209: Awesome Presentation - Building a High-Performance Intake System for Law Firms recorded at TGR Live! 2026

If you spend any money on marketing, or if you do referral marketing, like Stacy was talking about, you want to have clients coming into your business. The only way to get them in is the bridge-the bridge between your marketing dollars and your law firm-is your intake center. I guarantee you, you are all losing clients in intake. That includes me. There is no way not to. Think of a strainer. Your intake center is full of holes. The key is to plug as many of those holes as possible. We're going to talk about lots of ways to plug the holes. It's impossible to not lose clients, but

the key is to lose as many or as few as possible. Right?

Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of Internet Marketing for Law Firms podcast, featuring the latest strategies and techniques to drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into clients. Now, here's the founder and CEO of 10 Golden Rules, Jay Berkowitz.

So, I'll tell you a little bit about me, but before I do that, I want to give some thanks. So, first of all, thanks to Jay. I do quite a bit of speaking. I've been at a lot of masterminds, a lot of summits. This summit has been unbelievably organized. So there's a lot of work that goes into that. I don't know that you guys really realize how much work it takes to put this together. So not only am I a speaker, I come as an attendee. I'm a vendor. I have a sales team here. It takes a lot of work, so let's give Jay a round of applause. Secondly, I want to thank the vendors. I'm not

sure you guys realize these summits would never happen if it wasn't for the vendors. The vendors pay a huge part of the cost of putting this production on together. So make sure you say hi to the vendors and you talk to them because if it wasn't for them, this would be way more expensive than it is. And then lastly, I want to thank all of you because if it wasn't for all of you, this wouldn't happen. Whenever I speak, I make sure that I come up with things that you can truly execute on. So some speakers talk about really big ideas and grandiose things, and you see lots of big picture

thinking, which is super important. I do some of that, but I also make sure that there are concepts that you can take home with you. So there are at least six different items in my presentation today that, if you have an intake department and if you're from a law firm, you all do intake, right? No matter how small or how big you are, I guarantee you that there are things in this presentation that will help you improve your intake. So make sure you're taking notes on really the executable items, and that's the last piece of general advice I'm going to give you. So Jay talked about taking notes.

So I've been doing mastermind and summits for probably 20 years, and so what I used to do was take a ton of notes, and I'd sit in the seat where you are, and I'd be texting my team, "Oh my God, great idea! We need to do this. Oh my God, great idea! We need to do this. Then I used to go back to my office, and I'd say, sit down with the team, and I'd say, "Look at all these ideas. We need to implement this. My suggestion is to not do that, right? So it's what I call the Big Bang Theory. So I've spoken to a number of people here. People are telling me we're talking about AI. I can't get my

team to use AI. The key there is what we call change management. You have to get your team to buy in. If you're texting your team from here, all you're doing is creating fear and anxiety and shock. If you're taking a list of things to go back to your team and you're saying, "Hey, look at all these great ideas. Let's implement this. It's overwhelming. You have to really think about how you roll out the ideas. Only select a few. You cannot implement 10 new things when you come back from a meeting. It's impossible. Pick one, two, or maybe three, depending on the size of your team, and decide this

is what we're going to do. All right. So that's my advice. So who am I? I started as an EMT at 16 years old. Went into the military. Became a police officer. Well, I was a cop. I went to law school. They paid for it. My plan was to be a Fed. I had a catastrophic car accident. I have a herniated disc in my neck, two in my back, which basically ended my career after seven years. And then I opened up a law firm. I was in-house counsel to a plumbing and heating company, simultaneous to running the law firm, which is really where I got my business experience. We grew the plumbing company from

about 5 million to 4050, people to 300 people. We bought 300 units of real estate. We started a dinner and a movie theater, which ended up failing. So a lot of cool, different types of businesses.

And then I grew the law firm. So my law firm does personal injury, social security, veterans' disability, and workers' compensation. I have a team of about 300 plus. People. Then I run a legal solutions company. We do record retrieval. As Jay mentioned, I have a mastermind group, and we do staffing. I own companies in Colombia, Peru, the Philippines. I live in Puerto Rico. We have a team there, so we hire people, train them, and staff them out. And then I'm a partner in a company called Faster Outcomes. They're here today, as well as my team. Faster Outcomes is an AI company. We use

it in my law firm. So, with all that said, our intake team is 55 people plus. So, when I talk about intake, I have a really good understanding of what intake is and how I can help you improve your intake company. These are the things we're going to talk about today. So, integration of systems, delivering the call, use of a queue, auto callback, how to convert the chase process, sales team, AI in the call center, and analytics and KPIs. If we have time, we'll get to that. Sometimes I'm long-winded and don't finish the end. So, how many people think that intake is super important to their

law firm. Why doesn't everyone have their hand up? So if you're the marketing person, you don't think intake's important. If you spend any money on marketing, or if you do referral marketing, like Stacy was talking about, you want to have clients coming into your business. The only way to get them in is the bridge. The bridge between your marketing dollars and your law firm is your intake center. I guarantee you, you are all losing clients in intake. That includes me. There is no way not to think of a strainer. Your intake center is full of holes. The key is to plug as many of those

