Extended Interview: Matt Spiegel – GNGF

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– Thanks for joining us. This is our extended interview with Founder and CEO of Lawmatics, Matt Spiegel, where we talk about intake and lead management and using automation to improve the customer journey at your law firm. The first part of this video is from our “GNGF Live”, which happens every other Wednesday. But the second part is the bonus extended interview where Matt and I dive into some specific examples on automations, his team has helped law firms that help them save time, save money, and actually just help their overall business grow. If you already saw the Live, I’ll put the timestamps to this extended interview below. Be sure to like and subscribe. The pace will fall along with all of our conversations on legal marketing and the business side of running a law firm. And watch this video on the platform of your choice, you can find everywhere we stream at gngf.tv. Alright, let’s get to the video. Welcome to “GNGF Live”, your bi-weekly asked the experts about all things law firm marketing and business growth. I’m Mark Omer author of “Online Law Practice Strategies” and Founder of “Get Notice Get Found”. My guest today, is a former criminal defense attorney turned legal tech innovator. I met Matt Spiegel many years ago when he was still the innovator behind my case. But today we’re talking about intake lead management, and automating key parts of the customer journey at your law firm and his new legal tech company Lawmatics helps with all of that. Matt and I are both working out of our homes today due to the current corona virus crisis. We were chatting earlier and both of us were definitely having some internet issues. We both have kids at home right now who are taking classes over Zoom. Kind of taking a little bit of bandwidth. Please bear with us if we have some choppy video and audio today. We will certainly work to make sure the content of this interview is so good that it’ll overcome all the technology issues. As always though, be sure to like and subscribe to our page and not just a video so you can be notified whenever we go Live in the future. Of course, it never hurts to show a little love in high five with your mouse over there to the Like button on the video. We’ve got monitors in the chat so ask questions and interact while we’re Live. And if you’re watching this in the future after we’re Live, we do monitor comments on YouTube and Facebook we’ll try to get back with Matt and ask any questions that you may have. On weeks when we’re not streaming interviews, we do drop videos as part of our GNGF Tip Series on YouTube. These are in-depth videos focusing on one topic at a time. Check it out on our YouTube page. Joe, you can throw a link to maybe one of our latest videos and the YouTube page there. Please check out the YouTube page and subscribe to YouTube as well because we drop it like that every other week some really good GNGF tip videos on law for marketing and business growth. To check him out, and let’s get to the interview. I’m very excited for this one. It’s going to be a great topic, something I’m really passionate about and matters even more passionate about, let’s get the interview. Matt, thanks for joining me today.

– Yeah, happy to be here. Thank you for having me, Mark.

– Awesome, and as I mentioned in the intro, we are in the middle of the corona virus crisis here where we’re both working remotely despite the beautiful green screen backgrounds behind us. You are not sitting out in the mountains and I am not in our actual GNGF studio. And I think we were joking earlier, that both of us have kids taking up a lot of Zoom bandwidth at school right now at home. Bear with us if we see any internet issues today. So Matt–

– Not only the kids going to school, also construction projects at home so there’s a loud bang at any moment in the background, that’s why.

– Totally get it. Matt, we met at, I’ll remember this, at a Blues bar in Chicago during the ABA Tech Show many many years ago like buddy guys or something like that. But for those that don’t know you as well, can you share your background? I know before all the legal tech wizardry, which we’ll even get to, you actually started out as a lawyer running a law firm, right?

– Yeah, pretty, I think I don’t know if it’s a standard story and legal tech, but it feels pretty standard. I did the whole practicing as a lawyer thing. I practiced as a Criminal Defense lawyer primarily for a total of about six years. I finished up Law School in 2005, not to dig myself or anything but 2005. And then I practiced at a bigger firm for a few years. And then in 2009, I decided to start my own law firm. I got kind of both sides of the spectrum there. I got the big law firm experience, and then I also got to experience the perils and the joys of starting your own solo law firm. And it was in doing so and starting my own law firm is actually what led to the idea for my first company in the legal tech space. I overlap them a bit actually practicing law, my own firm and trying to start, what would become my case at the time. But yeah, I had a lot of experience in seeing what it was like to run and market at a really big firm, and then trying to replicate that at a smaller practice.

