Welcome to the effective lawyer, a podcast for ambitious attorneys who want to improve their practice. My name is Jack Zinda, and I'll be your host. Hi, and welcome to another episode of the Effective Lawyer podcast. I'm your host, Jack Zinda. And today I want to talk to you about how to identify Cases that your firm wants to sign up in a really efficient manner.
You know, if your firm is like mine, you probably get lots of potential client calls And maybe dozens, if not hundreds, are cases that you may not want to take, and Try to figure out a process that you can efficiently identify good cases, figure out how to take them, and then giving yourself space and time to make sure you don't miss out on a great case.
So today, I wanna talk to you about what our firm's process is to, 1, evaluate strong cases, and then what steps you take to ensure that it's a good case, And you lock it in and you maximize value. So, all right, let's set the stage. You are in your office, you get a call, And someone says, hey, we have this call on line 1. Do you wanna talk to them? It's a potential client.
What a lot of firms do is just that call goes directly To the attorney or the paralegal without any initial screening of the case. That can be problematic for several reasons. 1, it It could be a case you definitely don't want. It may not be a practice area that you handle and that can cost you a lot of time to your day.
Every interruption that you have, Studies have shown take about 15 minutes out, not to mention the time that you're on the phone with the client, you've gotten distracted and you're not sure, You know, how to get back on track to what you're doing before. So the first suggestion I have is you want to have at least an initial gatekeeper, If not a full time intake specialist, do the initial screening of your cases.
And you want to give them a script with a checklist of things they want to check To and see if it's a good case that you wanna pass along to you. And there's several setups that I've seen work. When my firm first started, we didn't have the resource is to have a full time intake specialist. So we gave the receptionist a script of questions we wanted them to ask for any potential client.
It was very brief because they didn't have enough Time and it could roll over and go to an answering service, which we didn't wanna have happen. The other thing that you could have Someone do is then have a full time intake specialist that that is all they're doing is screening intake calls and they can actually get really at identifying what cases you want and what cases you don't.
Or you could have a situation where it goes directly to you as the attorney or to your paralegal to do the screening and then closing on the case. Where to sign the case up? That's an important question. You can either do it on the phone, Via video conference or an in person meeting. Before COVID, we were adamant of having all of our client meetings in person. That Still is the most effective way to both evaluate your client and to get the case signed up.
Since we, post COVID, we have moved to a process where We will try to sign the client up over the phone. If that doesn't work, we will move to a video conference, and then we wanna meet with the client in the first 30 days of signing the case which it gives us some time to evaluate, decide if we wanna invest the resources in flying somewhere to meet with someone in person. Okay. So we've talked a little bit about the process.
A couple of other things you're gonna want to have with this are scripts that tell your intake person, your receptionist, or your paralegal what To go through some sort of form to fill out. And, of course, there's software programs that can do this. They're called CRMs. Or you can make it as simple as a spreadsheet or a Word doc That you have the person do. You wanna make sure that it's quick and efficient because they need to get through the things very fast.
And then you want to go through a decision tree that you give them on whether or not they're going to sign the case and what steps and actions they want to take to do that. Now we've talked about some of the the elements you need to have an effective sign up process. Now let's talk about how you evaluate the case, Because you're not gonna know all the facts that come in with that initial call. Let's say it's a wrongful death case and the person calling you has no idea what happened.
Let's say you can't get a good read on the client if you think they are trustworthy or you're not sure how hurt they are. And you also don't want to lose out of the case and you wanna make sure they don't go hire another law firm if there's a delay in signing it up. So the pillars that we evaluate in a case, there's 3 of them. 3 big buckets. The first is liability. Okay. Who was at fault For what happened, and can you meet can you meet your legal burden of proof? The second is damages.
Do you have enough harm in order to Justify taking the case on. And the third is source of recovery. Who's going to pay for the harm if it happened? And as As most of you know, that's almost always going to be an insurance company. So on liability, you wanna have the elements of each cause of action that you Commonly take whether it's premises trucking cases, motor vehicle, workplace injury.
