The Sterling Family Law Show

Stop Making Attorneys Do All Your Law Firm Intake - #160

• Jeff Sterling Hughes

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Law firm intake delays killing your revenue? Discover how non-lawyer intake systems cut scheduling from 3 weeks to 3 days while boosting close rates 20% - without increasing operational costs.

Family law firm owners struggle with volatile attorney consultation performance and scheduling bottlenecks that lose clients. We reveal the counter-intuitive intake system that stabilized Sterling's revenue while freeing attorneys for higher-value work.


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📄 CHAPTERS 

0:00 - Law Firm Intake Crisis: Why Clients Wait Weeks for Consultations 

1:58 - The $17M Firm's Attorney Performance Problem 

4:46 - Why 3-Day Scheduling Beats Sales Skills Every Time 

7:07 - Building Non-Lawyer Intake Systems That Actually Work 

9:19 - 20% Better Close Rates: Real Performance Data from Sterling Lawyers 

16:12 - Common Pitfalls: When Non-Lawyer Sales Go Wrong 

20:31 - Small Firm Implementation: When You're Ready to Start

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Speaker 1:

Are new clients in your family law firm waiting weeks to be able to get to see you? Are you looking for a way to increase the level of care that you give your clients without increasing your costs operationally? Then I urge you to consider non-lawyer sales. It really is a thing and it really does work, and we're going to talk all about it on today's show.

Speaker 2:

Welcome back to the Sterling Family Law Show, the podcast designed to help family attorneys build the firm of their dreams. I am your co-host, tyler Dolph. I'm also the CEO of our hyper-focused law firm-only marketing agency called RocketClicks, and I have my co-host, Jeff Hughes, who is the CEO of our own family law firm, sterling Lawyers, on the show today and we're going to talk about non-attorney sales. It's a hot, hot debate. We've gone through some trial and error and excited to talk it through today, jeff.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, tyler, I did a couple of shows on this, maybe two years ago, so we're two years into it here at Sterling Lawyers. And for all you naysayers out there, I just want you to know, I was firmly in your camp. I did not think that non-lawyer sales was a thing. Who, what client in their right mind would actually give a retainer to a non-lawyer that can't give them advice about their case? That's what I believed, right. So I'm excited to talk about this because a lot has changed from when I introduced this concept and talked all about it two-ish years ago on the podcast here. So now we're back. We're going to give an update as to where Sterling Lawyers is with non-lawyer sales and rest assured, against all of my wisdom, it is a real thing and it's a big thing here at Sterling Lawyers. So where do you want to start, tyler?

Speaker 2:

Yes, for those listeners who didn't hear the podcast two years ago, just give us a summary around the why, what was happening in the firm that caused you to say, okay, fine, let's try it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so we're a $17 million 27 lawyer firm today. Back then I think we were 20, early low 20s in terms of lawyers and the lawyer abilities and results in the console room were so volatile. We would have some that would just connect with clients and convince clients that we were the right solution for them, to guide them through what they were going through, and others that just struggled, and it wasn't like young lawyers and experienced lawyers, it ran the gamut. Some of our newest, most inexperienced lawyers way outperformed the most experienced, so it ran the gamut. Way outperformed the most experience. So it ran the gamut.

Speaker 1:

In addition to that, family law is volatile. Right. Christmas time things slow way down. No one wants to deal with a family lawyer in a divorce situation during the holidays, okay. Summertime it also slows down a little bit as well because people are out enjoying the warmth, which we get like three days of warmth here in Wisconsin, so they're out doing that Right. And so it was always extremely volatile and we were super frustrated because we were having a very difficult time forecasting and planning out the law firm because we had this volatility. It was like 40 to 40% swings in our results from month to month with our volatility and we tried everything, and then I was a little.

Speaker 2:

What did we try? Did we try just having the right people that had the high close rate?

Speaker 1:

Okay, only you guys are doing sales, the other ones aren't doing any like yeah, so we would like rank our attorneys by their ability to close, and they would get the most consults first, right. They would get the consult first right. If they were busy, then it would kind of go down the line to the lowest and what, as you can imagine, happened, right, the most skilled lawyers ended up booking themselves up and getting too busy and taking themselves out of consults, and then we ended up having the vast majority of our consults going to the inexperienced lawyers and on top of that, as everyone's getting busy, they would block themselves, and so we're setting consults out two or three weeks, which probably was the biggest factor, honestly, because I think the just to sorry to interrupt you there the psychological effect of having a very full calendar and going into a consult room already feeling busy yeah.

Speaker 2:

Stress. Oh well, I just got to get through this, right. You're going to lose that human element.

