Life Beyond the Briefs
At Life Beyond the Briefs we help lawyers like you become less busy, make more money, and spend more time doing what they want instead of what they have to. Brian brings you guests from all walks of life are living a life of their own design and are ready to share actionable tips for how you can begin to live your own dream life.
Life Beyond the Briefs
Money Down the Drain: How Bad Phone Service Cost Us $18,000
Are you pouring marketing dollars into a leaky bucket? That's exactly what's happening at law firms with broken intake systems. As a personal injury attorney who has quadrupled my firm's revenue in just four years, I can tell you with absolute certainty: fix your phones before spending another penny on marketing.
In this eye-opening episode, I share the shocking story of how we fired our answering service within just 48 hours of hiring them—after they cost us $18,000 in potential revenue from a single mishandled call. When a potential client phoned at 10:05 PM explicitly asking to schedule a consultation, the answering service operator ignored her request for ten minutes until she hung up in frustration. With our average fee value of $18,000 per case, that single botched interaction was extraordinarily expensive.
The problem extends beyond answering services. Many firms create unnecessary barriers between themselves and ready-to-hire clients. Your staff must fundamentally believe that hiring your firm is the best possible outcome for someone with a legal problem. As I tell my team: "Nobody calls a plumber asking how to fix a toilet—they want the plumber to solve their problem." When potential clients reach out, they're raising their hand for professional help, not a DIY tutorial.
I share the simple but powerful phrase that transformed our intake process: "You sound like you need a lawyer, and I can help you." This straightforward approach helped us recover 25 cases (worth approximately half a million dollars) just by calling back people who had previously reached out but never signed with us or explicitly declined our services.
Before investing in more lead generation, ensure you have a clearly defined "deal box" of case criteria, staff who believe in your services, and an intake process that facilitates—rather than obstructs—the path to becoming your client. Your potential revenue is already calling; are you ready to answer?
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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
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Hello, my friends, and welcome to another Friday solo episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live lives of their own, design and build practices they enjoy showing up to on Monday. Now today's episode is about the number one way that I see law firms bleeding money, and that's on the phones. If you don't have your intake figured out and you don't have each part of the process doing the task that it needs to do, you shouldn't be investing any other dollars in your marketing until you get that fixed. And today's episode is about your nights and weekends and after hours and rollover phone service. And if you aren't listening to the calls, today's episode is going to scare you, because you should be listening to the calls every once in a while. You don't have to listen to all of them. You shouldn't listen to all of them, and maybe it shouldn't even be you, but somebody in your office should be spot checking the phone calls with your after hours answering service just to make sure that they're staying on script, to make sure the phone isn't ringing forever. Listen, this is a challenging, challenging industry to be in. I think I am now with the best of the best, but it hasn't always been this way. Today's episode is about the time that we fired our answering service within 48 hours of hiring them because they cost us $18,000. Enjoy.
Speaker 1:Today's episode is going to be about acquiring new clients, removing barriers to client acquisition and the mistakes that law firms and businesses in general because we all kind of make the same mistakes the mistakes that businesses make as they're approaching new client acquisition. The primary thing that I think we get wrong is that we make it too hard to hire us, and if you don't know who I am, my name is Brian Glass. I run a personal injury law firm here in Fairfax, virginia, and I've been with this firm for about four years. In the four years that I've been here, I have 4X our revenue of the personal injury auto accident section, and I did that largely by compressing the amount of time that it took from the time that a client called us to the time that they retained, and then compressing the amount of time that it took from the time the client was finished treating to the demand package went out the door and we could move their case to a conclusion. I am all about speed and removing barriers, and barriers is one of the problems that a lot of law firms have, especially small law firms, in client acquisition. So backstory on this 24-7 call answering service Pre-COVID we used a call answering service that would effectively be our rollover phone calls during the day, when the reception and the staff didn't pick up, and then they would also handle calls on nights and weekends.
Speaker 1:During COVID, as the world compressed and as the government gave out free money to people who weren't working, companies like this had a really, really hard time hiring people and hiring and keeping good staff employed. And so at one point, hiring and keeping good staff employed and so at one point we were going back and listening to calls and recognizing that there was this period of like 15, 16, 17 rings before the call got picked up by this after hours answering service, and that's obviously that's not a good client experience and I can't imagine why anybody would listen to the phone ring 15, 16, 17 times and not hang up. But some people didn't hang up and then when they got on the phone with these people, the customer service was not very good anyway, and so we ultimately terminated back in like 2001, the relationship with one of these services and went to just a straight voicemail system. So if you called us after hours or you called us on a weekend, you got our voicemail and what we found with that was that if a new client called and got through the voicemail and left the voicemail Friday night at like 7 o'clock by the time we called them on Monday morning they oftentimes weren't picking up, so in some case we were missing. You know, 50% of the people that called us over the weekend we could never get in touch with again.
