#11 - Overhauling Client Intake Process, Working with an Advisory Board, and Culture Benchmarking [Sterling Chronicles July 2023]

The idea is to pay it forward . So that's the thinking here . So I've identified five different headlines from the month of July 2023 , and we've had a little bit of time to settle . And here we're , mid August , right now shooting this . So I've got our numbers in and I'm ready to share all of that with you .

Hello and welcome to the J Sirling Hughes Show , where we share the secrets of how we are building a rapidly growing law practice .

You know , over the past nine years we have grown from zero attorneys to over 25 and doing over $15 million in revenue , and my purpose here is to document what's working and what's not working in our practice , with hopes that you can take that and recontextualize that to your practice and shorten your success curve .

My name is Jeff Hughes and I'm your host , and this is the second installment of our Stirling Chronicles and the idea here and this is something that I wish so much that I would have had back when we started our practice back in 2014 and 15 , because I didn't have a track to run on and have a model to follow .

We were kind of pioneers and trying to figure things out , for the most part on our own as we started our practice back then , and so my thinking here is if I can share with you all on a real candid basis , on a monthly cadence , as to what's happening in our practice , why we're doing what we're doing , the failures , the wins , and hope that maybe there's

something you can take there to help you , maybe inspire you a little bit and do better than what we've done is . Really the idea is to pay it forward . So that's the thinking here . So I have identified five different headlines from the month of July 2023 . And we've had a little bit of time to settle and here we're mid August right now shooting this .

So I've got our numbers in and I'm ready to share all of that with you . So , all right , let's get rolling on that . So headline number one is that we are overhauling completely , dismantling and overhauling our intake process , and the intake process in law firms is vital .

This is one of the areas that is most often overlooked in the health of any law firm and that is how the firm brings clients into the practice . And the typical way is that when a prospective client calls , the phone may or may not be answered . And I've tested this .

I've done a lot of cold calling or secret shopping , I guess you would call it over the years into law firms and for a while there I was running at about a 50% answer rate and sometimes it would dip below that .

Sometimes it would rise above 50% in the answer rate of these firms and even with our within our practice we struggle hitting 90% and we've got a lot of resources behind our intake . So answering the phone is vital and it's often really minimized in looking whenever the leadership of the firm looks at the business model because the revenue coming into the firm .

So it's a critical part of any firm , it's certainly a very critical part of our firm , but it not only should be answered but it should be the phone should be answered by someone who really wants to talk to a prospective client coming in .

A lot of times the phone is answered by a legal assistant or by a paralegal and they're busy I mean , they've got a lot of priorities are juggling that day trying to keep up with their attorney and keep the office moving , and they view a lot of times they view the call coming in as an interruption to their day .

It's not fun and they don't enjoy it , and it's just another thing to interrupt them , that's unscheduled , that they can't really plan or plan for and plan around .

So , and also on that intake , the connection with that prospective client is where at all the magic happens If there's one thing to be done on that intake call , and that is to connect with the client .

And so those are what we focus on and what we work on , and so we're overhauling our entire system to focus more on making sure we're answering the phone consistently , that we've got our best teammate on the phone to receive that call and really connect and establish an emotional bond with that prospective client coming into our practice .

And so here's what we've done Up from starting 2016 timeframe , or so we called our intake team .

Css stands for client specialists or client service specialists . That was what we called that team , so we're retiring that name . Truthfully , I didn't like it this whole time , but that's what we called it . I didn't like it because it didn't seem like it was descriptive and I didn't know really what to call our CSS teammate , css agent , css .

I didn't know what to do . So we're retiring that name and in its place we're breaking that team up into really four different responsibilities . So we have a team called that we're calling intake . Obviously they're receiving the calls coming in . Their job is to receive all of the unique phone calls that we get in .

What I mean by unique is that our system allows us to identify a first time caller into the firm . So that team will take all of those first time phone calls coming in . Ideally , hopefully , those are prospective clients that are calling . They're not returning clients because we get that quite a bit and they're not marketing a lot of marketing .

Folks keep calling us over and over again and so hopefully we can eliminate them from calling back that second time on that team . So that's the responsibility of the intake team .

Their whole job is to connect with the client and for those that we have an opportunity to serve and to take care of , we want them to set an appointment with another one of our teams , which is our legal assistant , our intake , our consult legal assistant team coming in .

So that's the job of the intake team is to simply set appointments on anybody that's qualified that we are able to add value to and help . Second team is our general team , and so this team handles all of the calls that are coming in on the second time . That phone number shows up on our system and beyond .