– All right, at the large firm, you had some of the bigger software and technology, I guess there and doing that on your own, you realize like, “hey, lawyers need this too.” You kind of created my case, which I would say, it’s probably when the first easy to use, I’m going to emphasize that, Cloud based practice management tools. You really gear that toward, solo or small law firm being able to get set up and going in days.

– Yeah.

– You had great success. You sold the business. And as I was joking, I wrote off in the sunset, but then you’re back. What problems did you see lawyer staffs struggling with that brought you back to legal tech? Why did you start Lawmatrics?

– It’s an interesting path that we took to get here. You’re absolutely right about our kind of, our focus on product that my case and I’m a product-junkie, my team was product-junkies and we wanted to build a system that was super easy to use. And initially, my case was built just for my own law firm. It wasn’t even built for the masses, for other businesses. It wasn’t until after we kind of got down the road a little bit that we realized that other law firms could benefit from the platform that we were building. In doing all those things that you said, which was building my case, and then selling my case, and then actually, once we sold it, I stayed on with the company for a while, as you mentioned, it was during that process, about a year before I left my case. We always kept our finger on the pulse of the market. And we always tried to really understand what our customers need and what problems they were trying to solve. And what we kept hearing, one of the biggest problems was this idea about managing their leads. And most lawyers that we spoke to, they didn’t really know what that meant. They just knew that they had an issue with it. This was in like, 2014, that we really identified this as a problem. Now fast forward to 2017. And I’m looking to come back into the legal space. It’s a space, quite frankly, that I just know really, really well. I’d have been doing something completely unrelated for the previous two years and was not super happy with it. We know the space well, we had a bit of a reputation in that space, we thought it would be it’s a comfort zone. we wanted to come back to where we were comfortable and so we started looking at opportunities, and we kind of sat there and discussed these things, part of my team was also part of my team in my case previously. We discussed this opportunity that we had seen back in 2014 2015, about lead management, and we just saw no solutions in the marketplace to really address the problems. At the end of the day, we said we’re going to build… we’re going to basically take all the tools that we’re used to using at tech companies.

– Right, okay.

– And we’re gonna bring that into law firms and that will solve the needs that they have around this idea of lead management and

– Yeah, it’s a really good point because technology companies right now software companies like that. It’s just standard, table stakes to have like the HubSpot, the sales force, the Infusionsoft, whatever the tool of choice that thinks CRM and automation and follow up marketing and all these pieces. But you have, the marketing that goes on to drive leads in. Your SEO, your buying leads, whatever, and then you have the practice manager system which you’ve helped build one. Where in this customer journey, does Lawmatics fit it?

– Yeah, and it’s a really good way to look at it because we look at it as as a customer journey. And I think people in law firms aren’t necessarily programmed to think about that concept of a customer journey. But we in marketing or in tech firms, we obsess about that, we obsess about the customer journey. If you break down the client of a law firm, into I think maybe three different major portions of the journey, you have that moment where they’re first contacting your firm, you have that stage that they’re lead, right that they’re a prospect. They’re going from the moment they contact your firm up until the point that they’ve hired you. Once they’ve hired you, there’s another part of the lifecycle, another part of the journey, which is the the active case. Depending on the type of law, sometimes that’s pretty quick, sometimes it’s very long. And then within that case management, you’re going to have different portions of the journey. But that’s all specific to your practice area. And then you have a moment where your relationship with them as it relates to that case is over. And that starts a whole another part of the journey. And I think that’s actually probably the biggest part that law firms miss, is that after the case part, but where Lawmatics really looks to focus are those the first stage and the last stage so that stage that whole process where they’re a lead, trying to get them from contacting your firm to signing up, and then the other half is focusing on when they’re not, when they’re done being a client and making sure that, that is a very rewarding journey and profitable journey for you as a law firm as well.

– In talking about that, just really quick because most people I talk to when we talk about, kinda like the the lead process, this customer journey before they become a client. They think about it then. Not many people think about it afterwards, but afterwards, you’re talking about: hey, you want to get… Can they review you or me? Your reviews are very important, following up on the review process, following up about referrals, staying in Top of Mind awareness, there’s a whole bunch of business that can come from just continuing that conversation with a once somebody’s done kind of being an official case.

