Welcome to Episode 22 of The Legal Intake Experts podcast! For more than a decade, Answering Legal has helped growing law firms ensure they never miss a chance to connect with new leads. Now, we're pulling back the curtain to share our best strategies for strengthening your intake process and turning more callers into clients.

This one gets recorded at half volume, because host Nick Werker has a six-week-old asleep down the hall. What starts as a new-dad check-in turns into the most practical conversation we've had about preparing a law firm for the things you can't put on a calendar.

Co-host Tony Prieto makes the case that the time to build your team, your tools and your workflows is before you need them — and Nick admits he didn't pack his hospital go bag until the morning his wife went into labor. From there, our experts get into what an "emergency preparedness go bag" looks like for a law firm: an answering service you actually know how to reconfigure, intake staff you've trained and reviewed real calls with, and marketing and intake systems that talk to each other instead of pointing fingers.

Nick also delivers a call-out to firm owners who treat marketing and intake as somebody else's problem, and explains why the single most common reason a firm cancels its answering service is a disconnect nobody bothered to chase down. Plus: whether you can steal a baby (you cannot), where a six-week-old lands on the dog development scale, and whether driving a Ferrari in reverse really rolls back the odometer.

Chapters:

0:00 Cold Open: The Announcer Bit
0:22 Welcome to The Legal Intake Experts
1:32 Why Nick Is Whispering: There's a Newborn in the House
2:06 It Is Actually Very Hard to Steal a Baby
2:32 Six Weeks of New-Dad Life
3:12 The Dog-to-Baby Development Scale
3:42 Life Events Happen — Build the Team First
5:00 Infertility, IVF, and Why Nick Is Saying It Out Loud
7:19 You Can't Always Plan the Timing
8:50 The Go Bag Nick Didn't Pack
10:15 Ripple Effects: Remote Tools and Workflows
12:12 Being In the Office Is No Excuse for Bad Workflows
17:02 "Handle Everything Life Throws At You"
17:22 You Can't Close Up Shop, So Restructure Instead
18:44 Training Your Staff to Handle Intake
21:31 Intake Should Not Be Your Job
24:58 Nick's Call-Out: Lawyers Who Abdicate Responsibility
29:17 There Is No Set-It-and-Forget-It Tool
31:53 Why Firms Actually Cancel: The Disconnect
36:48 Breakfast Nooks and Active Participation
38:49 Ferris Bueller and the Odometer
39:59 Sponsor and Sign-Off

Topics Covered:

-Building the plan before you know you need the plan — babies, deaths in the family and everything else you can't schedule
-Flipping your answering service workflows before you take time off, and training intake staff by flagging and reviewing real calls
-Why intake shouldn't be the lawyer's job, but the buck still stops with the lawyer
-The abdication problem: "the leads suck" with no feedback loop between agency, intake and case outcomes
-Reverse-engineering a drop in signed cases, and the unforwarded phone number behind most cancellations

People & Resources Mentioned:

-Christopher Earley — Earley Law Group, host of The Earley Show
-Ron Latz — LegalFenix
-State Bar of Arizona practice management hotline
-Slack
-Google Ads, Meta and SEO
-Ferris Bueller's Day Off

The Legal Intake Experts is a part of the Answering Legal Podcast Network. Learn more about the show here: https://tinyurl.com/yk9x2p58

Want to connect with our experts?
Reach out to Nick Werker via email at nick@answeringlegal.com
Reach out to Tony Prieto via email at tprieto@answeringlegal.com

Interested in learning more about Answering Legal? Book an appointment to speak with us here: https://tinyurl.com/watz5s8h

You can also give us a call at 631-502-5070.

Welcome to Episode 21 of The Legal Intake Experts podcast! For more than a decade, Answering Legal has helped growing law firms ensure they never miss a chance to connect with new leads. Now, we’re pulling back the curtain to share our best strategies for strengthening your intake process and turning more callers into clients.

In this one, things really go off the rails, as host Nick Werker has taken over full control of the show. With producer Joe metaphorically duct taped to his chair and co-host Tony Prieto also held hostage, Nick spends the episode confessing some of Answering Legal's past failures.

Nick first takes us inside a pair of call-forwarding mishaps that could have been avoided through better education and communication from his team. Our experts then turn their attention to mistakes involving law firms’ online listings and discuss nightmare scenarios like Google marking your practice as closed, competitors suggesting damaging edits to your profile or your firm’s location coming up as a Chipotle. This episode features one mistake after another, with plenty of valuable lessons about what not to do at your practice.

Chapters:
1:01 Nick Usurps the Episode (and Takes Producer Joe Hostage)
2:14 New Segment: Mistakes
5:53 Mistake #1: Call Forwarding and the Missed LSA Calls
8:08 Why Separate Tracking Lines Are Worth Setting Up
10:26 Should You Forward Your Cell Phone, Too?
13:40 Mistake #2: A Bad Review, a New Phone Provider, and a Surprise IVR
16:51 Taking Ownership Instead of Blaming the Client
19:14 Mistake #3: Where Law Firm Marketing and Intake Overlap
21:57 Google “Suggest an Edit” and the Lawyer Whose Office Was a Chipotle
24:29 Intake Lessons That Apply to Any Business
25:41 Freeing Producer Joe / Outro

Topics Covered:
-Setting up separate lines for LSAs, Google Ads, Spanish-language billboards, and other sources so messages arrive pre-labeled
-Conditional call forwarding on a personal cell phone (and why your clients will love it)
-Taking ownership of a bad review instead of pushing blame onto the client
-Auditing your local presence, listings, and tracking numbers

People & Resources Mentioned:
-Gyi Tsakalakis and Conrad Saam — Lunch Hour Legal Marketing
-Near Media
-Christopher Earley — Earley Law Group
-Delisi Friday — First Call Friday
-Darren Shaw — Whitespark
-Michael Cooney — WhatConverts
-CallRail
-Google Local Services Ads (LSAs) and Google Business Profiles

The Legal Intake Experts is a part of the Answering Legal Podcast Network. Learn more about the show here: https://tinyurl.com/yk9x2p58

Want to connect with our experts?
Reach out to Nick Werker via email at nick@answeringlegal.com
Reach out to Tony Prieto via email at tprieto@answeringlegal.com

Interested in learning more about Answering Legal? Book an appointment to speak with us here: https://tinyurl.com/watz5s8h

You can also give us a call at 631-502-5070.

This podcast is produced and edited by Joe Galotti. You can reach Joe via email at joe@answeringlegal.com