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If you're a law firm owner who thinks like a business owner, not just a lawyer, this is for you. July 17th and 18th, we're hosting our next in person Mastermind in New York City. We're kicking off with a strategy workshop with Jessica Gonifiss of Silver Peaks Accounting. Dialing in your numbers so you can make smart CEO level moves. Then it's straight into Mastermind Hot seats. No fluff, no filters, just real strategy, real feedback and and breakthroughs. Plus, we're hosting an exclusive dinner. Bring a plus one. Connect deeply and build the kind of relationships that transform businesses. If you're ready to think bigger, move faster and scale smarter, get your Mastermind ticket@maxlaw events.com.
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This is maximum Lawyer with your host, Tyson Mutrix. Today we're going to talk about something that's going to help you get everything to where it needs to go in the most efficient and effective way possible. It's called the routing Framework. It's an AI agent framework. And if you've ever asked who's handling this or caught yourself forwarding emails all day, this episode is going to be for you. And this is going to be how you make sure every task gets to the right person automatically. Before I jump in though, if you benefit from listening to this podcast in any way, I would love it, love it, love it, love it. If you wouldn't mind giving us a review, wherever you get your podcast, do us a favor. And really, most importantly of that is subscribe. And I mentioned this during the last episode, but over 80% of our listeners are not subscribed. So, uh, it's just a shocking number to me and I'd really love to get that down to under 50% by the end of the year. So if you don't mind, please hit the subscribe button. This lets the algorithms know that this show show is worth sharing and showing to more people. Thank you. Let's get into this episode. At its core, the routing framework is simple. It's about recognizing what kind of task or message just came in and, and instantly sending it where it belongs. That way it gets to the team member or the tool that's best equipped to handle it. So let me show you what I'm going to show you a sample one. This is just a very, very simple routing framework. And for those of you that are just listening, that is completely fine. You're not missing anything. Just imagine you've got a workflow where it starts with, this one starts with a form submission. It could be start, could start with a Phone call, it gets fed through an agent, and then it gets routed to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 different places for an email. Right? And then it gets put into a Google sheet. That's that. It's just, it just means it gets routed to where it needs to go. That's all. It really, really means nothing complicated with this one. That's. That's what's so great about it. It's a really simple thing. Getting it set up can be a little bit complicated, and you might run into some errors with things going to the wrong people on your team, but you, you'll work out those, those kinks as they go. But it's kind of like having a receptionist who instantly knows who should handle every call, every email, every document. Except it's automated, it's lightning fast, and it is always on. They don't take breaks, which is kind of cool. So why does this matter for your law firm? Well, let's walk through how most firms handle things right now. An email comes in, you open it, you read it, you decide who should handle it. You forward it, you hope they respond, repeat. That's pretty much how it goes. With a routing system in place, that entire workflow gets replaced with something automatic. A client sends an email about their bill, it goes straight to accounting. A new lead fills out your form. It's instantly assigned to your intake coordinator, which I'm hoping that already happens. But I know that many of you, still seeing and talking to many of you, it's not how it works. Maybe a judge's office calls about a hearing, boom. It's routed to the responsible attorney, not floating around in someone's inbox. And I said call emails about judge emails about something. That's the difference. You're reducing your response time. You're eliminating manual handoffs. You're freeing up your team to focus on the work that actually moves cases forward, which is the most important thing. If you've never read A World without email, I. I recommend that you do. It's. This is a big part of what they talk about. But let's kind of zoom out and look at how maybe other industries are doing this. Look at Zendesk, for example. They're a customer service platform. They use routing to categorize different incoming support tickets. Those are automatically tagged, and then they're sent to the right agent based on urgency, topic, language, you name it. And they saw a 70% reduction in response time. It's incredible. Customer satisfaction scores also went up, which is awesome. HubSpot. They do something similar. They automatically Route new leads to the best salesperson based on territory availability or product interest. And that for them that means that prospects aren't waiting and conversion rates are going to go way up. And, and this isn't. We're not talking about theory. This is something, it's a high impact process and you can easily do the same thing in your law firm today. It's not something you have to really wait on. You can do it in an afternoon really easily, may, maybe not even that. So how is it, how can you start with this? Well, the first thing you're going to want to do is make a list of the types of requests that you see often. Maybe they're billing questions, client inquiries, court scheduling, depositions, case updates, you name it. We all have several that we get on it and it depends on our practice area. But the next thing you're going to want to do second is decide how you want those routed. Maybe your billing is going to go to your admin case manager or office manager. Maybe new leads are going to go to your intake person. Time time sensitive case issues. Those can go directly to a case manager or the to the assigned attorney. So you kind of figure out where the routing goes and then the next thing you're going to do. Third is you're going to set it up using non code automation tools. You can use N8N Zapier make. I've mentioned those quite a bit. Those are some of the most common ones, most popular and really easy to use. Of those three, I think Zapier is the user interface is the worst but any den is my favorite and make is also good. But those are going to let you, you've got those set up. They're going to let you read incoming emails, messages, form entries. You can, you can shove everything into this. They're