• Plaintiff attorneys: Understand how much their lawsuits are worth — without the steep costs of experts with EvenUp Law
• Learn how to set – and meet – internal sales goals with Double Your Case Files Masterclass
• Estate planning attorney? Get online leads and sales coaching with Seminar 2.0

We’ve all seen the huge million dollar payouts advertised by personal injury attorneys. 

While some plaintiff cases result in handsome settlements, it’s not necessarily the norm.  For Americans who live paycheck-to-paycheck (about 40% of American families), affording a high-powered lawyer is out of reach.

To make matters worse, there aren’t many good options on the market for consumer litigation funding. And without a great attorney, a settlement may be meager at best or even non-existent. 

Raymond Mieszaniec’s family experienced this situation firsthand. During his childhood, his father was in a catastrophic vehicle accident, leaving his father permanently disabled and his family financially stuck and unable to afford a great attorney.

Saam Mashhad, on the other hand, saw these situations play out from an outside perspective. During his time as a lawyer, he was startled by both the human and financial cost of not being able to afford a great attorney.

So Saam came up with an idea to make personal injury attorney services more accessible to more people. And when Raymond heard about Saam’s mission, they joined forces to co-found EvenUp Law. 

In this week’s podcast, Saam Mashhad and Raymond Mieszaniec of EvenUp join us to discuss how their company is a game-changer for personal injury attorneys and plaintiffs, alike. 

On the attorney side, they explain how their software helps attorneys generate demand packages and build up the value of the cases at a lower cost.

They also discuss how their platform allows consumers to get financing at a hyper-low rate, so more people can afford the legal help they need.

There’s much more to learn in this episode about scaling your firm, so tune in now!

About Our Guests:

Saam Maashad and Raymond Mieszaniec are the co-founders of EvenUp Law, which helps personal injury victims get justice, irrespective of their income, access to capital, or legal representation. Connect with Saam Mashhad on LinkedIn and Raymond Mieszaniec on LinkedIn.

About Our Host:

Jan Roos is the CEO of CaseFuel agency, helping law firms generate revenue through pay per click advertising. He is a legal marketing expert and is the author of the bestselling book, “Legal Marketing Fastlane.” It talks about PPC lead generation, a technique used to generate client leads for big and small practices.

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Law Firm Growth Podcast, where we share the latest tips, tactics, and strategies for scaling your practice from the top experts in the world of growing law firms. Are you ready to take your practice to the next level? Let’s get started.

Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Law Firm Growth Podcast. I have a very exciting episode right now with a ghost from my past, an old friend in Saam Maashad. And we also have Raymond Mieszaniec, and Saam and Ray are the co-founders of EvenUp Law.  

So, you know, I like to talk about a lot of stuff that’s new in this space. This isn’t directly related to marketing, but it is absolutely important for the operations and one of everybody’s favorite practice areas: personal injury. So Saam and Ray, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thanks for having us. Yeah. It was great to see you after so many years. 

Yeah. So, Saam and I’s story actually starts back in university. We were both students at the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University in, I would probably say, I’m not sure if I remember the day, but I’m guessing it was a cold overcast Montreal day. One, or both of us were probably hung over. And we were both on the Executive of the McGill entrepreneurship division. 

That sounds about right. Yeah, definitely hung over. 

Yeah. Yeah. And interestingly enough, I think, our 19 or 21 or whatever version of ourselves would probably be pretty proud of where we wound up, but I would love to hear the story for the listeners of how you wound up running a startup in the legal technology space from the start. And what kind of got you here? 

Yeah, sure. So as you know, after Desautels, in a moment of youthful indiscretion, I decided to go with the law school. I did do that. And I graduated, ended up going and practicing in big law and commercial litigation for some time in Toronto and Montreal. And really this idea arose when I was in law school, the idea of consumer litigation funding, it was a largely undisturbed space, where funders would be extending funding to consumers who are in need of financing while their lawsuits are going forward. 

And the idea sort of germinated in law school. And we started to carry it over the practice. And one of our co-founders who isn’t on the line, Rami, I tried to convince for about four to five years to do this consumer litigation financing idea.

Right. And it would eventually convince them was this paper written by Anthony Seabach showing the disproportionate returns that existing consumer litigation funders generate. So they charge between a hundred plus percent interest on these funding arrangements that they put out. And he was really taken by this and brought Ray into the fold.

And this story really resonated with Ray and sort of took things to the next level. And I’ll maybe let Ray give his origin story here. I think you would be given pretty good context. 

Yeah. So, Hey everybody, this is Ray. For context, I am not an attorney. I knew nothing about the law coming into this. Prior to this, I was in education and recruitment. This is my second rodeo, a second startup. And essentially, we were sitting in Dolores, for those familiar with San Francisco – Dolores park, we were sitting in Dolores having a picnic and Rami just brought up: “Hey, do you know what litigation finance is? My friend Saam is thinking of getting some friends to pull some money together where we can invest in lawsuits together and also help people at the same time.” And when I heard that story, I was like, okay, so how does litigation finance work? 

