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TTS Rewind: 73. Yani Smith - An Expert's Guide to Intake Optimization
Executive Summary
In this segment, Maria Monroe and Yani Smith dig into one of the most common breakdowns in law firm growth: intake. They focus on the systems and habits that determine whether firms can accurately track leads, respond fast enough, train staff well, and close the cases they actually want. A major theme is accountability on both sides, not just from intake staff, but from firm owners who may not have built the right processes or training in the first place. They also explore call paths, quality control, empathy, response time, and the role of phone trees, all through the lens of creating a better experience for potential clients and a more reliable intake operation.
Maria Monroe: Welcome to the Tip to Skills podcast, where we discuss running and growing your law firm. I’m your host, Maria Monroe, president and co-founder of Larring.
Today I am joined by Yani Smith, and we talk about one of my biggest annoyances in intake. From setting up a phone tree to gathering data to utilizing Lead Docket to empathy and friendliness, I literally ask her, I think, every single question I could possibly think of.
This is one of our longer episodes, but it’s full of so much knowledge. I’m so grateful that she took the time to do this. I hope that you guys find this episode valuable.
Maria Monroe: To me, you’re Yani. I don’t think of your last name.
Yani Smith: You know my name is Yanesha.
Maria Monroe: No, I didn’t know that. Okay, we can save that for the podcast. You want, all right, Yani Smith. Hi, Maria. Tell us what your business is called.
Yani Smith: I’m Yani Smith. I’m with Legal Intake Pros, and we help law firms remove the friction and maximize intake to grow, so we fix the core intake issues.
Maria Monroe: It’s my biggest annoyance in intake. I know. I fucking hate it.
Yani Smith: I know.
Maria Monroe: I just wish everybody could just get it down perfect.
Yani Smith: Oh, it’s hard. It’s such a tough spot for an agency too because it always feels like you’re placing blame on the clients. So the client’s like, no, the issue’s you, and I’m like, no, no, no, you should look at your call volume. The issue’s not me.
Maria Monroe: Yeah.
Yani Smith: But it’s always a fine line of not trying to shift the blame, but also bring attention to, well, let’s talk about your intake.
Maria Monroe: As much as it annoys me, I am by no means an expert. I know that you are an expert. So I wanted to pick your brain on what are the most important things to get down in terms of intake. If a firm said, “Hey, Yani, maybe we don’t have the funds to hire you,” or, “We’re just so far behind,” I want to understand the top seven things that a firm can do.
Yani Smith: The first thing I want to say is I used to be that client that was calling the SEO company like, “We need more leads, we need better leads.” So I’m sorry, because I know that you guys do it a lot, but you don’t know what you don’t know in a lot of ways.
And I think what is harder said than done is to fix these issues when you’re inside of the firm. So that said, it takes time and there’s no easy lift, but a couple of things that you can do.
I know that most of your clients are probably on some sort of a call tracking system already, relatively quickly. So what we find is that a lot of clients have a call tracking system, and maybe they have an intake software like Lead Docket.
Maria Monroe: I love Lead Docket.
Yani Smith: Me too. Yes, I know Lead Docket is great, but most people don’t leverage all of the features, all of the capabilities of Lead Docket, such as integrating their call tracking system with Lead Docket, all of your contact sources, so that if you enter the phone number of a potential client or you have a web form that comes in, you integrate that with the system and it will auto-populate and attribute to the contact number.
Maria Monroe: I have a question though. We’re trying to solve this issue with attribution where they sign a case, they have a phone number, but the phone number doesn’t match the CallRail number.
Yani Smith: The caller ID.
Maria Monroe: Yeah, so it’s like maybe they called from an office or their sister’s cell phone or something like that where the actual phone number that is tracked and called isn’t the best primary contact number. So when we’re trying to find where a case originated, is there a secondary? I know the answer, but I want to tell people so you can tell us.
Yani Smith: I love this question because we do this often for our clients that might want to get super granular about specific landing pages or location pages on their site without building out several types of forms on their site. So you can just use the UTM codes and enter that into Lead Docket. You can use UTM codes or add specific domain URLs if you’re using a system like Lead Docket.
Maria Monroe: I don’t mean the number that the call tracking number dialed. I mean the number that they called from. So the number that CallRail is tracking, say it’s 800-555-5555, it’s not the phone number that is the primary contact’s phone number. So at some point during intake, the callback number is a different phone number. So it’s hard to trace that this phone number from CallRail is actually attached to this different phone number that we’ve attached in our CRM tool, or sorry, in our case management software, to the client. So the client’s phone number is not 800-555. It’s 323-8-whatever. Do you see what I’m saying?
Yani Smith: Kind of, but are they entering a different number from the device that they’re on?
Maria Monroe: Yes.
Yani Smith: You can still use the UTM codes.
Maria Monroe: But I’m not saying they’re entering it into the contact source. I mean to the intake specialist.
Yani Smith: Okay, so there is an extra thing. In Lead Docket, you can get super granular. So the way that we set up Lead Docket at Legal Intake Pros is we pull everything from the referral URL. So you have the current URL, the referral URL. If we have UTM codes that we can feed into the system as well, we will do that. A call tracking system as well.
So when an opportunity comes in, it will actually show a trail of this is the number they called from, this is a digital footprint in terms of maybe the page that they’re on, any UTM codes that match up. So there is a way to foolproof it where you’ll have multiple data points in the build, including their actual phone number.
Maria Monroe: Exactly.
Yani Smith: But you have to, we rely on our clients to get that information from them, especially social media. So if they have a social media campaign and those callers or prospects maybe didn’t click the actual call to action on their social media to call, we’ll just get the UTM codes from them so that it will automatically attribute to the social media campaign or whatever other campaign that they have.
So there’s ways of doing what we call foolproof tracking without necessarily needing the actual call in order to attribute to that contact source.
Maria Monroe: And are you also tracking, so CallRail will give me source one, like the channel drill down, do you know what I’m talking about? And it’ll tell you it came from this website, but then they went to this.
Yani Smith: Yes. It actually gives you a whole kind of history.
Maria Monroe: Are you looking at all of that?
Yani Smith: We are looking at that, and you can pull that information in. So if anyone is listening and has Lead Docket, a good way to do that, if you go to management and you click on auto source rules, you’ll be able to find that.
Maria Monroe: You’re welcome.
Yani Smith: Yes.
Maria Monroe: Okay, so that covers one thing.
Yani Smith: Yes.
Maria Monroe: What else do you recommend that law firms do? Kind of the basics, right?
Yani Smith: I think something that would be an easy lift that would make a really big difference is for firms to take the time to develop a call path. So not a script. We’re pretty anti-scripts. We’ll provide scripts, but the goal is to get off the script as soon as possible.
What we mean by call path is key points of the things that the intake team will hit on if they’re on the call with a prospect. That way it’s consistent every time.
We listen to calls all the time where you’ll have a rock star intake specialist who will score a high score on a call, and then the next one forgets to explain the contingency fee. It happens. Of course. You will get distracted. Things come up in their lives and their performance will fluctuate. They’re human.
Maria Monroe: That’s the biggest thing. A firm will be like, “But I have this intake specialist. She’s amazing,” and I’m like, “Yeah, but they’re still human.”
Yani Smith: And if they also know that there’s no one watching, monitoring, quality control, if they’re having a bad day because they got in a fight with their husband or boyfriend or something happened, they’re human and they could have off days, off weeks, off months. When do you want to catch it? Do you want to catch it on day one, day seven, or day 200?
What we find is that if you have a quality control system in place, what does quality control mean? An actual protocol that is unscheduled, that’s never missed. We’re listening to calls, scoring them, providing feedback in real time. We’re looking at the cases that we didn’t sign up. Why? Exactly why we didn’t sign them up. We’re looking for these opportunities and we’re finding them within 48 hours versus day 200.