holes as possible. We're going to talk about lots of ways to plug the holes. It's impossible to not lose clients, but the key is to lose as many or as few as possible. Right. So, show of hands. Whose average fee is over 5000 a case? Put your hands up if you're over 5000. So, some of you are under 5000. Keep your hand up. Keep your hand up if you're over 7500. Keep your hand up if you're over 10,000. So, we'll stop there. So, imagine for those of you that have an average fee of 10,000. Every time you lose one case, that's $10,000 out the window, gone. You can't recover it. If you lose four

cases a month, one case a week, that's half a million dollars a year. And I guarantee you, every person in this room is losing at least one case a month. That's half a million dollars a year. By the time I'm done with this, I dare one of you to challenge me and tell me no, I'm not losing a single case after you see everything we're going to talk about. So, what's important? There are three ways that most of us give a client a way to contact us. One is an inbound phone call. Two is a form fill. And three is chatter texting. So, what I see is the number one problem in law firms and really all

businesses is we don't treat all three with the same sense of urgency. So, when you call someone, what do you expect? The answer, right? You expect them to answer the phone, and most law firms answer the phone, and you answer it in probably seven seconds or less. Two rings is five seconds. If you add in the time that it took them to dial and it to connect, you're at 15 seconds. But when you do a form fill, how many of you respond to the form fill in the same diligence that you answer your phone? I heard never, right? And that's the reality. In my mastermind group, those are all people that I

train on intake, and all people that know I ghost call them. And when I ghost call them, we do inbound calls during the day. We do inbound calls at night to see how they handle night. We do form fills during the day and form fills at night.

The average law firm is over an hour to respond to a form fill, and these are mastermind clients that we've trained and know that I'm going to be calling because we do it twice a year before I have an in-person meeting. I have some people who still don't ever respond to form fills. If you don't respond, guaranteed you lost that client. If you respond in an hour, it's highly likely you lost that client. Why? Well, you gave them the choice and said, "Hey, if you don't want to talk to me on the phone, fill out a form fill and I'll call you back. Well, they filled out the form fill, their foot

starts tapping, and then it's, and then they're like, "All right, I'll call someone else. That's it. You lost that person. You have to treat all three with the same sense of. Now we're going to talk about automatic routing of inbound calls. So you have a phone system. Some of you might have a CRM, and you all have a case management system. So your phone system, we're going to call it Ring Central. CRM, let's call it Lead Docket. Case management system, let's call it Smart Advocate. One, because I see Natalia sitting over there. Number two is because I use Smart Advocate. So for most of

what we're going to talk about, we're going to eliminate the CRM from the conversation because it's not necessary to include for you to understand what I want you to do. It works the same as if you connect to the the CRM and to your CMS. So we're just going to talk about connecting our phone system to our case management system. Now, why you want to connect your systems? One, single point of contact. Two, never place a new client on hold. Three, you want to have the right person talking to your lead. And four, you want to create the best chance of conversion. Now, single point of contact.

How many people, when I call your law firm, have a receptionist answer the phone and say, "ABC Law Firm, thanks for coming, calling. This is Janice. Please hold, because Janice is reception, and she has new clients calling, she has existing clients calling, and she has vendors calling the doctor, the insurance company, the automobile shop, whoever. How many people use a receptionist? Don't be afraid. It's all right. It's probably 70% of you plus. The reality is, Janice has to put people on hold, even if there's no other call coming in, and she answers, and the person says, "Yes, I was in a

car accident. Janice isn't the screener. She's not your intake person, so she has to say, "Okay, please hold, and then get the intake person to answer the phone. When you put someone on hold, I guarantee you, you have a percentage of people that hang up. So now, close your eyes and imagine you're not a lawyer, you're not in case management, you're not in intake, you're not a vendor. You had a car accident, and it was serious, and you've never had one before, and you don't really know what to do, but you've seen these crazy ads on TV or Gary's client on the radio, and you're like, I'm

going to call. Do we cheat them and how? Because they're going to make a difference in my life, and they're going to help me because I don't know what to do. I'm kind of scared. I have anxiety. Big birth is destroyed. I can't take my kids to school. I don't know how to get to work, and what happens? Please hold! Holy shit! They're putting me on hold. I thought that I was going to be important to them. People hang up. How do I know this? Because I made that mistake for many years. I've been doing this 25 years. We track everything, and before I figured this out, and then we started measuring

our hangups. You get hangups, so if you put them on hold, they're going to hang up. So, three steps in this process we're going to talk about: the caller ID, the DID, and we'll get to the third. So the caller ID. Everybody knows when someone calls your law firm, it carries with it the caller ID, right?

