospects and How to Win Them Back

Welcome to the Dominate Law Podcast. I'm your host, Don Adesha, and today's conversation is about a problem many law firms don't realize they have generating leads, but losing them somewhere between that first inquiry and becoming a signed client. This episode is proudly sponsored by Equa Marketing, helping law firms strengthen how they are found, understood, and chosen online. Equa is also offering listeners a complimentary 60 -minute lead conversion strategy session valued at $900, where their team will review your firm's visibility, website, and opportunities to improve conversion.

Book your session at www.dominatelaw.com. Joining me today are Emily LaRouche, founder and CEO of BackofficeBettys, who brings deep experience in law firm intake and client experience, David Vickner, a trial lawyer and law firm leader with a strong focus on client hospitality and conversion, and Joshua Lennon of Clio, who brings the legal technology, data, and workflow perspective. We're talking speed to lead, better follow-up, stronger intake, and what it really takes to turn more qualified prospects into clients.

Let's get into the conversation. Right. So, my first question goes out to you, Emily. Across growing law firms, what pattern clearly separates teams that convert leads consistently from teams that lose prospects before a consultation, even when demand might be strong? Well, the speed to lead is definitely going to be number one. I was just looking for an attorney recently, and I was surprised that there were quite a few that didn't even have a phone number on there anymore.

It was like, fill out the contact form, schedule online. I work with hundreds of lawyers, and so I kind of know the game, but even then, I still wanted a personal communication. I wanted to be able to pick up the phone call and discuss. So, first of all, I believe in the human experience, and the other thing is, the first to connect closes, and so if we're just really doing those rote things, it's very not personal. It's like, what's your name?

Give me your details. That kind of thing. It's not going to close a case, so definitely, we've got to be responsive, be human first, and he who connects first is usually going to close the client. So those are the three big ones for me. So Emily, there is a bit of a bottleneck there, right? Office hours. What are we doing about that? Because after office hours is usually when we have that problem, where we're calling in to an office, like you said, you were trying to get in touch with the lawyer, but perhaps it might be after hours.

In that case, would it be okay to have these new AI receptionists? What's your take on that? I've been pretty anti-AI for the phone space. There's a lot of competitors coming out doing it. My personal experience dealing with the current iteration of what we have available in that space is it's not there yet. So I've tried using it myself with various companies. I don't love it. But I will add to that, most of the lawyers that we work with are going to be estate planning.

They're your nine to five, Monday through Friday. They're not going to call you back on the weekend anyways. So for a personal injury firm or someone who needs criminal, they need that fast response. I'm going to say that's better than not answering at all. So I'm going to say sometimes maybe, it depends on your particular business. But for our clients, we're there during business hours and that's when the prospects are calling.

It looks like Joshua has his hand up. You might have some more to add in there. Good. Sure, Joshua.

Thanks. This isn't contrary to Emily at all, but we do a survey of legal consumers every year as a part of our legal trends report. In 2024, after surveying over a thousand consumers of legal services, over 50% said they were open to starting their communications with a law firm via chatbot. But 63% of them said they want the chatbot to lead to a lawyer. And so it's a good starting point. But I think if you don't have that escalation to an actual conversation, then it's not what clients are looking for.

Okay. So what we're really looking for is not a, I apologize, but glorified intake AI, but rather someone who would really escalate the process to the nearest human whenever they are available. That's fantastic. Thank you very much for that, Joshua. And thank you, Emily. Now, David, at what point is a typical intake journey? Do promising prospects most often disengage because the firm's process creates friction or uncertainty for them?

Yeah, I think Emily hit two of them, speed and empathy are, to me, the two big things that we have to train our teams on to not lose the lead at the beginning. But there's a big word in there, which is train. And I think that there's a growing gap in all of our law firms at every level, but especially at intake. It's like a silent killer. We're putting all these other fires out, but it's gnawing at the fabric of the organization, which is a lack of training.

So we're in probably our third year. We have a full new client, the services department, but we have the same consultant who's been working and training us on a weekly basis. We're in our third year with her, and we've never stopped investing in that training and having somebody work with our team because there's always iterations in that training. And there's certain small things that we don't think has an impact. For example, our engagement letters.

