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The Chicago YouTube Accelerator is coming up and it's about actually getting it done. We've got our friends Jeff Hampton and Ryan Weber joining us to lead it because they're doing the thing. Ryan's biggest client, who happens to be his wife, is known as the real estate lawyer on YouTube and has over 95,000 subscribers. And Jeff's law firm channel, Hampton Law, is sitting close to 600,000 subscribers. These aren't people guessing at YouTube. They're in it and they're laying out exactly what's working and, and how you can apply it to your firm. You'll dial in your niche, map out your content, script and film your first video, and build the backend so it actually turns into a system. We're in the last month before this event. If you want YouTube figured out this year, this is the place. Grab your ticket to the Chicago YouTube Accelerator@maxflot events.com.
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This is Maximum Lawyer with your host, Tyson Mutrix.
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Welcome back to the Maximum Lawyer podcast. Today we're sharing a presentation from the Maxlocan 2025 stage. And today's session is from Regina Edwards, a family law attorney who has run a flat fee litigation practice for 15 years. And she walks us through how she uses communication policies and automations to save time, protect her calendar, and keep clients informed without living in her inbox. In this talk, Regina breaks down how she intentionally designs her intake to attract the right client, sets early expectations, and builds a system where she's only involved at key decision points. This is Regina Edwards, Max Lock on Session. Leveraging automation to improve client communication and satisfaction.
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Our first speaker is Regina Edwards. She has an incredibly innovative law firm in Georgia, Edwards Family Law, and she's a pioneer in applying technology to her law firm. In 2008, she went paperless back before it was cool and she also switched to flat fees. So she's going to teach us about how to use automation to improve client satisfaction and communication. Come on up, Regina. I, I think I was going through something when I picked that, picked that as my walk up song. But whatever it is, I'm, I'm good now. Oh, of course. Oh, wow. That was very fast. Thank you. Okay, so just a little bit about me. So I'm family law. I'm in Georgia. I'm in Atlanta. I've been flat fee for the last 15 years, which always shocks everybody that I do flat fees and litigation. If you want a copy of this PowerPoint, you can go to that tiny URL, which is tiny URL. Oh, it's not on Sorry. How about now? Okay, so let's start over. I'm Regina, I'm from Atlanta. I have a family law firm. I've been flat fee for 15 years in family law litigation, which people kind of find surprising. But we have found a way to make it work. I usually kind of always start with this slide. This is how I feel like my clients picture me. I absolutely never look like that. That was a photo shoot. And this is definitely what I look like most of the time. And that's where I am most of the time. So some of you may be familiar with my Facebook group Lawyer on the beach, where we talk about life, work, balance and tech tools to help, you know, lawyer from really anywhere. It's a euphemism. I actually don't really like the beach. I like to sit on a balcony looking at the ocean. So this is what we'll talk about today. We don't have a ton of time, but I'm going to talk a little bit about intake and my clients avatar because the topic is communication through automation. How we connect with our clients with it taking less time from me, which is my ultimate goal. But we're trying to make it personal at the same time. So in order to do that, we kind of have to pick our perfect client from the beginning, guide them through the intake process so it's not a jarring shift from intake to the actual representation. So, so this is my ideal client. So you can see the husband says, I want half the value of the house and the kids every weekend. And she says, I want him thrown into a vi of lava filled with special piranha that can live in lava. So I do not want her. And you'd be amazed at how many people will pretty much tell you that up front in the intake. They'll tell you, I just want my ex to burn in hell or I want to get 100% of everything. And you know, he slept with my cousins. I don't want him to ever to see our kids again in life. I can't help you. I don't have the bandwidth for that. And those usually end up being kind of lose lose cases. So this is a sort of stretched out intake process. I'm not going to go through it step by step, but in general, I intentionally stretch out the intake process and that's for a couple of reasons. Family law can be kind of long and tedious and the clients that want to about talk, talk to an attorney right away. They want solutions right away. They want answers right away of how their case is going to turn out. The inpatient ones end up not really being my best clients. So we kind of put them through some paces. They're going to have to send up some documents. They're talking to my intake team. A lot of times I don't even do consultations for divorces. And, you know, if they fit within that client profile, then we can move forward. This is obviously not recommended for some practice areas like PI or criminal. You have to get those people signed up right away. They're not going to go through all of these things. But this is kind of my stretched out process and I do that intentionally because I want to kind of see how we'll work together going forward. And I want to kind of set the proper expectations from the beginning. It's not going to be bam, bam, bam, bam. And so the reason I really don't do personal consultations for divorces, it doesn't really take a lot of qualifications. It's, have you lived in Georgia for six months? Are you married to someone that you would no longer like to be married to? Like, that's it. Answer those two