The Secrets of Law Firm Intake— A Conversation with Gary Falkowitz

Law Firm Growth Podcast Episode 2: Getting the Hidden Case Files from Your Existing Marketing with Gary Falkowitz

Last weeks episode we discussed how to increase case volume

Jan Roos: Hey guys, quick note on today's episode. We had some technical issues, which resulted in lower sound quality, but for anyone who's willing to push through it, I really think that this is one of the most valuable episodes we're going to post this season. So without further ado, let's get started.

Narrator: Welcome to the Law Firm Growth Podcast, where we share the latest tips, tactics, and strategies for scaling your practice from the top experts in the world of growing law firms.

Narrator: Are you ready to take your practice to the next level? Let's get started.

Jan Roos: So we're going to get a little bit into Gary's back to go with this podcast, but I thought it was really important to bring him on because this is an issue that I see a lot of law firms of all sizes struggling with. A lot of times you're spending money on. marketing methods on just spending time networking, however it comes to to get these leads in the door.

Jan Roos: And it's not the easiest thing in the world sometimes to convert these leads. So thanks again, Gary and welcome to the podcast.

Gary Falkowitz: Oh, thank you. I appreciate that, Jan.

Jan Roos: Let's get started. So tell us the whole origin story of how you came to be the head of intake conversion experts.

Gary Falkowitz: Yeah. So about 13 years ago I became a lawyer and in my first I was working for a small personal injury law firm, and I was intrigued by how they were getting their leads and their expenditures in the marketing.

Gary Falkowitz: I only did that for a few months before I became an assistant district attorney. A prosecutor in Brooklyn, New York did that for a few years. And then went back into the civil world, first as an attorney representing hospitals and doctors at a well known law firm in New York City. And only did that for about a year, until I came back to the plaintiff side of things, which was the first thing again I did after law school.

Gary Falkowitz: When I say by the plaintiff side, I was hired as a litigation attorney. for a very well known national personal injury law firm. And there was some trepidation or hesitation, I should say, at the outset because I knew that their, the reputation with personal injury lawyers was that they were ambulance chasers, and it just wasn't very positive.

Gary Falkowitz: Now, I didn't know much about it, but it was a good opportunity that I, I think I took and I ran with. First, I started as an attorney, and when I, got to this law firm, I realized they were getting a significant number of leads on a daily basis, whether it's through the web, whether it's via the telephone, and there was a whole intake staff.

Gary Falkowitz: And I was intrigued because I also began to learn about the, the settlement values of these cases that were being resolved. So I remember sitting down with my boss, at the time, I was probably only an attorney there for about three weeks. Okay. He kind of gave me one of these looks like, thanks so much for sharing that with me.

Gary Falkowitz: Now, please go back to your office and continue to try to make me money. And I, and I appreciated that. But you know, it turns out about two years later such an opportunity was presented and was offered to me to manage the intake process. for this law firm. Now, I had no idea really what that meant, other than having staff that would be picking up telephone calls that the law firm was getting and it was our job to determine which cases were worth signing and then trying to get them signed.

Gary Falkowitz: And I think that's where, by the way, most law firms, that's the way they look at the front end side of their business. But with how much money our law firm was spending to generate those leads and with how much of a return on investment that the law firm could anticipate, I began to dig deep to see how we could maximize that return.

Gary Falkowitz: And I began to find a lot of holes within our system. And then through the relationships I had with law firms throughout the country, I came to a realization that the holes we had were nothing compared to the holes other law firms had. Yet, everyone was still successful. They were still making money. So I decided to bet on my knowledge, to bet on my passion, I left my position as a managing attorney where, by the way, I was I was on TV for the law firm, I was in charge of all the, the, the referral relationships, and I left all of that to consult law firms on intake.

Gary Falkowitz: And I guess I'll fast forward. I've been consulting law firms throughout the country, something I'm sure I'll do until the day I retire, and then I decided to, Group or to team up with a software company whereby we can create an outsourced intake department known as ICE which is short for Intake Conversion Experts.

Gary Falkowitz: And really to end my, my five minute soliloquy here, did that because we realized that the resources that law firms had and the attention that they were providing to intake were limited. And it was hurting their ROI. So this is what we do right now.