So those are oftentimes current clients who they have misplaced the number for their attorney or their legal team and so they're calling what they find online and that's just our standard number that's on our website . So they're calling that number and so their job is to redirect that traffic as it's coming in . And they're also handling vendors and so forth .

Prospective vendors that want to sell something to us are calling in on that line as well . Hopefully most of the time in that team's answer . That's a general team .

Then we have our CLA team , which we're calling CLA , but it stands for consult legal assistant and these are the folks that are receiving those initial consults or taking those consults , and they're connecting with the client , taking down all the information and identifying to what level we're able to provide them a value and assistance and help them solve their legal

problems . That's their job is to do that .

They're also quoting our fees at that time and taking any payment that if the client chooses to work with us as well , a lot of times what we'll do is we'll take that initial payment and then we'll set up an appointment , a welcome meeting with our attorney team , and the client will go there and maybe make further arrangements to work with our firm .

So that's the job of the CLA team , and so that team requires a lot of training . That is a pretty in-depth process . For us it's about a 45 plus minute initial consult conversation and these are non-lawyers and so they're really limited , obviously , in what they're able to do with that prospective client . They certainly can't give any legal advice .

Their job is to hear them out , connect with that client , take down all the information that's needed for us to be able to quote them and give that client fee certainty , which is what we do in our fixed fee model .

And so they take all of that down , give them their quote and if the client wants to work with us , then they'll take payment and schedule that welcome meeting from there . Then our fourth team that makes up our overall intake group would be our outbound followup team .

So these folks , their job is to reach back out to clients that have , or potential clients that have , expressed an interest in working with us and try to re-establish contact with them and see if the timing is right for them to work with us .

So they're doing a lot of just very rote follow-up work and it's very important , but it's very it's a lot of the same stuff over and over again as what they're doing . So those are our four teams that we're intake team , our general team , our CLA team and our outbound follow-up team from there .

So we're overhauling that entirely and we are working with a vendor that's helping us with a chunk of this , or actually a couple chunks of this , and that is your practice master , richard James . They may . I think the brand we're working with there is the , the staffing room and the closing room , both of those .

So we're trying to leverage them as a partner and helping us with our training , helping us with our ongoing quality control efforts and help us with recruiting as well . They're doing a fair amount of that . So it's really a it's a pretty in-depth , involved relationship we have with them and so far it's been great .

So if anyone's considering working with the closing room or the staffing room , richard James , your practice master . Those folks over there have been really really good to work with , very responsive to what we've needed and you know I've reached out to them one on one on very specific questions . They've been really good to help me solve those and get back to me .

So it's been a good relationship thus far . All right , that's headline one , overhauling our entire intake process , vital to our business model . Secondly , last month we had our second board meeting and this is something that's new Obviously our second ones .

We're doing quarterly board meetings with our advisory board and we have formed an advisory board of three other individuals plus our executive leadership team and we're meeting on a quarterly basis to talk about our practice , where we're going , the challenges we're facing , ideas , how we can overcome those challenges and really looking out several years ahead as we plan

out some pretty big initiatives that we intend to execute on in the years ahead . So this team or this group , this board , does not have a fiduciary responsibility in our firm . They're just advisory , but they are well qualified for the role . We've got a ton of value working with them .

So if anyone is considering , I would encourage all firms , even a small solo firm , to form an advisory board because the practice and the discipline of preparing a presentation on a quarterly basis , taking all of the numbers , putting all those together and presenting that information as well as the opportunities and the threats in the firm to an outside board of

advisors is a great exercise .

And I would say , because I'm doing the deck for us and I'm doing the presenting to the advisory board boy , I've gotten so much value from just the thought requirements that have gone into putting all of that together to present and wanting to be very candid about our challenges and issues and present that information in a way that the board can make something from

that and help us work through some of those challenges . So a board of advisors has been a real win for us this year , in 2023 , and doing that we also pay them and I would would not have it any other way for no other reason . I mean , all three of them are like well , fine , if you want to pay me , great , but they're not in it .

They're certainly not spending their time with us on a half day basis , once a quarter , for the money . They're doing it because they just want to add value to us and just build deeper relationships with us , and so I'm super grateful for that , thanks guys .

But we have to have the mental and emotional and financial investment in this group and I know that if we're paying them , that just drives that home a little deeper . So we're paying them out and I would encourage you , if you form an advisory group , to pay them something , even if it's $500 a quarter or something , for that half day that they're spending .

It's well worth it for you . Do it for you , not necessarily for your board member . They're not doing it for their money anyway , so do it for you . So that was the second headline . Third headline is this is all about AI . Okay , and AI is like .