If you can get them to one page and you describe it as an engagement letter, that's a lot more intimidating to a consumer than a contract, which is three pages. Something us as lawyers don't see as that big of an impediment to signing or retention is to our consumer base. So it's, I think, a bit of a gap between on the legal side, us as lawyers understanding what our consumers want or are intimidated by, and also a failure of training.

And it's intake, to me, most people call it intake. We call it new client services because we don't want our clients to feel like they're being run through a widget machine. But in the space, we refer to it as intake. But to me, it's like a garden. The minute you stop tending to the garden, the weeds grow, and you have to be auditing your calls. You have to be listening to your calls. They have to be a part of your training DNA every week in your new client department or the wheels are going to fall off the bike really quickly.

What's your frequency for training, really? Once a week. They have training meetings every single week, and they are also listening to calls every week. They're doing huddles together. We run audit reports now once a week looking at, you know, we have a call center which does live backup during business hours, but is live after hours, and a point Emily just hit. And so when we see, we look at, you know, time to answer the phone for our new client agents.

We look at professionals. We look at how many calls during business hours went to the call center, and there's a lot of subjectivity to that. Perhaps they were in a training, and so the call center needed to take the phones during that hour-long meeting. And so it's every week. Every week. Wonderful. Can you give an agenda for how the training looks like? I'm not in them anymore, but I will tell you that we are signing, the number right now is 94.7% of our wanted leads are signed by our new client department, and I'm very, very proud of that number.

And that to me is a product of a commitment to speed, like Emily talked about, a commitment to training, and a commitment to empathy, and preventing the impediments for the client to retain us. And, you know, I know they listen to calls. I know they talk about things like that come up in the everyday week of like, hey, we really did these things bad last week. Like, let's focus on getting better at this. There are sometimes items which come from the leadership team, such as like, hey, we're really struggling to obtain Google reviews.

You know, intake, our new client service is a fertile ground to receive Google reviews. People just don't think about it like that. And so that could be an agenda item that comes down from the leadership team that we want them to re-engage, refocus on that, re-ask people when they call type of thing. Got it. Thank you very much for that, David. Joshua, when a new lead contacts the firm, what does the five-minute response rule reveal about the role of speed in securing a consultation from that prospect?

It's everything. What we know from our surveys of legal consumers is they are not just contacting one law firm. Generally, they're acting almost out of a sense of panic, trying to reach out to every law firm that they can find. And so they also tell us, however, the first law firm that gets back to them is the law firm they end up going with. So that five-minute response time meets both their emotional need for, I need to do something now, I'm in panic mode, as well as places you to the top of the list against the competition that they are attempting to contact.

So 80% of consumers tell us that they want a response within 24 hours. And the likelihood of hiring a firm increases the shorter that time period is. So like 24 hours is like, you might still be in the running, but if it's less than that same day, that's where they want to get that type of response time. Now, weighing in on this, Joshua, I know you might be a little bit biased, but we have two options here that we have uncovered so far, call centers versus an automated AI receptionist, right?

Specifically for that after hours. So in that sense, how would you weigh it? So I do have some data that I can bring to this. In 2024, we ran our second experiment doing secret shopping of law firms. We contacted 500 random law firms, not all of them were Clio customers. We gave them targeted outreach based on their stated practice area. So we made sure that it was a client coming and asking about the services that they do offer.

Unfortunately, of our 500 firms that we went to, the secret shoppers wouldn't recommend 78% of them. We tried a phone, website contact, email, and chatbot if they were available across those 500. The only consistent positive rating came from law firms where somebody answered the phone. Everybody else were rated mostly negative. And so yeah, having somebody who answers the phone is I think the best option. The second best option down was the chatbot.

And our secret shoppers did say that they would go with that. I've got one other data point that I think I can raise against that though. And it does happen to focus around our product Clio Grow, which is the client intake product. And we found that firms that were using three specific features had a 50% increase in leads and a 50% increase in revenue from those leads. And those three features were an online intake form, the hooking up of their account to Google local service ads.