Common sense, and everybody knows in your case management system you have what, the phone number of everybody that you deal with, all of your vendors, all of your clients, any contact that you have. In the blink of an eye, if you've attached your phone system to your case management system, it's going to scrub the list and it's going to identify: Are they a client? Are they a vendor? Does this phone number not exist in my system? No matter how small you are, you can do this, even if you don't have the ability to do it the way I'm going to describe it. You could take all of your phone

numbers on a daily or weekly basis, push it out to an Excel spreadsheet, put it in a SQL server, and simply have your phone system scrub against that list. Not even connect to your case management system. Let's say you have a case management system that's like Needles, closed API, not friendly. You can't connect with it. You can't do anything with it. You could push the numbers out to a third database and scrub against it. How do I know that? Because I used to be a Needles user, and that's what we did way back in the day when we started. You could do that. So anything that I teach right

now here, every one of you can do. What I can promise you is less than 10% of you are going to do it. Why is that? I have absolutely no idea. But that's just the way it is. So when I went to Anthony Robbins and Jay talked about walking across the coal. I did it, and when Anthony Robbins said, "You're all going to leave this rock concert, and you're going to go back home, and you're going to think about implementing this, and think about implementing that, most of you aren't going to do it. And he said, "3% only 3% of you are going to implement the things we talked about doing to change your

life. And people don't do it; they get motivated and they say they're going to do it. I'm going to tell you how to do it. Go back to your office and do it. Otherwise, what did we just decide? If you choose not to do it, every time someone hangs up $10,000 a hangup, you're losing one a week, half a million dollars a year. It's a lot of money. So we connect the phone system. It comes in, it scrubs. If it identifies the number, it decides if it's a client. If it's a client, my suggestion is you push that directly to whoever they need to speak to. Based on your case management system, you create a

status. Whatever the status is, where the call goes. Could be the case manager, could be the lawyer, could be finance. However, you run your office, you can direct them right to the person they need to speak to. Two, if it's a vendor, I suggest you use an IVR. An IVR is a phone tree. Thanks for calling ABC Law Firm. If you know the party, the extension you're calling, dial it now. If not, press zero for the receptionist. Never use an IVR for customers, but for commercial business, who cares? They're commercial business people. They're used to it. They have it at their business. They know who

they need to speak to. Why not save the human beings the time and route the call? Lastly, it does not recognize the phone number that goes directly into intake. Intake answers the phone. The person who answers the phone handles the call. We don't transfer. We don't ask lawyers for opinions. We sign that client. So, not to offend any of you who are lawyers, lawyers should never be near intake. That's a disaster waiting to happen. Why? Because we are brainwashed in law school to identify problems. We look for problems. That's not what intake is supposed to be doing. Intake is supposed to be

looking for solutions and finding reasons to sign cases. If you sign a case you decide you don't want, there's no such thing as indentured servitude, right? We don't have to keep it. You can say, "Hey, we've done a great job investigating your case. I got the police report. I sent out an investigator. I'm sorry, you just have a case we can handle.

And that's it. You drop it. You do the job. You don't need lawyers to make decisions. So DID number, the purpose of the well. So first of all, a DID number, basic, right? I do a pay-per-click ad, and I do it for a personal injury. I assign a specific identifying phone number to that ad. So when that call comes in, I know that it's going to be a personal injury call because I do personal injury, Social Security, veterans' disability, and lots of digital marketing. If it's a television call, I can't identify where it came from, right? Because they're dialing a regular phone number, 888 Rob

wins, and it could be anything. But for anything that I can direct the call because I have intake people who specialize in social, specialize in VA, specialize in PI, and then I have the group that does everything. I want to know what they're calling from. The other reason you want to know where they're calling from is marketing, right? So everyone in here who's in marketing, you want to have call attribution. What am I giving credit to? That's why we use the DID number. Form fills, purchase leads. You can use UTM codes for those of you in marketing, right? So the UTM code travels from our

pay per click ad, comes into our website, it tags our form fill, and then our form fill comes into our system, automatically loads into the system, and it should be preventing to your call center agent, right? So, what you don't want, you can if if you don't have the ability to do that, you can have it come into your email. The problem with email and the reason that law firms don't respond to form fills is because I'm answering the phone. I can't also manage watching my email and everything else that I'm doing. That's the disconnect in most law firms why they're not responding to form

fills. Whereas if the form fill is presenting inside the call center system, it routes into your call center, your case management system. The form fill gets filled out. It presents to the phone system, and the phone system then presents it as an inbound call. So your phone system, imagine, is the brain controlling where all the calls go. So you have all your call center agents. An inbound call comes in. It identifies who's next, who's available, what skill set can they do. It delivers an inbound call. If a form fill comes in, Smart Advocate grabs that call. If. Fills out the

information. It presents it to the front. The phone system comes by, grabs that next form fill, grabs the information, the name of the person, what the call is about, and then presents it to the next available person, just as if they were going to present an inbound call. There's no delay. It's 30 seconds to fill out the form fill in case management presents it to the front. My phone system comes by every 30 seconds, picks it up. It's a one minute delay. That's it. If I have a call center agent available, they have an inbound call or they have the next form fill that's there. We treat them

with the same sense of urgency. Does that make sense? If you can't tie your phone and your case management together, then do an email. Make sure that you have certain people focused on the email. If it's just buried and they're getting all sorts of emails, I get hundreds of emails a day. I would never see it. Your call center person-it has to be a specific email address that doesn't get any other crap. It just comes in and it sits there, and they have to be notified. And you can set an alert on it. Everybody got that? Texting and chatting. So we said you have three ways to contact me: an

inbound call, a form fill, or you can chat. Almost everybody that has a law firm now on their website has a chat feature, right? We hire companies like Juvo, Intaker, whoever else. We don't recommend you do it on your own, so it's very hard to do it on your own. Texting requires even more speed and efficiency than a form fill, and frankly, as fast as inbound. People today who chat and text, they want an immediate response.