Every time you open up the news , go to just about any sort of social media website , you're going to see something about AI , and we are keenly attentive to the AI threats and the AI opportunities that we see coming down the road for us in our little narrow , small circle that we are in in the world .

And so our whole executive leadership team and one of our attorneys went to Chicago for 11 hour , very exhausting , all day seminar on AI at the University of Chicago , and it was terrific .

We learned so much and understood much more deeply how AI is going to potentially impact the world and impact our our practice in particular , and we built some tools and we learned a ton about some of the things that are coming and how to leverage those in our practice . So that was a real good use of our time .

One of the major takeaways that I want to share with you all here is that we don't know for sure , obviously , how AI will change our business model , but we believe that it certainly and very soon will .

The timeline feels like it's a year to two years out when we see some pretty significant shifts in our business model and we're seeing tools come out every single day that are just getting better and better and more powerful , and so the real takeaway for us is making sure that we have are starting to think today about how we can organize and find and collect

and connect up all of our data in our practice . So we have a number of pools of data in our firm , so , starting with our most prevalent one , which is our CRM , or we use Salesforce , and so that's a huge database with a ton of data in it , and you know that's pretty well organized right now , right there .

But outside of that we have a number of other data sources that don't connect up to Salesforce that we need to figure out a way to first organize within those platforms and then find a way to connect those into one platform with Salesforce or maybe a third party . So we're working on that .

So , by way of example , we have a phone system and those phone systems obviously have all of the calls and that come in through it , all the data around , length of calls , call numbers and all that sort of stuff , but we don't tie that to our Salesforce record .

So whenever a client retains us and chooses to work with our firm , they have a new opportunity set up in Salesforce so that doesn't tie back to the phone call . So we want to be able to do that . That's just one example . We have a number of marketing platforms that we work with that don't tie into that Salesforce data set either .

So finding where all that data is , organizing it , putting it together so it's ready to go when the AI tools are more available to us that we can use and leverage to make our practice more efficient and serve our customers better . So that was our major takeaway and so I hope that made sense to everyone .

But if you're not thinking about that and preparing for that now . Now's the time to do that and not wait , because it's going to , it's coming on fast and we need to be prepared for that . All right .

Headline number four is that we are doing something we haven't done before and that's called a pulse survey .

And what the the idea behind the pulse survey is we , on a quarterly basis , we want to come to our teammates and ask them the same set of questions , identical set of questions , every quarter , and do it anonymously , because we want their candor and we don't want any pressure on anyone to feel like they have to answer in a certain way .

But we want to know how they're doing . How are we doing from a leadership perspective ? How are they ? How is our teammate doing within the firm ? Are they growing ? Are they being heard ? Do they have a voice ? Do they feel confident in the direction that we're going to the foot ? They feel confident in their role and their future within our practice .

And so we did our first one , and what the idea was was to do this and then present all the results to our team on our Tuesday all team meeting . And so we did that , and so a couple of things that came out of that .

I'm real excited with what we have discovered , not only from just some good feedback we receive , but some real opportunities to get better and do better for our team and serve our teammates a little bit better .

So the idea would be we're going to do another one of these in a couple of weeks and then at the end of this current quarter we'll do that , and then we'll be able to compare and watch our progress hopefully progress quarter over quarter .

And so what we got was that , for the most part , our team is feeling great and they feel a high degree of engagement and morale in our practice . And so , from a good standpoint , what we uncovered is that and these numbers are super high that we're thrilled with from a positive standpoint , the work enjoyment .

About 96% of our teammates said they enjoy their work , 96 again said that they have a high morale about their office , their team , that they're on , and the 91% said they felt really positive with their career path . They understood what it was and they felt energized about the future for themselves personally .

Then , flipping that around on the opposite end of the spectrum , for opportunities for us to improve the experience of our teammates , what we discovered is that about 32% a high number felt like the workload versus the schedule were not matching up .

They really felt , you know , pushed on from a work standpoint , too much work , not enough time to get that work done . In 23% , another fairly high number felt they just weren't supported as much as they wanted to be and we're hoping to be in their job .

So that really illustrated to us that we need to do a better job from a support perspective to our teammates . And that was a real nice I wouldn't say wake up call as much as kind of a sobering like hitting the phase and say , hey , we got to do a much better job from a leadership perspective , supporting our teammates .

And then 11% said they really didn't feel like that , a voice in their job , a voice in the firm . And that's something that falls on me as the leader for sure . We want everyone to feel like they feel that right and they want to . They have a voice in our future and where we're going .