– Yeah, in my opinion, if you take, let’s say you have 100 leads, and you have 100 clients who are done with their case, so you have 100 like past clients. I believe that you can get as as much if not more business from the hundred clients who have already finished their case, then you can from increasing your conversion rate on the hundred leads that you have. Software like Lawmatics is going to be designed and a good strategy regardless of whether you using Lawmatics, you obviously want to do whatever you can to increase your conversion rate on the front end, but there is a wealth of opportunity in your past clients and turning that old business in the new business. And again, I think that, that is a much more opportunistic bucket than even the increasing of the conversion rates for your leads.

– Now I would totally agree. In fact, before marketing how did most lawyers continue to get business coming in the door and the referrals? It was people who had already worked them that they stayed in touch with, maybe they stayed in touch with them via networking or sending out a postcard just saying thanks or hi, whatever it was, just very basic. Top of Mind awareness to existing customers is how most law firms and many still today, get a lot of business. That, as a marketer who works a lot on that front end, I completely agree. And I push people all the time, they’re like, “what can I do today?” I’m like, “how’s your email list?” “Start there, before you do anything.

– Yeah. “Start with…” And they’re like, “what Email list?” I’m like, “well go through all your files “and get those emails. “You can do a lot–”

– You said something right there, it’s about top of mind. And we see so many lawyers that we work with come to us and say, “hey, well…” It’s not really gonna be a big deal on the backside of the client journey because even once I’m done with them they really are not going to need me again. And our response that is always that, that’s just not the right way to look at it because it’s not necessarily about what you can do for them again, they might need another lawyer that you can refer them to and depending on your state, you might be able to see some revenue from that referral. And this idea of–

– A friend, that they have a friend that needs a lawyer.

– Yeah, and they have another friend. And the idea is like you mentioned: staying top of mind, because a year from their case being over two years from like five years, 10 years from their case being over, if they hear anybody asked him about a lawyer, regardless of whether it’s the practice area that you that you deal in or not, you want them to think about you. K You want them to come to you as like, “oh, you are my lawyer, doesn’t matter, you do estate planning, “I need a personal injury lawyer. “You’re my lawyer so I’m starting with you. “Can you help me? “And if not, can you send me to somebody who can?”

– Yeah, it’s funny to say that I was on a panel discussion for Nevada State bars and some Bar Association very recently, we were talking about, “hey, what do I do right now and during this crisis, “when I can’t be at my office, I’m working from home. “I don’t really know how my next clients coming in.” And that was my advice was basically email everybody on your list and just remind them that any legal question they have come to you first. And you can help them find somebody. You may not be able to practice that, but just be that first call in, by the way, you’re probably going to get a few calls of people who go, “oh, I do need your help.” That was, that if you turn that into an automated system, now you’re doing it just on a regular basis, like it is part of–

– Absolutely, absolutely.

– And probably kind of goes into like my next question, because I wanted to talk to you about, we talked about spending all the time getting leads coming in, and then all the practice management tools to actually work through and be more efficient if you’re running your case, running your firm. But how does automatics help firms actually get more business? Already paying marketing companies, but how does Lawmatics kind of fit in?

– I t’s kind of along the lines of the things. It’s along the lines of the things that we’re talking about. Starting on the front end, you’ve got 100 leads that come in in a given month. I guarantee you that law firms are not converting 100% of those leads into clients. Infact–

– I can guarantee with you.