Your biggest rock stars are going to make mistakes. Mistakes are okay. Sometimes they may not even realize that they are regressing or missing some best practices because if you are a high-volume firm, your intake specialist may be processing 30 calls, 35, 40 calls a day. Forgetting to go through the contingency fee if you’re just kind of going off your experience and knowing the process is actually pretty understandable.
But if you have a call path that’s a system, this is a checklist, it’s right in front of you, it becomes second nature. They just know that this is the process versus one particular intake team member might have some pre-lit experience, so she kind of just knows to ask these questions. It’s best to have everyone follow that same process every single time to ensure that we’re providing every single potential client with the same type of service, the same type of guidance.
One thing that we also see and hear a lot is something that should be included in this call path where the intake specialist will sometimes forget to just explain the process. They’ll just forget that part.
Maria Monroe: I know.
Yani Smith: It’s very common, Maria. So very common.
Maria Monroe: Let’s kind of recap. Number one is having a source to attribute things to. We have Lead Docket. Number two is having a process for a call path.
There’s one thing that I’ve never been able to understand. If a firm says to me, and this happens all the time, “When we want a case, we sign it.” This is something that firms say to me very confidently every single time. Like, “When we want a case, we sign it. We always sign it.”
I know every case that we don’t sign, but if there’s no quality control and we’re looking at qualified leads or wanted cases, different firms call it different things. Is there a particular term you like to use?
Yani Smith: I like wanted case.
Maria Monroe: Okay. So if somebody says, “This month, we had 21 cases,” and we’re just taking that at face value and not looking at what happened with the other 70 calls that came in, how do we know that they just chose, because they couldn’t close it, they couldn’t get the case signed up, to mark it as a non-wanted case? Does this happen or am I crazy?
Yani Smith: It happens. It does happen. It happens, and it’s tough.
One thing I will say is that the practice of only entering the leads that we want into the system will cost a firm cases. You’ll have that practice of maybe the receptionist will take a call or an intake team member, maybe a lawyer, and it’s for a case that’s outside of the practice area, so they won’t enter it into the system, and it could have been an LSA call. One, we don’t have the data from that call. But then you have this practice throughout the firm where we’re not entering all leads into the system, and eventually, how can you guarantee, like you say, that we’re actually missing the opportunity to enter the cases that we do want?
So we do audits, and we have had experiences where we call in with a case that meets every single thing that the firm said they wanted, and we were told we’re going to receive an agreement and we never receive it. But that’s what happens when you do not put a lead in the funnel of a system to push it forward, to remind you, to prompt you, to move it forward. So that’s heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking, and it happens.
So rule number, I don’t know which one we’re on, five, enter every lead in the system no matter what, regardless. One, you’ll be able to measure the performance of your marketing campaigns to ensure at least one of them, if you’re getting a lot of bad leads from a specific campaign. Yes, enter into the system everything. One of them, you’re going to learn a lot if you do that.
And as it relates to wanted cases and being able to track if they’re measuring or if they’re using maybe the right statuses, if it’s this wanted or unwanted, this is what you should do. If your system allows you to parse out what’s called a sub-status or a sub-phase, do that and remove the general decline.
What that means is that your firm, if someone declines something or rejects it, it has to specify that it was rejected for gap of treatment, rejected for minor injuries. But just the general decline that doesn’t explain why it was rejected should be completely removed. That way, they are forced to select one of those options.
What happens often is that if a case is rejected, but it was actually lost because maybe they called twice and couldn’t get ahold of them, it’s moving to rejected, declined. When you eliminate that and then you’re auditing, let’s look at the rejected minor injuries specifically, and you’re realizing that the case facts actually include injuries, but maybe we didn’t pursue them as often as we should have and we lost it, we’re able to then pinpoint.
So I hope that makes sense. If you have a label or category in your intake system that is to exclude what a wanted case is, or rejected for instance, add subcategories, add sub-phases, however your system is set up, to include the reasons why a case would be rejected from your firm. But remove a catch-all decline/rejected phase because that’s usually where all of the actual wanted cases that were labeled as rejected will live.
Maria Monroe: But even with categories, in theory, somebody could mark a case rejected, but maybe, so here’s my fear. You have a firm that is putting a lot of pressure on the intake team. You need to sign X amount of cases per month, and they can’t close the case and they’re getting a lot of heat for not closing those cases. So they mark it as rejected, no injuries or whatever, no policy, no insurance, whatever the reason is.
My whole thing is if nobody’s checking, how do you know that it’s not happening? Maybe I’m just inherently a distrusting person. Anytime, for example, we use a CRM too, we use HubSpot, and if somebody marks a deal lost, I get notified every time somebody marks a deal lost. There’s a reason, and I can go and watch the calls and look at the communications and say, well, what happened here? Did we drop the ball? Or was it just not a good fit? Or they went with another agency, which obviously happens.
But for me, I’m always like, how do I know that this was handled correctly? For us, and I assume you can do this with Lead Docket, everything just feeds into HubSpot. It doesn’t have to be manually entered. Everything is already in there and it can’t disappear without me being notified. It can’t be deleted, period. They don’t even have an ability to delete, but it can be closed unless I’m notified.
So I just don’t understand why law firms don’t have, and I’m not saying all law firms, but some law firms don’t have the same type of quality control. As a business owner, forget law or agency world, as a business owner, I want to understand what’s happening with these potential clients. What was their experience like? What happened?
There’s quality control. I will literally watch calls that my reps do, and if something didn’t go as I would have hoped, the rep knows I watched this call for quality and training purposes and this was said to you, but it’s actually this or whatever. I have now the ability to address it. So if a case isn’t closed and let’s say you have an intake manager and they listen to the calls almost in real time, same day, and they catch something, they could literally call that person back and be like, “Hey, I want to connect you with the lawyer. We have tons of experience in this, this, and this,” connect them to the lawyer, boom, lawyer closes it. Am I crazy?
Yani Smith: No. Absolutely not. I’m not going to say all law firms. I know that there are firms that are listening to their calls. They’re listening to their calls. I think the key is to address that in real time.
So if you’re listening to calls, what are you doing with that information? Are you doing a heavy way to measure that? Is it a scorecard? If it is a scorecard, are you tracking the areas that need improvement? And how are we translating that to the team? Are we coaching the team on some of these areas that need attention?
That specific example, though, about miscategorizing leads, I don’t know if there’s a lot of room for forgiveness in a firm if that’s happening continuously, because it’s dishonest.
Maria Monroe: It is.
Yani Smith: It does happen. And I can’t say that I can use that as an example to coach because if it happens once, you know how to use the system. If it happens twice, there’s not a lot of tolerance for that.
Maria Monroe: That’s my whole point. If you have a system in place to monitor this. And that was my next question. How much tolerance would you have? Because maybe it would depend on how egregious it was. Maybe there is a coaching opportunity and they didn’t have the knowledge to determine that this was, in fact, an injury. Maybe it could be a hidden TBI, whatever, something super complex, fine.
But if it’s blatantly, I couldn’t close this and I marked it as rejected, no injury, I would fire them. Straight up. That’s just me. I have very little tolerance.
Yani Smith: Assuming they know how to use the system.
Maria Monroe: Assuming they know everything, of course. I would want to understand what happened here. Also, I guess it depends on the history of the employee. They could be like, “I don’t know what happened. I didn’t mean to do that. I really knew that this wasn’t closed. Something happened. It came in and I was trying to save it for another case.” If you trust the rep enough or the intake specialist enough, okay, fine. Maybe that one you forgive. But then if it happens again, now there’s a pattern here. Then I would be very like, no, this is just not a good fit.