Jan Roos: Well that's a great story Gary. I mean one of the things, you brought up a number of really really good points I'd like to dig into.

Jan Roos: But I mean one of the things you noticed is that there's this Some law firms that have been successful almost in spite of this, and, and one of the things I like to say often is that, you know, you can drive a car with three wheels, but you're probably going to get a lot better gas mileage when you've got four on there.

Jan Roos: And that kind of seems to be the situation with a lot of these law firms. I mean, maybe they're closing, you know, one out of 10 calls or one out of 20 calls, but without making any change to their marketing expenditure, if you can get that up to one to five you know, you're going to double or quadruple the amount of case files that you're going to be posting in a given month.

Gary Falkowitz: Yeah, and, and I'll, I'll use a statistic that's, that's should be used and assessed in my industry more than it currently is. We call it a conversion percentage. Now, I, I know that every industry will use that term and, and define it with respect to how their industry works, but within the, within the personal injury world, the way you really want to assess your intake and your law firm at intake is of all by, by assessing the following.

Gary Falkowitz: Of all the leads that you received, you first want to know how many of those qualified. And then you want to get a percentage of the ones that qualified, how many of them ultimately So if I had a hundred, my law firm generated 100 leads and 50 of those leads qualified for retention, but yet I only signed 25 of them, my conversion percentage would be 50%, And what I've noticed is that Over the last six to eight years or so, is that the conversion percentage is remarkably low.

Gary Falkowitz: Depends upon the case type, but I would say that it's only a little bit more than 50 percent when it should be closer to 80 or 90%. of your qualified leads.

Jan Roos: Yeah, well that's, that's some interesting information. And it's like, you know, a lot of the people don't go ahead and, and calculate those numbers for themselves.

Jan Roos: So I always try to hammer down that you have to know your numbers when you're running a business, regardless of whether it's a law firm or anything else. But, I mean, you can see the, the benefit to that, because if you're at 50%, you kick that up to 80. You know, you're, you're close to increasing your, your retainers by 60%.

Gary Falkowitz: And not only that, Jan, but you're talking about an industry where It's the ROI is sometimes so high that you can't even calculate it. What do I mean by that? So if I told you that I can get you a three or four times return on your stock market investment in three to five years, you'd say, okay, where do I sign?

Gary Falkowitz: And of course I would as well. When it comes to personal injury matters for cases that are retained. First of all, I would say 95 plus percent of cases that are retained resolved for a fee. And then second of all, Your, your return on investment, if I were to compare your cost per acquisition to the amount of money you earned, you're talking sometimes 10, 000 times, and that's a big, I understand that's a large gap from 10 but if you think about it, If your brand is so strong, and people start to contact you on their own voluntarily, where you didn't have to spend one dollar of marketing for them to contact you, because maybe it was a former client's neighbor's brother that contacted you, you literally acquired that case for zero dollars.

Gary Falkowitz: And if you, whatever you resolve it for you can't even calculate the percentage of the ROI, because there was no acquisition fee.

Jan Roos: Yeah, absolutely. And this is something that I see a lot, especially when we're talking about solo practitioners. A lot of the times people are talking about networking and you know, that they, they want to take the easy cases.

Jan Roos: They want to take the referrals from the brothers. But the thing is that when you have some outbound marketing efforts, a lot of the times that's, you know, you're, you're seeing another network effect. Fact that's coming from that, because it's the case that you're closing. I mean, I, I'd assume the people who are spending time on this are doing good work, and that's kind of how you can, you can build that stuff organically.

Jan Roos: But yeah, to your point, I mean, regardless of whether it comes from a referral or it comes from, you know, some whizzbang marketing method, at the end of the day, no retainer's getting signed unless the intake is gonna be in, in place. It's, it's a last step and everyone has to go through, which is why it's so important to focus on it.

Gary Falkowitz: Oh, 100%.

Jan Roos: Yeah. And this is the thing too. I mean from a lot of the experience that we've had on the marketing side of things, it's almost shocking sometimes when we're doing, we're doing these audits of how people are handling their phones and their email intake and stuff like that. And the thing is you know, it's, it's really well known and, and laws is a very interesting industry because it's the only place that there's not really any focus on something called like, you know, any, anything that can be compared to a sales team.