Speaker 1:

Yep, yeah, so it was. All of those things were conspiring against the good results, but I want to back up a little bit that what I just said was vitally important. Getting new potential clients in the console room within three days is the biggest factor. It's bigger than like skill in the room, um ability to connect. It's getting them in quickly and we were having a big time struggle doing that. And so three weeks, you said sometimes, yeah, that was our average for much of 20. What are we in 25 now? And 23 was a two to three week out period of time before we can get someone in the console.

Speaker 2:

What could happen between that first interaction and three weeks later?

Speaker 1:

So I was listening to a podcast in 2023. In fact, I remember I was on my way to my niece's graduation listening to this podcast on non-lawyer sales. It was so eye-opening that it was actually a thing and it was actually working. It was with Michael at your Practice Mastered and he was being interviewed by someone, and I remember sitting in the graduation ceremony on the end of the aisle where I could actually put my phone to my left, so my family couldn't see it and I was entering the information because I wanted to know more about this and reading as much as I could about it because it was such a dire issue for us to solve. And that was in May-ish June or so of that year. By July, we were ready to launch our non-lawyer sales experiment, and so we started with four what we called consult legal assistants.

Speaker 2:

And how did you find these people? What did that look like?

Speaker 1:

We found them on Indeed. They were all throughout the United States. So we had one in Florida, one in Arizona and one in Colorado and I remember the other one in Georgia. So we had those four that started with us. We found them all on Indeed and away we went and we had a leader, mary, who's still the leader of that team, who was also kind of already doing a version of that in Illinois, so we call it the Mary Project. So he was doing a little bit already toward that, but not not quoting, not going all the way through the full consult. So we wanted to go all the way through the full consult and have these CLAs take the consults.

Speaker 2:

And so we had to build a process and scripting and the whole deal right.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we followed your practice mastered script. That was 17 point kind of script. It sounds like a lot but it really is boiled down. It's pretty easy to follow. So we started off with their script. We've since modified it heavily and to fit family law and to fit fixed fee in particular, which is all we do and so we started with that and we've learned a ton over the past two years on how to get it to work. Much of our early assumptions proved out to be wrong for us and some of them were right. Ultimately I can skip to the end and we can fill in the gaps here Ultimately, our non-lawyer consults are incredible and I'm underselling this when I say it Absolutely astounding to the success of our firm today.

Speaker 1:

So today we still have only four full-time consult legal assistants. Now we've had to cycle through a number of them, so we've hired four others, trained them. That did not ultimately work out. So we're about a 50% hit rate on trained to. Still with us. Mary still leads the team. We have these four four today and in addition to that we've learned to remove a lot of I would say, task or just like paperwork off their desk.

Speaker 1:

So we have three full-time support teammates that are supporting our CLAs. They're all in the Philippines, our support teammates are and all of our CLAs are here in the United States. And so these three support teammates do all of the nuts and bolts and blocking and tackling for our CLAs by sending out agreements, sending third-party agreements out, different things they need to do in order to get things done. And so today our CLAs do around 60 plus percent of all of our first consults and probably this is undervalued. They do a hundred percent of the follow-up. So our lawyers are doing the other 40-ish percent or 30-ish percent, I would say of our consults, but they're not having to do the follow-up. They're able to go in, do the consult and go back to serving clients, doing court work and that sort of stuff. So they're doing a CLA's are doing a huge percentage of our consults and are, from a performance standpoint now these are new, these are right off the press.

Speaker 1:

Today, tyler, okay, and a 90 day rolling is what we look at Our CLAs are at at basically outperforming by 20% our lawyers. Yeah, so they're 20%. Their close rates 20% better than our lawyers. That is incredible Plus the they, because our CLA's cannot give any legal advice whatsoever and they don't, and we have been, we've monitored that. We do QA on almost all of our our consults to make sure we're all following the process.

Speaker 1:

And the biggest, the biggest no-no is not giving legal advice you can't do, or giving legal advice you can't give that. So, but we're finding that because they're so rigid around our quoting process that they're actually quoting higher than our lawyers quote, because our lawyers will, you know, find ways to, you know, not not follow the process, because they just want, they want to put their stamp on it, and so they're doing. They're performing better from a closed perspective and, in addition to that, they're also generating more value from each consult that they're doing. So it's, it's been a total win for Sterling lawyers and I'm excited to share those everyone because I want everyone to think about it. At least think about it, consider it, because if you can get a team built, it can really, it can really pour gas on the growth of a law firm.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean not to mention the, the hours saved for the attorneys to do what they need to do.

Speaker 1:

So that brings up some of the I shared with you. The obvious benefits right, the performance numbers, the, the revenue increase and all that sort of stuff but there are. There are some hidden advantages here, some hidden disadvantages too that I'm going to touch on here. But from a benefit standpoint, the biggest one is to our legal team. Our lawyers have, when they were doing consults, the majority of all the consults.