But if you don’t have this in place, if you just don’t have it in place, you’re just getting your reporting numbers back to your agency or your marketing person that you don’t know are accurate.
Yani Smith: What I want to be careful about here is because I see it all of the time. What you’re saying is that if they know better and they know how to do better, I’m going to hold them accountable to that. Yes.
So I think it’s extremely important for law firm owners and lawyers to also hold themselves accountable so that if, after listening to the episode, you go look for things in your system and you find them, ask yourself, have I provided the training necessary? Ensure that the team knows how to use the system.
I would say 90% of the law firms that come to us do not know how to use the system the way that they should. It’s wild.
Maria Monroe: We use something, I don’t know if law firms do this, we used to use Trainual, now we switched to Guru, and you can literally have these digital, very corporate, like I worked for AT&T and every quarter it’s like I’ve got to watch these videos and take this quiz at the end, and you hate life for that two hours, but that’s just the reality.
In this situation, they can have so many things digitally, and I’m not saying that this replaces the human coaching and interactions. That absolutely doesn’t. But it gives you a really great starting point. A new person comes in, you start here. Before we even get to the role plays and the coaching and actually let me listen to you on a call, start here.
Do you recommend that they have some sort of training in place already?
Yani Smith: We typically will start with the fundamentals when we have a new intake team member that joins a team for one of our clients, but we assess them first. Not everyone needs the same level of training. Sometimes an intake specialist will have pre-lit experience, so we can skip the whole part about criteria and case types. Maybe someone’s completely green to the legal industry and they need a one-on-one.
We start with data entry best practices.
Maria Monroe: Wow. So before empathy and ringing the emails, it starts with the data and the expectation of how we keep integral data.
Yani Smith: Every single lead must be entered into the system, and that is rule number one.
Maria Monroe: I love this. Can you repeat that sentence one more time?
Yani Smith: Every single lead must be entered into the system, and that is rule number one. Every single lead must be entered into the system, and that is rule number one.
That’s where we start. So we start with what is intake, aside from legal, what is intake, what is the purpose of intake, what is a CRM, how do we want to enter this information into this CRM, what is a marketing source, what is a contact source, so that they’re fully able to understand the importance of the information that we’re gathering and what it means to them and why the firm is collecting this information.
So we start there. We do share some very basic videos, but we do that just before our one-on-one assessments. That’s how we handle it personally. All of our training is tailored to the intake team member. So we do our trainings live through Zoom video, and it’s super tailored to how they have assessed their experience and how they performed on the audit because we were studying them for about a month before we work with them.
Maria Monroe: Because you guys first do an audit, and then if you move forward with them, then you’re doing the actual coaching and data and all this crazy stuff.
In our experience, we have a really strong assessment of the areas that they need coaching because of that. But what if you’re a law firm that is, again, hiring for whatever reason? Should they start with data entry, teaching their team, this is how you use whatever case management software?
And then I guess on that, I have so many questions, we could do like 10 episodes on this, but what if they don’t have Lead Docket? Are there specific case management software systems where maybe you don’t need something like Lead Docket? And if so, which are those? Is there any other tool you recommend besides Lead Docket?
Yani Smith: If your firm is spending money to attract leads and cases, you want to ensure that you are investing in some sort of a funnel to nurture those leads and that you have an intake team that is empowered to manage those leads, that knows exactly what questions to ask, and that understands how to use a CRM.
I’ve mentioned Lead Docket because I love Lead Docket. So I sometimes have firms that are like, “Oh well, I do this through my case management software.” There is SmartAdvocate or Clio, and they’re utilizing the actual case management software for intake.
Maria Monroe: Have you seen a case software that can do what Lead Docket can do?
Yani Smith: No. My preference is always get Lead Docket. Integrate it with CallRail. That’s my preference. Give me the reports.
Maria Monroe: Okay. Case management system is a case management system.
Yani Smith: Yes.
Maria Monroe: I agree. But I think sometimes it’s a lot for a law firm. Emotionally. Forget everything else. Emotionally it’s like, wait, I have a case management software, now I’ve got to teach my team to use this other software, and I’ve got to implement it, and I’ve got to integrate it with my case management software, and I’ve got to get them on board, and now the team’s bitching, and I don’t want to hear it. It’s just so many things that go into it.
I’m not trying to be insensitive. I’ve run a business. I know what it’s like to roll out a new tool. But I think it’s so, so important.
Okay, so going back to fundamentals. You start with data, you tailor the approach depending on the intake specialist’s prior knowledge, and then what?
Yani Smith: Then we hit empathy.
Maria Monroe: I was waiting. When is she going to bring up empathy?
Yani Smith: Then we bring empathy.
Maria Monroe: I would have lost all respect if you hadn’t.
Yani Smith: So we start at the fundamentals and then we move on to empathy.
Maria Monroe: I have a question about empathy. Can you teach someone to be empathetic?
Yani Smith: I believe so, but let me finish. I believe that you can teach someone empathy, or at least fake it till they make it, or identify opportunities to be empathetic. The reason is because I think often it’s not that someone might not have empathy, they just may not have the tools to show it. It could stem from their upbringing. Maybe they didn’t have a good example of how to articulate or express empathy.
There was a meme that went around for years where it was like a friend who would poke another person that was crying with a stick, “Are you okay?” Just to give an example of a friend who doesn’t know what to say. That happens. Sometimes it’s awkward at that point.
Maria Monroe: Because here’s my thing. I use friendliness as the other one. Are you friendly and are you empathetic? I think they’re two separate things. I think you can be very empathetic without being the friendliest.
I guess there’s a third category. It’s obviously positive attitude. In terms of culture and team and being a good employee. And then there’s friendliness. I don’t think you can teach someone to be friendly.
Yani Smith: Different. I agree with you.
Maria Monroe: I agree that you can teach someone that maybe doesn’t come across as the most empathetic to come across warm and empathetic. But I guess my question is, is it worth it? Because if I’m interviewing someone, and I’ve said this before on the podcast, I would try to, I don’t know, be like, “I have the worst headache,” or, “I slept like shit last night,” just to see if they’re like, “Oh, I’m so sorry. Do you need to reschedule?” Do they show that empathy or are they just ready to talk about themselves?
That’s something I would do because to me it’s like if I can hit on positive attitude, which I can tell if you have positive attitude in two seconds, literally two, I will end an interview three minutes in if I don’t think you have positive attitude. Are you friendly? I think that can very quickly be seen. You either are or you’re not. And I can tell when someone is faking friendliness. I think it’s very easy to see that.
I think the empathy part is a little bit trickier because you could, again, maybe not know how to show it. But I just think that’s a tougher thing to hire for. So what are your thoughts?
Yani Smith: So I think that obviously if we want to screen, assess for empathy, assess for their skills, that’s important. But sometimes we have someone that killed their interview. They seemed extremely, they said they were empathetic, but they didn’t have to be empathetic towards you during that interview.
Sometimes you’re left in a position where you listen to a call and you realize this team member is great. We thought they were super empathetic, but they just didn’t have the words to validate this person who experienced a catastrophic injury. That person could have been extremely empathetic in that moment but just did not have the words to comfort that person and didn’t know what to say. It happens.
So I think that it is worth it if that team member is a willing team member. We only train and we only work with willing team members. If they’re willing, then I think it’s worth it. It’s hard to find someone that’s going to check all the boxes, and if they surprise you, I do think it’s worth investing in them. So long as they’re willing. If they’re apathetic, on the other hand.
Maria Monroe: I think I’d be great at intake. I really think I’d be great at it. It’s like three minutes. But I think I’d be great because here’s the last component. Can they close? It’s still a sales job.
And I think it’s such a unique type of sales because it does require that empathy. If we think of salespeople, the first thing that comes to mind typically when somebody says salesperson is like a car salesman. Nothing against car salesmen at all or women. I just don’t think you automatically think empathy when you think of that person.