Jan Roos: And if you look at the fortune 500 or, or basically any other industry, the most Highly compensated person beyond of the founder or the C. I O is typically the top paid salesperson and they provide the the compensation for that because there's obviously a lot of more money behind that if somebody's making rain, then you know it's gonna be very valuable to company.

Jan Roos: But if you're talking about somebody who's You know, solo practitioner, maybe they're trying to get back to their work and they're not treating the person with with, you know, the respect of somebody who could be a lucrative client or, you know, you, you have your 15 per hour front desk person who has no incentive to go ahead and try to close that because, you know, at the same time they're, they're getting distracted from whatever work they're working on.

Jan Roos: So it's a, it's a really interesting opportunity for, for people who could haven't taken a look at this. So one question I also wanted to ask, so I mean, we've spoken about personal injury law and I don't want to, I don't want to tune out any of the listeners that might be doing other kinds of stuff, what other sort of industries have you worked with, Gary, and what kind of, if there's any numbers that you could share about that as well, it'd be good to know.

Gary Falkowitz: Yeah, so with respect to my intake company and my consulting, it's mostly personal injury law firms, but what I'm saying is really can be applied for any type of law firm or business that you have. And let me say something that I hope echoes for those people that are listening with whatever business they have.

Gary Falkowitz: You know, it's easy to spend money marketing for whatever product you're, you're looking to sell. And it's, it's even easy to provide a service. To your current clients. What's not easy in this day and age, given the competitive nature of really everything, right? I mean, there's, there are very few secrets.

Gary Falkowitz: There are very few industries or products out there where you don't have a competitor, right? So assuming you have a competitor, there needs to be more emphasis. on that sale, right? You know, you said it yourself that in some other businesses, some of the sales people will get paid a lot more money. Well, in a law firm structure, usually your intake staff are getting paid the least.

Gary Falkowitz: Regardless, whether it's personal injury, whether it's divorce, whatever it is, you're the people that are picking up the telephones, are getting paid the least. Yet, and this is what's really interesting to me, Jan. Clients of lawyers, are Rarely look to change lawyers once they've signed with a law firm. So in other words, it doesn't matter how bad of a lawyer you are, how infrequently you're following up with a claimant, how, you know, how much you may have been rude to that client on the phone for the last three years when they were your client.

Gary Falkowitz: Once they sign that retainer, once they sign an attorney client retainer with your law firm, they're likely going to stick with you. So there's got to be a higher emphasis. On getting them to sign that retainer and so much of that is disregarded because we're successful anyway, because the fees that law firms are acquiring make them profitable anyway.

Jan Roos: Yeah, exactly. And that's, that's a really good point. Especially now we're talking about this in 2018, we've got ABO, we've got Yelp, we have all these different things. I mean, if, if, you know, if you're, if you're advertising on Google, you know, you're not the only shop in town. That's a really good point, Gary, because it's like, if you, if, if you could be the best lawyer in the world.

Jan Roos: If your staff is rude to the person when they're ending up picking up the phone, they're not going to retain you. They're not going to get a chance to find that out. So yeah, definitely very, very good point. So, I wanted to ask you, as far as the kind of situation, you get in, people, people hire ICE, and then you're, you're doing an audit of their existing process.

Jan Roos: What are some of the common pitfalls that you've been seeing with law firms that don't have a good intake process?

Gary Falkowitz: How much time do you have, right? I would say, And I'll just pick a few of them, but one that really stands out is the lack of understanding and I mean it's hitting on what you just stated, it's the lack of understanding of the competitive, of your competitors out there and the claimant, if your intake staff don't have the resources, if the person picking up the telephone doesn't have the resources to both qualify that claimant and communicate either an interest to proceed or not on that very first phone call, your chances of, of making that claim in a client of yours are reduced significantly.

Gary Falkowitz: And I would say one of the biggest issues is we think we have the value of time on our side. We've convinced ourselves, believe it or not, and I think it's changing a little bit, and I'd like to think that I'm one of the people helping to change it, but we, up until recently, and for some law firms still doing this they've convinced themselves that because the caller is calling, they must be interested in retaining that law firm's services.