– Great, and it’s… To be honest with you, especially if you’re spending any money on marketing, if you’re a law firm that gets 100% referrals, your conversion rate might be pretty high, it’s still not going to be 100%, but it might be pretty high. But if you’re a law firm that’s doing any sort of organic marketing or digital marketing, your conversion rates are gonna be… They’re gonna seem low, even though they’re probably not, but they’re gonna seem low. There’s a lot of room there to increase those conversion rates. And the best way to do it is with automated processes, automated engagements, things that are designed to kind of capture the attention of that lead, engage them before they even have an opportunity to go call the next person on Google. If they find you, and they call you, and they’re going down, I use this as an example all the time like criminal offense. People don’t necessarily know criminal defense attorneys all the time. They go on Google, they do, they look for San Diego DUI lawyer and they’re gonna call people on that list. They call that first name on that list and they get a voicemail and then what are they gonna do, they’re gonna move on to that next person on the list. If you have a system and something like what we do at Lawmatics, is we’ll help you engage that lead automatically, so that they’re engaged with you, they don’t have a chance to even call that next person on Google. They’re getting a text message from you, they’re filling out a form, they’re booking their consultation without ever even having to get in touch with you. They’re doing it all automated. And those are things that just low hanging fruits to just increase your conversion rate. If you got 100 leads, and you’re used to… You get 20 new clients a month, if you can increase that to 30 clients a month. Or even just increase it by 10%. Get two or three extra customers a month. That’s gonna have a massive impact on your bottom line. And then, there’s obviously a lot more you want to do on the intake, but then, on the back end, we were just spending some time discussing. Lawmatics is going to help you do all of the nurturing that you need to do. Whether it is a drip campaign that is designed to kind of set up a cadence of emails that go out, as soon as someone’s case is over, that’s going to be very helpful. If it’s sending out an email to every one of your old clients on their birthday every year. Things that you as a lawyer are probably not doing right now, but you know damn well that you should. Lawmatics or system like it is going to be able to automate that process. You mentioned earlier getting reviews, that’s something that you want to do, as part of your automated drip sequence. At some point within a good small window, after the case is over, you’re going to want to request a review and that review is going to have a huge impact on the business that you get. I think the idea here is good system is going to do two things: It’s going to increase your conversion rates on the front end through engagement, and then it is going to increase the amount of… The dollars and the value that you see from clients who have already used your law firm. And that’s going to be done through, email marketing and other kind of little levers that you can pull.

– And when you think about it, some of the stuff we just talked about, like maximizing, I use the term maximizing the yield, which is a marketing, ROI type term, but basically, you’re spending a lot of money bringing somebody in, if you’re doing any kind of digital marketing like you said, the expense to take the exact same amount of money you’re spending and increase the ability to, like you said, maybe just two or three more cases a month. That expense is significantly less usually than a lot less money you’re spending on the marketing. So you–

– Yeah, oh yeah.

– I don’t know the details of that the pricing of Lawmatics but I’m guessing for a few hundred a month, for a cloud based system, or whatever. With a little bit of a setup work. For a few hundred dollars a month, you’re gaining more clients on the thousands of dollars you’ve already spent versus spending

– Exactly.

– Versus saying, “oh, well I just need to double “the amount of leads coming in, “we’re now you’re spending instead of 2000 4000, to go through that same small funnel that’s not converting your conversion rates that’s too low. Working that conversion rate, with the exact same spend, you get more clients. It is one of the things where as a marketer again, because we were in technology all the time we understand this stuff, it’s just so obvious, but working on that intake process in the lead nurturing, and then all the automation you can do there which, by the way, we’re saying automation and lead nurturing and stuff. We’re not even saying hire employees to do this, we’re saying, there’s systems and tools that can do a lot of this and increase the amount of thing. It’s just, for such a low additional cost, you gain so much more if you’re already doing a lot of the other pieces. Those things I kind of bang my head sometimes go, “why isn’t everybody doing this?” The interesting thing is, while lawyers said they needed it, all the marketers, and people were out there trying to help law firms were begging for this kind of product too. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about, the things that you’re unique to marketers, but it kind of seems obvious, but it’s not obvious.

– And another thing that you mentioned too, that I think is important, you’re spending this money on marketing, like you’re mentioning right now, you’re spending these dollars on Pay Per Click and you would be astonished, well you probably wouldn’t be astonished because of what you guys do. But we are astonished at how many people are spending significant amounts of money on marketing for their law firm. They have no idea which of those marketing campaigns are successful. And in a system like ours too, is going to help you understand which one of those systems are being successful and you’re not gonna… We always think about it is: it’s like, you have this bucket, that’s got a whole bunch of holes in it and it’s catching a lot of water, but a lot of water is coming out of the holes, but you can’t see the holes, you have no idea which holes to plug. And that’s kind of the analogy for, if you’re spending a bunch of money on marketing on different sources, and you’re getting a whole bunch of leads, you have no idea where they’re coming from, you don’t know which marketing campaign you should spend more money on, you don’t know which marketing campaigns you should pull back from. It’s important along with kind of the marketing automation stuff, to have a good analytics platform that can help you indicate and have visualization into which sources are working for you and the ROI that you’re seeing from those sources.

