Current intake practices place a substantial weight on intake staff. They must engage with leads to gather all the essential details, respond with polish and professionalism, and understand the markers of successful cases. And they have to do it fast — before the potential client signs with somebody else.
To make matters even more challenging, intake staff often experience high turnover rates — meaning just as soon as someone is trained, they might be already moving on to other work.
This is one reason legal intake often doesn’t meet client expectations. Too often, potential clients report that law firm intake is slow, inconsistent, and lacking in empathy. At the same time, firms struggle to find and sign the most promising clients.
Trusted AI Tools Are Changing The Game For Legal Intake
Lead Docket has long been recognized as the premier lead-tracking platform for law firms. The tool has gained industry accolades for helping firms improve their case quality and increase revenue.
This Article Will Explore How New AI-Powered Technology Is:
- Helping firms move faster to win over the right clients.
- Improving intake communication to ensure empathy and professionalism.
- Keeping teams aligned and in-the-know.
- Taking the guesswork out of the lead qualification process, helping firms focus on the most valuable cases.
Read on to see how this new technology can help firms improve client satisfaction, save on intake training costs, and significantly increase revenue.
The Quest for Faster Intake
The ABA Benchmark Study on Law Firm Intake Process shocked the legal industry when it found that 42% of law firms fail to respond to client inquiries within 3 days.
55% More people pointed to a quick response as a reason for hiring a lawyer than issues of cost, years of experience, online reviews, personal recommendations, and location.
This slow response means that firms lose out on high-quality clients. A prompt response is the most cited factor client's consider when hiring an attorney, according to research done by Martindale-Avvo.
Conversely, slowness to respond was the most cited "red flag" deterring clients from hiring a particular attorney, with more than half of respondents naming it as one of their three biggest red flags.
AI Lead Summarization Makes Follow-Up More Efficient:
Lead Docket users already benefit from the top tools to help your firm be the first to respond to new leads. But now you can deploy AI technology to respond even more effectively.
With LeadsAI, your firm can benefit from Lead Summarization. The tool analyzes all the available intake information and summarizes the most salient details in one succinct paragraph. Rather than rifling through reams of information, you can immediately grasp the substance of the case.
Identifying Referrals
In addition to finding cases to pursue, Lead Summarization also helps you quickly identify cases to refer to your colleagues, helping you gain revenue from leads that don't meet your qualifications. Join Filevine's robust referral program to send and receive referrals to other trusted firms.
Lead Summarization will make the intake experience better for clients, more manageable for legal professionals, and more lucrative for firms.
Learn How To Qualify And Sign Clients Faster >
Building Better Communication Patterns
According to some troubling ABA survey results, most law firms are not giving potential clients the levels of polish and professionalism they require.
When it comes to intake professionals being polite and professional, the survey found significant room for improvement. But of even more concern is the lack of empathy: 42% of callers reported they felt no empathy from the person who answered the phone.
35% of callers reported they felt that the person assisting them with intake details was polite and professional.
FIRMS THAT WERE EMPATHETIC
- Not at all: 5%
- Poorly: 13%
- Somewhat: 19%
- Well: 22%
- Very well: 42%
Those reaching out to lawyers are often in an emotionally vulnerable state, and need intake professionals who are helpful and caring. But managers find it difficult to ensure their staff are exhibiting some of these more subtle and qualitative aspects of legal intake. They also too often remain unaware of the pain-points and hang-ups within the intake process.
Improve Communication Patterns With Message Summarization
Message Summarization provides you with a sentiment analysis of all intake communication. By evaluating the language, tone, and overall strategy in messages across multiple channels, you can better understand engagement patterns and identify opportunities to refine your outreach. For example, an analysis may reveal that emails are overly formal while text messages lack valuable meaning. Or it may uncover spikes in negative sentiment around fee objections that require negotiation.
Every law firm touts their empathy and care. But with Message Summarization you can actually measure and improve the quality of your communication with potential clients. With insights into your leads' sentiments, pain-points, and decision-making processes, you can better tailor your outreach and messaging more effectively to close more deals.
Discover Tools To Help You Improve Client Communication >
Creating Seamless Hand-offs
Good legal service requires an entire team. But when services for a potential client are handed off to someone else, it’s hard to get up to speed on past interactions.
When clients move between intake professionals, paralegals, and attorneys, they sometimes have to repeat the same process, answer the same questions, and have the same conversations over and over. This builds frustration, erodes trust, and wastes everyone’s time.
Notes Summarization Helps You Stay Up To Speed With New Leads
LeadsAI offers Notes Summarization, which sifts through all the events, conversations, and updates that have happened through the course of intake and delivers a clear, consolidated timeline.
With Notes Summarization, it’s easy for each person engaging with the potential client to be fully informed. Your new clients won’t have to repeat themselves, you won’t have to waste time studying up, and the case can move forward more efficiently and with a better sense of care.
Learn More About AI Intake Tools >
Taking Out the Guesswork
Busy lawyers don't have the time to familiarize themselves with every incoming lead to decide whether or not to pursue a case.
That means intake staff have to make big decisions about which leads are valuable and which aren't. When intake professionals make a mistake, great clients get away or lawyers waste their time studying and rejecting qualified leads that aren't actually a good fit.
To cut down on these mistakes, firms must continue to invest significant time and energy into training their intake staff to recognize all the signs of strong cases and all the red flags of weak ones. That level of training is an intensive, lengthy process, often taking weeks or even months before a new hire is entrusted with independently handling this step.
Pursue The Strongest Cases With Predictive Analysis
Fortunately, revolutionary new tools make it easier to find the best clients for your firm. AI-powered Predictive Analysis takes the guesswork out of lead qualification and helps you pursue new clients with confidence.
Using a trove of proprietary Lead Docket data, the Predictive Analysis tool predicts the likelihood of success for new potential cases. With AI's guidance, you can take the guesswork out of the intake process, and immediately pursue the most valuable cases.
Predictive Analysis is currently available for motor vehicle accident cases, with expanded case types coming soon.
The ROI of Predictive Analysis
Increased Revenue
LeadsAI reduces rejection after sign-up rate by 25%. For our model firm, their rate went from 10% to 7.5%, which allowed them to bring in 10 more fees per month. That's an additional $864,000 a year in revenue.
Cost Savings
AI analysis makes it easier to train your intake professionals. Because the tool can predict success, intake professionals can have a faster and more accurate response, with less sunk investment in training. LeadsAI cuts training costs by an estimated 25%.
For the model firm, which spends an estimated $22,000 on intake training each year, that's a savings of $5,500 yearly.
Try Out Predictive Analysis For Your Own Cases >
Seeing Results: Better Intake Means Higher Profits
Legal intake is one area where law firms can see big improvements.
Even more modest efforts to tighten up the process lead to financial gains. Survey results show that investments in better managing the intake process has significantly improved firm profitability 65.5% of the time (another 30% of respondents said it was too soon to tell).
Q: For each of those things you've done to improve your firm's profitability, has the action resulted in a significant improvement of profitability?
- Yes: 65.5%
- Too soon to tell: 29.1%
- No: 5.5%
LeadsAI can catapult your firm to higher profits through even more dramatic improvements to your intake process. You'll save time, make more informed decisions, and convert more and better leads.
How Would Your Firm Benefit From A Better Intake Process?
Talk to a Filevine representative to find out. Request a demo today