Very hard in your own call center unless you have someone truly dedicated to just doing that, and that's all they do. They sit there and wait for it. You're never going to be able to do it fast enough. Use an outside company. I use Juvo. They do a fantastic job. So, the key on the chatting is to not convert that texting person to a call. Right? Your texting person says, "Oh, I have an agent available now who would love to talk to you about your case. Can I transfer you? So that person responds yes, and so then they try to connect that person to the law firm and disconnect the chat. I

used to think that was a phenomenal idea. How many people think that's a great idea? Well, I'm texting with them. Let's get them on the phone and talk to them and sign them. Sounds like a great idea, right? So, why is that not a great idea? Well, I gave you three choices. Call me if you want to call me. If you want to call me, we're going to talk. Fill out a form, Phil, and you know I'm going to call you back. The one method I gave you that doesn't require you to talk to me is text and chat, and now I'm going to force you to text and chat with me. I used to think it was a good idea until I

actually thought to see. Let's look at our connection rate from our text and chat messages to the office and how many people we talked to. We had a 50 percent hangup rate of the people that were disconnecting on the transfer from chatting to live talk in our office, 50% Do you know how much money I was losing? Like millions of dollars. Not kidding. That's millions of dollars. We have a lot of volume. I was beside myself. Like I'm an idiot. Why did I ever think that was a good idea? Like the light bulb went off, and I just thought one day, "Holy! So we now don't ever talk to our clients if

they don't want to talk to us. If I open your case with a chat, we transfer you once we we sign you through chat, all electronic. Then the case manager starts to text with you and says, "What is your preferred method of communication? If they say I like texting, no problem. If you ever want to talk to me, I'm always available. Otherwise, all of our conversation and communication will be through chat, and that's it. We have some clients we never talk to. Everything is done 100% electronic. Delivering the call to the best person. So, if you have more than one person in your intake center, this

applies. What does that mean? That means the way life works is you have people that are great, you have people that are that average, and then you have people that you should be firing, right? Don't keep people that aren't at least good. If I have an inbound call, who do I want to give that call to? The person who's great. Why would I ever give it to not the person who's great if the great person is available? He has the highest chance of conversion. So you score. Your team in your system, and your system is programmed to see person A has this score, person B has this score, person C has this

score, and then you have skill sets. So I've talked to a lot of you. A lot of you do more than one area of law. So depending on if you need to have multiple intake people, you might have someone who only does intakes for one thing, another person who does intakes for something else. So when the phone comes in, we already said DID number tells us depending on where the advertisement came from, specifically what area of law is it. So now we look at that group, and then secondly we look at the score. Who's the best available person that I can transfer this call to, and that's how we select

use of a queue. So what does a queue mean? Now, how many of you have your intake gets busy and then you roll over the call to an answering service during the day?

So the problem with that is answering services are not as good as you. Let's just keep it simple. How many people believe that an answering service cares about your clients and cares about signing your clients as much as you? Is anybody under that misbelief? That just wouldn't make sense, right? It's your money. It's your business. It's what you do for a living. They just answer the phone. So when you let it roll over to the answering service, you are losing a percentage of clients, guaranteed. Why? Well, number one, the phone already rang at your office, ring, ring, ring, and you didn't

answer it. So whatever set of time you have it ready to transfer, now it transfers to the call center, your answering service. It has to ring again, and then someone has to answer, and it doesn't quite sound like you. And there's usually some indication on the phone who's listening that it transferred. They recognize the change in the ring from your office to the change of the ring at the answering service, and there's a slight transfer. Some people hang up right away. That's it. You lost that person. So lock down your intake center. Transfer new clients into your intake center. Don't

let existing clients come in. Don't let vendors come in. Reduce the amount of traffic and flow into intake so you can staff correctly. Everybody else goes somewhere else. Now my intake center. I know what is my average inbound traffic for new clients and staff according to that. Then, if all of your people are busy, you have no choice but to have a queue. If you roll it over into your office, how many people roll over the call into their office and let a paralegal answer? So the problem with that, if you haven't actually looked at the data, is if you're doing a general rollover, which means

six people's phones start ringing. I'm intake. Let's say we're a small office. You have one person in intake, and then I have six other people in the office. Most of you probably roll to the six, so the six people phone starts to ring. You know what happens, and the phone just keeps ringing, and the person hangs up. And then if they do answer, they're not trained. They're case managers. We're going to talk about your intake. Intake is not a case manager. They don't dot their eyes and cross their t's. They talk shit. They're salespeople. They're driven by money. They build friendships. They

build relationships. They make that person happy. That is not your case manager. They are not salespeople. That's not their job. So you have a reduced conversion ratio when you give it to a paralegal. One, they don't answer the phone on time. Two, they don't talk to the person with the ability to sell and to convert. So, lockdown intake. Put the person in a queue. Thanks for calling ABC Law Firm. I'm sorry. All of our people are busy right now helping customers, we're going to be with you in an average of, and you should know your average. What's your average hold time? How long is it going to

