How To Craft A Good Legal Intake Training Process

In a lot of ways, running a business is a lot like owning a home. You’re deeply invested in the wellbeing of your business. You’re responsible for it, sometimes solely responsible. And you definitely spend a lot of time thinking about it!

The biggest similarity, however, is that both running a business and owning a home are about upkeep. If you own a home, the lawn has to be mowed, the plants need to be watered, the filters need to be changed. Constant upkeep is necessary for a healthy business in the same way, even if everything is working as intended! Preventative maintenance will help make sure things run smoothly in the future.

For law firms, a big part of that upkeep and maintenance is legal intake. We’ve written before, several times, that a good legal intake process requires regular check-ins. The same is true of your legal intake training process. And sometimes, if you’re inheriting something without good foundations, it can be best to start from scratch. In this blog, we’ll be tackling how to craft a good legal intake process.

Lay Down Strong Foundations

The first step to building anything from the ground up is to figure out and reinforce your foundations. In the case of a legal intake training process, these foundations are your priorities.

It’s important to establish your priorities first because there’s a lot you could get out of your legal intake training process if you design it right. Are you just training a legal intake specialist, or a general receptionist? What is the purpose of your legal intake? What do you want your trainees to be able to accomplish for your firm?Answering these questions is key to a great legal intake training process.

Finding The Principles Of Your Legal Intake Training Process

The answers to the above questions can vary from firm to firm, but there are a few general rules when it comes to a legal intake. For example, first and foremost, legal intake is about the client experience.

Clio’s 2021 Legal Trends Report showed 70 percent of clients prefer to conduct their first conversation with an attorney over the phone.

If the vast majority of your new clients are going to be contacting you over the phone, you’re going to want to make sure that they’re getting the best experience possible. Making sure new leads feel comfortable speaking to your legal intake specialist is key. They should be understanding and prioritize a positive experience for every caller, even while respecting your boundaries and protocols, which we’ll get into more later.

Your next priority might be information gathering. After all, a big objective of legal intake is to know what your new leads need from you. A good rule of thumb is that new leads should never have to repeat their story in full after telling it to your legal intake specialist.

A secondary benefit of gathering all of a new lead’s case information is that you can make a very easy decision about whether a case is right for your firm. Your legal intake training process should allow your receptionists to immediately know, for example, that a personal injury case is not appropriate for your family law firm. Which family cases you want to take is a much trickier prospect, but eventually your receptionist might be able to weed out bad cases based on having seen similar cases before!

Finally, lead capturing is another of the big objectives of legal intake. The nice part is that if you’re good about building the rest of the process, your lead capturing will come along well. It is, after all, a summation of the process. Making sure leads feel comfortable with your firm by enhancing their experience and making them feel confident in your abilities by gathering the right information will make sure they stick with your firm.

Put Down Solid Walls

Once you’ve laid a solid foundation, it’s time to start putting down some load-bearing walls. In the case of a legal intake training process, you’ll be building the protocols and examples you use to train your future legal intake specialists. Here at Answering Legal, we train our receptionists for months. If you want to learn more about our legal intake training process, click here. Below, we’ll gather just a few tips we’ve learned over the years.

Basic phone etiquette is the foundational skill to hone in a legal intake training process, if you’re training a receptionist. Greeting the caller and mastering a friendly yet professional tone are key to everything that comes after. When your trainee has mastered this skill, they’ll be able to tell what a caller wants to get out of a call and provide it.

Next are phone handling skills. These skills are less “soft” than the rest of the training objectives, and are more like learning to follow a formula. Your receptionist should know how and when to put a caller on hold, which calls to transfer, and when and how to take a message. Cheat sheets, protocols, and notes are great teaching tools here. After a while, it becomes second nature to follow a call flow chart from memory!

Developing Your Legal Intake Training Process

Finally, of course, comes the most important part of the process: legal intake. In our metaphor about a house, this is the kitchen, the heart of the home. The key to a good legal intake training process, other than learning your legal intake process itself, is in learning how to project expertise.

In their 2019 Legal Trends Report, Clio’s analytics found that 45 percent of legal consumers found that their biggest issue was finding a firm they were confident was right for them, and that the most important criteria in that search was a lawyer’s expertise.

First and foremost, your receptionist should be an expert in your legal intake process. A new client shouldn’t feel like they’re filling out a form, even though that is basically what they’re doing! Rather, it should feel like they’re having a conversation, telling their side of the story, and all the while your legal intake expert is pressing them for details to fill in the gaps in their intake form.

Next, they should show expertise in your law firm and practice area. Your legal intake training process should prioritize making them familiar with the specific legal terms involved in your practice area as soon as possible. And they should especially be able to make clear to prospective leads what’s going to happen next, as over 70 percent want to understand that next steps before hiring a firm!

Finally, their expertise and demeanor should reflect your firm and its values. Your legal intake experts will be one of the most public faces of your firm, so you should make sure that your legal intake process reflects what you want new leads to come away from that first phone call thinking about your firm. You should make sure to emphasize whatever makes you stand out from your competition in your legal intake training process.

Be Flexible

But how do we get there? Well, here at Answering Legal, we train our receptionists for months. There are tutorials, practice calls, role-plays, and shadowing opportunities. But the biggest part of our legal intake training process is in answering the phones for Answering Legal itself. Our receptionists pick up for us before they ever answer the phones for law firms.

Of course, you probably don’t have that opportunity! You want your receptionist to be competent before they ever pick up your phone. If you have a senior mentor in this process, you’re in luck. Shadowing can be on the table, and you can delegate a lot of the training.

A 2022 Training Industry Magazine report found that the average cost of training a worker was 1207 dollars.

If you’re training your sole receptionist or legal intake specialist, you might have to account for even more of your time in the above cost as well!

The hardest part of training is being flexible. Everyone learns differently, as teachers around the world could tell you. You could come up with a great legal intake training process for 40 percent of your potential receptionists, but you’ll run the risk of missing out on a stellar client experience provider if they don’t gel with your teaching methods.

Therefore, you have to leave little details up to improvisation. You should have a basic legal intake training process, and review it with your trainee throughout the training. If a trainee responds better to practice calls than to some form of memorization of your legal intake process, you can adapt and work in more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

And, finally, training isn’t a one-and-done event. It’s a constant process. At the beginning, you should set up a check-in system. At first, checking in daily is a good way to understand where your training process stands. Over time, these check-ins should become less frequent, but even years down the road, it’s good to perform check-ins and establish goals and expectations. It helps your employees know what’s expected of them, and helps you get more of what you need from your team.

Trust Answering Legal’s Legal Intake Training Process

If that sounds like a lot of work, it’s because it is! Legal intake is worth the work of perfecting your training process, of course, but it’s not easy. And, as a law firm owner, you’re probably already short on time and long on work to do.

That’s why you should delegate the legal intake training process to Answering Legal. We train all of our receptionists for months before they ever pick up the phone for your law firm. By the end of that training, our virtual receptionists are legal intake experts.

Our staff isn’t the only part of our service that we take seriously, however. We own our own call center software, which allows us to constantly improve. We’re always adding new law firm software integrations to our directory, for example, and even have a mobile app our customers can use to run their firms from their phones!

Want to skip the legal intake training process entirely? Click here or call 631-686-9700 to sign up for our free trial. For a limited time, we’re offering firms that sign up for our service their first 400 minutes free.