Buying Leads Along With Streamlining Processes

Buying leads for lawyers solves some of the classic problems of client intake. However, knuckling down and streamlining a law firm intake process is still a way to make the most out of every opportunity available. It should also increase your capacity to onboard new clients and grow your firm.

In this article, we're going to go step-by-step through three typical stages of a law firm's client intake process. During each of these steps — initial contact, client qualification, and client onboarding — we'll look at how to streamline your processes.

We are Legal Locator, dedicated to providing quality, real-time leads for law firms. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out or schedule a consultation.

Initial Contact and Pre-Contact

Initial contact is the first stage of client intake for any law firm. However, you can start your optimization process well before anyone reaches out to potentially retain you as an attorney. There are plenty of examples of how to do this:

● Build strong landing pages and advertisements: However the potential client finds out about you, that will influence the perception and understanding they have of your firm and its services. Landing pages or advertisements should be motivational, but they should also be specific enough to do some of the work of matching clients with your firm.

● Allow for robust self-identification: With the obvious exception of sharing confidential information, you want to learn as much as possible about your potential clients and their legal issues as soon as possible. One of the easiest ways to do this is to provide contract forms that help people to explain themselves fully.

● Automate the back-and-forth: Beyond providing contact forms to get the information you most need from prospective clients, there are other ways to eliminate the back-and-forth communications typical of the early intake process. For example, there are web tools available that allow people to automatically schedule initial consultations with your firm. Live chat is another useful tool that speeds up intake, collects useful information, and makes clients feel as though they are receiving an appropriate amount of attention.

Buying leads is also a good way to eliminate some of the early intake inefficiencies, especially before clients contact you. In fact, one of the main selling points of lead generation agencies is that they run the advertising and marketing campaigns for you — no need to assume any of that risk. All you have to do in pre-contact is to set your filters correctly so that they reflect the types of cases you want to bring into your firm.

After clients contact you, the single most important thing to do is to react quickly. Leads get stale very quickly regardless of the source, and a policy ensuring immediate replies will save you from missing opportunities.

Qualification/Screening

Screening clients is the next stage of intake. At this point, you have to determine whether the prospective client's case is a good fit for your firm. You'll also have to confirm that there is no conflict of interest that would prevent you or your firm from representing the person in question.

You can streamline much of the qualification process by streamlining your intake and pre-intake processes. Even something as simple as using the phone for initial consultations helps.

However, you'll still need to check for conflicts of interest. That can be a significant task depending on your practice area and the size of your firm.

Luckily, you have some options here. Better yet, it's relatively obvious which one is the most efficient based on the current state of your firm.

If you're running a single-attorney practice without many previous clients, you can probably just keep a spreadsheet of contacts to run through when you are screening a new prospect. This might take a few minutes, but overall it will be a lower cost to your firm than the next option would be.

Another efficient choice is to use dedicated software or business-management-suite plugins. This will be the fastest way to conflict check regardless of the size of your firm, but that only really matters when you find yourself digging through spreadsheets with thousands of contacts from multiple attorneys with years of experience.

A faster conflict check should help you close your new client relationship sooner. It should also help you convert leads that might have otherwise become impatient and selected a different attorney.

Client Onboarding

The final stage of the intake process is bringing the lead on as a new client. The goal of all your streamlining up to this point has been to get clients on board as soon as possible.

You can streamline the actual agreement process, too. For example, many attorneys now use online documents and signing, speeding up the traditional back-and-forth considerably and eliminating some of the need for meetings. Client onboarding is also usually a good time to set expectations about communications throughout the rest of the case.

Move Quickly and Make the Most of Your Opportunities

Every hour that you shave off of your average intake process can be added back in to increase your firm's overall intake capacity. Buying leads from a flexible agency like Legal Locator can help, too. We pride ourselves on delivering quality leads on a schedule that works for you, with options to change your incoming volume from one month to the next. Reach out at any time to get started immediately.