I would have those elements handy So you can quickly see if the facts meet your case, especially if you don't practice personal injury law regularly. But even if you do, it's good to have it for your staff so they can help evaluate what the liability facts are. The second damages, you wanna figure out what is your minimum threshold for a case you're going to handle, and you wanna make that a black and white rule.
And if you go below that threshold, you wanna put that case in the pro bono category. That's important. I see a lot of law firms struggle, Especially newer attorneys would take in on a lot of bad cases that they're never gonna get paid on, or they're not gonna get paid enough to justify their hourly rate. Remember, you don't have to take every case. You need to figure out what your hourly rate you want it to be and work on the cases that you wanna work on.
Now early in your career, you may have to take cases that you may not wanna take later on, but something I've done each and every year is address what is our floor And we've raised that up consistently each and every year. We're currently at a hundred thousand dollars as the minimum our most junior lawyers should take on a case. And we do the same things with our more senior attorneys, only their threshold is much higher.
For example, a senior attorney is gonna be something, you know, in the 7 figure range is the minimum we want them to take for their cases. So you're not going to know all these things. You want to start off by Talking to the client, introducing yourself and say find out what happened and why they're calling. Now you want to talk slowly.
You want to be empathetic and you want to make sure you're talking to them like a human being and not talking to them like an attorney or someone who doesn't care about their case, or is only worried about Getting them to sign a document. It might go something like this. Hey, this is Jack Zinda. I'm the partner at Zinda Law Group. I understand you've been through something terrible. I am I'm so sorry to hear that. Why don't you tell me a little bit about your case?
So you wanna find out their facts about what happened. And I'd also make it a point to ask something personal about themselves And then share something personal about yourself. This is how we connect as human beings. They'll stop seeing you as a lawyer and they'll stop Seeing you as a person that they can relate to. Kids are great. If they're a coach, sports, if they're a teacher, what they do for a living, if it relates to anything you've done in your past, Geographic, you know, location.
But actually I have a list. I don't do this anymore, but I used to have a list of these things and I would practice it before the call So I knew what to talk about. Now, if you are somebody who gets nervous easily or you're a junior lawyer and you're worried you're going to talk too fast, Practice with a recorder. Imagine you're somebody who you admire and try to emulate the way they talk to clients. Confidence you wanna fake it until you make it.
And if you fake it enough, you'll eventually have the confidence you need to convince a client to hire your firm. If you talk quickly, if you try to rush the process, they're going to get suspicious and they're going to think you're not a good lawyer or you don't have their best interests at heart.
If you'd like a copy of any of the things you heard about here today or to set up a time to talk 1 about 1 of our team members about a case please go to Zinda Law dot io, and we have amazing resources, downloads, guides, And you can set up a time to talk to us if you wanna talk about how we handle things or any case in particular. So I'll start off by finding out what happened leading up to the wreck in just a narrative format, asking what happened next, What happened next? What happened next?
And then I go through the wreck and then to where we are today covering their treatment. At this point, I'm gonna know if I want the case or not based on the facts that I've been given. If I don't want the case, I'm still going to be very polite to them. I'm trying to make them a referral source in the future. I'm going to let them down easily. Never blame the client for not taking the case.
You wanna talk about the way the law set up may not be fair or the circumstances may or may not be right, but if you blame them, they're gonna be upset with you. And I've actually gotten referrals from clients that I've not Taken several times. That's because I'm empathetic. I care about them. I give them some helpful advice, maybe on property damage or something that I can help them with. So I find out what happens and I decide it's a case I want. Okay?
Now I'm gonna go through my background And I'm gonna have some talking points that make me seem like the best lawyer on the planet. Now I know that sounds very arrogant. I'm I'm sure there's Lawyers that are way better than me, but when it comes to sales, you have to come across as extremely confident in your abilities without sounding like a jerk. And I do this by listing any awards I've gotten, law school I went to, cases I've worked on.