questions. Yes, I can help you. So I can't really answer questions about alimony and custody and equitable division until I get discovery. So we just try to train our intake team to let them know, you know, after 25 years of doing this, there's nothing that you can bring before me that I haven't seen before, I haven't dealt with. So my goal is to try to sign most divorces up without having to do a consultation. So this is a more compressed intake where you do, you just send out a form, you get their information, they immediately go into the client file and then you can send them fee agreement. A lot of PI firms in my area are definitely doing that. They're just sending out fee agreements from the beginning and signing everybody up. I mean, I don't know how y' all do that. I guess later on they'll qualify the case and, and turn some away, but that's a more compressed schedule. So this is my intake form. So I ask things that are important to my practice. I need to know if there's a case filed, where it's filed. I'm down to practicing in only two counties now. So I like to know from the beginning if it's going to be in the correct venue. I also ask up front, how do you plan to pay for your fees in this case? Some people find that question intrusive. Maybe I don't care. I like to ask because some People say I have no idea how I'm gonna pay and I don't have any money. Okay, well we've got some resources for you. Our automations, we use lawmatics. We'll send them texts and emails about sending them to the Atlanta Bar Referral association or Atlanta Legal Aid or Georgia Legal Services or somewhere they can help them. And then I like to. And then this is very important in order to provide fair flat fee billing. We're a paperless firm. You have to be comfortable with email. You have to be comfortable with scanning and using a client portal. Is that okay? That's not going to be okay with everybody. That's fine. That's just not my ideal client and I kind of send them elsewhere. So this is a map of my intake process. Again, I'm not going to go through it in detail, but this is so everyone that comes into my firm knows what the process is and I'm sort of out of it at most steps. So there's an automatic conflict check that lawmatics runs. My intake team also does it again as a backup. Where I come in is after my NT team talks to the qualified leads, I do a quick scan and then I give them the quote for the fee. That's my only, that's my only involvement in the process. So it requires developing a script. My script is at the link and again if you download my PowerPoint you can just click right on the link. So most people are going to have a follow up drip campaign. This is mine. I only send two or three emails. I know that you're supposed to send more family law though I do think it's a little bit weird and I've had people say, well, I don't want a divorce anymore, why are you emailing me? And my ex saw this message and now I'm in trouble. So I swear this has happened. So I just don't send a lot of follow up emails. I figured people can find me if they need to find me later. So regarding intake, what I do is I have the answering service, they fill out the form, then they get invited to a discovery call with my team and they receive several emails after that. And this is just an example of follow up email. So that's just sort of the process to kind of get them onboarded and then after they're onboarded then this is how we kind of automate our communications. So step one is get a communication policy. Step step two, see step one and then implement it. So if you don't have a communication policy then Your clients are going to dictate it for you and that's not what you want. So this is mine. And I'm not telling you to adopt mine, I'm just telling you to get one. So this is mine. Mine is somewhat controversial. Can't really call me. I can give you my number. Go ahead and call me and see how that works out for you. It's not going to. I do not have a phone in my office. So we don't accept unscheduled phone calls. We talk about this during the consultation. All of our clients are given a portal. They send messages through the portal, which allows everybody in my team to see the messages at once. They can get automatic responses. But we do say in order to honor everyone's busy schedules, we do require scheduled meetings instead of, you know, unscheduled phone calls. The easiest way I kind of sell that to people is, you know, when I'm doing deep work on your case, when I'm preparing your case for trial mediation, you don't want me to be interrupted by somebody else calling. So that's just kind of what I say in order to get people to buy in. Then I define what an emergency is. Because in family law, someone showing up 10 minutes late to soccer practice is an emergency. So I say this is an emergency. Your children have been kidnapped, not taken to your ex mother in law's house in Tennessee, but like literally kidnapped. That, yes, that's an emergency. Or defects, that's children's services is at your door, or the police are at your door regarding a fame and law issue. Those are emergencies. The following things may be very important, but they're not emergencies in the true sense of the word. So we kind of tell people from the beginning, yes, your case is important, yes, we know these things are important to you. We have a way to triage and respond to these things, but it's not going to be immediate. And again, this is not for everybody. So we try to, you know, pick the clients that are okay with this approach in the beginning. But again, that's really what allows us to, to do what we do in terms of the flat fees, which is pretty rare in my geographical area and then in my practice area as well. So we sometimes use an auto reply on weekends. Again, just sort of set the expectations. So if you're opposing counsel, you kind of get the point too, that I'm not going to respond on the weekends. So we say, you know, we're not going to respond on the weekends. But obviously new clients can call, fill out our new intake form, and then we include a lot of