Gary Falkowitz: When in reality, the claimant is calling because they're considering that law firm, and that's a big difference. And we've got to treat that caller as if, I like to call this the the black check mentality. May I use an analogy real quick, John?

Jan Roos: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Gary Falkowitz: Okay, so, for those of you who don't know, in blackjack, your objective is to beat the dealer.

Gary Falkowitz: In order to beat the dealer you have to make an assumption. You have to assume that the card that is face down that the dealer has, it has the value of a 10. Right? So you make a decision based upon that assumption. If the dealer has 8 showing and a card face down, you assume that the dealer has 18 and then you make the decision you think is appropriate.

Gary Falkowitz: Well, for intake specialists and for law firms, there's an assumption you have to make with every call. And this is it. You have to assume that every claimant that calls you already spoke with one law firm and they're about to call another one after they speak with you. So what can you do differently on this one phone call that will allow you to sign this client more likely than the two other law firms that they likely spoke with?

Jan Roos: That's a super powerful mindset and thank you so much for sharing that Gary. I think it's really important that people have to get off this idea that it's a lot of times that they think that the, you know, the best cases will come to them. And, you know, if you ever have to get to the point where you follow up with a client, then that's not somebody that's worth worth dealing with.

Jan Roos: And actually, you know, I'd like to ask you as well, because sometimes, you know, we, we encounter this with some of the clients that we work with. What could you say in response to the the idea that, you know, these good cases just fall onto your lap? A lot of times people say either, you know, somebody wants to take too much time, they're not worth it, they require follow up, they're not worth it.

Jan Roos: What kind of experience have you guys seen with these cases that people might have to follow up with?

Gary Falkowitz: You know what? Let's stop looking for the easy road here, okay? I can't tell you how many cases that either I or a law firm friend of, you know, a lawyer friend of mine or a law firm I consulted with, took on a case, took the chance on a case that had many question marks and created a, a, and was successful, and acquired a fee for that case, okay?

Gary Falkowitz: It's this, we didn't pick, you know, if we, if you became a lawyer, you likely became, you likely put a lot of work. into law school, and into creating your own business, or into creating your own reputation within the industry. We can't stop. You have to understand that there's work to be done, and that if you want to maximize your, the attorney's fee for any case, you've got to take on those cases that may not seem to be clear or high valuable, or, you know, valuable at the outset, and then you've got to make them valuable.

Gary Falkowitz: I can't tell you how many cases that seemed like they were going to be garbage at the outset actually turned out to be a valuable case. And I want to go back one more, to one more thing you brought up, Gunn. So what are some of the things law firms could do differently? And I'm a big analogy guy, so I'll use one more analogy.

Gary Falkowitz: If you've ever gone to a car dealership, thinking about leasing or buying a car, there's one thing in common with every car dealership you walked into. And that is, that before you leave that car dealership, you walk into. A manager is going to come over and talk to you and shake your hand, okay? Why is that?

Gary Falkowitz: And the reason why is because the manager is your closer, right? The manager of a car dealership is the person that basically takes it into their own hands and says, I don't want this person leaving my shop without keys in their hand and a check in mine. That's the whole point of that manager saying hello to you every single time.

Gary Falkowitz: Well, why isn't the law, why aren't law firms taking a similar approach given our ROI? In other words, in other words, Intake Specialist speaks to a claimant, looks like a case the law firm's interested in, Intake Specialist conveys an interest in representing the claimant. Why are we not getting a lawyer on the phone?

Gary Falkowitz: Why are we not going one step further? Assuming that blackjack mentality I just described is, is actual, which it should be. Why are we not doing one more thing than every other law firm is doing? That's getting a lawyer on the phone saying, you know what ma'am, this is exactly the type of case we can assist you with.

Gary Falkowitz: My, my, I just looked over your case and I'm glad you gave us a call. Compare that to two other law firms. Who's gonna win?

Jan Roos: Yeah, absolutely. And that's the thing, differentiation is, is super key. And again, I really appreciate the analogies, Gary, so keep them coming if you've got more. This is another thing too, so this, this comes up often when when people are discussing doing marketing plans.