Speaker 1:

It was a huge time suck because you have to prep for the consult and for us what that looks like is we have to go on. Our state bar has a website you can look and see details about a case. Illinois has got it by county and we've got it here by the full state. So we would always go require our team to go on first, look up anything you can find about the case, about the parties that are involved, so you're somewhat armed with information. So that takes some time. You got to do the consult. You do the post consult, notes, follow-ups over the ensuing days, which a lot of times just didn't happen. You got to send out agreements. You got to modify agreements. You got to do all that sort of stuff.

Speaker 1:

We were having our lawyers do so. Now they just got to go in and pretty much do the consults with very little pre and post work, because our team is prepping that for them and only doing 30, 30 plus percent of the consults now. So there's that. It also and here's something, one of the hidden advantages our clients coming in feel a higher connection to our law firm because they're just not talking. They're not just talking to the lawyer and paralegal, they're talking first with a CLA who is a lethal salesperson and they connect so well and they're so patient and understanding and experienced with helping just empathize with folks going through a family law crisis that they feel more connected even once they get involved with us. So it's helped our full client experience right there. So it's saving attorney time, improving client experience, making my CFO and me happy. All of that sort of stuff is is coming, has come together as we've done this, so it's been a real win across the board for us.

Speaker 2:

It's just back to the psychological part of this right Context. Switching, getting out of flow, is detrimental for productivity, and so if you have someone who is doing the same task over and over again, they're able to stay in that flow. I have to be human, I need to be supportive. I need to be emotionally in the meeting and really listening. Doing that over and over again it's easier than I need to be supportive. I need to be emotionally in the meeting and really listening. Doing that over and over again it's easier than I need to do that Now. I need to file this grievance and do this thing and paperwork and then come back and be a human, and so allowing them to live in that flow state for a longer period of time has got to have a benefit.

Speaker 1:

Oh, it's major for our lawyers. Lawyers run the firm, they are the firm right, they're on the front lines and what we want is we want our lawyers to do the things that only lawyers can do. That means giving advice and going to court predominantly and setting legal strategy, things like that. We don't want them worrying about anything else, if we can possibly remove that responsibility from them. So they've got clear minds and clear time and margin in their day to serve clients, call them back, do the things that need to happen there.

Speaker 1:

So this program has enabled us to do that in a really big way and it's also it's reduced the volatility. So now we get clients in the consult room within three days almost every week when we measure this. So it's a real big number that we follow. So the volatility has dramatically declined. So we're able to predict out where our firm is and where it's going months out, because our volatility has declined so much. So it's enabled us to plan out and plan growth, where we can never do that in the past because we would hit a month where all of a sudden our sales dropped 40% or would increase 20 or 30%. So it's stabilized all of our forecasting and planning out into the future and that's been really helpful from a growth perspective.

Speaker 2:

Love it and I got to believe. The close rate in the consult room is so much higher because of that, volatility decrease.

Speaker 1:

It's higher because the clients are getting in right away, so they're not getting discouraged and setting an appointment and then getting impatient or just needing a lawyer sooner.

Speaker 1:

So they go talk to someone else, end up working with that particular firm. So we're able to get clients and that's been the biggest win from a close perspective and they're also feeling heard, they're telling their story, they're spilling their guts right away with someone who is going to live like for all the gray things about lawyers, they have a really difficult time as they get more experience slowing it down in the console room and just listening and letting clients let all because they've heard the story a hundred times. So they want to get right to the meat of it, like giving advice, and they want to help them. They want to get to the help, Whereas they don't spend the time helping by just slowing it down and just let the client share that. That's. That's difficult to do because for a lot of reasons it's not. It's coming from a good, good place that it happens, but our, our CLAs are just trained that way and they're just in tune. So much more with that empathy factor that's needed in that first initial consult.

Speaker 2:

Well said, all right, so we've done this process for the last two years. And if someone is listening to this and it's like, okay, fine, I want to, I want to look into this more, explore it, seen this and it's like, okay, fine, I want to look into this more or explore it, talk to us about some of the pitfalls, some of the key learnings. What didn't we do correctly when setting this up that someone can avoid?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, a couple of things here. Well, the biggest downside to having non-lawyers is doing your consults is they can't give legal advice and so inherently there is a certain number of cases where they screw up by funding them when they shouldn't be funded and we correct that right away and refund them. But that incurs a cost to us to do that, so there's an expense there of refunding that credit card right back. So the most common are in post-judgment cases, where they're not uniform, like divorce cases or fraternity cases are. They require almost a one-off analysis in every single post-judgment case and, like most states have this, you can't come back to court on a post-judgment unless you fit certain criteria, you meet certain thresholds and for us, like in Wisconsin, just to give an example and I think all of our family lawyers have the same thing in their states it's a two-year moratorium on coming back to court unless there's a very substantial change in the circumstances. And even after two years there needs to be a change in circumstances for that to happen. And that's a legal analysis. You can't train CLAs with thousands of different fact patterns to really do that consistently right to know whether or not we can. They're a good candidate to work with us. So we have some of that and there's some times where they'll sign up a client that is just not a good fit for our firm and they don't really sense that right up front. And that could be for personality reasons or a whole host of reasons, a lot of which are something's really going on in that with that person, that we just don't want to work with them because it's going to be, it's going to suck life out of us and kill brain cells. So there's some of that going on. So that's that's one of the big downsides. Other ones is that you have to understand that it's not a hire someone and they work out forever like everything. You're going to hire and they're not going to work and they're going to have to move on and you're going to have to deal with that with retraining.