And this was really interesting to me because back in 2004, my dad was actually involved in a catastrophic motor vehicle accident that rendered him permanently disabled for the rest of his life. So for the next, three to four years, we were actually in court fighting against the big insurance carrier, trying to get a fair settlement. All my mom was working three jobs at a time just to put food on the table. We didn’t have any access to financing to get us by. So this was actually really interesting.

This is something that could have felt like it really could have helped us during those times. In addition to that, my dad ended up seeing that my mom was working so hard. He took a low ball settlement offer by the insurance carrier. Saam is probably more familiar with this as he was on the dark side, if you will, but insurance carriers don’t necessarily present the best offers early on in the case.

And typically low ball plaintiffs who are financially strapped. Like my family was. So my dad ended up taking a $600k settlement anad for two immigrant parents, this was more money that they’ve ever earned in their entire life. They’ve never seen anything more than this. Little did they know that they could be settling more. Six months later, a secondary victim in the case who was not directly impacted by the driver that hit my father, but was hit by a piece of my dad’s vehicle.

He settled for around $1.5 million. We know this because this guy was a local guy and he spoke with us as he was going through his case. And then my dad realized basically how much we’ve lost from not going the extra mile with our attorney and the insurance carrier. So from that, we walked away with less and we were just thinking if we had a better attorney, had better representation who better understood what that case was worth. I had, we had better representation. Maybe my parents would have known that they could have stuck it out and earned a larger settlement through this.

And that’s kind of what made me so fascinated about what we’re doing today. One thing to sort of quickly add is that $600K might sound like a lot of money, but. Keep in mind that usually a third of that minimum goes to the attorney and then there’s a huge chunk of that that goes to pay off medical fees and liens.

And what have you. So, what actually went into his parents, his pocket is somewhere between $200-300k. If you want to think about the value of the working life of a person that is only a fraction of that. And so obviously this is a situation that is widespread in America. And as Ray mentioned, there are really two governing factors.

First is lack of access to capital for the plaintiffs. So there is no financial runway for them to get from incident to payouts. And number two is, I don’t want to be harsh, I don’t think it’s a bad representation, it’s just that the plaintiff bar does not have the same tool kits as defense does. They don’t have as many people working for them.

They don’t have access to experts. They don’t have the benefit of having as much time. They’re often constrained by their own cash flows. So it’s just a much more difficult practice to work up all of your cases. The same way the defense can. Yeah. And it’s actually, we have a pretty interesting market too. And this is the thing, whenever I’m talking with civilians, everyone is, “Oh yeah. Personal injury attorneys. You work with those guys, you know, ambulance chasers, blah, blah, blah.” But the whole story that you just mentioned, Ray, just kind of realizes the human side of these things in a way that I honestly don’t think gets discussed on even legal podcasts that much.

I really think the work of a good personal injury attorney is Robin Hood stuff, right. You’re fighting on behalf of the little guy for some wrong that’s all on them. And when it plays off, it’s fantastic. But you know, there’s the real factors too, you know, it’s like, you know what? The attorney had the ability to do it and you know, maybe it was his first rodeo or the pressure from the actual plaintiff.

To settle can sometimes be more than people can overcome. So from the perspective of the people who might be launching PI practices, it’s really interesting too. Because it’s obviously easy to look at your competition or look at your own websites sometimes and see those 5 million recovered, 7 million recover, 11 million are recovered, but the reality is those giant settlements aren’t the kind of things that get settled with a demand letter in two months. And sometimes the ones that are particularly grievous, you don’t really think about the human factor of this. 

So just to educate myself on this, from what you guys see, like what’s the market penetration of people who has access to this in terms of the overall personal injury world, because we’ve worked with quite a few personal injury firms as far as the marketing side, but I’ve never actually discussed this with any clients I’ve ever had.

Yes, so, just going back on what we do, right. We build this technology that powers two different products. One is this consumer litigation financing product, with hyper low rates. And then the second is this idea of software that helps attorneys generate demand packages and to build up the value of their cases to damage assessments.

The first prompt consumer litigation funding has been around for about 20 years. There is a begrudging use of it. And that hesitance to use it is derived primarily from the extremely high rates that are pervasive in the market. So I recommend everyone to look at the Seabach study, but basically the average rate is around 100%.

And so the attorneys have a very difficult time recommending consumer litigation funding to the clients in good conscience for a couple of reasons. Number one is it leads to settlement distortions. So if you get a thousand dollars of funding and then it turns into $5,000 by the end of it, and you’re settling for $15,000, the client might not sign the bottom line.

If they’re only getting like a net recovery of $2-3k, the other issue is that oftentimes clients get this money and they forget they ever had it. And so it becomes a difficult conversation to have at the end of the case. And finally, the rates are really high relative to the underlying risks.