Jan Roos: We like to use the free consultation as a a method to getting people up. Because, you know, from what we've seen, it's really, really hard to advertise without a free consultation. But we get tons of objections from attorneys that go, Oh, I don't want to answer the phone all day. I don't want to provide these three complications to tire kickers.

Jan Roos: So what kind of ideas do you have around that kind of thing?

Gary Falkowitz: Well, I think, you know, it's, it's very difficult in this day and age to have an upfront fee for your business. There are many options out there and the smart the smart salesperson or the smart lawyer or the smart business owner is always going to say, let me give you a free consultation or a free conversation or a free meet and greet.

Gary Falkowitz: I think it's really important. I think claimants are understanding that there are many options. You, especially with the whole, with the web, with where we are digitally and everything's at our fingertips and you can literally compare three of the same product from three different service providers and you could, you know, compare apples to apples and decide what you want.

Gary Falkowitz: without even speaking to somebody. I think we have to run with this free consultation. And guess what? If after that free consultation, there's an interest in representing that claimant and there's an upfront fee at that point, then talk with the claimant about that. Explain to them why there's an upfront fee.

Gary Falkowitz: But if you're going to scare the claimant off right at the outset without even hearing what they have to say you're hurting yourself. There's no doubt about it.

Jan Roos: Yeah, you're not even going to get that call most of the time, and you know, hopefully you didn't spend too much to get that person in front of you, because, you know, it would be a shame to lose that kind of income.

Jan Roos: So, yeah, super good point. I wanted to ask you, so, you know, you've obviously been through, you know, tens, dozens, hundreds of these at this point. Could you tell me, for people who might be considering this, what kind of, I mean, could you give, like, a success story for, for, you know, an awful situation you guys were able to turn around, and what kind of results they were able to get from that?

Gary Falkowitz: Yeah, sure. So, I have a bunch of them. I'll use one as an example right now. There's one law firm I consulted with, spending a lot of money marketing their services. They have their own intake staff. And by the way, I consult with law firms whether they have an intake staff or not, whether they're spending you know, 20, 000 a year or 20 million a year.

Gary Falkowitz: And we, and by the way, my company, Intake Inversion Experts, we work with law firms that are either small, that have the money to market, but they don't have an intake staff. or that are large and they realize that they they're just not doing a great job. But going back to the success story there's a law firm I consulted with that was referring cases out to other law firms but because they were, they didn't have a good follow up process in place, they weren't sure as to which cases They were being, going to be honored with a referral fee on it and to make sure the other law firm recognized them as a referrer.

Gary Falkowitz: So after a review with the law firm we realized that there were hundreds of cases that went to this other law firm where they were not, Marked as the referrer and we got that fixed to make sure that that law firm, we're talking about, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe millions of dollars of referral fees that could have been completely disregarded or forgotten about.

Gary Falkowitz: And what I, what I realized in my consults is that there's so much under the hood. There's so much going on that lots of times law firms, they just don't prioritize the intake. They don't put someone in place to make sure that the T's are crossed and the I's are dots. They don't make sure, you know, their follow up process is limited at best.

Gary Falkowitz: I'll give you another quick success story. There's a law firm I consulted with. That was signing between 40 and 50 cases a month. And I told them not to spend any more money marketing. And that with my assistance we were gonna, we were going to increase that number of retained cases. They're already up in the mid nineties right now.

Gary Falkowitz: So they doubled their inventory, their attention rate because we fix things because we, you know, we found problems that and solutions to those problems, but don't get me wrong. Finding the problems is the first step. And we found solutions to those problems to help them maximize their marketing ROI.

Jan Roos: Now, if somebody, you know, we got, we're going to have a lot of law firm owners that are either, you know, small, large, medium they might be considering at this point, you know, what, at what point. Would somebody want to consider moving forward and focusing on this in their business? Like, what kind of metrics should they do, and how can one get started with evaluating whether this is something that they need to focus on?

Gary Falkowitz: Yeah, so, a couple things. One is, I'm almost done writing a book, so once that book is out, they should read my book. Number two, they can go to my website to get an idea. It's maxintake. com to get an idea on what to look at. But the reality is, they have to look in the mirror. You know, they have to understand, you know, am I, can I see all the leads that are coming into my office?