I also do that for the law firm, Talk about other attorneys that we have, successes they've had without sounding really braggadocious about it. Then we're gonna go through the Contract itself and explain how these cases work big picture and then drill down into specific parts of the contract such as what the percentage fee is what the case expenses are.
If you're in a jurisdiction where there's a lot of people cutting their fees or advertising really cut rate, You won't be prepared to address that, explain why your firm's better. And if it's something where you feel like you should cut the fee, just be prepared to do that so you can get the person signed up. Your backup goal, if you don't get them signed up, is to get a next appointment to talk about their case further.
If that's the case, you want to make sure that you inoculate yourself from other lawyers taking your case by saying why your firm's different and distinguishing yourself from other law firms. Don't bad mouth Firms, but we'll talk about in general, you know, there's some firms that are high volume, some firms where you won't actually talk to a lawyer, Some firms that aren't used to handling trucking cases.
So I'm making them think about the things they'd wanna ask those other law firms if they're shopping around. Then I may offer to do some free work before they even hire. Say, hey, would it be okay if I got the crash report and started looking into this to decide, is this a case That we could help you with so you've got a head start. And if you don't hire us, no problem. I'll be happy to share whatever I gather with you.
And then I might send the crash report to the client, Show them some information we gather to show them that how good we are, how responsive we are. Make sure you set a follow-up appointment with a date and time that's Pretty recent in decision making. If they're not the decision makers make sure that next person on the call with you is with you. Sometimes it's a spouse. Sometimes it's a parent, even with adults. Sometimes it's a sibling. But you wanna make sure they're on the next call.
Okay. Here we are. So we got it signed up. We locked the client in. They love us. They're ready to rock and roll, But your work is not done. You still don't know if you have a case. Okay? At our firm, we have a phase in the case we call the investigation stage. So in the investigation stage we want to establish for sure that this is a case we want and we give ourselves 14 days to do it. Okay. In some circumstances it can take longer than that, but overall 14 days is what we're shooting for.
That staging includes 3 things. First, Proving liability without your client's testimony. Doesn't necessarily have to be crash report. It could be witnesses. It could be circumstantial evidence, But you need to have substantive evidence that the case happened the way the client said it did. Number 2, You want to make sure you fully evaluate the client, find out their background, their histories, or anything that's going to prevent you from settling the case.
We had a case recently where 1 of our clients had a big Lien that we were not aware of the client was hoping by keeping it from us that we may not have to address it. Well, it came time to settle the tax lien of course comes up because we always do a search for those things and the client is refusing to move forward with resolving it because The money would go to the IRS. Now we've done a whole bunch of free work.
We got them actually an incredible result And they don't wanna do anything because the net they're not gonna get very much money in their pocket. And unfortunately, IRS is 1 of those issues where it's very difficult to get them to Cut it back so you can give money to the client. So you want to make sure you like the client, you think they're a good fit. You do background research on them. Next, you want to see if the damages meet your minimum threshold.
Sometimes people come in because They are upset about property damage. They need a rental car. They just have questions and they're not always Hurt as bad as you think they are in order for them to justify having a case. I'm a real big believer in you don't want to Try to get people to get treatment that, that don't, they don't believe they're hurt or they don't think they, they need it. You wanna at least focus on the clients that are truly injured That needs your help.
You're gonna be much happier as an attorney doing that, and the cases are gonna be a lot easier. 1 thing I believe is our job is to tell the truth, And the truth always comes out. And if you look at your job that way and your job is to present the best version of the truth and fight for your clients, it becomes a lot easier because if you think the truth is not going to be good for your case, you may not want to take the case at all. So we're going to figure out how hurt the client is.
You can usually tell in the first 2 weeks, you know, do they need additional treatment? Have they had follow-up appointments? Things like that. Next, we're gonna establish the source of recovery. Now this is key. You wanna make sure that you get an acknowledgement letter from an insurance company saying there's insurance Coverage. If you can't identify an insurance company, we have a whole bunch of tricks that we use for different types of cases to identify insurance.