Speaker 1:

Our process today is a four week training process and we have a leader of our team who does that training. It took us a long time to help Mary get to that level where she's now equipped with all the skills to do that, so that there's there's a leadership challenge there. And then there's a four week plus training, just observing and training them on how to quote, how to do all that stuff. And then, once they go on the phones or in the video, everything's remote by video, by the way, or we try to get it by video, sometimes it's by phone Once it gets there.

Speaker 1:

Still, we, we train for the two weeks of just like live whispering, watching, you know, over the shoulder type coaching and that sort of stuff. So there's a long training cycle to do it and you need someone that's equipped to do that. If the lawyer can't, because they're just busy, you got to find someone else to do that. So it takes some time to develop that. But if you can do that, we did it over years. Right, this was not done like in a month or two or a quarter, it was month or two or a quarter is done over years to get there.

Speaker 2:

So that's one of the other downsides to it. It takes time to build that muscle and the hit rate of a salesperson across industries is extremely low. This is not an easy position to fill, correct.

Speaker 1:

Correct. It's easy for us to acquire interest for the position. We'll get hundreds of candidates because we can search nationally for a candidate. So we get hundreds of candidates and we do it all through. Indeed, we pay. Well, all in their CLAs are making between $120 and $160. So it's a nice compensation that they get for that. It's a. It's a nice compensation that they get for that, um, but it's a special person that could do it and listen to stories that are tragic and sad and hard to hear all day, day after day.

Speaker 2:

You know it's that's, that's, that's not easy yeah, it's got to be the right type of person for sure. So, jeff, if, uh, if I'm a small firm and I have five attorneys and they're telling me they're overwhelmed and they don't have time to be in the console room and I want to explore this is a non-attorney sales kind of pivot. Do you think it depends on the size of the firm and what's happening? Is this only for larger firms, or have you seen this be successful in smaller firms as well?

Speaker 1:

your firms or have you seen this be successful in smaller firms as well? Oh, yes, I've seen it be successful in other firms not necessarily family law, fixed fee firms, because there's only a few of us out there, okay, so that's where I'm coming from. But I've been a part of Richard James's mastermind at your Practice Mastered, where a lot of folks in that group do that, and I've hired a couple CLAs from other firms and I know that there's other mastermind groups that are overseeing these programs as well. So I know that it works. So if I were a smaller firm two, three attorneys I think at two-ish, three-ish you're ready to hire for that first role.

Speaker 1:

Now they may be required to do other things so you can't keep them busy enough, but I think that's the time to do that. So the way I would approach doing that is I would probably send them to Richard's you know his education course that they've got on training. That's a good place to start. That's probably the best place I know of to begin. If that's not something that someone's interested in, then you've got to just commit to hiring someone and have them sit with you over weeks and in every consult to train them, to get them ready to do that, and if you're selling hourly services, I would. I would offer that it's easier than selling big, big fixed fees right up front, because it's it's you know, it's a lower upfront cost, the barrier to entry is a little bit lower to get them going and it's easier to kind of understand and explain that you're just paying for an hour of time and this is what it's going to cost you and this is your initial retainer.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah. So it sounds like the warning or opportunity signs for a firm to start thinking about this is their consult window is too long into the future. You know you're waiting a week, two weeks, three weeks before you can get someone in. Uh, or your, your attorneys are overwhelmed. They can't simply handle the number of consults that are coming in. Um, you know which is a good problem to have, but something a problem nonetheless.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I'll underscore that without an anecdote. So my brother, unfortunately, is going through a divorce and he reached out to a lawyer and it was like a three week wait for him to get in to see her and I and he ended up waiting it out because I was kind of helping him see that it was worth it and it wasn't an urgency around it. But if that is like most other people, they're not going to wait for that, they're going to like go call the next person on their Google listings and that's who they're going to go to. So if if you're, and a lot of firms don't even track that number, they don't even know but they intuitively know if they're busy. So if you are busy and you're putting people out two weeks, three weeks, I would offer that this console legal assistant is going to pay for themselves within and it's worth it to try that. So I think you're right. That's the starting point.

Speaker 2:

Love it. Jeff appreciate the insight.

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