So I think law firms get really turned off when it’s like, this is a sales team. And they’re like, how do I reconcile the willingness, the friendliness, the empathy, and then you’ve got to be able to sign up the case?
Yani Smith: The way that we package that is we use purpose. We actually try not to use the word sales. We’ll use it with clients sometimes. We try to refrain from that with the actual intake team.
The reason why you mention salesperson selling cars is because we think of someone that doesn’t have our best interest at heart. When you asked the question earlier about fundamentals, we also introduce a couple of core beliefs into the intake team. One of those is that they are an ambassador of the firm, that they help remove friction for all clients to gain access to get legal representation, and to remind themselves that they have the most important job in the firm.
When a prospect contacts the firm, it’s because they need help and they called the firm. So if you are following up, if you are moving forward with the ask, whatever you want to call it, or to sign up the case, to make the sale, you are helping them get the help that they need. They needed that.
Sometimes they need you to overcome their objections in order for them to know that I’m making the right decision. A prospect will often say, “I don’t want my boss to think that I’m a terrible person, and I know I got hurt at work, but...” They’re also waiting for you to tell them, “No, that’s all right. This is how the process works.” Some people need that extra validation.
So we teach the intake teams to identify those moments to reaffirm prospects about why they contacted the firm to begin with. But we don’t focus so much on the close as much as you do what it takes to help facilitate the firm’s next success story and to ensure that you’re getting that person help.
I always actually give the example of my own mother. My mom was a single mother. She was a widow immigrant, and she was hurt on the job when I was really young, and she never went to get help from an attorney whatsoever because she felt like, “I’ll bounce back, everything will be fine.” That is a very immigrant mentality, and they don’t want to miss work, so all these components come into play.
She never did. She ended up going on to have numerous surgeries. She had a spinal fusion just a couple years ago. That is the perfect example of someone who might be on the call with an intake specialist and say, “You know what, I’m just probably going to feel better. You know what, forget about all this.” That is the responsibility of the intake specialist to remind them of your statute of limitations, to remind them that their injuries can get worse.
So when you think about it from the lens of purpose and having that prospect’s best interest at heart, it doesn’t feel dirty whatsoever. It feels like a responsibility.
Maria Monroe: I love that because I think, again, it’s hard bridging that gap. But from an agency standpoint, I’m like, how do I get across to clients that this is still, I know it sounds dirty to call it sales, whatever, but it is still, at the end of the day.
Maria Monroe: It leads me to my next question. What would you consider a good sign-up rate? So if there are 100 wanted cases that come in in a month, which I know for a lot of people that would be amazing, right, but how many should they be signing?
Yani Smith: I will say, I’m going to give a lawyer answer. It depends.
Maria Monroe: Let’s say they’re all wanted cases. Are they med mal?
Yani Smith: Well no, because med mal, they’re probably like one case.
Maria Monroe: But let’s just assume that it’s a personal injury firm with no threshold. So they’ll take a soft tissue minimum policy case. That’s why I used the word wanted. For med mal, they could get 100 calls, but they really only want one. So I mean wanted like it hits every, they check every box. They’re like, “I want to sign this case.”
Yani Smith: It meets the firm’s criteria. It could be the firm could have a seven-figure threshold. It could have soft tissue. They’ll take any injury. Assuming they want the case.
Maria Monroe: Right. Assuming they want the case. 100 cases come in, what would you say is considered a good sign-up rate?
Yani Smith: If we want all 100 cases, yes, that’s what they want for their wanted cases. If they’re truly wanted cases, we should sign every single one up. But that’s unrealistic, in my opinion.
If they meet our criteria, every single one of them, they actually are a wanted case, that’s why I asked earlier, are any of them med mal? Because med mal can be considered a wanted case. It can sit in the wanted status for two months while they’re getting medical records.
Maria Monroe: But that wouldn’t count because then it becomes rejected, right? I mean truly, what is the percentage? Because the numbers that I typically hear fall in the 90 to 95 percent. Do you agree with that? If you’re looking at a firm that, let’s say, they have the data component done, and you’re going in and you’re saying, okay, there were 100 cases in the last X amount of months that you wanted, but you only signed 60. Are you concerned or are you like, that’s a great sign-up rate?
Yani Smith: No, we’re looking at the rest. We’re looking to find out why didn’t we sign up those other cases, to look for the core issues. And you’re going to have scenarios where you could have a percentage of those that hired another attorney.
You know, it’s interesting. Most of the leads where they hired another attorney are from web chat and web form because of the response time. So we’re able to really hone in on that.
Maria Monroe: That’s my next question with cadences and follow-ups, but I’m not going to let you move forward till you give me a good number. What do you feel good about? You’ve worked with a firm for a year. What should their wanted close rate be for you to feel like this is doing great? Obviously, it could change in literally a second. This is ongoing. It’s not a set-it-and-forget-it. You can’t just train your team, set it and forget it. There has to be quality control in place. But at what point do you say this is good? I’m not so worried about it.
Yani Smith: If your wanted to convert rate is actually 90 percent, that’s great.
Maria Monroe: I love actual.
Yani Smith: I love what you said, because that’s the thing we talked about. If it’s actually 90 percent, that’s great. I’m going to tell you every firm is different. Again, I’m really going back to maybe this firm handles a type of personal injury case that has a longer lead management cycle, like a nursing home or med mal. Those cases, unfortunately, will hurt the conversion rate. So like a 75 percent for them could be pretty good.
But just a standard PI firm, they’re volume, they’re a volume firm, we want to be at at least, I would say, 80 percent and up.
Maria Monroe: Okay. Where are the rest going?
Yani Smith: They hired another attorney. Most of them due to response time, and the second is due to poor follow-up.
Maria Monroe: Okay, so let’s talk about this. This is another one of my sticking points. Talk to me about response time. Somebody submits a chat or a web form or calls a firm and for some reason the call is missed. How much time do they have to have a reasonable chance at still signing the case?
Yani Smith: If they missed the call?
Maria Monroe: Missed the call or it just came into the web form. How quickly do they need to act?
Yani Smith: I’m being dead serious because you know and I know. I think it’s hopeful that you could still get the case because you let it go to voicemail. But I would say immediately.
Maria Monroe: If you miss a call, don’t even get me started on that. You work with some of my clients where we’re having this exact issue.
One thing that we started doing, I don’t know, have you seen the emails?
Yani Smith: Yes. I love them.
Maria Monroe: Do you? The weekly recap.
So what we’ve been doing for our clients is giving them a weekly recap of the prior week. How many missed calls they had, how many Google reviews they got, and we’re actually calling their law firm and seeing how many rings it takes.
But talking about responsiveness, somebody submits a web chat or a web form. How long do they have to contact them?
Yani Smith: Our rule is immediately. Immediately.
Maria Monroe: Can you set up automations?
Yani Smith: Automations for like an auto reply?
Maria Monroe: Yeah.
Yani Smith: We set them up for all of our clients.
Maria Monroe: Thank you.
Yani Smith: All of our clients. The minute that you submit an online form or web chat, you are going into a high-engagement funnel.
Maria Monroe: And what do you use for that, if anything?
Yani Smith: Lead Docket.
Maria Monroe: Okay, thank you. It’s not sponsored. Lead Docket, if you want to pay me, let me know.
Yani Smith: Take us to dinner or something.
Maria Monroe: Right.
Yani Smith: No, you know why? It actually helps our clients. So it’s not about, it could be any company. I don’t care as long as it helps the client.
Maria Monroe: So automatically they’re getting what? Emails, texts?
Yani Smith: Emails, texts, whatever contact information method that they’ve provided.
Maria Monroe: And how quickly do they have to call them, though?