Speaker 1:Now we have no way to know if those were good cases, bad cases or otherwise, but what we do know is that we never got the chance to evaluate the case, for did we want it or did we not? And so we cycled back around a couple of months ago to interviewing call answering services to have somebody to step in and to experiment with. Are we missing viable cases on nights and on weekends? And it turns out in the first 48 hours of the experiment that yes, of course we are right. Of course there are people who are calling because they work their own jobs from nine to five and so they're calling after hours to try to connect with a lawyer. The reality of that practice is they're not connecting with a lawyer after hours. But they are connecting with somebody who interrupts their search, schedules a phone call with us or somebody on our team and then stops them from calling the next law firm. And that's really the point of what we're trying to accomplish here is I don't want to sign you up at seven o'clock on a Friday night. I don't want somebody who's outside my office making a decision about cases that we're going to take or that we're not going to take, but I do want to interrupt your search and I do want you to stop calling other lawyers.
Speaker 1:And so we go through this whole process with this 24-7 vendor and I'm not going to say publicly who they are, although I've told the folks in our mastermind group who they are we go through the whole process and we give them scripts really three scripts, right? So I have an auto accident practice, we have a long-term disability practice and then we have an other script, right? So if it's one of these two cases, then you follow the script, and if it's not one of these two cases, then we go and we just collect a little bit of information and we try to refer them out if we can, and in my view this should be like one of the easiest jobs in the world, right, you should be able to get on the phone with somebody, go through the script, capture their name, phone number, email address, what happened to you, what day did it happen? What are your injuries? Okay, great, sounds like a case that's in our deal box and I'll come back to that later and schedule a phone call through the Calendly app, through our Calendly link. Like, it's really easy. This thing just syncs with my calendar or our intake coordinator's calendar and you can just schedule it.
Speaker 1:It turns out this is not all that easy to do in practice. So the very first call that I listened to, the thing goes on for 10 minutes. At minute two the caller a new caller says all I want to do is schedule an appointment with a lawyer. And the guy continues to do an intake, not on our script, but continues to ask her questions about our auto accident case. At minute eight she says again, I want to just schedule a phone call with a lawyer. She's called us at like I think it was 10.05 at night, something like that and anybody who's calling at 10.05 has zero expectation that they're going to get through to speak to a lawyer, except maybe in a criminal defense practice, certainly not in an auto accident practice. So this is not what she was calling for anyway, she's calling only to schedule a time and she probably was calling thinking she's going to get a voicemail and get a call back to schedule a time to talk to a lawyer. Finally, the caller gets so frustrated with this intake operator at minute 10 that she just hangs up on him. And so I read through this intake and we get an email with a summary of the call and at the bottom of it it says she didn't want to schedule a call right now. So I go back and I listen and I say who would call a law firm at 10.05 at night on a Saturday night and not want to schedule a phone call? Like, what else are you calling for? And so of course that's not an accurate description of what happened.
Speaker 1:As we're listening to the call. She's asking over and over and over again to schedule the call and the guy just doesn't do it. So mistake number one is that's a terrible customer experience and I happen to know that our average fee value in an auto accident case is $18,000. So if that's an average case that probably cost me $18,000. So that lady hung up, she wouldn't return our calls the next day when we tried to reach her and she's probably gone like a ghost. So that's mistake number one is doing the job improperly.
Speaker 1:Mistake number two is how they handled it. So we we sent an email to the sales rep, whose response was that she was forwarding it on to the customer service people. The customer service people then responded that they were going to have a talk with the rep. Now, keep in mind this is the very first call that these people have done for us. So that exchange happens on a Monday. On Tuesday we get another phone call from a guy with a workers' compensation case. So this is outside of our practice area.
Speaker 1:The intake person on the other end of the phone doesn't follow any of the scripts, spends the first five minutes just talking with this guy, finally gets around to the script somewhere around minute 10, against a 15-minute phone call that we're paying for by the minute for a case that we know we would not take because it's outside of our deal box, and it ends with an appointment being set with one of us, so so violating like all of the rules of how this is supposed to have gone. It's a case that we know just by looking at it we're not going to take it and and I'm spending I don't know $30 on this phone call. And so again I emailed the rep and I said this is the second time in two days that I'm having to email and say this is a problem and your sales rep has been unprofessional and they're representing our brand and we just can't have that. And again I got some responses like okay, we're escalating this and so ultimately we just decided to terminate the relationship because it there's no indication that it's getting any better and there's no indication to me that there's anybody on the other end of the phone whose hair is on fire trying to solve this problem, that there've been two really bad calls within the first 48 hours, which is an indication to me that maybe what seems like a bad call to me doesn't seem like all that bad of a call to them. So the practice pointer coming out of that is, as a business owner, when you get notified of client complaints like this, you've got to make a really big deal of you personally reaching back out to the client and apologizing for them if their complaint is legitimate, and making sure that you are sustaining this relationship Because in my mind now we've gone 48 hours, two bad calls and no response on the other side.