– And as a marketer who tries to be as transparent as possible, and I’ve talked about this in other episodes here, but a law firm should control that information. If you’re relying on your marketer to tell you how good their campaigns are, that’s the wrong person to tell you how good their campaigns are. Your systems, like a law firm system should be helping to understand: okay, these leads coming from this campaign, whether the Facebook campaign, the paid ad campaign, the organic traffic, this email marketing campaign that somebody wrote for you, whatever, how is that performing? A good CRM and analytics platform is going to, well should have that as a kind of core feature but like Lawmatics does, but they need to have that integration with Google Analytics, integration with maybe a call tracking tool like call rail or something like that. These are things are should be out of the box features that you can implement. We’re kind of going off to the next question I want to ask, but I wanted to make that very clear, that analytics piece, the law firm should own it, and most people don’t have the type of software that can give them that information.

– Correct, correct. I was talking with Aaron Garcia at a conference in recently and she’s gonna be actually on GNGF Live in a few weeks maybe follow up some questions with her, but she speaks a lot about the benefits of automating her law firm. She’s a criminal defense attorney as well, she said the benefits she’s gotten on her business have been awesome in terms of time, saving and stuff, but something very interesting, she talks about is that, she’s also seen this side benefit in providing a better client experience. the more she’s automated pieces in kind of her work flows. Have you seen that, with any law firms have begun utilizing like Lawmatics and this type of platform?

– Yeah, look the client experience at the end of the day, I know we’re talking a lot about the benefits to the law firm and how you can get more business, but at the end of the day, the client experience, those two things actually go very hand-in-hand, the better client experience if somebody has at least in my opinion, the more likely they are to refer business to you. With all of these platforms, I think Lawmatics, CRM intake platforms, practice management platforms as well. this idea of customers experience is critical and needs to kinda permeate throughout, not only throughout the software, but throughout Europe process as a law firm. For us at Lawmatics, we’re constantly thinking about how to improve the customer experience for the clients of our clients. We’re in a very interesting position ’cause it’s like, we sell a product to a customer at a law firm who then uses our product for their customers. We are constantly thinking about ways that we can sort of give them tools and experiences that are gonna deliver happiness to them and I think we’re seeing that a lot. What we’re seeing is people using Lawmatics not for intake and not for post case engagement, but actually exactly what you’re talking about: to deliver a better customer experience. Maybe that’s communicating with the client in the way that they wanna be communicated with. Some people might wanna communicate via Email. Some people might wanna communicate via text message, some people by phone. Having a system that allows you to to kinda interact with your client, the way that they want to be interacted with, is really key. Things like letting them easily schedule appointments with you using automated scheduling platform and things like that. I think technology has a way to really deliver, to really delight your customers even if you’re a law firm now. And we’re trying to do that too.

– And if you think about it, the consumers of a law firm are being conditioned outside of just their interaction with the law firm significantly more from a technology perspective. Buying a house, a car or whatever, you can do a lot of that online on your phone signing documents.

– Yeah.

– I think, the last time I signed mortgage documents it happened to come through while I was on vacation and I was able to do it from my phone with the inside documents. Having that–

– I think about and how we’re doing this right now too. On Zoom right?

– Yeah. And people are obviously more so right now during this crisis but even before you see people communicating via Zoom and and other video conferencing tools for lots of different reasons. And so, why shouldn’t lawyers be able to have the ability to communicate with their clients through Zoom, obviously, maybe some security issues right now, the lawyers need to think about when it comes to Zoom, but hopefully they’ve got that figured out. A lot of different ways that technology, I think it’s like, I’ve always looked at it and I looked at it this way when I had my own firm, as well as, the ways that that we use technology in our everyday lives to help things be more efficient and to just make our days more enjoyable, those should be the same things that we allow… that law firms are able to use with their customers. And I think we’re seeing a big push in legal in general to kind of move towards this idea of customer experience. Again, you’re talking about a term that has been super common in the the tech world for a decade. But getting law firms to think about, not just think about the legal side, the work that they need to do, but actually think about the experience that the person has with their firm. I think we’re seeing a bit of a shift to get there now.