take to get to that person? Let's say 40 seconds. We'll be with you in an average of 40 seconds, and then do a periodic message, right? A little music and a a sales piece, whatever you want to say nice about your firm and how you're going to help that person, and they made the right choice, and then a little music. When you get to 40 seconds, if that's what you decided, or you said a minute and a half, you have to intervene because that person is expecting at 40 seconds or a minute and a half or whatever you told them that someone's going to answer the call. If you're not ready to answer the

call, very simple. You give them a choice. I'm sorry, we estimated a one minute and 30 seconds, but we're still not available. We can call you back as soon as we're ready. Average time is under five minutes. Someone will call you, or you can continue to hold your preference if you'd like to be called. Back, press one. Almost every phone system has this in it. If you don't have that in your phone system, your phone system's a piece of shit, right?

That's so outdated and old. You should be able to put that in your phone system, no problem. If you have an outdated piece of shit phone system, get rid of it, get a new one. That's my recommendation. So that's what a queue is. The last piece of the queue is prioritizing the call. So if you do more than one thing, so I do social, it's only worth 4400 bucks as an average value of a social security case. So we have to do huge volume to make money there. If I have a social security case waiting and I know it's a social security case because it came in off a DID number, and I have a PI case that

comes in after that, or a VA case, which are both worth more than social. What do I do? I jump the social security case. I let that person wait. If I lose them, I lose them. We're going to call them back, and I'm going to show you how. But I would rather talk to my more valuable case first. Even if you do only PI, what's more valuable, a trucking case or a slip and fall? Your trucking case. So if you have a DID number for a trucking case, and I don't normally say this, but I thought of it because I see Steve sitting right there. So your trucking case comes in, and you identify the DID number.

You know it's a trucking case, and you know, holy shit, this is could be a seven-figure case. Same thing in your queue. You jump any other call to get to the trucking case first. Agent dashboard that's just monitoring your system and knowing what's there and how many people are on hold. This is worth its weight in gold. Now you don't need to take pictures of this. You're all welcome to my show. I give everything out that I put up. So you you want to take pictures? If you want the entire slideshow, you're welcome to it. This is a lot of money for every one of you. You all have this

problem. I'm going to repeat that. You all have this problem. What is this problem? This is people who hang up before they talk to a human being. How many people think, "Oh, no possible way. Everybody loves me so much. No one would ever hang up before we answer the phone to talk to them. Anybody think that? Now you're definitely not going to raise your hand. I can guarantee everybody has hangups. So the question is, what do you do when someone hangs up? Do you have a system in place in real time to identify the hangup and be able to call them back. Anybody have that? One, two, okay. So this is

something that should be your priority when you go back to your office. Most phone systems, you can get your company to write a script to put this into your phone system. This is phone system has nothing to do with case management system, it's strictly your phone system. If it was me, I would drop my phone system if they couldn't do this for me. That's how much this is worth. That's a real number at that screen. So what does it mean? It means that in a 10-month period of time, and this is probably three years old data. In a 10-month period of time, 2300 drop calls happened in 10 months.

Our system was designed to immediately call back every drop call, so it identifies call came in. It either went into a queue or they hung up. Anything over 15 seconds. If it's a five-second call, I'm not interested. They hung up. They don't want to talk to me. It was the wrong number. Anything over 15 seconds. Most studies say 20. We decided to do 15. The system automatically identifies the number. Oh, they hung up. It then calls that number back, presents it to the next available agent. Screen pops them and says, "You're returning a hung up phone call. If the caller ID gave us the

number, it gives them whatever we could grab from the caller ID, my agent says, "Oh, mr. Smith, I'm so sorry. I see that we were disconnected. This is David from Rob Levine's office. How can I help you? Out of 2,300 calls, we signed 688 cases. That's no bullshit.

That's a real ass number. So back then, my average fee was 9300. When you blend in the the social security value, the PI value, the VA value, that's a lot of money. So no matter how small your volume is, I guarantee you have hangups. If you have hangups and they're worth $10,000 a piece, and we converted 1/3 of the hangups into a case, however many you have hangups, let's assume the 1/3 is an accurate number. If you can convert 1/3 of your hangups into a new client. Think about how much money you're making. Does it matter how much your phone system costs? It doesn't. People think, "Oh my

God, I don't want to spend more money on my phone system. Who cares, right? All the things that I'm telling you at $10,000 a pop, how many calls do you need to save to make back the value on a better phone system? Get rid of your phone system if you can't do this. This is the biggest money saver out of everything I just showed you. So, we all spend money on marketing somewhere between this says 25 to 40. Some people probably spend less, 15% Let's say average person is probably spending 30% on marketing. Right. With all those dollars you spend on marketing, you should perfect intake because

every phone call counts. So, what is our number one goal? So, anybody hear the marketing slogan "One call, that's all. A number of law firms use it. It's the same slogan I use and teach for call centers. One call, that's all. That is your goal. Your goal is to convert in one call, that person, when they talk, your salesperson in your office has to be super friendly, has to be compassionate, has to have empathy, has to listen, and has to convert that call into a signed case. If they don't, what happens? 10 grand out the window. When you don't convert in one call, because I couldn't