Yani Smith: We say as soon as possible. If that’s 30 seconds, if that’s within a minute, as soon as possible. So we implement a, if you see it and you’re not on the phone, you grab it and you call, versus grabbing that, assign it to someone, and then maybe they have two more outbound calls that they need to make, and therefore that person might go 30 minutes before being called.
Do not have an alphabetical system to disperse leads because that’s what will happen. You must have whoever is available next, whoever’s off the phone next, needs to be the person making the outbound call to contact this web form or the web chat.
Maria Monroe: How do you ensure that multiple people aren’t calling at the same time?
Yani Smith: With Lead Docket, it actually blocks it out. If you’re in Lead Docket and you’ve opened up an opportunity, it’s impossible for another person to open it up because it’ll strike it out and it’ll say, “Maria is calling Sarah Beth in Alabama.”
Maria Monroe: Perfect. Okay. Now how many rings should it take? I don’t know if we have enough time to get into the whole phone tree scenario and what provides the best user experience, right? So first let’s start with how many rings until it’s picked up.
Yani Smith: Honestly, I’m going to give a, if you can ring, if you can pick up the phone in the second ring, pick up the phone on the second ring. Set up your systems, set up your team, make sure that you have an after-hours call center if you’re not staffed up.
Maria Monroe: Is there one that you like?
Yani Smith: The best of the worst, but I think it’s an industry thing. It’s hard, but there are a lot of great ones.
Right now I think Intake Solutions of America is doing a really good job for some of our mutual clients.
Maria Monroe: Okay.
Yani Smith: So they seem to be doing a good job at the moment. Go Answer has done a good job for some of my clients in the past as well. And I know that some are happy with Smith.ai.
Maria Monroe: Yeah, I’ve heard that too. The one that I’ve recently been recommending is Legal Conversion Center.
Yani Smith: LCC, yes.
Maria Monroe: I actually have a client who just got Legal Conversion Center. But I need to talk to all of them. I don’t like only giving the client one option because then if it goes poorly, it’s going to reflect back on me.
I’ve always said, look, it’s not that necessarily I want to put all the blame on a call center. I just think that’s a really, really fucking hard job. To run a call center is hard. I just think you really are looking for who’s the best of the worst, and not because of anything necessarily that’s there. I just think it’s inherently impossible.
No one’s going to do intake better than setting it up correctly in-house. Period.
Yani Smith: And don’t get me wrong. If you call our company, half the time it’s going to go to an answering service. Half the time it’ll ring to someone, but half the time it won’t. But what we do is not as time-sensitive as what you guys do or what law firms do.
Maria Monroe: Okay, so two rings is what I say as well. The other thing is, we just had this with a mutual client, where it’s ringing to one person, then if that person doesn’t pick up, it goes to the rest of the team or to another person, I can’t remember. So now it’s creating all these rings, as opposed to the phone ringing at multiple desks at once.
What are your feelings on that and what kind of phone trees should law firms set up? Before we even go into that, really quickly, how do you feel about phone prompts like, “Press one if you’re an existing client, press two if you’re a new client”?
Yani Smith: This is going to be an unpopular opinion too. I know how SEO agencies feel about phone trees, but this is my experience and my perspective about the call routing system and phone trees.
If you have a call tracking number set up, just route your LSA calls to the intake team. It’s going to skip the receptionist, skip having to go through a phone tree.
Maria Monroe: I agree with that.
Yani Smith: So we always opt for that, right?
Maria Monroe: Yes.
Yani Smith: Because you’re going to save rings and they’re going to get to the team as quickly as possible. And if that team does not answer within a couple of rings, then we can move into our overflow structure where that’s a call center. It may be a paralegal that’s a backup, which we actually don’t recommend either because they’re busy and they may not follow up on that lead.
So we recommend pointing them directly to the departments when necessary. A phone tree actually helps with that. But I think the reason that a lot of people hate phone trees is because it sounds so mechanical.
So we love to help our clients set up a highly personalized phone tree if they opt in for one where the managing partner is using his own voice, where he’s welcoming them to the firm. If they’re calling about an existing case, press one, or a new case, press two. And even when they’re holding, they’re listening to maybe audio of a commercial that they’ve done that has a client testimonial or their value propositions because unfortunately sometimes you do have to be placed on hold.
Why not make it a hero’s journey while they’re waiting?
Maria Monroe: I love that. I absolutely love that.
Yani Smith: So I think that if we make the tree a little bit more personal, it becomes less of a negative experience. So I think phone trees are great when you make it the most elevated experience.
Maria Monroe: I love that. Now, how do you feel about the firms that have a receptionist that then routes the call? What I run into is that the receptionist will pick up the phone. They’re not an intake specialist. They’re literally just the phone router. They get on the phone with someone that is just dying to tell them about their case, and they just start regurgitating. And the receptionist either lets them talk or interrupts them.
I don’t think there’s even a good way, period, to handle this. Because if you let them talk, now they’re going to have to repeat their story. If you interrupt them, they’re going to find that you’re rude. So obviously you can tell how I feel about it. But how do you feel about it?
Yani Smith: So we teach our intake teams call control, and we have very specific training for receptionists. What we advise is that when a receptionist is taking a call and asking if it’s about a new case or an existing case, if they say new case, the first thing that they say and do is set an expectation.
“Thank you, Maria, for calling us about your new case. I’m going to transfer you to an intake specialist who’s going to ask you the questions about this case, and they’re going to be able to help you with that. What I’m going to do is just take your name and number just in case we get disconnected before I transfer you over.”
You get it in, in terms of what the expectation is, before they have the ability to share. You’re not always going to have that opportunity because someone may steamroll and just move on to the call.
Maria Monroe: What about right when they pick up the phone, saying something like, “Could you please tell me if you’re calling about a new or existing case so I can best know how to transfer your call”? Saying it in the introduction, somehow getting it in there so hopefully something clicks in that person’s head like, I’m going to be transferred.
Yani Smith: This is interesting because a phone tree does that in a lot of ways, right? That’s that for you. You have a real person asking that question, but you have a little bit more control with the phone tree because they know what to expect.
So I think that the goal is to set an expectation, and you can modify the script so that you can ensure that they know that I’m not the person that’s going to be taking this information. The goal is to be able to set that expectation before you even collect their phone number.
Maria Monroe: What do you think is better? Phone rings to all the intake specialists, not available. Should it go to the paralegals, who are in the middle of doing something and they’re distracted? It’s so hard, in my opinion.
I hear this in intake where they’re still working on whatever it is they’re working on, even during the intake. I can relate. I think when you’re in the middle of doing something and then my kid walks in and they want something and I’m just like, I’m not listening to you right now. I literally have to turn to my kid and be like, “Hey, I want to give you the attention that this deserves. I’m in the middle of something. I can’t do that for you right now. But I do want to give you that attention.”
Obviously, a paralegal can’t do that on the phone. So is it better for it to go to a paralegal that might not be able to turn that switch off and then the new switch on, or for it to just go to after-hours?
Yani Smith: I actually have a very strong opinion about this.
There’s something to be said about transferring a call that means that it could be more work for someone and then giving them the power to make the decision of whether this is a new work order, essentially, for putting it in those terms.
So if a paralegal is busy and they have a responsibility, it’s really not fair for them either to have to stop what they’re doing and then process an intake and then be expected to follow up on that intake. They’re most likely going to miss best practices to maybe enter into the system, which we see all of the time, to just try to get it off. They’re trying to get back to what they were doing.
They may not enter it into the system, so it doesn’t go into this follow-up funnel, or in the event that they feel that they are overworked at that moment, they may set a higher criteria than the firm has in order to reject the case because they don’t want to open another file.
