Transcript
A (0:01)
Hey, it's Sam Alaia here, founder of my legal academy, where we help lawyers scale and automate their law firms so they could send up more clients and reclaim their precious time. If you're looking to grow your practice while working less, click the link in the show notes to book a free call to discover a radically different way to grow your law firm. Enjoy the episode Mastering Law Firm Intake. Today we have a super, super valuable video and podcast for you with an amazing guest. The topic as Good as It Gets, Mastering Law Firm Intake, how we currently sign up a thousand clients per month. Eamon, you want to introduce yourself?
B (0:40)
Hey, thanks for that, Sam. My name is Eamon Graziano. I've been working with Sam probably like a year and a half or something like that at this point. And we've signed up a ton of clients. I run a couple different law firms with Sam and yeah, it's definitely been a fun experience growing and scaling these law firms.
A (1:01)
Amazing. And Eamon, when you joined us, we're at probably a couple hundred clients per month now to over a thousand clients per month. And we in the past year and a half, because we have a couple of law firms that we work together, we have a lot of experience that will be sharing with you a lot of different issues that we dealt with. A lot of stuff with our team intake team, a lot of stuff with intake. And that'll be our talking points. And so let me just review what we'll be talking about today. We'll be discussing, number one, our tech stack. What is it? What kind of tech tools you need to be able to sign up more clients? Number two, the ideal intake team structure, which is crucial. Looking to scale up your intake team. Number three, measuring performance and quality assurance. What does it take to be able to improve your conversion rates and be able to send up more clients? Number four, the cadence. How often should you contact your leads? And how to increase your chance of you getting contact with leads. And number four, the pitch, how to improve your pitch to be able to offer your legal services and sign up clients. So we have a lot to discuss, but let's start off with the tech stack. Pretty much the backbone of the automation of sending out more clients is the tech stack. So Eamon, what do you see as the ideal tech stack for sending out more clients?
B (2:29)
Yeah, so there's really kind of four to five things that go into like the most streamlined, sleek tech stack. The first key piece is what CRM you're using, and that is probably dependent on how many intakers you have to Start off and then how much you're going to use that CRM throughout the rest of your firm. You're going to have, you know, less than five integers. Something like Legal funnel is perfect, something simple that someone can implement for you. But once you start growing past that, it's better to look at something that's a more, more of a fully functioning CRM. I know a lot of law firms use like the Clio Grow and the Clio Manage. We use HubSpot, which is more of like a broader CRM with a lot more capability and flexibility. I've worked at firms that use Salesforce, which is like probably another tier and you know, expensive, you know, in expense, but also in capability above HubSpot. But the key to a good CRM is one, how many automations you can put into it and then how much data you can extract from it. Sam and I, we look at our data from our CRM, you know, and make decisions based on that. You know, Sam, what like on a daily basis basically for all the different firms. So yeah, I would say HubSpot is perfect for that. It's like the perfect middle of the road. Not too expensive like Salesforce, but pretty robust in its capability. And then the next thing I would say is you need something to connect your marketing to your CRM. So for that, you know, Zapier is perfect. A lead comes in, we populate it directly into the CRM and you know, the intakers start calling it and what phone system they used to call it is the third piece that we discussed. You need to have a good soft phone system that is capable of completely integrating with your CRM. You want to have not only be able to outbound and inbound call, to handle the outbound and inbound calling. You want to be able to have your text messages showing up directly. You want to be able to see if there's missed calls in your CRM. Can you hear the voicemails? Can you re listen to calls on the actual lead in your CRM? That's all key. And then you want to be able to have, you know, a dashboard or a wallboard that shows what all your intakers are doing. Are they on calls? Are they on break? How long have they been on calls? What are their, how many calls do they make a day, what their average talk time is. So that's all super important because at the end of the day, if you're paying an intaker to do intake, you want them either on the phone or like signing up either on the phone or looking for the next person to be on the phone with is really the only two things you want them to be doing. Internal communication, that'd be the fourth thing. I think that's huge. I've seen, I've seen soft phone systems like Ringcentral do it. I've seen, you know, you can do it on Microsoft Teams, but for Sam and I, we use Slack and Slack's just awesome. You can have a bunch of different channels for categories of things to discuss. Everything's archived. You can have a quick call or video chat with somebody, a team member directly on Slack you can do automations from your CRM into Slack. Just an example of what that would look like. If a new lead comes in, you could get that posted into a certain channel. Or if somebody has a meeting coming up in five minutes with a potential client that could get posted into a channel and then everybody's aware. If somebody didn't completely fill out the CRM or missed putting in a field, you could get that posted into Slack. So just a lot of cool things you can do with that. And then the last piece of the puzzle to really get to the a thousand plus mark where we're at is how are you leveraging AI to enhance what the intakers are doing? We use AI to, in a simple way just to set appointments, which I mean it's amazing. We get you know, a 90 contact rate or we've gotten, you know, a little bit higher than that on some months. So a typical contact rate without an appointment set is closer to like in that 5 to 10% range. With an appointment set that the AI is doing, an intaker wakes up in the morning, logs into work, oh, I've got 10 appointments today. He knows he's probably going to talk to nine of those for sure. So that's another way to do it. If you want to go really advanced, you can have the AI actually filtering, having conversations, doing light disqualification. And that to a whole other level increases the productive time of the intakers. An intaker, you know, one of the firms that Sam and I work on has pre qualified warm leads that are already talked to you by AI. An integrator gets on the phone with them and it's a layup to close them. So, so that's great. And it also, you know, they work 247 so that's also an added benefit.