– I always explain this, it’s like, I can pick up my phone, I had a few buttons, I can have food delivered at my house, I can have a restaurant ordered, I can have a car pick me up, I got booked my tickets and I have WiFi already ready for me at the plane. All the stuff from my phone paying for everything with a couple swipes and looking at my phone with face ID, whatever it is. But yet there’s still many law firms that require a client to come into the office and meet with them for 30 minutes before they’ll sign somebody up. It’s just is… And by the way, go down to a downtown location and pay for parking on their own time and go, walk to the outlet, people have time for that these days. I can do everything from my phone, why would I wanna do that? The lawyers that are figuring it out like Aaron was right. She’s seeing a better customer experience and as a benefit to something that she initially started off as a little bit of selfish behavior. It’s like, I don’t want to automate some stuff off my plate. I have more questions Matt, but we’re out of time on our Facebook Live, do you mind sticking around along? We could post this on Friday on an extended interview or something?

– Sure.

– Alright awesome. I wanted to go into some examples of automation. Things that help people save time, money, it grow business, we talked about some but I want to get some more detailed examples of what you’re seeing other law firms do ’cause I think kinda brainstorming. Here’s what other people are doing helps a lot of law firms go, “oh, I can do that too.” and I haven’t done that yet and I have… That’s what I wanted to spend a little more time talking about. But before we wrap up, where can people find you online?

– Yeah, so easy to find us, www.lawmatics.com is the website for Lawmatics, easy to go there and kinda find out what we do. You can also find me, I’m always happy to chat. I love chatting with lawyers anybody who has questions if they’re getting started on on kinda using a platform, it could be Lawmatics or any platform, I’m always happy to kinda share my experiences and help, and I can be paying pretty easily at Matt, M-A-T-T @lawmatics.com for anybody. Feel free to reach out.

– Awesome, we’ll put those in the chat, Joe if you can throw to make sure the URL you gave and then is email address, that’s awesome. Matt, thanks so much for hanging out with me today and for sticking around but for those joining today, be sure to like and subscribe our page so you can get notified when our next episode goes Live. We’re gonna keep on going here on our Zoom today but be sure to check out the extended interview with Matt on Friday, where can learn even more about all the details and brainstorm around, things you can do to automate your law firm. Thanks for sticking with us Matt. I do wanna keep talking about kind of examples and stuff, what do you do about law firms that know they maybe need some stuff, they need email marketing, they’ve heard automation, they’ve heard somebody say it really helped their firm, but they have no idea where to start? I feel like there’s a lot of people in that boat, what do you tell people?

– Before we go into like specific actually examples, it’s a good question, because it’s like generally how to get started and I think what we always tell people is, look, you have a process right now, even if you don’t think you have a process, you do. You have something that you do when someone contacts your firm. Starting on the intake side, you have something that you do when someone calls or when someone goes to your website and fills out a form. It may not be great, and it may be super manual, but you have some process. That’s where you want to start. You want to just start with the process that you currently have, and you want us to review it with somebody who, like at Lawmatics, you’re going to review it with somebody at our company. You want to just start with that and see how can you just automate the stuff that you have now. If you don’t change anything in your process, how could I just automate it? And that is bare bones place to start. Once you kind of get down in place, I think then you can start to think about where you want to plug some stuff in, where maybe the holes in that process. I think laying out that process though is really critical. It’s really the only way to kind of understand what part of your process needs to be made better.

– And coming full circle we talked earlier about the measurement side, the analytics and stuff like that. I guess getting something set up and then plugging in all the things you’re currently doing maybe from marketing or some other pieces, and then seeing where some of these holes are, like you said that the leaky bucket, not knowing where the holes are, you can find out where some of those holes are because you now control some of your data. Maybe you can also place to start to kind of say, “Okay, there’s the next thing “I need to do is fix one of those holes.”

– Yeah, getting things connected, if you’re not already connected to be able to measure your efforts, getting those things connected is obviously a very good place to start. But yeah, to your point, I think understanding what’s working and what’s not working is such a critical part of that process. And that’s not necessarily on the intake process is more on the marketing side of the house. And it’s so critical. At least most firms that we work with, marketing is one of the biggest parts of their budget outside of people. You’re spending all this money, if you don’t know that it’s working well for you. You’re just throwing money blind, you’ve got to be able to dial that stuff in.

– I think the idea of having the marketing tracks and everything, but also, just analytics all across the board, how fond you calling, how fond are the people calling in and how fast you’re getting back to people? How fast are they going to the next step in the cycle? If you have a process and you’re expecting somebody to call back, you can now measure it with a system like this.