So there is just this overarching sense of unfairness. That being said, this is a necessity for many, many clients. And so there is no official market study around this issue, but we estimate that there is between $700 billion of funding that’s circulating every year. But if you look at the general PI practice, there’s about a hundred billion dollars worth of settlements and most types of PI cases, excluding mass torts.

And if you look at the average distribution of wealth in America, there’s 40% of folks that live paycheck to paycheck. So if there are any kind of income disruption events, then those people will presumably need some funding to carry them over the finish line. And so that represents in rough numbers about 40% of a $40 billion market.

Right. And we’re not there yet. And the reason why we’re not there yet is because this industry is still in its nascent stages. Because of the taboo around the high rates and the funders and so on and so forth. And I think our ideas that this can be changed, consumer litigation funding can be made more palatable. If the rates are more transparent, the rates are lower and that there is just better operating relationship between law firms and funders. 

Okay. That’s awesome. And I think that also makes a lot of sense too, because it’s been something that I’ve always been peripherally aware of, but a lot of these funding options too, I bet there’s obviously better and worse people to take your money from at the end of the day.

And if, if it’s money with certain conditions, I could probably get a loan for 10 grand right now. I might not have my kneecaps in a couple of weeks, but there’s always the option. There’s always considerations to take in mind. Okay. So switching over to like the stuff that you guys are doing around maximizing case value. I think that’s super interesting and a little bit on purpose, I did a very low amount of discovery on this with you guys. So I really want to hear a little bit more about what you are doing to help people. Not only get to the point where you have the payout, but ultimately make that payout be something that’s bigger than it would be otherwise.

Yeah. So to give you more context, I’ll let me just walk you through my background and how I would approach a PI defense. So I would typically do a lot of very serious cases, wrongful death cases and serious dismemberment cases, and on the defense side, the first thing you do when you get a case like that is to assess exposure.

You want to report to the carrier what is the value of this case and what is the exposure of the firm and they need to do this exercise for accounting purposes. They want to know how much cash they need to set aside for their outstanding claims, and to do so you will look at historic cases that the carrier had, or you will do a verdict analysis for the pain and suffering damages.

And you will also do an economic analysis for things like lost wages. Future medical costs and past medical costs. And you’ll look at things like loss of services and so on and so forth. Now, this analysis becomes pivotal in governing the defenses theory of the case and operating strategy, but plaintiffs don’t have the entrenched ability to do so for most cases.

So what we do when we step into law firms is help them build up the value of their cases earlier. And what that means practically is that they give us the information that they have, their medical records, their medical bills, learning, that information policy information, that the inputs that they get from the client with respect to how the incident occurred and so on.

And we build up those facts into a demand package that becomes really, really well presented, well-organized and builds up elements of loss that would otherwise not be claimed like lost wages. Lastly, medicals lost household services. And we also reference verdicts for things like pain and suffering or loss of consortium as well.

And the net difference is huge, right? There’s in one scenario, you’re getting a demand package with a two page demand package saying this is what happened. Liability is clear. Here are the analysis procedures, give me your, your policy limit. And then in the second case you have the demand package that clearly has built up the thesis of that piece of litigation.

Right? You have a clear exposition of facts, a clear exposition of liability. You have a detailed medical narrative, you have a detailed theory of what your damages should be by element of loss, with supporting documentation, with supporting computation and all the supporting verdicts. And so that forces the claim adjuster and forces opposing counsel, if applicable, to treat that claim very, very differently.

And the promise of even is to be able to deliver this product at scale. And at an affordable rate. So we’re basically trying to give the plaintiff counsel the same capacity as the fence has in a scalable and cost efficient way. And we can do this with a variety of, uh, techniques that we can discuss a little bit later, but we have a tech stack that allows us to do this at scale.

Yeah, well now actually the brand name makes a lot more sense because basically, yeah, it’s like, you know, the people that you’re up against are hiring, you know, the top talent from the top universities and colleges in the country. And if you’re the person who just, you know, this might be the first personal injury case here, even if you’re a smaller, you know, even a couple person firm, it’s like, you don’t have that.

Army of, you know, brilliant  to carry this whole workout that workload for you. But yeah, let’s get into that too, though. So as far as the actual tech stack, how are we kind of like getting all these references and stuff, right. Cause I think, let me actually ask you this. What does the process look like without technology to be able to deliver something like this?

Like what would it look like if you had to just use human bodies to solve this problem? Sure. I’ll just give you a sense of how most firms solve this issue. So there’s, I just want to be mindful of the stages of litigation there’s the pre-litigation practice. And then there’s the practice while in litigation pre-litigation with most of the firms that we’ve dealt with, it’s typically a case manager.

Who will take care of it? What that means practically is that they’ll take care of intake. They will follow up with the client to make sure that they’re going to their treatments, the old retrieve, the medical records. Once they have all the records, they will write the man package. He’ll send that out.