then categorized as. And then those are then routed instantly by the AI agents. So just start with one thing. Don't, don't try to jump into different areas. Start with one thing. Maybe you're going to start with routing all new leads from your website directly into your CRM and then you, you start assigning the them to intake. Right? That's, that's maybe a simple one that you could do. It's pretty smooth and again I'm hoping that you already had this set up through your website company but if you don't, this is a, this is something you could do with it easily but once you have that part smooth, you can then expand to other areas. And this is something with your website too where it could read, maybe you can use it to say it's reading anything that's submitted on top of like all the case details. So they can, it can read, you can have the agent read all the case details. Because sometimes what people do is they'll mark the, the wrong type of practice area that it is on. If you've got a form on your website, you can have it verify that that's the correct one and if it's not, it can then route it to the right area. So that's another way of looking at it because maybe you have a big intake team and you have people that handle different types of practice areas. That's a way you could route to the right place. But I think what we're really going to talk about next though is results. So let's talk about results because I'm not going to just tell you, hey, go do these things without giving you some sort of proof. So let's get into to the results of this. It's, I'm trying to give it the words and it's not, it is not, it's not working. So give me a second. That's the problem with the prompt prompter. Businesses that use automated routing are reporting up to 50, 50% faster response times. As I mentioned, Zendesk reduced ticket mis misassignments by nearly 90%. I mentioned HubSpot earlier. Their lead conversion rates have increased by over 20%. Amazing. And this is because they weren't wasting time on manual delegation. And that, that's going to translate directly to law firm life. You're going to have faster responses, fewer drop balls, a better experience for potential clients and for your team especially. So let me give you some of the best practices as you start to build this out. Be specific about how you define each category. The clearer the input, the better the routing. The clearer the input, the better the routing. Really important review and then you're going to refine your roles every few months because this is something that's going to, it could be a moving target. What worked when you had two employees. It's, it's, it might not work when you have 10. Very similar when it comes to AI agents. So you're always going to have some sort of human oversight. That's a really, really important part of this. Include human oversight in this because you could really screw something up if you don't remember it's a support system. It's not a replacement for judgment. Don't forget that part of it. So like I did in the last one, I'm Going to answer a few common questions that I've been getting from people because I think that this is going to be really, really helpful that I'll go through some of these common questions I get from lawyers. And then some of those are in the guild, some are outside the guild. But we get, we get texts about this too. And I think maybe this will help out. But what, what's the first one I should automate first? What you're going to do is you're going to start with tasks that happen often. They have a very. They have a clear pattern that it follows and they don't really require deep legal judgment. Right. I'm not talking about just judgment, legal judgment. Because if it, if it doesn't require any judgment, then you could just use an automation. But we're using AI here. You're going to use an AI agent for this. So it's going to require some judgment. But I would start with anything that requires some sort of legal judgment. Right, that's. You're going to say that for later. And so something like this might be new lead intakes or maybe a billing response. So billing responses is another, another one that you could eas run through this. Another question. Does routing remove the personal touch? Not at all. In my opinion, it actually frees up your people so they can be more present in the actual conversations that matter and they can actually be talking to your people more often. They freeze up their time to do those things. Another question I get, how do I know it's working well? Just track a few simple metrics, track response time, number of misrouted messages, how long a lead sits before follow up and compare those to what you're doing now. And the improvements should be, should be pretty obvious. You don't have to overhaul your entire system overnight. Just take one repetitive task, build a routing rule, test it, and then expand. It's really that simple. That's how progress happens. Just one task at a time, you. One clean automated handoff at a time. That's it. So just start really, really simple. That's what I, it's what I recommend for you. But that's all I have for today's episode. This routing framework, it's simple, but the payoff is really, really huge. This is one where it's a simple one, but the payoff is one of the best of the frameworks. So you're gonna get faster response times like some of the other ones, but more accurate task assignments and a team that knows exactly what to do without needing to ask, which is another really cool feature of this, but again, thanks again for joining me for this Saturday episode. If you want to share how you're using routing in your firm, I'd love to hear it. Or if you've got questions, send me a text. 314-501-9260 until next time. Remember, consistent action is the blueprint that turns your goals and into reality. Take care.
- [13:08]
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Real quick before you head out. Have you checked out the Guild yet? If you've been listening to this podcast or hanging out in the Maximum Lawyer Facebook group, you've probably heard us mention it. But if you haven't taken the next step, let me tell you, you're missing the best part of this community. The Guild is where law firm owners like you go to level up. It's not just more content, it's a powerful mix of weekly live trainings, group coaching, accountability, and a tight knit community of people who actually get what you're building. You'll be able to tap into real conversations with people who are in the trenches with you, scaling their firms, testing ideas, solving problems, and growing fast. If you're serious about building a firm that runs like a business and not just a job, this is where you want to be. Go to maxloguild.com and take that next step. We'll see you inside.