information. They can upload documents to our upload link, our client guide is on there and they can obviously click to pay. So the next thing that I do is. And you can click on that or you can Type in that URL tinyurl.com eflclientguide I highly, highly, highly recommend that you have a clickable link to send to the client as a guide. And the main reason for that is the link will never change. So when you use TinyURL, you can change the underlying link, but the main link stays the same and that allows you to change the content. I'm using Canva for this. At some point in the future, I may use something other than Canva, but it doesn't matter because the link is going to stay the same. So I include absolutely everything that they need to know about their case in this one guide. And the reason for that is if they don't read the guide in the beginning, because no one ever does, I can just say, oh, this is in your guide at page X. Instead of looking through different materials and different links to send them. So these are just screenshots of different pages. I include my vacation dates. I'm very transparent about when I'm going to be in and out of the office. I am dead serious about my vacation time. People do not call me when I'm on vacation. So the way that we. The reason why it's okay with my clients is we make sure immediately before going on vacation, they get a call, they get an update about their case. We tell them what has happened, what is upcoming, and the next steps in their case after we come back. So it's not as if they're sort of left wondering what's going on while we're gone. We put our communication policy in there. We include the timeline for a typical timeline for a family law case. So they know kind of what the steps are and how long each case, each step is going to take. Typically, we usually beat those timelines. So I kind of like to. I always get this wrong. Over. No, under promise and over deliver. Yes. So we kind of stretch it out a little bit and we're usually able to beat those timelines. These are more pages from the guide. These are documents that I want them to give us for their case. This is an explanation about their portal. There's also a video that walks them through how to use their portal. This is an explanation about mediation. So essentially everything needed to sort of walk them through their case is going to be in this guide. Here's an explanation about discovery depositions, how to send documents and evidence. So just literally everything that you need your clients to do is going to be in this guide. So when we go through each phase of the case, we can just point them to that page of the guide. And this list gets longer every year. Do this, not that. So the one in red I had to add recently, do not under any circumstances email the other side's attorney. Do not contact the judge or file things on their own. I really wanted to add also, please, you know, calling your ex a C word in said email to the judge is probably not the best course of action. But so anyway, I put this guide in there. I'm pretty adamant about boundaries and what clients should and shouldn't do. And for the most part it's not really a big deal. And then I just have a blown up slide of what my timeline is. I think I created this on canva. So our biggest issue in discovery, and I think where a lot of clients get super frustrated is the discovery process. It is tedious, it's a pain. Everybody hates it all across litigation. But imagine being married to the person that you no longer like and all you want to do is get divorced from Darth Vader and you don't understand why they're asking for tax returns from, from 2015. You just have to do it. So I've tried to make this process as easy as possible. I do not. Yeah, the video is not going to play, so I'll show you. These are kind of screenshots of what pipefile does. So I use pipefile. It's fantastic. There's a video. They also have their own YouTube, but you can. You send out the request and you do it folder by folder and the client drags and drops the documents into that particular folder. And on the right is what it looks like when it's done. So when I get the discovery back from my client, it's already organized in these folders. It's fantastic. You can also set the settings to reject jpegs. So if you're asking for tax returns, you don't want a JPEG file, you want a PDF scanned file. So you can automatically set it to reject any file you don't want. You can also go in manually, look at what they've submitted and you can reject, like if you can't see something, if it's blurry, you can reject it and send them a notice. The system is also set up where you can put in reminders, text Reminders, email reminders for the client. So when they log in they see. Exactly. This is what they would see when they log in. They see what they've done and what they haven't done. They can write notes to other each you in the portal, you can write notes to them. My point is this has made discovery just a lot less painful. So for my, for what I'm trying to do, since I'm flat fee and I'm trying to get these people to a resolution as quickly as possible, getting through the hurdle of discovery is really the main thing. Once I get through this, I can then analyze their case, get them to mediation and get it settled. And this is a real pain point for clients. So making this process easier has made my life a lot easier and I think has really improved client satisfaction. So this is just a screenshot of what it looks like from our view. You can also see when the client views your request. So it's really great to see that they're logging on, they're looking at it and you can keep track of how far they are. And again, this is the result. The result is all these very neatly organized folders. You also can, if you have, if you're in a place where you have standard discovery, where all the questions are the same, you can set that up as a template and then all you have to do is enter the client's email and phone number and you're done. 10 seconds, discovery is out. And it's phenomenal. So the next