And the third was an online scheduler that allowed the potential client to book their own consultation. And I think all of those have in common an action that can be undertaken by the potential client. And so it's giving them an affirmative step forward. Just like if they were talking to somebody directly, they're feeling like, OK, I've gotten something done. That's really cool, Joshua. Thank you very much for sharing those data points.

And so the chatbot is coming in second. Not necessarily a AI receptionist, like do you mean by chatbot like AI receptionist or just on the website like chatbot? In this instance, it was just on the website is what we asked our shoppers to tell us how they interacted. And that would not be equal to a AI voice? Yes. It was 2024, so it wasn't as popular an option as it is now. And for us, it was more important that somebody answered the phone rather than if the phone wasn't answered at all.

Got it. Appreciate that, Joshua. Really appreciating these data insights. Emily, as firms scale their intake function, how do you choose between immediate responsiveness and protecting staff capacity when both affect conversion and client experience? Well, we work with a lot of small firms and I've seen some that I've looked at the calendar and said, I don't know how you even take a restroom break during the day. It's pretty sad how overwhelmed smaller firms can get.

And so one of the things that I like to do is set parameters and I'll encourage lawyers that we work with, please set parameters around how many consults you can do. And what I found is people booking and to Joshua's point, it doesn't matter if they're booking through the AI agent on the website. It doesn't matter if they're booking through a virtual receptionist or someone sitting in the firm. Once they've booked, they generally stop looking.

And so removing the barrier to do business with you and getting that consultation on the books is usually what stops them. So if the firm's busy, you know, I've had a fractional executive team for years. I love the fractional business model. You get experts at what they do only for the time that you need them and you pay for what you need. I love the model. And so we eat our own dog food. And I highly recommend it to any firm, like if you can't do it, if your receptionist is on vacation, she needs a break, whatever the case may be, you don't have the staff in hand.

Find somebody who can back you up in that. Now, Emily, get them booked ASAP, right? What does that look like, really? I mean, you mentioned even intake forms. Is there a difference in the conversion rates? Well, I think, you know, I'm a big operations and process person, and it sounds like David's firm has got this lockdown. So probably a good one to speak on it. But for me, you've got to have a regular process. And we love Clio.

So I love it when we have clients who use Clio because we will put leads straight into Clio Grow. And so they're already into the law firm system, booked the appointment, got them scheduled. And through the process, you know, we trained our team into the systems and processes that work for the law firm. And then we hire empathetic people. And so I think when you just have the right systems and then you pair it with the right people, it's like rocket fuel for your business.

Any tips on hiring empathetic people? How do you kind of script that? I'm going to give you our trade secret. I don't think I've ever told anyone. It's a silly thing. But of the hundreds of people we've hired, we have found that the absolute most empathetic customer service forward and ability to adapt to stressful situation people are those who've worked as servers. And they've done it a couple of years. They have dealt with the worst of the worst experiences.

They can adapt. They're usually friendly. They can bounce back. And so when we see that on a resume, we get really excited. Thank you so much for sharing that, Emily. Now, Harrison from our audience has asked, thank you deeply for this panel. As a firm working to develop a thriving, empathetic and trained intake department, are you able to give your top three needs for a successful starting intake team? I understand the empathy, speed and training, but would you recommend other items for leadership to consider?

Perhaps, David, you can start us off on this and Emily or Joshua can add on to it. So if I understand the question, is it in the sense of what other things are you looking for in training your intake team or in what to hire? Are you able to give your top three needs for a successful starting intake team? That's one. OK, so I'll go a little bit more basic. If you're starting out and you're just hiring somebody, number one, somebody who actually said they want to be on the phone because there's good days and bad days doing that job.

And they're on the phone a lot and they got to talk to people. So finding somebody, I really loved what Emily just said. I thought she was going to say somebody from Chick-fil-A, but she was saying along the same lines. And we also hire people from hospitality, not just from intake, but for pre-litigation case manager positions. We love hiring people who have a hospitality background, drug rehabilitation, recidivism type positions where they've dealt with very difficult scenarios and had to face adversity.

