← Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
361. Toolkit: Lead Leaks in PI Firms: Where They Start and How to Fix Them
00:16:50
Turn Missed Opportunities Into Signed Clients With Smarter Intake
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- [00:00]
Chris Dreyer
You fight to win every case. Your marketing should fight just as hard. Whether they're searching on Google or AI. Make sure your firm is the first name clients see. Lead the pack with AI Search from Rankings IO show up first, Sign more cases, start dominating at Rankings IO, intake.
- [00:16]
David Haskins
Is the department that doesn't get enough attention unless it's bad.
- [00:20]
Chris Dreyer
This is pim. I'm back with a special toolkit episode where we highlight the systems and partners that help personal injury firms scale. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder of Rankings IO. We're tackling one of the most expensive blind spots in your business, lead leaks. These are the hidden gaps in your intake processes that cause good cases to slip away before you even know they exist.
- [00:42]
David Haskins
We have over 100 lead leaks we've identified now, and one of the ones that I see firms succumbing to is.
- [00:50]
Chris Dreyer
That's David Haskins, and he can sniff out any leaked leads today. We dig into where they start, how to spot them, and the tools you can use to plug them. What you learned in this episode can boost your want rate and see better marketing roi. Let's go. You worked with over a hundred firms. You know, high level. What's some of the most common assumptions that get law firms into trouble? You know, when they're thinking about intake?
- [01:15]
David Haskins
The most common assumption is rooted in cognitive bias. You're assuming that this is your level of performance, your level of conversion. A lot of times firms can leak leads before they even hit the CRM. It comes down to, like, what Harlan Schillinger said. His trademark phrase, what you don't know, you don't know. This issue, this problem is in. It's. It's incredibly costly.
- [01:38]
Chris Dreyer
You know, if it's not controlled, it's a huge problem. You know, putting my marketing agency hat on, it's like, we can drive a ton of leads, and if they don't get converted, we're out of business or we're in trouble. Then it goes a step further. If we're helping with intake, then it's like, hey, what about case values? And all those problems? And it's massive.
- [01:56]
David Haskins
We work with mostly a lot of smaller firms, one to five attorneys in mid and smaller markets. They are more reliant on their SEO than major market players and volume firms. They can live or die by how their intake operates. And so many times I could have two campaigns in similar markets, similar population sizes, similar reputation review scores, and similar rankings like, say, in the maps or organic. The one firm is like, you are the best thing that's happened in my life, in my business, and then the other firm will go, ah, it's not really working for us. We're not really seeing the conversion and the diving into how their processes are set up, how they're staffed, how they're measuring bandwidth to staff up. There's so many of those unknown unknowns that they're not uncovering and that all contributes to lead leak.
- [02:46]
Chris Dreyer
Yeah. So what's this process look like? Walk me through this audit process and like some of the things that you're looking for and then we can address some of the issues.
- [02:54]
David Haskins
As we've dug into the issues, we've noticed that it's not just giving people scripting, teaching them on call control, teaching them empathy, concise and thorough information gathering, but there's an element of cognitive bias that happens on the phone that you just wouldn't know if you're not sitting there listening to phone calls and secret shopping or auditing random calls. I saw a workers comp lead come in and the agent mistakenly thought it was an employment case and so they said, you need an employment attorney. Just go, go on Google and look for an employment lawyer. There's a couple problems with that. One, you lost a valid workers comp case that you could have signed up. And two, even if it was an employment lead, if you do workers comp, like you need to have an employment referral arrangement with an employment firm, is that kind of bleed over happens a lot in the workers comp field. If you're the intake manager or you're the managing partner and you're reviewing that lead in the CRM, what do you see? John Smith called employment law issue, you know, reject it. You would look at that lead and be like, oh yeah, well, you did what you're supposed to do. It's not until you actually listen to the call and start to uncover these little cognitive missteps that I think happen. Because if you're on intake, you're taking three to five to six calls for every one qualified lead. Sometimes in more catastrophic or complex practice areas like med mal, it could be 30 to 50 calls to one lead. So if you think about it, that agent, when that phone rings, sort of like a Pavlov response, when that phone rings, they're used to getting on the phone and most of the time disqualifying the case. So you sort of end up in a natural process, not by anything you're doing wrong, but in a natural way. You sort of end up arriving at this instinct to disqualify sometimes more than to qualify And I think, yeah, I always tell attorneys the best intake person that your firm will ever have is the founding attorney.