thing I'm going to talk about, the last thing I'm going to talk about is a portal. So this is what we use to communicate with our clients and we try to make it as personal as possible, but it still has got a lot of automation behind it. So the portal that I'm using is Motion IO. So the best way to sort of think about the portal part of Motion is kind of like a window. So you're building everything behind it on. I think it syncs with, I know it syncs with airtable because that's what I use. But I think it also syncs with Asana and some other project management system. So I use airtable to run my practice. Everything is there and then the client just sees what I've coded it to see. And it sounds super complicated, but once you get it set up, it's actually very easy. So the front page of their portal gives them information about what to expect on their portal. Across the top has all the different headers and these are different pages from the portal. So with pleadings, it automatically syncs with Google Drive. I think it also syncs with Box. I'm not sure if they've synced with Dropbox yet. So essentially this has cut out a huge step in my process. So how I get documents to my client is this. We just put them in the folder that they were going to go in anyway. So we use just Windows Explorer. All the documents go into the folder. So once it hits that folder, there's an automation in airtable that automatically sends it to the client with the link and then also a link to their portal. So they can either look at the document then, or they can just log on their portal later and look at it. It doesn't sound like a big deal to not have to separately upload that file later, but when we're processing hundreds of documents a day, it really is a time saver. And then you also know that you're not missing anything because there's no extra step once it goes in the folder it's supposed to be in anyway. The client is automatically getting notification. So we find that we're not getting a lot of complaints about. We don't know what's going on, what's the next step? Because they're constantly getting notifications and they're getting links to pertinent information from their case. And how we make it personal is we have these case statuses. So when we update them in airtable again, again, the client automatically gets an email saying, hey, this is your case status, so it's not canned. That's me actually telling the status of their case. So we try to make it personal. Hey, hope you had a great vacation last week, hope Joey had a great soccer game, whatever. And then just tell them about, you know, what the status of their case is. So they're getting this every two weeks. So we have found that when we are proactive in sending these automated messages every two weeks, we're not really getting calls about what's going on, because they know what's going on. So the same thing with discovery, we have a discovery portal. This is how we internally keep track of it. But the client is able to see at the same time, so they can click on links to see exactly what was turned over to the other side, exactly what was turned in from the other side, without us having to do any additional work to get it to them. These are other pages. The left is correspondence. It's the same thing. It syncs with Google Drive. So any correspondence, we just throw in the correspondence file and automatically get to them. It also has tasks and we have a task template. So for every type of case, there's going to be certain types of tasks that you need everybody do. In every case, you can set that up initially and then just deploy them when you want to. So it has a pretty robust task list to the client and it tells them when they need to do the task and give them reminders. So this has definitely been super helpful. So if you want my tech stack, it's at that link. And these are just some examples of books that I've read that have really kind of changed my practice. Most of y' all have heard of Profit First. If you haven't absolutely read it, it's pretty much the envelope system for grown ups. But it really does work implementing value pricing. Ronald Baker is an accountant, but he's written a bunch of books on value pricing and flat fees, which is kind of my big thing. The happier attorney, she was an estate planner. She wrote a book about flat fees, the Four Hour Work Week. So I love this book. I love 75% of this book. 75% of this book is brilliant. The other 25% is a little batshit crazy, to be honest. But the overall theme of you shouldn't wait until you're 65 to retire. Enjoy your life, take mini retirements, figure out how to delegate. All of those general concepts are amazing in this book. There's a whole chapter about how to sell T shirts on ebay. You can skip, skip that one, I promise. But the general concepts really are amazing and changed my life. And then the five hour workday is sort of similar. And then I also have another flat fees page. So those are the kind of, those are the books and those are the concepts that kind of led me to kind of where I am, which is running my litigation practice with taking me out of sort of the grunt work and day to day while still keeping the connection with the clients. Because at this point, I really, really do love practicing law. I'm not trying to scale. I love what I do. Eventually that might change, but having these systems in place, I think later on will sort of help me out. That's my time. Thank you so much.
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Max.com is this October in Atlanta and early bird tickets are live right now. If you've ever wondered what we actually cover at this event, it's nearly everything that goes into the business of running a law firm. Because at this level, it's about putting all the pieces together the right way. If you've got a vision for your firm that's bigger or just better, better systems, more organized, more profitable or more self sufficient. This is the room that helps you make those shifts and build momentum in the right direction. Go to maxlawcon.com and grab your ticket today.