In this episode of Taking the Stand, we sit down with Keith Lee, former attorney and current Chief Marketing Officer for Case Status.
Case Status is an exciting new legal technology company dedicated to helping law firms improve client experience and satisfaction. Their app allows clients to quickly view the current status of their legal matters and streamlines communication with the law firm. Attorneys can request documents, schedule appointments, and respond to messages all in one place. For Filevine users, the app is even more powerful. It can seamlessly sync changes in Filevine to Case Status and vice versa, allowing you to track every detail of a case in one place.
Learn more about how Case Status is changing the game in client satisfaction in this episode of Taking the Stand. Visit CaseStatus.com to book your demo today.
Full Transcript
Erik Bermudez: Hello everyone and welcome to today's edition of Taking the Stand, where our mission is to inspire you by inviting VIP guests, to understand what success principles they've used, to find a greater achievement. My name is Erik Bermudez and I'll be your host. Welcome to today's podcast. Hello everyone. Welcome to today's episode of Taking the Stand. We are thrilled that you're joining us. We have a very, very special episode today, where we are going to talk about to the consumerization of legal services. With actually our platinum partner, we are so grateful for Case Status being our platinum partner at our upcoming Filevine Legal X conference. We hope everyone that's listening today can join us. It's going to be a phenomenal show, a wonderful conference. And like I said before, Case Status is our platinum partner for that show. And we're thrilled to have them and have their support. Today with us, we are going to be speaking to Keith Lee, who is the Chief Marketing Officer of Case Status. Keith, thank you so much for joining us. We really do appreciate your time.
Keith Lee: Hey Erik, it's great to be here and chat with you again.
Erik Bermudez: Awesome. Well, before we jump into the content of today's episode, which I think is really intriguing and something that Case Status is right in the middle of, why don't for our listeners that maybe don't know Case Status and don't know you, can you take a minute introduce yourself and introduce Case Status as a high level and especially as one of Filevine's partners.
Keith Lee: Keith Lee, I'm an attorney. I practiced for a number of years then I got into really involved in the legal industry and legal technology. I wrote for Above the Law for a number of years. I have written a lot about the industry and legal technology over the years. And then about a year and a half ago, I was approached by the folks at Case Status and came on board. Because it was a great team of people and the product's really great, because it really meets one of the challenges that I know really well as an attorney, which is client communications. Because it's very difficult because to the client, they've got one case and that's all they think about. It's one of the most important things in their lives. From our lawyer's standpoint, depending upon what you're doing, if you're an insurance defense or personal injury, you might have 100 cases, 150 cases, 200, 300. It's really difficult to keep up with all that stuff, without a system. In Case Status, there's a number of things, but that was the original Genesis of the idea that was that, litigation takes a long time. But people think litigation is Law and Order. It's like, oh, it's an episode of Matlock. It's something happens 45 minutes later, boom, boom, boom trials done. Actually things take at the short end, 10 months at the long end, 36, 48 months. How can you manage the client's expectations and a regular systematic way, that lets them know they're important to you and your firm and takes a lot of the burden and work off of you as the attorney.
Erik Bermudez: You mentioned something in your comments there that really stood out. Managing expectations. And for all those listening, we all know that managing expectations, it seems so easy. Well, we need to do a better job of managing expectations. That's how we help client satisfaction. And that's how we help reduce client frustration, et cetera. How does Case Status in your mind, specifically help with the expectation setting with clients?
Keith Lee: Everything else in your life, is amplified. It's on your phone, right? If I order a pizza and I go to Domino's or whatever, there's a pizza tracker. And it's like order received, assembling, cooking, out for delivery, there's no assymetry in information, right? They become very transparent in what they're providing to you. Amazon, even your bank. We kind of took that and said, "All right, let's build out stages of a case. And let's build out a case tracker, right? Let's have stages, let's display the whole thing to the client. Let's attach explanations to each stage of the case." So if a client's like, okay, intake, they know they're in stage one. We have pre-baked and all of this can be changed obviously by our customers, by law firms. But we have a lot of templates oh, with your workers' comp practice. Okay. These are the typical stages in our worker's comp practice area, in terms of workers' compensation. Here's how long they take, there's explanations of what each stage is about. So a client comes in, they can just look at any point. They don't have to call and be like, "Well, what's next?" They can just pull up case status on their phone and go, "Oh, I'm in stage one. It usually takes this amount of time. And then we'll move to stage two. And I understand where the case is going.' And then, hey, if you have a question, just message us right there in the app. If you have any questions, boom, boom, boom. So it's by showing, giving them a roadmap of what happens. And then also making sure if there's any questions, they know it's not pick up the phone, it's the immediate availability, just text, just text. Because people don't like to talk on the phone anymore, they just want to send messages. So we keep those two things hand in hand, really, really help manage client expectations in a big, big way.