– Yeah.

– It kind of like identify, “oh, I thought I had a process “but nobody’s following it some of these systems are great for identifying keens and things that you already thought were working. We got a–

– Yeah, pipeline management. Pipeline management and pipeline analytics are really critical. Things like you mentioned a couple of really good examples. And another good example is that we’re seeing a lot of people kind of get familiar with and kind of peek under the hood of something that they haven’t been able to see before is like your show rate. You’re scheduling all these consultations, what percentage of people actually come in for those consultations? And then from the people that come in for the consultation, how many of those actually end up hiring you? These are analytics that every law firm needs to really understand. Every business period needs to understand. Every business needs to understand: how much money am I spending to get a new case? How much money am I spending to get a lead? And then where does that go through the funnel? If you don’t have that you’re flying blind.

– And the data, it’s really interesting too, in terms of some examples, keep going examples, I know law firms that if you have four or five lawyers, maybe we’re talking more than a solo small amount, but like four or five, six lawyers, they can even now measure the show rates for those lawyers, and then, which lawyer has the best conversion rate and go, “oh, yeah, what are they doing different?” “What can we learn from them to kind of like teach the other “people, when somebody comes in? “Why are they closing more with you, “than this person over here?” And just to kind of have some baselines to learn from? Especially once you get the data.

– I got data, all you hear about is data. That’s all we hear about for every business around. It’s all about, data, data data. We’re actually seeing data play a huge role in the current prices that we’re in. You’re constantly seeing these different visualizations and crunching data in an amount that is a bit unbelievable. Law firms are not immune from the power of data. They’re like any other business and they need the data as much as any other business. And unfortunately, lawyers have not treated data as a tool so much in the past, but again, there’s a shift, I think to kind of using data to your advantage now, and tools are coming on the market to help you do that.

– The people I’ve seen do it, from few years ago, it was a lot of a Google Sheets, Google spreadsheets, and a lot of manual tracking. Once you can pull that into an automated system, but the nice thing is, people are starting today can start with an automated system, it’s great. It’s like people, years ago before practice management, what they were having to do and plug together and probably you had to do and your initial law firm, pieced together a whole bunch of system to get the system you ultimately want and then you went and build it. Let’s talk about actual example. You’ve helped a ton of law firms implement this kind of intake and automation and these kind of tools. What are some example automations that law firms have implemented that you think have maybe saved them time, or save them money, or maybe like helped kind of grow their business?

– I’d say that the best example is the lowest hanging fruit. And I think has the most impact. And it’s been that like, very, very initial intake engagement automation. It’s kind of bread and butter, it’s kind of what we… When we’re working with a new firm, we look to kind of get this portion set up. And there’s like slight variations of it, depending on the type of firm that you are. But generally speaking, it goes a little something like this, someone comes to your website or calls in, and as soon as they do that, you want to get them a text message that kind of says, “hey, welcome to our firm. “Thank you for reaching out, “one of our attorneys will be in touch with you right away.” Or something to that effect. And at that point, if you don’t know that… You’re probably gonna have an idea, you should have an idea of what type of case there Calling in about. Whether that’s the form on your website that has that information, or the person who answered the phone or receptionist service can get a gist, “hey, what type of case are you calling about?” After that, text message goes out. We want to get them scheduled for a consultation, you want to get them scheduled for a consultation. That is the call to action. That call-to-action is critical. And when I say call-to-action for anybody who doesn’t know what that means, it’s that, what are you asking the person to do with that given… With your engagement with them, with your interaction with them. And this situation, you are trying to get them to schedule that consultation for almost every law firm that’s out there. What we like to do is, you get that text message out, welcoming them to your firm, and then within a minute, you send them another email or a text message with a link to book an appointment on on your calendar. It’s an automated platform that will, just like Calendly or something will allow them to just pick a time available and get in. Now you’ve got them scheduled an email to talk to them. And look, you want to talk to them, I’m not saying that you don’t want to have, personal interaction with them, but you just want to get them engaged and set that appointment as quick as you can. Then what we do is right after that appointment gets set, we usually wait about another two minutes, and then we send them a deeper dive intake form. On the website, maybe they gave you their first name, last name, email address and the type of case that they had, personal injury. A minute later, you’re sending them a form: Tell us more about your case, what was the date of accident, what happened? Now you’re doing a couple of things, you’re serving a couple purposes. One: you’re engaging them. Again, they’re feeling good. They’re like, “wow, I haven’t even met with this law firm yet, but I’m already kind of working on my case.” And second: the lawyer is getting a ton of information that is critical to them, which they will now have at that consultation, they won’t have to get it again. They’re gonna have it all in front of them, they get kind of right into the meat and potatoes and start talking about their matter. That automation, and then it is an automation, it’s like a flow that you just build and will just happen automatically when somebody comes in. We typically see that increase conversion rates by around 20% just that one automation. There’s a lot of opportunities, you can see that big of an increase from something so basic, now imagine all the other automations, you want to get into. We see a huge opportunity. That’s thousands.

