Exploring Legal Intake Solutions For Your Firm

Is your firm seeing the majority of its new prospects actually turn into paying clients? If not, it’s probably time to step up your legal intake game.

If you’re not already making lead capturing a priority at your firm, you absolutely need to start doing so now. The way you address new leads over the phone and through your website will usually determine whether or not they move forward with hiring you. If your practice offers a delayed or uninspiring response, your prospects are likely to start shopping around with your competitors. So what we’re saying here is that legal intake truly has the power to make or break your business.

Now we recognize that lawyers who run growing firms usually won’t have the time to handle all of their firm’s intake work themselves. That’s why in this post we’re sharing three legal intake solutions that can help attorneys improve their office’s new lead conversion rate, without having to increase their daily workload.

Solution #1: Teach Your In-House Team To Be Intake Experts

Later on in this post, we’ll tell you about some great outside resources lawyers can rely on to elevate their firm’s intake performance. But before doing any of that, attorneys would be wise to make sure their current staff is properly trained on engaging with new leads. Anyone who is responsible for answering phones or handling online communications for your firm should have a clear idea of what to do when a potential new client reaches out.

The best way to ensure that your staff is able to expertly execute the legal intake process is to give them a written script to follow. For tips on creating this script, you can check out this recent post from our blog. If your practice covers multiple areas of law, make sure you have specific intake scripts in place for each type of new client you might be welcoming to your firm.

Once you have intake scripts established, take the time to go through it with your phone answering staff, and even participate in practice calls. The more experience your staff has with executing your legal intake procedures, the better they will sound when engaging with prospective clients.

Solution #2: Let Answering Legal Assist With Your Intake

The days of consumers respecting your office hours are long over. So are the days of prospects leaving you a voicemail and patiently waiting for a call back. In order to win over new leads in this era, you must be ready to answer their calls live at any time and begin onboarding them with your firm right away. And we do mean any time, after hours and weekends included.

In order to avoid missing any new client opportunities, you’ll need the help of a highly qualified legal intake team. Answering Legal’s virtual receptionist team will be your top choice, as our service operates on a 24/7 basis, and is the best in the industry at handling the legal intake process.

All of our new receptionist hires go through months of in-depth training on performing legal intakes before being allowed to execute it on behalf of real law firms. This ensures that our staff members are able to handle any legal intake requests for your firm with supreme confidence. Lawyers will also get to customize the intake questions our receptionists ask, allowing us to onboard your new leads just like you would.

Anytime our staff performs a new legal intake on your firm’s behalf, you’ll get a text and email message after the call concludes, recapping all of the information our receptionist collected. You’ll have this information in hand no matter where you are located at the time, and from there can make a quick decision on how to proceed with your new lead.

Learn more about the benefits of hiring legal intake professionals here!

Solution #3: Use Technology To Simplify Your Online Intake

If your firm’s website offers a live chat or sign-up form, it’s important to make sure you’re monitoring all of the new client requests you recieve, and organizing them properly. If this sounds like an overwhelming task for you and your staff, you should look towards legal softwares for help.

Here are some of our favorite legal intake solutions for capturing leads online:

Clio Grow:

This software can be used to help automate your intake process. The platform offers shareable online intake forms, e-signatures, and document automation to turn your firm’s client intake process into a simple, organized system in the cloud.

Filevine:

This software will aid you in managing leads more effectively and refining your marketing mix. It helps ensure faster follow-ups with new leads by tracking all potential clients in one unified system.

Zola Suite:

This software will assist you with identifying and cultivating high-value prospects. You can use it to automatically track where leads are coming from, organize prospects by source and generate meaningful metrics to help guide your practice.

CASEpeer:

This is an intake software made specifically for personal injury attorneys. It provides a comprehensive intake window that makes it easier to track leads, share information across linked cases and review case data.

Learning how to operate through a new software system will take some time, but in the long run, it will help your firm become significantly more efficient, and save you and your staff several hours of time each week.

Final Thoughts

In order to truly master the lead capturing side of your business, you’ll want to take advantage of all the legal intake solutions mentioned in this piece. The investment you make now on an in-house legal intake staff, our virtual receptionist team and legal software programs will more than pay for itself once you start turning a much higher percentage of your new leads into actual clients.

Want to see Answering Legal in action for yourself. Get started with a free 7-day trial of our service by filling out this form or calling us at 631-686-9700.