Maria Monroe: Thank you. I was hoping you would hit on this. There’s reason why people that are going to work on the case, especially if they’re not vested in it. Obviously, a partner or the owner shouldn’t have to sign up the case because now it’s like, oh, here’s another case where I’m going to have more work. That’s the reality of things.
Yani Smith: It’s true. That’s why I have a very strong opinion about it. One of our primary goals is we are trying to decentralize lawyers from intake. Lawyers feel like, “I’m going to be the one that signs up all the cases. I’m Harvey Specter. I need to be the one that gets on the phone.”
In one way I could see that. Of course, talking to a lawyer is maybe more beneficial in some ways. I could see why that would be super helpful. But on the other end, I’m like, wouldn’t your time be best spent doing something else, like prepping for trial or managing the business?
I think that there is this belief in our space, especially when law firms are in their first few years, that the lawyer has to be the one to do the intake and be involved in the intake. What is an intake specialist going to do? Some lawyers will be like, “Wait, they’re going to sign up the case? They’re going to determine if this is a case or not?”
How do you feel about that?
⚠️ 🛠️ `show ~/.openclaw/workspace/memory/2026-08-05.md (agent)` failed
And then I guess the follow-up question would be, what about, is there a time that is appropriate to say, let me transfer you to one of our lawyers?
Yeah, absolutely.
I think it all boils down to availability. So if you are a lawyer and you just are available to screen cases that you want and do not want all day long, and you're able to also keep up with other things, which means that we're not letting people off the phone to take a message and have a lawyer call them back, oh yes, that's where we see the bottleneck.
I literally hear this even when we're monitoring LSA calls, right? And we're listening and notating. And I will tell the team, okay, well, how many of these ended up in signups? And they'll be like, well, there's no way for me to know because it's always like, I'll have a lawyer call you back. And I'm like, what? Put me on any amount, right? That should not be happening.
If they're not available, just sign up the case. If you need to reject it later, reject it later. How is the intake team not trained on what cases sign up and which cases not to sign up, right? But getting through to the lawyers sometimes, I don't know if you struggle with this, especially with the newer or more boutique firms. I personally think there's some limiting beliefs around it, like nobody else is going to be able to do this as well as me. I'm needed for this.
And I'm like, well, I mean, how does Morgan & Morgan do it?
I think that it comes from lawyers feeling like they have to be involved in their intake process. I think it's coming from a place of wanting what's best for their clients. They truly believe that I am the only person that can qualify this case and really ask the questions that are necessary. My intake team isn't trained on that. I don't have time to train them on this. And it just becomes a cycle, right? I don't have time to train them on this. I need help. I'm probably losing cases because I'm having to call them back, and then they've hired another attorney. And until I can spend the time to train them, I'm just going to have to continue to take these intakes myself. And it's just a vicious cycle.
And I think the other component to add, a lot of lawyers, at least the lawyers that we work with, are trial lawyers, right? So they are used to getting these very warm leads, right? But the moment they start doing any sort of marketing, I'm like, the marketing cold lead isn't going to wait for your callback. They are just not going to wait for your callback.
So I think it's also like, and do you guys factor that in when you're auditing intake? Do you factor that not all leads are created equal, right? And how is that addressed?
I want to just go back and finish answering the other question for lawyers listening to this and wondering, can there ever be a future where I'm not stuck doing an intake call on a Saturday instead of spending time with my family? Yes. You have to invest in either a resource to train your intake team.
They can learn how to approach a call with the empathy that's necessary, how to identify a viable case, a valuable case, for all of your case types, and they're going to do a better job at following up with that lead because they'll be solely responsible for doing that. So it can happen.
I just want any lawyer listening to this to know that freedom is possible for their firm. And with that comes growth, because you have someone that is available to actually nurture those leads that you've invested to attract into your firm.
The goal is to try to create a standard and a process for everything. If there is a trend where, let's say, your intake team doesn't have a clear criteria of when to sign up a car accident case, take the time to document that, right, or work with someone that can help you do that. And with a car motor vehicle accident case, I am under the strong belief that an intake team should be able to identify that case and sign them up without bringing in a lawyer.
When it comes to another type of case where maybe there are nuances, like a premises liability, what I like to do, and someone internally that's not working with us can do this as well, is take the time to go through a premises liability case so that you interview the attorney and you bring the attorney, these are the leads that you signed up, these are the leads that you rejected, why did you reject this lead?
Also, if an attorney is responding to a lead that was sent with additional questions, just add those questions to the intake questionnaire. That's important information that can be asked during the intake process. And the goal is to build out your intake process so much that the attorney can just make a decision. Should they have to be involved? If they have to be involved, that indicates that perhaps there is an opportunity to document the criteria for this so that the intake team can handle this case.
So what we do is, and sometimes it takes one, two, or three sessions, where we sit down with the attorney and we truly understand all of the information that they need. And now that you have this information, what do you consider a weak case? What do you consider a really strong case, and why? So we just dig and dig and we probe and we probe, and then we document the criteria for the intake team so that they have a roadmap of, this is a clear sign-up. We might reject it later, but this is one that they will feel really good about if you don't let pass, right? And this is what they consider a weak case. It's okay for you to bring in an attorney just in case there are maybe some nuances that they'll be able to discover, but you want to get as close as possible.
And then of course you have your med-mal. If I were a law firm and you know you're going to get X amount, if you're lucky, of seven- or eight-figure cases, like a catastrophic truck accident, and you know the trucking company, you know that there's going to already be a minimum policy of millions, is it like, hey, we have a really fucking hot lead, I need an attorney that can ideally also sign up cases?
I think that that's another, I don't want anyone to get mad at me, I know all of you think you're the best at signing up cases, but I do think there are lawyers that are better at it than others.
Yeah. I've even heard some that I think the lawyers can be kind of rude and condescending. And I'm like, yes, they're struggling because they're busy, which is why you should have an intake team.
Okay, yes. But now let's, and typically I hear this one, like, people don't actually have a case, right? Believe it or not, is what I hear more. And I'm like, oh, that was a chance for a review. Explain to them why they don't have a case. Be friendly. Get me that review. But that's a whole conversation for another day.
Is there a point where, if this magic criteria hits, we involve a lawyer? Or do you think, no, the intake team should be the best at closing in? They should have examples of results of cases that have gone to trial. Should they, if it's a trial firm, explain the difference between a settlement firm or a pre-litigation firm and a firm that actually goes to trial? Because this is something I hear a lot from lawyers, right? We actually go to trial. They're so proud of it. And I'm like, how proud you are, I want to hear your intake be that proud and explain to the average consumer. They don't understand the difference between you and a big advertiser that you claim doesn't go to trial. Because I'm not trying to put down big advertisers either. I think that's a super hard job, right? And I'm all about marketing, so kudos to them. But what I hear from the trial lawyer is, all these people ranking, or not all, but ABC and D and this big, they don't go to trial. Okay, is that passion coming through in intake?
Okay.
Yeah. Well, it all kind of flows, right?
Yeah.
So let's just go back. Is there a point when the lawyer has to be brought back in? So we establish what we call an escalation policy.
Okay.
So all the prospects, all potential injured people, should be given the same level of service. But there are some that we escalate, which means that that intake specialist is going to actually cover their same call path as they would with any other viable claim, which actually includes things like establishing the value propositions of the fact that perhaps we are trial attorneys, right, and that we have this experience. Or maybe we have attorneys that have practiced on the defense side and they understand, right, and then they have that intel knowledge. All of that has already been sprinkled throughout the call, right, if the intake specialist is applying that, which I would argue is sales.
Yes.
So if there is a case where there is an overnight hospitalization involved, right, or a TBI injury, not only, so the conversion or the ask is different. It's when can we come to you? When can we come to the hospital?
Yep.