Speaker 1:If somebody in some level of status at this company had reached out to me and said, oh my God, I can't believe we got this wrong the first two calls that we're going to comp the first month and there's not going to be another call like that the rest of the month, we would still be a customer and I wouldn't be making this podcast about them, unlike having this done in-house, where I can train one person who's answering my calls. I have no idea who's picking up the next call that's coming in, and for every call that they screw up, that's a client that would have retained us but didn't because of their experience with the customer service rep. We're losing $18,000 in revenue, which really brings me to my the point that I thought this podcast was going to be about this morning when I was driving in and before the second bad phone call happened, which is that before you go and spend any more money on marketing for your firm, on pay-per-click advertising, on taking somebody out to lunch as a referral, on SEO, on whatever it is that you're spending money on, before you do that you've got to fix all of the holes in your leaky intake bucket because it doesn't matter how many more cases we've pushed through that bucket, if I've got an initial person who's pissing callers off and making them hang up, then we're just pissing that money away. So here's the steps that I would take to fix a leaky bucket and the steps that we're taking at Banglass Law. Number one you've got to have a really well constructed deal box. You've got to be able to say to your intake team and your intake team has to articulate to you the kinds of cases that you want with a high degree of specificity.
Speaker 1:So for me, on the auto accident side, I want only auto accidents. I don't want slip and falls. I don't want medical malpractice cases. I don't want products liability cases. I have a friend that I was texting with who's telling me he's doing a one-off products liability case. Like, shoot me, I want, I want to know the routine of the case and I want it to be something that I'm very good at doing, and I'm very good at doing auto accident cases. So I want clear liability cases where I don't have a prior history of injury to the same part of the body. I want somebody who's gone almost immediately to medical care. I want somebody who's got a course of medical care that's been prescribed to them. I don't want somebody who's coming to me first and asking what do I do next To me. Those people are not necessarily all that badly hurt, and so that's a rule that I just use as a strike. Like, I've got categories of people who I won't represent and that's just outside of my deal box, and somebody who calls me before they've gotten medical care is one of them. And then, of course, I want to know that there's auto insurance.
Speaker 1:I want to know that we don't have, you know, a judgment proof defendant that will never get any money out of, because, despite the number of clients that'll tell you, it's about the principal, it's not about the money. It is always, always, always about the money. I've never gotten to the end of the case and had it not be about the money? So that's it. Number one and most important, you have to know exactly what you're looking for, and your staff has to be able to articulate back to you this is exactly what we're looking for. Why? Because you don't want to be bothered by what about this? This is outside the deal box. Is this the kind of a case that we want to work on? Every time you're bothered and have to respond or get on the phone and talk to somebody who's a case that you know you're not going to work on, you are wasting your time and you're taking away from the cases where you really could be spending more time adding more value to a good client's case. But here's the other important thing that having a really well-constructed deal box allows you to do. When you put up these walls and these barriers around, these are the kinds of cases that we can accept. Then it allows your staff and associates to make decisions about cases that we can help out on or not. You remove some of the thinking about how do we add value to this case and it streamlines the process of a prospective client reaching out to you to becoming an actual paying client.
Speaker 1:Second thing you have got to know, and your staff has got to believe, that hiring your firm to solve the client's problem is the very best thing that the client can do for their life. Nobody calls a law firm because they want to be taught how to solve their problem. They call the law firm because they want the law firm to solve their problem because they want to hire a lawyer. Think about it this way you don't call a plumber and ask the plumber, how do I fix a toilet. You don't call a mechanic and say how do I change my tires. You take your problem to these professionals and then you let them solve them. And when you have staff that doesn't believe that it's in the client's best interest to hire the law firm, you end up losing cases to well. This sounds too easy. Let me try to benefit your life by telling you how it's actually done. Now there's a space for that.