They will negotiate the outcome with the insurance carrier and then they’ll settle the leads. Okay. Most of this is done by a case manager. Okay. With some oversight by the attorney, you can think of it. There’s an inverse correlation between how involved the attorney is. Versus how many cases the attorney has.

Right? So the more cases the attorney has, the more of this process is handled by a case manager and really case managers are the unsung heroes in the pre-lit practice. They handle a lot of dealing with clients. They end the ad. It’s not an easy task, but. It’s all a manual process. That’s primarily driven by a case manager.

And if they have a lot of clients that are really being pushed to produce as many demand packages as they can to meet the demand. And sometimes that creates a lot of strain on what they can do in appropriate spaces. So they actually have to physically read through the medical records, read through the bills, synthesize them, add them up, and put some pros around it.

Put them into the band package, add some additional flourish and then send it off. So it’s a tedious manual process that is often done by non-attorneys. Okay. Gotcha. So basically I think that the promise here too, it’s, it’s almost like a different situation for different firms because you know, that all kind of sounds like overhead to me.

If I’m thinking about the big firm, who’s got 50 of these guys, and if you want to get a better job, like you have to do some sort of a cost benefit analysis of how many people you want to have on payroll versus what the outcome is going to be. So it’s kind of like talking about that too. So it’s interesting because in some of those, for those larger firms, it’s kind of leverage.

But for the smaller firms or the solos, even it’s like, this might be a capability. Like I’m sure there’s a bunch of cases working on right now or that the attorney who’s doing everything else is also the case manager. Right? Exactly. That’s, that’s absolutely right. So if there is no case manager, the attorney has to run this end to end.

And so solo practitioners or attorneys that have work in small offices will often be in these overage situations. Right. If they have a few depositions along the, this week, And they need to send out a few demands, demands, take the back burner. It’s very difficult to service them in time. It’s very easy not to have enough time.

And so where we step in is we give them that overage capacity. So if you are an advocate and you want to be an advocate, we’ll allow you to be an advocate by doing this paper, pushing work. In a high quality fashion in a scalable fashion. So we help a lot of solo practitioners who are either starting out or who have a growing practice to service the demands as they come.

And what we’ve noticed is that as soon as someone uses us a little bit, they tend never to leave because basically we’re much cheaper than a case manager or a paralegal. We’re always going to be there when they need additional help. It doesn’t necessarily represent a fixed cost to them. So it’s like having a really, really good junior associate slash expert on call at all times.

And so it makes a lot of sense to keep us around. And moreover, it’s even good to have us around. To almost get a second opinion on how much you think your case is worth. Right? Sometimes, sometimes we get cases and the attorney tells us, he thinks it’s worth 300, 400, $500,000. And we come back with a demand package for $1.8 million.

And we had one case recently where they settled for two times while the attorney thought the case was worth it because in the demand package, well, in this case was a mediation brief, but. We built in the economic laws computations. We actually produced the model, put it in there. We produced the model for loss of household services, and that significantly increased the potential value of the case.

And it was presented in a matter that had a lot of credence and opposing counsel had to deal with it. And he ended up. Picking up half of what we wanted or what we asked for, but it was still two X, what we thought it was worth it, the attorney thought it was worth. So that’s really the dynamics between us and smaller firms.

Yeah. And, and for the, uh, revenue minded listeners around it, I think that’s a very tangible thing to think about too. It’s like, you know, personal injury is one of those interesting space spaces where, you know, your customer lifetime value is dependent on so many outside factors, but, you know, just talking about the dry numbers, you know, shark tank perspective, if you can double your customer value, what does that do for the possibilities for your marketing and scaling the firm?

I’m sure that person’s having a much different year than they thought of for the size of that settlement. Right? Oh, yeah, for sure. The way Luke had it, it’s so easy to pay for our services with one case a year. If you do exceedingly well, you’ve paid for our services for a couple of years to get a certificate, you know, and one thing I also wanted to mention was around how we work with law firms, right?

So you can have one lawyer with one case manager and we can just work with the case manager. We just need the documents to produce these outputs. So we don’t even bother with the attorney. We just get the documents from the case manager and turn them around, these demands on a going basis that the attorney can review and send out.

And so we really interspersed ourselves in the practice of smaller firms and we basically turbocharge their pre-litigation practice enough and certain pieces of their litigation practice as well. And, you know, ultimately the comments we’ve gotten are around, you know, these demand packages that, that I can produce with your help.

I’m proud to present them to my client to say, this is the representation that I’m making on your behalf. I’m proud to present them to the claim adjuster, because I know that the reputation I’ll be building with equivalent gestures is that of an attorney that is attentive to detail that will build up case value as the pre-litigation stage.

And it just makes them seem a lot. Better and more confident and more assertive in their personal injury practice. Yeah, it’s kind of interesting too, to kind of watch some people’s brand trajectories over the years, too. It’s like, you know, winning those absolute dinger cases makes the insurance people start recognizing your name after a couple of years, too.