– I see something on that kind of email campaigns, work somebody who in criminal, it’s very common where you after the case, depending on your state, you can say, whatever year or whatever the actual, the timeline is the follow up campaign for hey, expungement conversations. And bring people back in for just really fast. it basically pushing paper for somebody who you know exactly fits the need that, because they’re in and you work with them and help them. It’s running those campaigns is almost, easy business. But few people do it. But with a system like this, it just have–

– I mean I was in Criminal offense, and that we had that issue too three years after a misdemeanor you can get it expunged, and I would always without fail, I always be like, “alright, this case is over. “Let me remind myself to call them.” You know how many times I actually reached out to them to get their expungement? Maybe once out of like 4000 cases You know how much money we leave on the table by not doing that? It’s crazy.

– And the other thing is we talked about–

– Sounds like that’s a really good example.

– Yeah, we talked about growing business, from all the follow up and increasing things by about 20%, maybe on conversions. But the other thing I want to make sure people remember is, you’re talking about, and this is an automated thing. Before somebody was answering the phone, ask these forms, following up, meeting with the person, getting somebody’s calendar in it, what’s your schedule look like. That was either a paralegal and assistant oftentimes the attorney themselves, was taking the time to do this. In addition to providing a system that is probably better for the consumer, because what they’re doing everything the rest of their life, you saved a ton of time for the attorney. And oh, by the way, yeah, more business.

– Yeah.

– Remind people that, it’s not just the other more business, but you’re getting time back in your week, like spend that time with the client, make it make a happier client, spend the time at home with the kids. if that’s what you wanted to. But you get time back in the week with automation. It’s just one of those things where I’m so happy that, when you’re like, “yeah, happy to come talk “about automation with the Americas.” It’s something that, it doesn’t get talked about enough, because the power that it has. And I’m happy to see, people like Aaron and some other people started talking about, automating things and I’ve seen some groups on Facebook, some lawyer groups are where they’re talking about this more and more and more, whether it be Lawmatics or some other solutions, it’s just good to see it. Thank you for coming on and sharing some of these things because the power to a law firm, especially for the dollar value. It doesn’t take significant investment. significantly less than you’re probably spending on marketing to be honest. Less than you can I spend on website.

– Significantly.

– It’s something, be sure to check it out. If you haven’t thought about this. Hopefully, we gave you some good ideas today. The automation, you gave the basic ones, we threw a couple advancements in there. And I think we scratched the surface. We didn’t talk about automatic document signing, which you can throw in there and get connected in. for people who need contracts before they can meet with somebody, payments for people who do paid consultations, you can have connected into the credit card system payments automatically happen. You’re not chasing people down to pay for consultation that you already did, which is very common. We’ve even scratched the surface, on some of this stuff. I don’t like overwhelming people, but there is just so much you can do for the price. Matt, thanks for spending the time talking with us today. And everybody, thanks for joining us on this extended interview. You got a lot of good brainstorming here. And if you need to hit Lawmatics, we have it above, it’s in the description on the YouTube here. We’ll have Lawmatics website and always hit matt@lawmatics.com.

– Yeah awesome, thank you for having me Mark and I hope everybody stays safe and healthy out there.

– Thanks, thanks Matt.

– All right see you soon, bye bye.

– Hey, what’s up, I’m Josh, thanks so much for joining us. If you feel like you learned something today, think of how beneficial it would be to chat with myself or another one of our marketing consultants one-on-one. Go ahead and visit our website to schedule your free consultation, it only takes a minute.