Speaker 1:In the auto accident world. There's a space where cases below a certain threshold, you're not going to get any value from a lawyer. We're just not going to add enough value to your life to justify the fee. And so it's good to have how-to products to be able to give those people be able to give somebody who's in a crash where they've only gone to an emergency room, but those people don't get law firm lawyer time. Those people don't get law firm lawyer instruction because now we're giving legal advice to somebody who's not a client. What we want to give them is very basic. Here's how to collect your medical records. Here's how to get it to the insurance company. Here's how to get an offer from them. I will tell you that this requires training, coaching, monitoring and retraining and that even in our law firm we have cases where we've looked back and we've said I don't really understand why the advice to the client was go and handle it on your own, and so, as a law firm owner, you can't trust that.
Speaker 1:Once you've given the instruction, once it's always going to be filed, you have to go back and look at the intake notes. You have to, every once in a while, have somebody who goes back and listens to the phone calls to make sure that you're not missing out on a big cache of cases. Because one of three things happens when we tell clients how to solve their problems on their own and we don't take up the mantle and take their case and go and solve them for them. Number one client doesn't listen to you at all and he calls the next lawyer on Google. Now, if you believe premise number one, that you are the very best lawyer and you have the very best law firm to solve their problem, then it is your ethical obligation to prevent them from hiring the next lawyer on Google. You are doing them a disservice by telling them I can't help you for this reason, or I think your case is too easy for this reason and you should go and hire somebody else.
Speaker 1:If you don't have a practice that's built out that's capable of handling smaller cases and some practices aren't built this way then find a young lawyer who you trust that you can refer those cases to, or hire somebody to handle those cases in-house. The other couple of things that might happen when you teach a client how to solve their problem on their own instead of taking up their case for them is that number one, or I guess number two is that number two they listen to you and they go and act on it and they screw it up and they call you back and now the problem that you're solving is thornier than it was to begin with. Number three they listen to you, but they don't hear you correctly and they screw it up, and then they come back and they blame you. Now, to be completely fair, some callers who are looking to be taught how to handle their case, and you should have a system for identifying those people who have done a little bit of web research and who are now mining you for information and making sure that we're limiting the amount of time that we're talking to them, because, as I told my staff earlier this week, we're not running a charity, we're not running a pro bono law center. We're running a for-profit business that allows us to do things like pay salaries and pay benefits and foster a place where we like to think it's the greatest place an employee will ever work, and I can't do that if we're giving away all of the information for free.
Speaker 1:Okay, so if you've made it this far and you're recognizing that maybe this is an issue that you have in your practice, then let me give you the piece of advice that helped us in 2019 when I started here so back in 2019, I was listening to the associate who was here at the time do these intakes with clients and just put up barrier after barrier to why we couldn't take an otherwise viable case. You need to send us a police report first. You need to send us a declarations page first. You need to go and get some of your medical records first. You need to fill out all these forms first.
Speaker 1:And I got really, really frustrated and at one point I just went outside his office and I wrote on the whiteboard across from him you sound like you need a lawyer and I can help you. And I said when you get to this point in the conversation, that's all you have to do. And all you have to do is deliver those two lines with enough authority that the person who is called looking for a lawyer to solve their problem is going to say yes, it's not that hard. What we're doing retaining clients who have reached out to you is not that hard. We're not making cold call sales. We're not having to get through three levels of manager to find a decision maker. You've got somebody that's raised their hand and they said I have a legal problem and they want your help, and you're putting up all of these barriers to them becoming clients. And so I said you know, I bet there are a number of clients within the last year for whom we raised so many barriers that they just gave up.
Speaker 1:And so I had our other associate pull the list of clients that we had talked to that had not signed up with us and had not told us that they'd hired another lawyer. And I think we found about 40 names on that list and I said you just call all of these people and find out what's going on with them. Did they settle their case on their own? Did they hire another lawyer or are they still hanging out somewhere? And of that list of 40, 25 of them were still hanging out somewhere. They hadn't hired another lawyer. Maybe they'd talked to somebody else, but they hadn't hired anybody else and they hadn't settled their case on their own.
Speaker 1:We got 25 cases out of that batch of clients just by making new phone calls, and at that time we're averaging three or four or five clients signing up every month, and so we did like five months worth of new client signups just by calling people who were already on our list, who had reached out to us in the first place and asked us for help, and either we'd said no to them or they got frustrated and stopped talking to us at some point.
Speaker 1:So just know like, if you've gotten this far and you're about to go in and kill your intake staff because you think this might be a problem, there is a way to salvage this. And you know, for me again, since our average case value is $18,000 fee, if you're able to find 25 cases, then the math on that is almost half a million dollars. By the way, guys, if you're listening and you have this problem or problems like this that you'd like to get some help with from other lawyers, we run a legal mastermind called Great Legal Marketing and if you're interested in becoming a member, reach out to me and let me know. My suspicion is we could probably find you half a million dollars worth of profit somewhere in your business just by having conversations exactly like this and by thinking outside of the box with other really smart lawyers.