- [04:57]
Chris Dreyer
That makes a ton of sense. And that kind of makes me think of Anajar and how they set up their law firm where they have the attorneys screen the calls because they can identify, you know, what's the case and what isn't, but they're kind of outside the norm. I would say most law firms, it would be better if they had this dedicated intake team where that's all they do. They have the processes and scripts. Like, what's your thought process about the setup? Like, one of the big ones. I just talked to one of our firms in Chicago on the phone and they were doing the classic, hey, it goes to Attorney 1. If he doesn't answer, then it goes to the paralegal, then it goes to the next attorney. And it's like, you know, I didn't even have this understanding or didn't even realize this was occurring or I, you know, would have made some recommendations. Like, what do you see? Just from the structure set up, that's.
- [05:44]
David Haskins
A perfect example of a mistake people are making. They assume that. So that would be kind of like optimism bias. And that can kind of lead to the injured man in the subway scenario where if there's one person, they'll jump and try to rescue him, but if there's 50, people can be kind of look around and go, who's got this? If it's everybody's responsibility, then it ends up being nobody's a sole responsibility. One time we saw a lead come through that was a drowning case, and a new attorney, an associate attorney, jumped on the lead. It was a Saturday and it was like 15 miles over the state line. Child drowned in a hotel swimming pool and was in intensive care, had a brain injury. And he handled the lead by telling them, we only practice in this state. That attorney thought that he was doing the right thing. When I brought that to the attention of the managing attorney, it was within a couple hours. They called the person, immediately spoke to the parents and drove four hours each way. Gave up their Sunday to go sign the case. And then once they got back, I said, look at the difference in your firm. One attorney is having a five minute conversation and tell them to call the bar. In another state, you gave up your weekend basically and drove all day long to make sure that you signed this case up. And without a consistent process to manage intake at that level, that could be happening monthly or weekly in a firm and you wouldn't even really know for.
- [07:12]
Chris Dreyer
Volume, where you're fielding a lot of cases, like, a lot of times they're following this, this logic base, you know, statute. Next question. Like, how do you teach intake to, to kind of discover and pull more details out on the case? Like, what goes into that? Is that a major leak that you've identified?
- [07:31]
David Haskins
We have over 100 lead leaks we've identified now. And one of the ones that I see firms succumbing to is what I call giving the client homework, which is investigating the case too much. I need to copy the police report, send me pictures of the accident, send me pictures of the scene or, you know, witnesses, insurance information. Like, I like Gary Falkowitz's approach, which is get to a, you know, reject or retain within Gary's thing is three minutes. Our process is to teach the one call close. We also like firms to adapt, like sort of like an a minute, an MVP retainer that doesn't need to go heavily into the, you know, medical disclosures and high tech and HIPAA and all that. You can do that in onboarding once you sign the case, giving that person in that first interaction, giving them the peace of mind and sort of the closure and the reassurance that you're not going to have to deal with the insurance company anymore. You're not going to have to worry about if you say something incorrectly or if you should sign a document. You've got somebody in your corner.
- [08:39]
Chris Dreyer
Your next client is asking ChatGPT right now, who's the best lawyer near me? If it's not you, you just lost the case. At Rankings, we make sure your name shows up. Go to Rankings IO and dominate aio, also known as AI Search, before your competition does. That's Rankings IO for AI Search. When people ask legal questions on Reddit or Quora, AI is paying attention. And if your firm isn't part of those conversations, you're missing a big opportunity to shape what AI says about you. Join us live on November 17th at 3pm Central Standard Time for the AI Feedback Loop, our new workshop on form strategy for law firms. We'll show you how to use public discussion boards to feed AI the right proof of your expertise, boost your visibility, and sign more clients. Grab your seat@ Rankings IE webinar. That's Rankings IO webinar. Here's the problem with over investigation. You're giving clients homework before they've even signed. That's a massive leak because instead of building trust, you're adding stress at the worst possible time. So where do firms go from here? Some run Intake through Salesforce. Others lean on tools like lead docket, which was built for personal injury. But what David's team is working on goes a step further. It layers AI on top of intake to spot the hidden leaks and uncover revenue that most firms don't even realize they're missing. Let's break that down.