And if you’re coming correct on all these things too, there’s probably a. That effect, that’s really hard to measure about just the reputation associated with your name, but also to clients too, just thinking about it’s like, it’s such a common practice in the personal injury space to just have those big numbers listed on the website, but it’s just like, if they can get bigger and more frequent, like that’s also huge for the reputation within the market too.

And it’s like just one of those things, like not even mentioning stuff like the referrals that could be possible as far as these improved outcomes. And then, you know, not even the bad outcomes that people are avoiding, right. It’s like, You know, who among us, hasn’t taken a client when they were a little bit overstretched, but those are the situations, those two star reviews on Google, man.

That’s not something you want to be getting into either. So I think it’s absolutely critical for the small firms too. And like I got to say too, like, there’s one thing that I’ve thought about a lot and it’s just like, um, some people who have. And I actually, I mentioned this on a podcast that I was on the other day with care of a ball who I absolutely have to introduce you to, but basically I was talking about how we used to evaluate people from what I had our sales team do, evaluating personal injury firms.

I said, you know, basically there’s kind of two, two types. There’s the personal injury firm. Then there’s the aspirational personal injury firm. And from what we were doing at the time, which was Google ad words, it’s very hard to get an aspirational personal injury firm to pay five or 10 grand a month plus fees for getting.

Campaign running, but absolutely there’s people who need to make that transition. And it’s such a hard thing to do because, you know, you have to assume that person has other practice areas. So I think just as far as anyone who happens to be in this position right now, you know, you usually think about, and it’s especially the marketing minded among us.

Think about how to get the case before, how to solve the case. And I think you guys fill such an important gap for people who are at that stage, but to kind of turn it around a little bit, let’s talk about some of the bigger firms you guys are working with. And I know not going to name any names, but I know you guys have partnered up with some of the bigger firms in this space.

So what do these deployments look like in those larger firms? Yeah, that’s a great question. And we, we primarily work with the larger firms on questions of consumer litigation funding. We should have started working more with them on the overage cases, right? Even if you have a giant firm with tens to hundreds of paralegals and case managers, oftentimes your people will be overworked.

And you want them a hundred percent for certain cases at the pre-lit stage. Right. And that’s where we step in. So there’s a particular attorney case manager that is overworked. They need help with a case that is either really, really high value or really, really simple. But it’s time-consuming from a records perspective.

We step in and we help them out. But I didn’t want to just go back on a previous point you made around the arc, the trajectory of, of a, of a PI practitioner, what we’ve noted as well. It’s very similar to what you mentioned. You know, you have a, you have a personal injury attorney that starts off starts taking smaller cases, and then they just graduate into these larger cases to the exclusion of.

The smaller like statement and policy cases are 50,000 policy limit cases. The reason why they do that is because they don’t have time. And I mean, the value of their time is optimized by them. Focusing on these larger cases. And what we’ve noticed is if we step in and we help you really streamline that pre-lit practice, you can keep those smaller cases because they’re still somewhat simple.

And grow your practice in the higher value arena. And so it’s basically free money, right? If we can. Pump out herniated disks for you through MBAs, with clear liability, we can turn around in 10 or 20 a month with minimal oversight from you. I mean, you’re going to read the demand package to make sure that the documents are in order and then send that out.

That’s what’s less than an hour’s time, right? You can generate consistently three to six to $12,000 per case with very, very little work knowing that it’s being taken care of by someone else. Yeah. I mean to connect to that too. This is also a huge question that I used to ask whenever. Um, I mean, it’s been a long time since we’ve been focused on personal injury, but one of the questions I’d always ask on calls is like, you know, you guys are out there catching fish.

What case is too small, or you throw it back into the ocean. And the reality is, you know, even those cases that are smaller than that, like, you know, I, I know some really big firms that are happy to take on a 15. Thousand dollar case because some people have figured out a process to get that settled. And those are usually the ones that settle quickly.

And it’s a great way to, as we refer to in the marketing world, liquidate ad spend, right. Obviously, you know, you’d love to be taking the seven and eight figure cases all day, but you know, those smaller cases, if it’s not taking time away from getting the bigger cases are going to keep your ad spend, it’s going to keep the lights on from a lot of the marketing stuff.

So it really does empower a lot of options for people that are in that transitional space. Yeah. I mean, I think what really attracted us to this space. I mean, we’re honestly much more interested in smaller cases than the big ones. The big ones represent a lot more. I mean, just our unit economics don’t work as well for the larger cases, but.

There has been no innovative solution that has been built to service these smaller cases. And most people, no matter how serious their injury, will be subject to either a state minimum policy or, you know, a 50K to a 100K policy. So how do you deal with those cases in the most efficient manner?

Providing the most service to the client and maximizing their outcome without forcing them to get like seven epidural shots to try to inflate the value of the case. So that’s really where we step in and try to maximize value through advocacy through good written work, through reliance, on data, both verdicts and computations.