Happy to share those with anyone if they wanna reach out send it to me. We have, like, a checklist that we follow-up for each type of case to find the insurance policies. Occasionally, You have to file a lawsuit to do that, but most of the time you can figure it out beforehand. So We establish the liability that they're harmed enough and their source of recovery is available. And that's 3 items that We track every day for every case that we sign up.
We end up stepping away for, from about half the cases that we initially sign up. And we have an 8 percent acceptance rate overall of potential clients. Now that's gonna differ than most other firms, But we know what we're good at. We know the way we can make money, and we've made more money every year. We've cut back on the number of cases that we handle or the threshold that we handle. So don't be afraid to do that. Don't back down and and say, oh, man. I I really want this case.
Now when you're starting out the cases I started out in the beginning, A lot of them are really tough cases and I got a good result in them, but I would not take them now because it was a ton of work, ton of ligation, and it was, like, real lucky that I was able to get that outcome. But when you're early in your career, you may have to take cases you would wanna take a year or 2 years from now.
But know what your caseload limit is so you can be sure that That you don't go over it with cases that you don't want to resolve. And 1 easy trick is if you take each case, you give it a value, and just assume I'm going to turn every case within 1 year, That's how much in fees you'll make the following year. Now obviously some cases take longer, some cases go less but that gives you a rough idea of the amount of fees you're having.
So if you have, You know, a hundred cases worth 5000 in fees each, that's 500000 in in potential attorneys fees you have, which Sounds like a lot, but that's a lot of cases to turn in 1 year and it's tough to give each 1 individualized attention. The other tip that you want to keep in mind is you want to maintain that strong relationship, especially early on in the case.
I try to talk to my clients 3 or 4 times in the first 2 weeks, and I actually write down the things to remember that make them special and that I want to talk to them about, such as them being a teacher, them having grandkids. I also do all of my client meetings by appointment only.
I know it's a little controversial, I know some attorneys give their clients their cell phones numbers, which I'm not opposed to, but I think that if you explain to the client, Hey listen, I want to make sure when you and I are talking, I'm focused on nothing but your case. So I like to do meetings by appointment only, kind of like a doctor.
And so when you call me, my legal assistant is going to schedule a time with us in real short fashion, maybe the same day or the next day, To talk about and answer whatever questions you have. That allows you when they call in, you're ready to go. You have the file from you. You reviewed where you're at, And you don't sound foolish or like you don't know what's going on.
I know for me personally, if I get a call I wasn't expecting just kind of pops in, I'm like yeah, the the status of your Card property damages this, and you were the person in the red light case versus I look at the file and say, Oh, you know Jane it looks like that your property damage was taken care of how are you feeling you know, how's it recovering, And ask something about themselves personally. And I think that it helps build a much stronger relationship than doing it the other way.
So to summarize a few points we made today number 1, when you're evaluating the case on the front end, make sure you have some sort of person to do the initial screening. Make sure you have clear scripts and clear criteria for why you want or don't want a case. You wanna look at liability, damages, source recovery.
Then when you're talking to the client, make sure you build a connection, make sure you learn something about themselves and make sure you practice talking slowly, confidently, and going through their file. Then after the case signs up, don't be afraid to get off of it early on if it turns into facts that you didn't think The case was what it said it was.
And then if it's a really significant case and, you know, we practice nationwide, I'm going to fly out and meet the client sometime in 2 week period as well. I hope this was helpful. We have all sorts of checklists and memos and SOPs on this. The signup stage, we have scripts. We have checklists for the investigation stage, investigation items we look for. So if you're interested in any of those things, please reach out. Happy to share it and you know, rising tide of resiliency. Till next time.
Thanks. Thanks for listening to today's episode of The Effective Lawyer. You can learn more about our team and find other episodes of our podcast at ZindaLaw dot com. As always, we'd appreciate that you subscribe, rate, and review the pod. Thanks.