So they're still expected to have that same level of gusto when it comes to making the close, but the close means getting the appointment, getting the visit scheduled. They're still explaining how everything works, but they're giving them VIP service. So they're still expected to follow that. They're not going to stop what they're doing, look for an attorney, maybe they're busy, and then have to call that person back. They're just sending it off. It's in motion. There's nothing to think about. Put it on the attorney's calendar and get it scheduled. And the attorneys all have that expectation. They would be more than happy on a weekend to attend that. Just put it on their schedule.
So we have an escalation policy that's about the level of urgency, of when you can just sign it up versus sign it up, schedule an appointment, and get the ball rolling immediately.
Got it.
And then now my second question, and you've kind of already answered it, is, do you have a very specific, or do you recommend that law firms have a very specific process as per type of case and results and whether it's settlements or verdicts or expertise, and really tailoring it to the type of case or type of accident or injury that occurred?
Absolutely. Your intake process for every case type should be very tailored to that case type or that sub-liability. It should be very tailored to that. It should include very granular questions. We'll have them in control of the call, but just being able to know when to pivot. Your intake team can learn these things. It's very possible. It just takes time to map this stuff out.
When it comes to being able to share results, a lot of our clients have intake teams with team members that had pre-lit experience within their firms, so they have that advantage. But we've also worked with intake teams where maybe they were a little newer to the industry, so they need more resources, like prior settlements. But we love that. We love when our firms can share maybe a recent verdict or a settlement with their team and give them an archive or collection, right, of stories that they can share, because they may not have a point of reference where they can relate to it personally, but they're able to share what the experience was like for someone that has gone through it as a client and how they came out on the other side, to the best of your ability, right, to identify with them at least. But they're able to come to them with a point of reference that humanizes, as someone else that's been through this.
I know you've been there. We actually had someone else that recently went through this, and this is how we were able to take care of them.
We always ask our clients, or any firms that's listening to this, if you do share a success story with your team, do not send a lawyer's weekly article. Sit down with your team and practice storytelling. Tell them how this case played out, how it impacted their family. Humanize it for them. If they see that passion in you, it's just going to fuel that purpose that we spoke about at the beginning of this. So you don't have to do it every week, but just take the time, even if it's once a quarter, to just share one or two stories, and be proud when you're sharing that. And it's really going to give them the purpose that they need to truly believe that they have the most important job in the firm.
So you know what's super interesting as I'm hearing you talk? I see so many correlations in the way that trial lawyers talk about speaking to a jury and the way that their intake team should be speaking to these potential clients.
Yeah. Of course. Storytelling.
Isn't that crazy, though? Because you would think that they would be the best at intake. Maybe we just need to make this correlation for them.
I swear, just one last thing and then I will let you go, because you said it and I'm like, we need to talk about this. How do you teach an intake specialist to have and retain control of the call? And the reason I ask this is because I think that their ability to remain in control of the conversation kind of taps into authority and that authority of how they perceive the firm and how they perceive them to be experts. And I think oftentimes lawyers don't understand or don't want to acknowledge that because this is the first point of contact, potentially, typically it is, right? They are the firm in that moment. So if they are not friendly and empathetic and come across as an expert and passionate and with purpose, that means that their firm and everything that the lawyer stands for isn't coming across.
Yeah, absolutely. They really are the first impression.
Yeah.
And they're going to be measured based on what the potential client thought about the firm versus what they actually experienced, right, when they're on that call with the intake specialist. So how an intake specialist can maintain control of the call is to guide the caller or the prospect throughout the entire call. That's setting an agenda, having empathy.
And this is something else I'll share. I hope everyone uses this, but you can tailor it to your firm. So we teach intake specialists something called the Imago dialogue. I could be mispronouncing that or messing up that second part, but it's the Imago dialogue. And it teaches the intake specialist to be able to validate, to empathize, but segue into a solution. Otherwise it just becomes one big therapeutic session of, oh my God, I can't believe that happened to you. That sounds terrible. I know. Let me tell you more. And it just continues, and it's a one-hour call.
So what we teach them is to empathize, you can validate, and then we have a list of one-liners that they can use that segue them into the solution.
So for instance, right?
Hold on. When you say validate and empathize, do you teach them to say what they said back? What do you call it when you do that?
Mirroring.
It's part of the Imago dialogue.
Okay, okay, that's what I'm getting at.
It's very similar.
Yeah. I've heard that before.
Yeah.
You mirror back to them.
You're right.
Yes. You validate.
Yes.
You know who teaches this? It's actually a lawyer that teaches us that's not in our space. I believe he's blind. He's a lawyer. And he teaches something very similar because I've never taken his course because I'm so busy, but I wanted to because he literally talks about mirroring and validating.
Yes. And it's so important because often when someone is repeating themselves over and over again, when we think about our own personal relationships, where you might have a disagreement and we're just kind of going in circles, it's because we think that the other person isn't listening to us, right? We don't think that they understand.
You mirror. How do you validate? What's the difference between, we're in the building, why don't we explain what the difference is?
Yes. So if I am showing empathy, right, I am acknowledging that I can imagine how you feel. I can imagine that you feel frustrated dealing with this unexpected event in your life.
Yeah, it sounds like this was very frustrating.
Yes. So that is more of an understanding, right? We can put ourselves in their shoes, whereas validating doesn't necessarily mean that you agree with them, right? It just means that it makes sense.
It makes sense.
This will be a joke.
It makes sense that you might be a little frustrated because you've left three voicemails to your paralegal and you haven't received a callback. It makes sense that you feel that way. I'm not agreeing with them. I'm not saying what you're saying is right, but it stops that call from becoming an unhinged call of projecting and a very upset caller on the other line. So if I just let them know that based on what you believe, it makes sense that you would feel this way, that person feels heard, and it allows you to validate someone that possibly is wrong, right? But we don't have to disagree with them. We're able to maintain control of the call and then segue to the solution.
So it makes sense that you feel X, Y, and Z, and I'm glad that you called me for help. And what I want to do next is...
Wow. That's so powerful to get control of the call. But if anyone wants to look it up, it's like a modified Imago dialogue. But I just have a question. What is the difference? Because to me validating and mirroring almost sounds like you're combining it by just saying, it makes sense. That's the validating part. But then the mirroring part is saying back to them whatever it is that they're frustrated about. So it's like better mirroring, in my opinion.
Yeah, yeah.
So we had a little bit of a scare where we were told that I spoke in five minutes, but it was really 20. So we were fine. We kind of remember where we left off, but we kind of don't. So this is not to be perfect.
But I think we left off on having very specific sales, I know you don't like that, you don't call it sales, but very specific, what would you call it, talking points?
Yes.
Talking points.
Talking points, yes.
And how to kind of tie all that into, what was it that you said, mirroring and validating and advising?
Yeah.
So, Ty, can you just maybe tie it all in for us in terms of control?
Yeah, absolutely.
So often, when a potential caller is calling a firm, it is very easy for that call to just derail. And often we'll see an intake specialist who needs call-control training be on the phone for up to an hour. I am going to be honest, that has happened to me. I mean, like 10 years ago in a firm, I'd feel terrible for the caller and I'd stay on the phone for an hour, but that's not helpful. And we're also not, as an intake specialist, placing ourselves in a place of authority.
Yes. I always think of the doctor. When you go to the doctor's office, do they just let you ramble and talk about what you Googled and what you're going to try and what you think you have? Or are they like, hold on? They ask you a bunch of questions. They're like, this is what we're going to do to figure it out, and then we'll come up with a game plan.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So they set the agenda.
Yep.
They set the agenda. I love that. I'm going to call it that one.
Yes.
This is what we're going to do first.
Yes.
And then we're going to do that.
Yep.
And that will lead you to this.