Erik Bermudez: So one thing I want to dig into, that I think we're all dealing with, you name the business, you name the sector, you name the industry, everyone's dealing with this monumental shift of the importance of consumer reviews. And that can be in the form of Google reviews, Amazon customer reviews for Amazon products. It just seems like this consumerization shifts in every industry. In fact, I can't tell you the number of law firms that tell me, "Look, if we answer the phone, they're going to go on to the next, most highly ranked law firm right after us and call them and see if they pick up the phone." How does Case Status and your technology in supporting and strengthening client communications between the law firm and the client, help with that specifically?
Keith Lee: Sure. What's really funny. I just actually, we were doing a case study on one of our customers, actually mutual customer. Someone who users Filevine, uses Case Status as an integration. And they actually came to us and reviews was a big thing they want it to capture. So one other thing we do, is we use something called NPS, which a lot of other people know what NPS stands for, Net Promoter Score. It's a test for customer satisfaction, very new to the legal industry. It's just a very simple thing. You just answer one question and it's on a scale. And we do that at each stage of the case. So when a client moves from stage one to stage two, stage two to stage three, we ask them this question, what you want is nines and 10s. It's on a scale of one to 10. If somebody, you get five or six, that is a red flag to you as an attorney that your firm has dropped the ball in some way. So you can jump in and suddenly give that person the extra TLC, the extra attention, oh, what's going on? Was it ... And correct that because clients are satisfied and they're giving you these scores at each stage of the case, as you get towards the end and they give you that good score. We have an automatic feature where we say, we'd love for you to give us a review and we can a link to your firm's review accounts on Yelp, Google, Ortho and just have all that available. And just immediately, just as the firm, there's just one button, hey, they just gave us a 10. Request to review right now.
Erik Bermudez: Interesting. So there's as soon as the law firm gets an account that, okay, they scored high on the NPS tracker, you click a button and it invites the client right then and there through the app? Or is it a text message or email to invite them [crosstalk 00:08:05]. Through the app app. Okay.
Keith Lee: Right through their app. So because that's where they're already communicating all the time, that's where they're seeing the stages through their case. That's where they're getting updates. That's where they're communicating with the firm. You on the firm side, on your version of the app, you go, oh, we just got a 10. Request review right then. And so that way you're capturing reviews when you know a client is happy and satisfied.
Erik Bermudez: That's great. That's great. I didn't realize you had that feature so that's wonderful. So talk to me a little bit about ... Our listeners probably know what Filevine does. Right? Manage the case, you can manage intake with it, we partner with you to help the client management portion and client communications be part of that. But talk to me about how our systems integrate. I know the Case Status team put a lot of time into building out the most seamless and effective integration, to help our users be as successful as possible. Can you tell me what the integration does and how Case Status from a technology standpoint, integrates and works with Filevine?
Keith Lee: Filevine is a great practice management software. And it does what it does really, really well. We just focused on the client's part. And we try and stay in our lane, but we know what we don't want to do, is introduce a bunch of extra work for anybody. Right? Multiple systems, enter this, enter that. That's no fun. We sync cases and clients from Filevine to Case Status automatically. So there's no double entry. You don't have to go put something in the Filevine and then put something in the Case Status. You put it into Filevine, it syncs over, it's automatic. The next thing we do, is we sync our activity from Case Status. So we have a robust checklist system. So you can provide a client, hey, we need you to do, go to a doctor, complete all treatment, then get us your insurance information, checklist, check, check, check, check. And they can submit all that through the app. So all those checklist items, those sync back to Filevine. Treatment tracking. So we have treatment log tracking for personal injury cases. That gets synced back automatically. In any appointments, because we have an automatic appointment reminder system. Any messages, because that's how you primarily communicate with your clients, is through in Case Status through the in app messaging. And all that gets synced back automatically to Filevine. And then we also automate status updates from Filevine. So the customizable stages that we have in our app, we know people in Filevine maybe have some a little bit different staging system so we make sure that those two sync.
Erik Bermudez: And you must be referencing the phases. We call it phases, but you can map phases within Filevine, which basically is the A to Z workflow and step-by-step of managing the case. Those can be synced with specific triggers on Case Status side, to send descriptive steps and context to the clients. So they're always in the loop.
Keith Lee: Yep, exactly.
Erik Bermudez: Got it.
Keith Lee: Okay. Okay. That's great. Now, one thing that's actually, we talked about this a little bit is ... And I don't want to overlook it because I think this term is pretty unique to you. You maybe have coined this term. I don't know. You can trademark it ... But you mentioned legal services and everything now these days, is becoming app-ified. You've referenced now a couple of different times, that the client can communicate with the firm via the Case Status app. So I was wondering if you can just take a minute or two and describe ... You've described very thoroughly what the law firm sees. Can you take a minute and describe what the client sees, when dealing with the law firm that's live with Case Status?