We want to empower all of them and include everyone in that , in that sort of thing . So one of the responses that we immediately were able to react around this and this had to do with the area of communication , what I've discovered over the years is that communication is always an opportunity to improve .

No matter what you do , you're going to have a way to get better at communicating out to your team , because as things grow , the dynamics of the firm change and as all that stuff starts to mature , communications one of the things that falls off the radar very , very , very quickly and it could have a pretty detrimental downstream effects on the firm .

And so what we understood from our legal team , in particular from our lawyers , is they really didn't feel like that transparency was there , like it should be , like it had been previously , for example . And one of the ways we felt like we can address that right away was in our morning huddle .

So we have a morning huddle every morning at 830 where we bring together all of our managers and we talk about our numbers from the prior day , our rolling day , our 28 day numbers , and what we need to work on that day , what some of our roadblocks were . And that's a time for you for us to say hey , katie , what's going on over here ?

Or maybe , paige , you have a roadblock here , what can we do to solve that ? And so it's a quick it's meant to be a quick standups type meeting the last 15 minutes and we weren't inviting any of our partners to that , which was a big mess and our thinking was flawed .

But our thinking was look , they're so busy taking care of clients running the court at 830 in the morning . We don't want to bother them .

But what we didn't realize is that they really care and they want to be there , they want to know what's happening and they want to see how other parts of the firm are doing their job and be able to share their concerns and their roadblocks .

And so we invited them and that's been a real good move since we did that and so we're getting really good participation from our partners in our morning huddle meeting . So it's gotten bigger . It's probably around 20 people at that meeting , but it's not 20 every time because it's first thing in the morning at 830 .

So a good quarter of us is in the car , are in the car and we're listening or you know , we've got our phone sitting there showing our face from a weird angle in the car in our Google Meet . But that happens every morning now at 830 .

So what's been really interesting to me to see is how teammates are rally to each other once they know and understand what another teammate's doing to support them and their mission .

It just bonds people together in a much more trusting way because they can see tangibly what's happening within the practice all across the many different departments that we have and how each department's supporting the other . So that's been really , really cool to see All right .

So final headlines I'm going to share with you are numbers for the month from a high level , and hopefully this will help benchmark a little bit . So we had 492 consults that were set last month in July . That was down about 15% from the prior month of June . So June , for some reason , was a really hot month . I wish I could .

I wish I could identify why June , because last year it was July . So it seems to like not have rhyme or reason it . Just within a certain wide range of parameters . We see these big spikes in our opportunities , or what we call opportunities , or our consults . So we had 492 last month that were set . Not all of them happen .

Folks change their mind , they don't show up . You know things you know break apart or whatever , and so that that's what we set last month were were 492 consults . We had 180 new clients choose us , so that was awesome to have 180 families and individuals trust us to support them and guide them through their family legal crisis , so that was an honor .

But that's down 18% from the month of June . So both both of those numbers are down almost the same amount 15 , 18% . So that gave us a close rate , a conversion rate of 37% . So that's what happened there . And then , from a top line perspective , we are down 11% from June , but still over budget .

So that was interesting to see because June was such a powerfully productive month . So we are down from I think it was 1.453 last month of June , and then last month in July , we did 1.295 million top line One big accomplishment to point out from one of our attorneys .

One of our attorneys , tiffany , did had her third month in a row of over $100,000 collections three months in a row . So she is an absolute machine and so congratulations to you , tiffany , for your accomplishment there . And then , to conclude here , we crossed a major milestone of sorts last month with our 7,000th review , public review .

So these are folks that come to see us , we serve them in their legal matter , and then they have the boldness to go out and leave a public review for all the world to see on Google or on Facebook or somewhere like that , and so we had 7,000 clients now that have done that . So thank you , clients .

That means so much to me and to our team that you're willing to tell others about us and how we served you in a public way . So that's been really cool

. We also saw our net promoter score drop a little bit . We were at 55 last month , we're down to 50 , as it stands right now , and so that is a famous metric used to measure client or customer satisfaction and from a standpoint of law firms , law firms typically are in the mid to high 20s , and so we feel positive with that .

But we see it as we're not competing against other firms . We want to be the best we can . We want to get that as close to the very top , which would be 100 as possible , which is , I mean , super hard to do in family law . But we can do better , and so we're really trying to push that number up . But 50 is where we ended up last month .

So , anyway , that's the five headlines . That's the Chronicles for the month of July , and I hope that there's something you can take from that and bring that into your practice and improve , do better , make more , serve more clients , whatever that success looks like to you . So have a great week everybody .