Gary Falkowitz: Am I having someone assess whether we made the right decisions with all of those leads? What's our follow up process like? What's our retention rate like? What do our intake specialists sound like on the phone? And if this, if these answers aren't clear to them, I'm not talking about making an assumption here.

Gary Falkowitz: If they're not clear to them, they don't have some of these numbers, you know, in front of them within seconds, then there's an issue. And if they're spending, and if you're talking about a law firm that's really spending anything more than 10, 20, 30 thousand dollars a month on marketing, you know, the numbers can become overwhelming depending upon your staff, which is why we created ICE in the first place.

Gary Falkowitz: We wanted to give smaller law firms, The ability, if they say they had the liquid, say they had the ability to go market for cases, but they don't have an intake department, right, or, or they don't have people that they can count on to respond, qualify, follow up, and retain appropriately. Well, now they have an option.

Gary Falkowitz: Now, one of the law firms, I gotta tell you, John, they're a large law firm. Some of the biggest law firms in the country. Okay? They are using our services for something called stale lead follow up. What that means is they realize where their Achilles heel is at intake. They may say, you know, we do a great job following up on leads that come into our office for the first week or two, but then we do a really poor job and we just give up on those leads and move on to the new ones.

Gary Falkowitz: So we've created an outsourced option for them just to send us those leads that you are either unable to qualify or unable to retain if they were already qualified. And I'll just give you one more quick success story if you don't mind. There's a large, there's a large law firm that came to us in September of 2017.

Gary Falkowitz: And I told them about this stale lead option, and I knew they had a bunch of leads. A lot of the large, large law firms, they're going to have a bunch of these older leads they didn't do a good, great job on. And I said to them, I want you to test me out. I want you to find all of your 2016, so at the case of leads that were at least nine months old.

Gary Falkowitz: I want you to look at all of your 2016 leads that you were either unable to qualify because you lost touch with the claimant or you were unable to retain when you wanted to retain it because maybe you decided that you gave up after a certain period of time. Is it okay? We're going to give you a thousand of those leads, Gary.

Gary Falkowitz: Do you know we retained 250 of those cases for that law firm? And now they work with us all the time. Because it's not that they don't understand intake. It's that they may not have the resources to handle intake appropriately. And we created ICE. As a dedicated intake department for law firms.

Jan Roos: You can obviously see the ROI, which is, which is something that like, you know, vanishingly few unsuccessful law firms and basically all of the successful law firms have a really, really good handle on.

Jan Roos: And it's, you know, it's one of those small hinges that swings a big door. You know, a targeted investment in something at the end of the funnel, I mean, you can have the best marketing in the world, but, you know, to use an analogy of my own it's like spending your entire salary cap on a football team when you're a quarterback when you don't have a single guy who can catch the football.

Jan Roos: And at the end of the day, it's about bringing the ball into the end zone, getting that retainer, getting that case ball, and getting that in your checking account, because if it's not, it's, you know, you're just talking about fancy numbers and, you know, pie charts and stuff.

Gary Falkowitz: That's exactly right.

Jan Roos: So, I think this has been a super helpful conversation, Gary.

Jan Roos: Where can anyone find you if they wanted to look into your services or more information around this? so much.

Gary Falkowitz: Yeah, I mean, there's probably only one Gary Falkowitz out there doing anything within the personal injury realm. So they can find me at maxintake.com, they can find me at intake. law, they can Google Gary Falkowitz and I'm sure it'll pop up.

Gary Falkowitz: But I'm everywhere right now, so it shouldn't be too difficult. And I'll say it this way, you know, if you're spending money marketing and you want to make sure that you're not leaving money on the table. Give me a call. If you're spending money or you're thinking about spending money marketing and you don't know if your intake resources are adequate, give me a call.

Gary Falkowitz: Anything having to do with intake in law firms I'm sure I can provide some value for you.

Jan Roos: Okay, fantastic. And you've already provided a bunch of value with this podcast, Gary, so thanks again.

Gary Falkowitz: Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you.

Narrator: Thank you for listening to the Law Firm Growth podcast. For show notes, free resources and more, head on over to casefuel.com/podcast. Looking forward to catching up on the next episode.