And I think it’s made a very big difference. Yeah. And it’s actually kind of funny too. I don’t know if it was just the way that we insured this, but you’re actually bringing me back to some of the textbook stuff that they talked about, an entrepreneurship class, Miguel, the disruption model, right?

It’s not about a lot of cases about innovating at the top of the market. It’s the part of the market that other people are not paying attention to. So, it’s cool that you guys are focusing on this, but in the same token, not to be too ambitious or extrapolate too much, right, but people who want to pursue this can jump on this road and become the firm that’s helping out with those in their market.

So I think it is really exciting, honestly. What’s the best way to get in touch with you guys? 

Sure. You can reach out to us at hello@evenuplaw.com or you can just visit our website at evenuplaw.com. That’s our software/servicing product for personal injury attorneys. Our consumer litigation funding product is on evenupcash.com. 

Okay, awesome guys. So once again to the audience, you know I love talking about innovative products on the show. I think this is really a fantastic opportunity and I’m not BSing.

I say that it is an opportunity because if this is something that your competition isn’t focusing on, this is something you can be focusing on. But also, I think for a lot of the smaller and transitional personal injury practices, this is bandwidth they can’t afford to lose.

Again, thanks for coming on the show guys. Thanks for creating this platform in the first place and for everyone else, I’ll see you guys next Tuesday at 8:00 AM Eastern on the Law Firm Growth Podcast. Thank you for listening. For show notes, free resources and more head on over to casefuel.com/podcast.

Looking forward to catching up on the next episode.

The post How a Consumer Litigation Financing Startup Was Born and Why Attorneys Should Take Notice with Saam and Raymond of EvenUp Law appeared first on CaseFuel.

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Maddy Martin of Smith.ai knows what it takes to help a business grow. In today’s episode, she takes a deep dive into responsiveness and explains how it will give you a competitive edge.

She shares how automation and delegation can help you improve your intake — and free up your capacity at the same time.

There’s much more to learn in this episode about growing your firm, so tune in now!

About Maddy Martin:
Maddy Martin is the head of growth and education at Smith.ai, which provides integrated communication services for small businesses, including their virtual receptionist & intake service, live website chat, and text answering. She has spent the last decade growing tech startups from New York to California and has expertise in digital marketing, lead conversion, email marketing, social media, SEO, affiliates, and event marketing (in-person and virtual).

About Our Host:

Jan Roos is the CEO of CaseFuel agency, helping law firms generate revenue through pay per click advertising. He is a legal marketing expert and is the author of the bestselling book, “Legal Marketing Fastlane.” It talks about PPC lead generation, a technique used to generate client leads for big and small practices.

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Law Firm Growth Podcast, where we share the latest tips, tactics, and strategies for scaling your practice from the top experts in the world of growing law firms. Are you ready to take your practice to the next level? Let’s get started.

This episode is brought to you by Sweet Process. If you’re looking to grow your law practice, who’s going to be taking care of what you’re doing today? There’s a reason that the fastest growing law firms that we’ve interviewed on this podcast all swear by SOPs and that’s because that enables them to focus on new things without stuff falling apart once they leave the room. Sweet Process was designed from the ground up to help teams ranging from solos plus freelancers, to enterprise scale law firms create and manage the SOP that allow your team to execute correctly every single time. And at the end of the day, that allows you the owner to work on your business, create new process, or even kick back and relax every once in a while.

And for a limited time listeners of the Law Firm Growth Podcast will be able to upgrade to a 28-day free trial by going to sweetprocess.com/lawfirmgrowth. Again, that’s sweetprocess.com/lawfirmgrowth. See what process can do for your firm by signing up today.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Law Firm Growth Podcast.

I’m your host as always Jan Roos. And I am here with Maddy Martin. You may have heard of her. You may have known her as the Head of Education at Smith.ai, but we were having her on the podcast for the first time. Thank you for coming here.

Thanks for having me, great to be here.

I wanted to start something out, which I found out that was really interesting, which we kind of spoke about on the pre-call, which was your background, which I don’t think a lot of people know about.

Certainly I didn’t but I know prior to Smith.ai, you had some really cool, interesting startup marketing stuff. So I was just kind of curious, what ended up attracting you to going into the intake space after your background in the startup world?

Yeah, well, that’s right. It’s sort of a long story. We don’t even have enough time for me to tell you all the things I’ve navigated throughout my career, but basically econ major, went to culinary school after graduating early and having some fun time to kill before your career really gets heated up and that’s way harder.

And actually that’s how I got my feet wet with the first startup, which was Food52. They have done incredibly well over the last decade or so. I connected with them. I was an early recipe tester. Then I was an editor. Then I ran their content syndication and audience development at a time when you could have a relationship with an editor at Yahoo and get your chocolate brownie recipe on the homepage carousel next to Kobe Bryant, and you got, you know, a hundred thousand page views in one go.

So that was an exciting time. And then I, you know, developed a lot of partnerships through that and moved to California. A relationship brought me out there. And then I realized I’m too type A to be three hours behind the New York City office that housed Food52. So, I encourage anyone listening to know thyself, right.

