Would You Hire Your Firm After the First Call?

Law firms spend a lot of money trying to get the phone to ring.

Search, ads, content, reviews, referrals. You can do all of that right, get someone interested enough to call, and still lose them during intake.

I see this from the marketing side all the time.

If we send a firm 100 calls, I don’t just care that someone answered them. I want to know what happened next. Were they the right calls? How were they handled? How many turned into consultations? How many turned into cases?

Because “someone answered the phone” is a pretty low bar.

Your intake is the first real interaction a potential client has with your firm. Everything they saw before that got them interested enough to call. What happens from there has to back up everything that got them there.

Amber Wanner experienced this herself when her mom fell at a restaurant.

She called several firms looking for help and remembers feeling like another number through most of those conversations. The firm her family ultimately chose was the one where the person on the phone took the time to listen and made her feel like her mom’s situation actually mattered. amber-kevin

THAT is intake.

The other firms may have had great attorneys. They may have spent a lot of money getting found. They may have had perfectly good scripts.

Only one got the case.

And this conversation is getting more important as firms figure out where AI fits into intake.

You already know I’m not anti-AI. Tech is a huge part of our growth at Array, and I think firms should constantly be looking for places where it can make the business better.

I just don’t think every place you can use AI is automatically a place you should.

If I’m calling AT&T because my phone isn’t working, give me the bot if it gets me an answer faster.

If I’m calling an attorney because I’m hurt or someone in my family is, I want someone who understands that this is a real situation happening to a real person.

That’s part of what Amber is building with IsReal. The actual intake call stays human, while technology handles more of what happens around it, like recording and transcribing the call, pulling out information, and getting it back into the firm’s system.

I think there’s room for both. The bigger question is whether your intake is actually working in the first place.

And before you buy another tool, change your script, or rebuild the process, I’d start there.

Pull your last 10 intake calls and listen to them.

As you do, look for three things:

Then do something with what you find.

If the same question keeps tripping up your team, fix the script or training. If after-hours calls consistently fall apart, address after-hours. If your people are spending more time documenting the call than talking to the person, maybe that’s where AI belongs.

You’re already working hard to get the phone to ring.

Make sure you’re getting everything you can out of the calls you already have.

Until next week,
Kevin

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