Those are the kind of people who you know are going to come in and they're going to be able to bounce back and go through the hard days. So one, that they want to be on the phone. The second, and I think lawyers are really bad about this, sometimes your intake people are going to be twiddling their thumbs a little bit. OK, like get over it. It's the one department that it's OK to be overstaffed in. And we do the opposite.

We understaff and we say, let's split the receptionist with the intake professional because they're the same on the phone. They're the same and it's not the same at all. And so it's one of those things like they're twiddling their thumbs sometimes because we go in waves, we go in seasons, we go in periods. You know, for us, we know we can look at the wave historically in our data over the last three years we've been growing and see what season is higher than others and know like, yeah, we may feel like we're overstaffed right now, but they're going to be running like chickens with their heads cut off in about two months when our volume picks up.

So that's the second thing is like, don't be afraid to overstaff that position. The third is kind of delves into this same discussion we've been kicking around about after hours call center versus AI agent. It's like, don't be penny smart and dollar stupid. If you're spending money in marketing, OK, you're trusting your intake team with your marketing budget. Right. So if they don't close and if they're not on the phone quickly and they don't get there like you're not going to sign the client.

And so if you're doing any level of marketing like we're looking at this thing and I'm sure like I'm with Emily, like I'm not a huge fan of AI on the phone at all. But if you came to me and said, hey, after 5 p.m., if they're going to get a voicemail or an AI agent, I'd rather them get an AI agent than the voicemail. But I suspect a lot of lawyers look at it and say, and our call center costs a lot more than this every month.

But, you know, they say, oh, I'm going to spend 500 bucks or a thousand bucks a month on that call center after hours. But the AI agent is going to only cost me half of that. Like I'm going to go with AI agent. Well, I think that's stupid because I know what my average fee is a little bit under twenty seven thousand dollars. I know how many cases we sign after hours and it's a lot. And so to me, the cost of the call center and having a human available 24 7 as well as attorneys back up on call to get in touch with a catastrophic injury or a serious case after hours is well justified based on a simple business analysis of looking at three or four numbers.

And so I know that's a lot, but, you know, all this stuff goes into like how you train your mindset and developing a strong intake department and a new client team. And my next question goes back to you, David, here. During a consultation, what decision logic helps you determine whether the conversation is centered on the prospect rather than the firm's preferred intake process?

That's a good question. Where my mind goes with that one is maybe my intake consultant won't like me saying this, but, you know, our new client team has free reign to know that they should spend the amount of time that they need to with every person who calls us. And that's a big differentiator for us because we do personal injury only. But let's say somebody who calls us for family law, succession, whatever it is, something outside our wheelhouse.

You know, there's a big piece of it where attorneys and counselors at law. OK, sometimes we're going to be their attorney, but sometimes we're going to be their counselor. And sometimes what they need from us is suggestions and tips on finding them to the right law firm, even if we can't monetize that phone call, because not everything is a business transaction to me. Like part of it is helping the consumer and the public to find the right attorney for their particular case.

And by the way, we can get a ton of Google reviews from these people who never retain us as a client. And that's where we get a lot of our Google reviews from. We've got almost 3000 across all of our GBPs. We get them from clients who we got nothing from. And so I think, you know, in the grand scheme of things, do I pay a lot of labor costs for new client specialists to spend time with leads that we're never going to get a case from on that day?

Yes. But I feel good about it. We get Google reviews from it. And one thing I can't measure, but I absolutely know, is that we get a crap ton of goodwill from people saying nice things about us in the community that we serve, which will come back to us in spades in referral business, which essentially allows me to manage my cost per acquisition on all my cases by being at somewhere between 20 to 25 percent of referrals.

Wow, that's pretty cool. I mean, you're thinking long term there, too. How do you get those Google reviews? You got to ask. That's the first step, right? You have to motivate your team to ask. You have to train them to ask. You have to remind them to ask. You have to highlight them when they get Google reviews. You have to do all the things in a coaching way of motivating your entire law firm to ask. And I'm a strong believer in you ask immediately, like some lawyers wait until the end of the case.

And I think that's really not smart. Like every chance you get, you should ask. And it may be that your intake team member asks and they don't leave it. And then you sign the client, then your case manager sign to them, ask and they don't leave it. And then maybe the attorney asks and they don't leave it. And maybe the person who's handling closing on their case asks a fourth time and they finally leave it. You got to keep asking.