Erik Bermudez: The difference there is, there is a sense of real time access, that I think has never existed prior to Case Status. How do you communicate with really any service based industry, that exists now? If you need ... If you go to your bank again, if you open up your bank app on your phone, there is a text communication piece, where you can communicate back and forth. When a firm uses Case Status, a new client gets signed up. We say, "Great. All right, we're going to send you a text message. Click the link in the text message. And then that'll invite you to install the app on your phone." So the client then gets the app installed on their phone. That's all they need to do. There's no set up a user account. There's no do anything. We control all that on the backend because it's tied to telephone numbers and it's related. It's all in the backend and then Case Status, the law firm gets all that set up. So for the client, it's like they get a text, they click it, they install the app, then suddenly they're in. There's their case. They see all their information, they see their lawyer's information there's the stages of the case, like I described like the pizza trackers. So there's a case tracker. They know where things are. There's a messaging tab. Oh, if I need to talk to anybody, I just touch this and suddenly, I can talk to them. Push notifications, just like we all have push ... Email [inaudible 00:13:10]. When you, as the law firm need to request anything from the client or send message to the client, they open it up and there it is. And it's the easiest way to manage things. You can go in, in and out. Everyone's familiar with it. It's not intimidating to anybody. Everyone's got a phone, everybody's got an iPhone or an Android phone. Everyone loves it. I can see what's going on. I can message my lawyer at any point in time. I always feel connected. Some people I think it worried they're like, "But I want to give this personal touch. I'm a lawyer. We're very customer service based." And that's going to be a step back because they want this personal connection. Wrong. I don't know if it's a generational thing, but if you're talking about the 40 and under crowd, the last thing they want to do is, getting a personal touch from their lawyer. Like man, just send me this stuff. I don't need to talk to you so. Right, right.
Keith Lee: People love it.
Erik Bermudez: No, that's great. And one thing to hit on specifically, Filevine does have a texting feature that's embedded with Filevine. Right? But it's very one-off and you have the case manager or the lawyer or the paralegal, can send a message to the client, within that particular project or case or matter within Filevine. And so that's there embedded with Filevine. So if the Filevine listener listening to this now doesn't know, you do have that feature right now within Filevine.
Keith Lee: Sure.
Erik Bermudez: Case Status is that, but magnified to a degree of 10. If you want to augment your client communications, your client touchpoints, the updates on where the case is progressing within the law firm, that's where Case Status can really augment and broaden the existing capabilities on top of what you already have with Filevine.
Keith Lee: Yeah. We just amped that up to 11. We trigger events attached to Filevine oh, we've moved from pre-lit to filing and now we're in discovery. All right. When discovery stage equals discovery, then Case Status send automatic message to your client, you're going to receive interrogatories. Interrogatories are, is a series of questions that dah, dah, dah, dah. You're going to get a request for production. You're going to get requests for admissions. And then instead of having somebody type all that out, every single time, all those can be saved in as baked message templates in our system, that will then automatically send to clients based upon things that are happening in the case. So again, we just are trying to eliminate a lot of the repetitive mechanical operational work in a law firm, just through smart technology.
Erik Bermudez: Well, Keith today has been a very insightful discussion with you. Thank you for sharing your insights, especially around this whole movement that we're experiencing around the consumerization of legal services. I think it's really important as anyone looks to the future of what a law firm looks like. I think how the consumer consumes an access as legal services, is going to be very different than it is today. It's different than it was five years ago. And Case Status is right there in smack dab in the middle of that.' So number one, thank you for being here and thank you Case Status and your entire team, for being a platinum sponsor again of Legal ex. If someone wants to get in touch with Case Status of course, you can always email me. I would be happy to make a warm email introduction to Case Status. My email is E-R-I-K. Erik@filevine.com. Keith, if anyone else wants to get in touch with you or the Case Status team, what's the best way they can do that.
Keith Lee: Obviously, people can just go to casestatus.com if they want a broad overview and just learn more about what we do. But if same, I'll echo Erik's offer. If somebody wants to personally connect with me or connect them to a demo or somebody or learn more, you can just email me. It's K-L-E-E@casestatus.com. And I'm happy to chat with anybody who's curious.
Erik Bermudez: Keith, thank you again for joining us on today's episode of Taking the Stand. And thank you to all of our listeners for listening in on today's episode. We hope you were able to capture some great insights about consumers, about your clients and how to make their experience wonderful. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day. That's it for today's episode of Taking the Stand.