overcome the objections, and we'll talk about that. What does that mean? It means the chase is on. I'm going to be calling people. I'm going to start chasing them to convert them. The goal is to convert in one call. What do we need to know? So there's a ton of KPIs in our law firm, right? The most important thing you want to know in your call center is your wanted to signed ratio. How many people know what their wanted to signed ratio is? So some of you. So what does that mean for those of you who haven't heard that term before? Wanted means I want the case. I spoke to you, I asked you

questions, and based on those questions, you have a great case. I want to sign you. Signed simply means I did. You signed a contract. You became my client. The wanted to signed ratio. So I teach your wanted to sign ratio should be at least 95% I think Chris teaches 93% Are you still at 93, Chris? So Chris, she's going to be on a panel with me. Amazing, right? I've known Chris a long time. So small percentage between us. I'd like to tell you you should be at 98% But so Chris sets a reasonable goal to get you to where you can get to. I think you can get to 95, right? Takes a lot of time, a lot of

work, and a lot of training for your call center people, but you can do it. But whether you're at 93 or 95 doesn't really matter. What matters is you know where you are, because I guarantee you, most law firms, when we look and we talk and we look at the numbers, are under 80% The value between under 80% and 93 or 95% at $10,000 a phone call is a lot of money. Overcoming objections, caller says, "I want to talk to my spouse first before I make a decision. I really didn't think that I wanted to spend any money. Why shouldn't I just do it myself? I think I should call two or three other lawyers

before making a decision. There's 10, 1215, common objections. We'll give you a list of objections if you want them, and I'll tell you what the answer is to each one of those, your person in your intake center should know instantly the answer to overcoming objections.

There should be no question. Overcome the objection. They should exactly know what to say. They shouldn't have to think. They shouldn't stumble. They shouldn't fumble. Because that's the key in the difference between wanted to signed. Wanted is easy, easy for me to identify. I want your case signed. If you just say, "Oh, fantastic! I love you guys so much. I want to become your client. That's easy. The hard part is the people who have an objection, and the key is to train your intake people to overcome it. So we said, "What happens if one call that's all doesn't work out the window? It

failed, so we have to convert on the first call, or we chase. So if we're going to chase, the simple key is this. So this is a suggestion at a chase. It doesn't really matter what your chase process is, to be honest with you. What's the most important thing is that you have a process, right? You have something that your team knows they have to follow and do in order to chase people. And I can tell you, a lot of firms don't have a chase process or they don't use it because when we ghost call, part of what we do is we terminate that call at the end of the ghost call. I won't let you sign me.

Oh my God, my kid just fell down the stairs. Sorry, I have to go. Call me back, please, or I'll call you. And we terminate the call before we sign, and then we're measuring their chase process over five days. I want to see what do they do. Some law firms one call. That's it. My person doesn't respond after one call, and the chase is over. One call worth 10 grand. I already decided I wanted you. You were gonna sign, and something happened that interrupted it. 10 grand in your pocket, and they only call once. That sucks, right? So you have to go back to your firm, and this is easy to do. Just

decide what is our chase process. Oh, we don't really have one, or my team isn't really following it. Let's make sure we have a process and follow it. So when I started this conversation, I said people, process, technology. This is part of the process. So whatever number of calls a day you want to do, number of texts a day. There's email on here. Personally, I think email is outdated. I don't think email makes a lot of sense anymore. Nobody reads it. Nobody gives a crap. It's just off into the blue yonder. But calling and texting is important. For PI, we only chase it for a week. Social

and VA, we chase it for three weeks. Then we give them a break, and then I revive it and chase them again. And we chase people forever for Social Security and VA sales team. So this is your intake team. Your intake team is a sales team. You want to be thinking about them as salespeople, driven by money. You want to commission them, commission them for signing cases. You need to motivate them, right? That's the key. So when you hire them, you're interviewing people for their sales ability, right? How friendly are they? How good are they at overcoming objections? How compassionate are they?

How can they respond to someone in real time when a problem is there and they're not sure how to deal with it and get them to signing on the dotted line, that's the key to making your sales team successful. I believe in commissions. So if you sign eight calls for me in a week, you make $17 per call for every case that you sign. After eight, if you get to nine, because that's our tipping point where it goes from good to a little over good, you now go up by $3, so all eight that you signed are now worth 20 bucks for signing one more case. If you get to 10, it goes up another three. All 10

are worth now 23 bucks, and it keeps going. There's no ceiling. I don't care how many calls you sign. People always say to me, "Well, don't you think they're going to cheat the system and sign cases they shouldn't? No, I don't think that way. People, process, technology. People, culture. Trust your people. Believe in your people.