And for me, that didn’t work for me. I can’t be three hours behind the rest of the team. I want to be ahead. Right. So they ended up getting connected through AngelList, if anyone knows AngelList. Cold sort of interview process with Art Agrawal who was running Your Mechanic. And they were, you know, they had proven their concept.

They were a startup that had customers. They had a network across the country of mechanics who would come to your home or office to fix your car. And it was at a time when Uber was just growing like wildfire and we were the Uber for car repair. I came on as their first Head of Marketing. I basically did everything from outfitting the mechanics to standing up all of the social, all the ads, postcard, flyers, radio commercials, emails, drips, you name it.

Like it was everything under the sun marketing and everything that I didn’t learn at Food52, I learned there. And under great leadership. We went through series A, series B. It was, you know, pretty sophisticated startup by the time that I moved on from there. And what we did that was actually really interesting is, not only do we have all these ads, extremely long-tail for any folks who are listening, you can only imagine what the ad words account looked like when it was “Honda Civic 2012 timing belt replacement San Jose” right? Like, we’ll get how many variables are in there. And we realized that that was actually going to be part of our content strategy.

So we built the biggest car repair advice site, basically online. Twenty-five thousand articles answered Q and A of the most common questions for the 2,200 makes and models over about 18 months. And that took a really large team. I really had to step up to the plate and manage everything myself, brought on editors and illustrators and things I had never done before.

And you know, at the end of the day that brought in a ton of traffic. It complimented our ad strategy. It really introduced people to Your Mechanic. If you think about like who your competitors are in any market that you’re in, you have to identify what are the gaps and the opportunities.

And for us, we were competing with the car repair shops that you would drive past on your way to work, from work. It feels funny saying that now, because we’re just going through the coronavirus pandemic, but we all remember what that was like. You pass by the pizza shop, you pass by the Jiffy lube. Right.

And we realized like we need to be more discovered than just when someone needs that timing belt replacement, that brake pad replacement, that oil change, because they’re going to go to that corner place because they’ve been driving past it and they think, well, it must be reputable. You know, turns out they weren’t such good service providers. And many people are afraid of bringing their car in.

Anyway, the whole point is that we really had to identify how do we get exposure to an audience that has a very familiar, but subpar, competitor of ours presented to them just by driving down the street, right? In lieu of billboard ads, you know, which we could have done, we really took a deep look at an approach into content and that worked very well for us. So a lot of partnerships there, there was a B2B arm and that was a really exciting time through there. I actually met Aaron Lee and Justin Maxwell who are the co-founders of Smith.ai and I had, you know, been thrown into the deep end so many times that my confidence level at this point in my career was really high.

And I was like, look, I pretty much feel like I can do anything that you throw at me. I’ve I went from food and recipes to car repair. You’ve got receptionists? Cool. I get it. Small business owners, just like those mechanics who were posting on Craigslist to get jobs before we started booking them through the engine that was Your Mechanic, small business owners that we serve as Smith.ai, they are similarly in need of strategic partners and vendors and solution providers who can help fuel and build consistency in their growth engine. So to me, I saw an education gap. I saw incredibly smart and high performing professionals who have a gap in the business side of their education and experience.

And those were things that married perfectly with a flexible month to month plan with affordable services, with plug and play solutions that you don’t have to become an expert and you probably didn’t go to business school for a reason. Right? You went to law school, you went to, whatever it is. We have a number of clients in different verticals, but that’s what really spoke to me.

Like this is something that’s not your core competency, isn’t likely to be your core competency. Outsourcing and automation make a lot of sense here at the affordable price, it’s a no brainer. Yeah, I want to go work for a no-brainer company. It’s as simple as that.

Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of stuff I find interesting about this. And one of the things is that, you know, you have such a deep marketing background. I think a lot of the things that when people, especially attorneys are thinking about revenue, a lot of the times they’re trying to market their way out of a problem. But like, you know, with the absolute insane depths that went as far as the content strategy that we were working on at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how good the marketing is until you’re closing that gap to getting them from a full lead that just filled out a form to a consultation that’s booked in your calendar, right. And it’s interesting that that’s kind of where you ended up winding up, because it’s in a similar trajectory that we ended up finding as well. Cause it was like, you know, we used to focus a ton on the marketing stuff too, but at the end of the day, you know, we couldn’t make somebody be a success if they weren’t calling the damn leads that were coming in, right.

Absolutely. It is the single most important thing to do is to answer the phone and also thoughtfully screen and schedule those leads. But what we know from the Cleo report, it’s very simple: two-thirds of potential clients base their decision to hire on your initial responsiveness. And during COVID we’ve seen, you know, that omni-channel sort of communication open up a lot. It’s not just calls, right? It’s not just emails. It’s really, and we don’t answer emails to be clear, but it’s chats, it’s texts, it’s Facebook messages. Look at what’s happened on Facebook. For example, they now have a plugin for any posts you make that’s asking for recommendations where they ask you to tag a business.