But you'd be surprised how much Google reviews you'll get from people who will never retain you if you just help them find the right lawyer. Yeah, that's the one which I was really curious about. So you're on the call. You're done with your consultation. You refer them out to Joshua. And then do you ask? Absolutely. OK. And I've done it when I've been on like I still do attorney call. We do weekly rotations. I do it when I talk to the lead.

We can't sign. And in my opinion, they've been the people who are the most prone to leave Google reviews if you ask them in the right way, because they know you're giving them your most valuable resource, which is your time, and you're not getting anything in return for it. Thank you very much for that, David. Joshua, when follow up extends across 21 days, how do you choose between consistent automation and more personalized outreach for prospects who have not retained the firm?

That's a great question. And again, I'm going to turn to Legal Trends data. We work with tens of thousands of contributing law firms looking at anonymized, aggregated usage data. So this isn't confidential data. And over the last year, we've looked at over four hundred and fifty thousand stalled leads out of Clio Grow. And we define stalled as there's been no activity within 30 days. And the largest chunk of those stall at when you send the detailed intake form.

So they've been like, I need a lawyer. Here's my phone number. Here's my email address. You maybe pre-qualify them as not a conflict and that they're looking for the right type of services from you. Then you send that intake form to get more information about them. And that's the biggest area of stalls happening. What we have found is if you have outreach within 24 hours, you actually have a 50 percent increase in your hiring from those stalled leads.

It's plus 10 percentage points in your conversion rates. And so the need for speed there, I think, outweighs the personal touch. But what we also see is later in the consultations or in the onboarding experience, when you've had a consultation, when they've had that face to face, I think then they need a little more personal outreach to help get them over the barrier. So I think you need to look at your pipeline and where they are in the stage to decide when automation is the right way to proceed and when personal contact will be the thing that helps bring it over the finish line.

OK, so it's really about the speed of getting them booked first and foremost and then really converting them through the human touch. What we think is happening from the data is the intake form is probably just too long, to be perfectly honest, right? We're asking for social security number, we're asking for where did you live the past number of years, you know, it really does become detail oriented and we're trying to weigh out how long is the right length.

But because of the different practice areas, that's going to be a tricky research project. But we can say this is where the majority of that things that stall within that 21 days, this is what step they stall on. So how can we reinvigorate it? And it's a touch as soon as possible. So you send it out on a Wednesday and you don't hear anything back on Thursday. You should have an automated email. That's like, hey, we sent you this form.

We need this information to proceed. Do you need help filling it out? Right. Do you want to schedule some time to go through that? All of those things will increase your hireability and increase the conversion rates that you see from potential to signed clients.

Right. So you have no idea about the ideal length of an intake form. I mean, well, again, we do need to break it down and because of contractual and technical constraints on what we can see in our subscribers data, there's only so far we can go now. So I think I think David and Emily will probably be better, have a better answer to what law, what length of an intake form is too long. Yeah, I think I see in like a workman's comp and it can be a very lengthy.

There's certain estate planning. There's so much information that's required. And I think those things are sometimes better done. Like I believe in removing the obstacle to do business with us in every way possible. And some people are actually going to prefer to sit down and fill out that form online and never have to talk to you. Other people are going to much prefer to be digging through their paperwork and work on their desk, talking on the phone or in person, bringing it in.

And so it's really like depending on your firm practice areas and that particular client, because we're all unique, is really adapting to how can I remove the barriers to do business with us? And David probably has some insight into what their intake forms look like to some firms. They're really short and like our team has no problem with them. Some of the longer ones when we're doing it on the phone, we've never had someone say, I don't want to go through this.

Never. So that's usually when we're filling out the CLEO form for them. And I've never had anyone say, oh, this is too long. I don't want to be on the phone anymore.

And that's great. Emily, David, do you have anything to add on? Yeah, I will just say we don't have intake forms. I'm kind of repulsed by even thinking about it. So at least in my world, impersonal injury is exactly what they said. And hit on is our engagement letter, which we don't call a contract, it's an engagement letter.