Train your people. You're a team. My people are not going to cheat me to make an extra three bucks or 20 bucks. Not to mention that we monitor everything. But believe in your team. Take care of them. Have great culture, and you-that should be the last thing you're worried about, in my opinion. Okay, this is all brand new, brand new. Never talked about this ever before. So AI is the huge buzzword. I'm a partner in an AI company. We use AI in my law firm. AI is everywhere. I use it my personal life. I have a 24-year-old and an 11-year-old AI is going to be in both their lives. My 11-year-old is

switching schools coming September. She's going to Alpha School. Alpha School is an AI-driven school. It's two and a half hours a day, one-on-one with an AI agent. The AI agent will teach reading, math, science, English. That's it. She will have the same teacher from seventh grade till she graduates from high school. If you believe in MAP scores, it increases your MAP score. You learn twice as much in half the time. The rest of the day at that school is your your work with a guide. So they do all sorts of crazy projects: launch rockets and build programs, run your own business, learn how to

trade. My 24-year-old is a trauma ICU nurse. I've been whispering in her ear since she was five years old, law school, and she's still not there. But I'm on the board of the law school in my state, and we are creating a hybrid program. Not only are we going to hybrid, meaning she can study remote while she's a trauma ICU nurse. We're going to institute AI as part of the the training curriculum to learn and teach and tutor. AI is everywhere; it should be in your law firm. If it's not, you're going to get left behind. It's not that AI is going to replace lawyers; it's that law firms who use

AI are going to be replaced by law firms who don't. So you need to use AI. Real-time coaching. So that means that your agent is on the phone and the AI agent is listening. So we have human talking to client and AI agent. When the human makes a mistake, AI agent screen pops and says, "No, no, you shouldn't say that. You should have said this. You made a mistake on describing the contract, and literally tells the agent, "Correct that mistake in real time. You are losing this customer based on their tone of voice, based on sentiment, based on satisfaction, based on everything that I see as

indicators, this call is going downhill, and it alerts the team lead who gets on the call and assists your human person to resolve the problem. Post call analysis. So you saw the volume that we do, right? I sign over 1,200 cases a month, so imagine how many calls we have to analyze. I can't do it. AI is going to listen to every single call and then give me a score for sentiment, satisfaction, flags, problems, issues, people who should be rewarded every call, and not just in my intake center. We're running going to run it firm wide, so I'm pretty sure we've now picked. I've been working on

this for over a year. We've now picked the final company we're going to use. We're negotiating the price. So every single client contact, phone call, attorney, case manager, no matter what it is, AI is listening, transcribing, and analyzing, and then we can look at everybody's conversation and say, "Really good. We have a serious problem. Outbound follow-up and signing cases. So this, my call center manager and I differ. Personally, I think we have so many Social Security case leads that we never get in touch with. Right. So people fill out a form fill. We call you immediately. You don't

answer the phone. It's just a thing in Social Security. It's not like PI. There isn't that same sense of urgency. There is mental health issues. They're harder to reach. I can't call them all back. There's too many. We call them, but not as much as I'd like to. We're going to use AI to do actual calling of customers. So the AI will call, get them on the phone, and literally start talking to them and do the pre-qualification.

So if that person has a good case, it's going to alert an agent, and the agent will join with AI. There's no transfer, there's no delay. Right when you delay and use a dialer, there's a seven-eighths of a second drop, and we all hang up. The agent is literally just going to intercept the call while the agent is talking, and introduce themselves and take over and sign that person. Eventually, AI is probably going to do inbound calls. My call center manager will have a heart attack when I say we're going to try it. It's not quite there. If you heard me talk a year ago, I would have said we are

nowhere near ready to do that. We are pretty close. I mean, you know, you look at AI generated pictures. Six months ago, maybe nine months ago, you were missing fingers. You had ears. Somebody put a picture up as a joke, right? Now AI is doing amazing, right? The videography is phenomenal. The voice is pretty good too. So it's really close. So this is not for you to read. This is just to tell you you should have this on your website. So for every form fill, people have to opt in. So for TCPA and liability, just go to my website robleen.com, copy what's on my website, and add it to your

website. This is not legal advice. Don't sue me if you have a problem. Our TCPA language has been screened by outside counsel, ethics lawyers, the state bar, so it's pretty good. Analytics and KPIs. We have a minute and 42 seconds. So first problem: numbers are down. What's going on? Well, it's one of two things. It could be a call center problem, and the people in your call center are having issues, or it could be a marketing problem. So that's the top of the funnel. Decide: Do I have a marketing problem or do I have a call center problem? When I look, I say, "Oh my God, I'm getting all

these crazy property damage calls. And I talk to my marketing director and I say, "Are you doing something new? Oh yeah, we tried these new keywords. We're trying this and trying that. Yeah, it's not working. They're generating property damage or insurance calls, and so we have to figure out. All right, fix the marketing problem. Or nope, there's a call center problem. What's the issue? Our phone lines down. Do we have a problem with agents? What's the issue? So look at your inbound call volume. Look at your form fills and chats. Run weekly trend reports. Outbound calls, contact ratio. You

want to be looking at your percentage of leads you're contacting. Contact attempts by division, by sales rep, contact same day ratio. What percentage of leads do we get in touch with on the same day on outbound calls? Lead pull time. How quickly are my agents pulling the leads? So how quickly are we actually responding to the form fills, connected call reports. We look at answer rate. What percentage of calls are you answering? What's your wanted to signed ratio? What percentage of your cases are you rejecting? What's your conversion rate? Wanted but rejected. Length of calls. How many

cases they signed? Those. Those are all the reports that we run. You should be running all of those reports if you want this. You certainly can email me at info@roblevinelegalsolutions.com, and we're happy to share the entire thing with you, answer questions. So I used to do consulting. I don't do one on one consulting anymore. So you, my panel, you have Brooke and you have Chris. They certainly can talk to you about one-on-one consulting. We do run a mastermind group, which Jay talked about. There, we can help you, but the one-on-one we don't do anymore. But certainly, Chris is great, and so

is Brooke. And is there someone else on our panel? Joe from Intaker. So that's really it. I'll be around if people have questions. Happy to answer your questions.