Yep. Setting the agenda is crucial. And when emotions creep up into that call and start to derail the call, that is where you can use tools like empathizing with them. So I can imagine that you feel frustrated right now with X, Y, and Z. It makes sense that you're angry because X, Y, and Z.
When someone is telling their story and they tend to be going through a loop, mirroring is very helpful because you're able to repeat back to them what they said in a very clear and concise way and ask them, did I get that? Is there anything that I'm missing? That way they understand that you heard them, that you understand what they're saying, then you segue into the solution. Often when people are repeating themselves, it's because they feel like you're missing something. So that's very helpful in that case.
Do you train them to say stuff like, it sounds like? I guess in a way that is part of validating them, right?
Because we're saying to them, it makes sense that you feel this way. From what I understand, you've experienced X, Y, and Z, and X, Y, and Z. Did I get that? Is that correct?
Yeah.
And it puts them in control to be able to say, yes, that's correct. You got everything. Thank you. They feel validated. And even if maybe it's not warranted, just validating them helps to land the plane, especially if the emotional caller is maybe upset over their case getting rejected, which is very common.
We're doing this a little bit backwards, but I first wanted everyone to hear how much knowledge you have. But now I think we should back it up with like, how do you know all this? What is your background? So can you quickly just tell us, how did you learn about intake and what have you been doing for the past, what is your experience basically? I know you just started Legal Intake Pros. I just think of you. I don't even think of the business. And I was torn, I'm not going to lie, about having you on, because you're like a secret weapon that I use for my clients. But I just think it's such valuable information. So give us a little bit of your background.
Yeah. So my entire career, just to recap, has been focused on marketing and advertising, specifically multicultural marketing and advertising in the Latino community. And that kind of segued somehow into the insurance industry. So I was an insurance agent for many years, writing current insurance policies, workers' comp policies, commercial policies.
Yeah, and I oversaw a sales team.
That is where I got my sales experience.
God, okay.
That is where I really had an understanding of property and casualty and insurance. And interesting enough, that led me into the personal injury space. And I was working as an intake director and a marketing director for a high-volume firm that practiced primarily workers' compensation and personal injury cases.
And it was a fast-growing firm. I had a lot of pressure from all of the partners to increase the number of signups. That's why I mentioned at the beginning, I was that person calling my SEO company saying, we need more leads. But what I realized is that no matter how much we were adding to that marketing spend, it wasn't translating to signed cases. And I realized we should probably hold up a mirror to ourselves and look at what's happening to those calls, to those leads, once they come into the firm.
It was a very attorney-centric intake system. So I then launched Lead Docket at that point, and we transitioned over to Filevine. We tripled the size of the intake team in the years following, but I stopped focusing on our marketing reports, and I started to really zoom in on our lost and rejected leads.
I love that.
Yeah. And that's really what birthed my passion for intake optimization. And then I went on to just help other firms across the country optimize their intake systems and try a couple of things that I didn't have a chance to implement at the time. And it's been truly a journey of just trial and error. So that's kind of what led me to launch Legal Intake Pros about nine months ago.
Now I have another question. I can't help myself. One of the problems that I see with intake is that sometimes the team doesn't expand. So it's like, let me throw more marketing dollars, which then increases the call volume, but it doesn't translate to more cases because now the intake is inundated with calls. And I just think even emotionally, from a human standpoint, after X amount of phone calls in a day, and knowing that calls to after-hours or whatever are also being missed, I just think that's not the right mindset to be handling these intakes, right? Do you see that as a problem too, understaffed intake teams?
Yes. But I do think that the way that we measure when we need to expand the team should come after optimizing. So that makes perfect sense. Remove, find a way to automate, find a way to remove all the manual work where you can, right? Remove the friction internally or remove the friction for the potential clients. And then let's reassess if this is more so an operational issue in terms of our processes or if we need to expand our team.
If we've optimized the intake team and our intake processes and we are at the point now where our response time is suffering, that's a really good sign. Let's scale up. Let's hire someone else on the team. But if you're choosing to keep the team at that size, then it's going to cost cases, obviously.
Going back to your experience, after working at that firm, you then worked at a digital marketing agency offering these services right before going off on your own. How long did you do that for?
I did that for about two years.
Wow.
About two years there. And it was so much fun because when you're in-house, when you're inside of the law firm and you're able to accomplish this there, it's really a challenge to see, can I do this for other firms? So when I was able to experiment and help other firms across the country and saw them achieve this transformation, it was like, I knew it was intake. And it was intake. It wasn't just there.
You're not crazy.
Especially right from me. So we had an issue recently where a client had me on upset email, and he was like, I was getting 28 cases and I got 17 this month. What went wrong? Of course, I just go to data, right? And I go and I look at results. Has anything changed? And there's results. Then I went and I looked at CallRail, and call volume was up. So I called his cell phone. I thought I was calling his cell phone, but I had just upgraded cell phones and it actually went to the firm. And it took seven rings for the firm to pick up. I called him back. I told him what happened. He fixed it. The next month they got 34 cases.
Wow.
So I know. But for me, it's hard to get everyone on board with this belief, right? Everybody just talks about, I want more, I want to generate more calls. And I'm like, well, are you maximized? And it's weird because it's not like I offer, people think I'm an expert. I'm like, I'm not an expert. They're like, well, you help me. I'm like, you don't want me to help me. I know it more in theory than intuitively, just from having a sales background, right, than in practice, right? Which is why it's so neat to have you and kind of hear you say all these things that I'm like, okay, that makes sense. I hadn't thought of that. This has been super helpful even for me.
Well, I've enjoyed this. And just to your point, sales is sales.
Yeah.
I don't like to use sales, but what you know and what's familiar to you, what you know for sure, of course it's going to make sense in the legal industry. Any industry, any business that is advertising for leads needs a funnel. It needs to nurture that funnel.
Yeah. I do agree that it's a very particular type of sales because of the empathy component.
Absolutely.
So again, that's where I kind of struggle with the terminology because sales in an industry like this sounds dirty.
It does, right?
But when you talk about the purpose behind it, then that really kind of shifts. And then just measuring numbers, you don't have to refer to it as a sales team. But if you're looking at these numbers, you have quality control in place, you're doing a lot of things that, in my opinion, I would consider sales. Maybe you don't give it that title, but you're doing things that I think are very similar. Even just a funnel, right? Using Lead Docket the way I would use a CRM tool, right? Having quality control in place, having a script.
And I agree with you. I love scripts as long as you're not reading the script verbatim. It's like you need to memorize the key concepts, the key talking points of the script, and then you have to say them in a way that sounds conversational and that makes sense to that point in time. It's not out of context, right? And I think that's, in my opinion, the toughest part, saying use the script but don't read the script.
Right. It's important for them to learn the opportunity to do role-play. We do role-play. We role-play. I'm telling you.
So Maria is right. It is sales.
Client acquisition is what I like to call it.
I like that.
We can call it client acquisition. But you're right. It's all the same. But it's different because there needs to be tons of empathy. And in my opinion, it's higher-end sales. And anytime that it's high-end, it's very specialized, and there's a lot of knowledge that the person has to have.
Absolutely.
So I think that's the key component. It's not just sales. It's high-end sales. And when you put it that way, it almost changes it a little bit. I want to start saying it that way.
Absolutely. And it is absolutely possible for someone besides the attorney to be really good at that and to follow up even better, I think even better.
Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate this.
Yeah, thank you. I really enjoyed this.
How can people get ahold of you? If you're not my client, please don't call her.
You guys can reach me at legalintakepros.com and Legal Intake Pros on all social media as well.
Perfect. Thank you, Ana. I appreciate it.
Thanks, Maria.
Thank you to Yani Smith for everything she shared with us today. If you found this story valuable, please share it with someone you want to see succeed. Subscribe so you never miss an episode. Leave a five-star review. It goes a long way to help others discover the show.
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