- [10:01]
David Haskins
We put all our clients on lead docket. I like the way that the CRM connects to like for instance, like CallRail call tracking metrics. One of the things I love is in our intake accelerator we create an unassociated calls filter so that you can go in, you know, if you're in lead docket or similar CRMs. If you get a call and it matches to your CallRail caller id, it'll attach that call and the call record to the lead so you can audit how the call went. Unassociated calls feature lets you go in and look for leads that didn't hit the CRM or didn't match. We've been developing a software that will actually listen to all your calls, grade all the calls, grade the operator's performance, surface the injuries, grade the case quality based on damages, treatment, liability A through D, and then as soon as a call over, a call is over, it gives us, it gives this full analysis and a score and will alert you of any missed opportunities.
- [11:00]
Chris Dreyer
I've never heard of any software that has these capabilities, particularly the scoring, the identifying, the notification for the leak and those types of components. Just to elevate and improve your staff alone has a big benefit, not to mention just a tremendous insight. Right. So you know, does this, are you able to sink into any CRM or is it only lead docket? Is it like, tell me a little bit about this in terms of the.
- [11:25]
David Haskins
Tech component, the software it's built to manage intake departments. So it's not doing the lead chase, the follow up, the signing, the reminders, the emailing, the texting and all that sort of thing. It's built to evaluate and catch any issues that happen at that first point of contact, you know, that first point of reaching out. And what we've done is we've used our best practices, our training manuals, and we've built an AI who is what I believe is the most thorough intake manager in the industry. Because they don't sleep, they don't get tired, they don't only have two ears and two eyes. It has infinite number of ears, as many as we need, and it's listening to every call. So it can identify any of these issues as minor as they Are so.
- [12:13]
Chris Dreyer
It'S like the ultimate quality assurance rep. And I'd say, you know, many, many firms don't have that. They'll have their intake specialists and things, and they might have one leader, but they're not listening to every call. Maybe they're cherry picking some calls.
- [12:25]
David Haskins
Yeah, in our intake accelerator, we, you know, for any attorneys listening or anybody in intake listening, that in our intake accelerator we were auditing five calls per agent per week. And when I've asked this in the industry or in talks, nobody is auditing that many calls. But for me, again, obsessed with efficiency, I looked at that and I said, if somebody takes a hundred phone calls in a week and they make one mistake, they lose one case. And you listen to five of them at the end of the week, which is still a lot, you have a 5% chance of finding that mistake. And if that person that's listening to those five calls is a human also, you could hear the mistake and not catch it just because you could have the same cognitive disconnect or your little misstep that that person had. So what we realized was if you could just analyze all of them, you could find the one in 100 that you miss.
- [13:22]
Chris Dreyer
When you zoom out and start to analyze every single call, patterns become impossible to ignore. That's the power of data. It takes bias and blind spots out of the equation. And that's where tech really changes the game.
- [13:35]
David Haskins
When we're scanning all these calls, a lot of times what we realize is intake is the department that doesn't get enough attention unless it's bad. Right? You messed something up, you screwed something up, you lost an opportunity, you did something wrong. And so one of the things we've created in the software is what we call the high five viewers, which is everything that's a green, you know, if the interaction was 80, 85% or higher, you can filter all those interactions and have one dashboard in there. That's all your best calls. And you could filter them by agent too, so that you can have, we have firms using them in their Monday morning meetings and their standups to give a, you know, add a boy, add a girl to people that are doing great work. It's a great way to elevate the intake team and give them more recognition when they're doing good job instead of just criticizing, you know, when they had a bad audit.
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Chris Dreyer
I think that's awesome. So instead of just beating them down and telling them how they can improve, like here's, here's the call that needs to be kudos and here's who we need to model.
- [14:30]
David Haskins
Yeah. And you know, a common technique in training and in management is like the criticism sandwich. Like, hey, you're doing really good with this. The shit sandwich is what I said sandwich. Yeah, yeah, you're doing really good with this. This needs to be worked on. But also, you know, this is still, you know, doing pretty good too. And it's perfect for that, you know, the shit sandwich. I like that.
- [14:50]
Chris Dreyer
What's the best way to reach out to you and connect with you?
- [14:52]
David Haskins
Find me on LinkedIn. Or you can check out the software@speedintake.com, get a little idea for how it works.
- [15:00]
Chris Dreyer
With David and his team are building shows. With the right processes and the right tech, you uncover hidden revenue and sign more of the cases you've already earned. That's the edge that best firms are leaning into. If you want to scale, it's an edge you can't afford to ignore. Alright, that's it for today. Join us on Thursday for another insightful conversation with some of the best minds in personal injury. I'm out.