Great job, thank you. Thank you, and thank you to Tim who encouraged this. Tim Sawyer, Faster Outcomes. I've been instructed we're supposed to stand at the front of the stage. They're going to put the chairs behind us, and we'll be safe up here. Okay, as usual, you all know I take notes. So, a couple things I wanted to share some of the key learnings and reinforce some of the things that we've said before. So one thing I said is you've got to answer all calls within 15 seconds, and we built this tool TGR Boomerang that if you miss a call, it grabs the phone number, texts

the intake team, and they call them right back. You said the same thing, and you had had an additional point which I didn't mention, which never IVR prospects. So IVR means a phone tree. If you're a new customer, press one. If you're an existing customer, press two. If you have another question, press three. That uses up your 15 seconds with Google Local Service Ads, and a lot of times people don't realize they're not showing up in the LSAs anymore. If you use a phone tree, and a lot of people hang up because they hear recordings and they hear the Google verification, it's hurting your

data on the percentage of calls you answer within 15 seconds. So Rob made that point. I want to reinforce that point.

Can I just add something?

Yeah, please do. So

there's only so much. Obviously, I can squeeze in. You can see I literally went to the last second. So on the Google LSA, I didn't talk about it at all. Everybody recognizes if you use LSA, they're recording the calls and listening. Now they're listening using AI. When you deny a client on LSA, they're tracking who you deny and what kind of case you're denying, and it affects where you're ranking and how calls are coming in. What we're switching to when we launch the AI is we are not going to ever deny a case ever when it comes in through LSA, we're going to say to that person,

"Oh, thanks for calling. Great talking to you. We're going to talk to the attorney, review the case, and call you back. Because when I call you back, Google LSA is no longer listening, and I'm not even going to call them back. Our AI agent who's doing outbound calls is going to call them back and say, "Not a case that we can take. I'm sorry. Blah blah blah. If they want a human, they can talk to a human. They probably won't know the difference.

I love that. Second thing I noted, and you're doing a great job routing the calls. So your content management system, the CRM, is identifying it's an existing customer. It goes to the paralegal or it goes to the legal department. If it's a like a vendor or someone who's selling something or one of the medical clinics or something, it goes to IVR and reception. And if it's a lead, it goes to the call center. So I really love that. Third thing I like the numbers you did on the hangups. So people say, "Oh, we never miss a call. Well, you're wrong. 1,000% you're wrong. People hear

the LSA recording. If only you do LSAs, or if you use call recording, they hear it and they hang up. Five to 10% hang up. So you miss calls. It doesn't hit. It never hits your reception. It never rings your phone. So those five to 10% you can call them back. And Rob's team's doing a great job. They got 2300 of those calls that were missed. They called them back and they signed 688. That's a great number. Congratulations, $6 million to the bottom line. I did note one as a question. I really like this. You do intake scoring, which makes a lot of sense, and you route the calls. If

everybody's sitting around and the first call of the day comes in, you route it to your best performing intake person, who scores the best on probably performance, sentiment, and conversion. Right? Do you burn that person out? Is there a risk of burning that person out?

Yeah. So that's a good question. Call centers typically have a very high burnout rate. That's just part of the nature of intake, we have some people. I think the longest person in our intake center now is eight years. Some people last two, three years. So yes, I'm sure people get burnt out, but the reality is that's the nature of the call center. So we try to have great culture. We try to do lots of things for them. AI is going to make a huge. Difference, I think, in in how we structure and how we take care of people. So I'll say this: this is something we're toying with, and

it's really for anyone who's using AI and the problem in the world, right? So if anybody's reading the articles, so what's going to happen to people's jobs when AI takes over, right? So you shouldn't be firing people. That's not the idea. The idea is to scale, use it, and grow. But so you're going to save a lot of time. So we're tracking it, as you started to mention, right? So one, they fill out daily report cards in our AI tests. Two is we use Microsoft Dashboard because we use Copilot as one of our AI systems as an example. So we're tracking what they're doing and how much time they're

saving. We talk to them once a month, and so the goal, the carrot that's going to come out at the end is if we can hit this benchmark, right? We have people now who are saving 40 to 60% of their time just using Copilot. That's not even talking about the faster outcome system. Just Copilot, figuring out their scores, figuring out their emails, planning their day-all those things. Our plan is to go to a four-day work week. So if I can get to a certain, yet Kaylin's face just dropped. Kaylin works in my office. If I can get everybody to a certain level of performance, so that I increase the

volume of work that people are doing, I have to reward you. I can't just keep dumping on you and say, "Okay, you're going to have to work twice as much, twice as fast, and I make twice as much money. I have to reward you. So the goal will be to go to a four-day work week. That's the future plan.