Right? So if your business, if your law firm is, if your dry cleaner, it doesn’t matter what it is, dry cleaning shop is tagged people are going to not go to Google search and see, oh, can I find this business? They’re going to click on your Facebook page. They’re going to send you a message. That’s the way that it works.

They send messages to their friends. It’s back, you know, a few years ago, when people started realizing someone’s texting their business number, they better figure out where those texts are going to. It’s the same thing with Facebook. It’s the same thing with other platforms that are getting more popular.

Websites remain extremely popular places to not just gather information that you need as a lead, but also to reach out and start that conversation. If you’re not there to answer when someone reaches out on, they go to the next business and that’s the power of Facebook. It’s the power of the network.

You’re going to get not one recommendation, but many. So back in the time, when you would call up your friend or ask your family at dinner, who do I use for my estate planning lawyer? How do I get a divorce? Who’s the best firm to go with? That’s really, if that’s happening on Facebook, even in private groups, in group messages, they’re going to mention multiple companies now.

And the speed of the response then becomes even more important. It’s not just one referral and you get to leave them sitting in your voicemail, which was always a bad practice, but a little more tolerated. That’s completely intolerable. Now you really need to be fast to respond and then you need to deliver information that helps them make the right decision for them, whether it’s your firm or it’s a referral you’re going to make to another firm.

Yeah. It’s kind of interesting too. Like I find this as a super consistent pattern with the people that we’re running into for running marketing stuff. It’s like, I think there’s a lot of bad habits. That ended up getting instilled as far as intake practices, just because people are used to referrals and like, you got to think about it.

I was actually, you know, taking a training for our team internally. I was like, this is the situation you graduate law school. You go to the big firm at some point. You want us to decide the gigs up and everyone’s starting on day one with referrals. So you know, that’s usually the situation, but unfortunately, that’s the thing. You don’t have competition with a referral. It’s not you versus the next person on the, you know, in the Google search results page, it’s you, who they know that, you know, their brother, friend, cousin, whatever can recommend you or they can roll the dice. So I think the thing that a lot of people have to realize is that like getting the stuff down is absolutely key.

If you don’t want to be at the mercy of other people having to be happening to bring your name up when you’re in the class, when you’re in a conversation that you’re not in the room. So it’s like the, you know, the key to having these firms that can, can predict anything, whether it’s, you know, NOLA, whether it’s webinars, whether it’s SEO, whether it’s, you know, pay-per-click, it’s like you have to figure out a way to close that gap.

Master close the gap. And let me tell you, actually, it’s really a big green space for you because 39% of lawyers are letting calls from potential clients go to voicemail. 64% never responded to the potential clients outreach. Like what does that tell you to me? It says, wow, there’s a lot of people who are not doing this. So if I do it like the world’s my oyster, I’m going to get so many clients just by being responsive.

And then my marketing costs and the return on investment goes up. I see a lower cost per lead, a new client. I’ve got, you know, a better, bigger book of business and I can be more choosy because the more leads that come through doesn’t mean I’m going to sleep less. I’m going to have too much work. I don’t even want that Maddy don’t tell me I can have more work, you know, thank you.

It means you can be pickier because we all know that there are clients who we would have liked to say no to if we could have, and there are clients that maybe we didn’t get back to soon enough, who probably would have been like a really great. So it just gives you more control at the end of the day.

And that’s what it’s about. If you’re running a small firm, even if you’re running a VR firm, you know, you want the right clients and you want to control your destiny.

Yeah. The, actually the you’re, you’re bringing something up that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, which is basically this phenomenon of the door lawyer.

Right. A lot of the times, you know, especially when things aren’t super tight and I can imagine there’s a lot of people, maybe people listening to this podcast have been going through this situation with COVID and maybe. You know, when you’re your best self, you only want to be tight practicing X type of law, or you want to be working with X client avatar.

And then you got the person that says, “Hey, I know this, isn’t your thing, but can you do this?” And if you don’t have, and again, people think if I don’t have the leads, then I don’t have to take that person. But it’s really, if you don’t have the people. You know, on your zoom officer, your consultation of the habit, but ultimately it’s also taking the right kind of people.

And I think there’s also a path to join charging what you’re worth. And like, if it’s people who don’t want to work more in the short term, then I don’t really have too much to say as advice. But, you know, if you get to the situation where you have more people, then that’s the path to hiring out people that, to help you with this kind of stuff, hiring out an associate. I mean, maybe taking a vacation every once in a while, right?

Law clerks. I mean, are your friends, freelance lawyers? There’s a ton of these networks out there, you know, Locklear.Legal, Lawyer exchange. There’s so many opportunities to sort of like hand off that work to paralegals. Like if you can’t find a great one, hire up your legal agency and they’ll assign people to you and you don’t have to manage that person. Brilliant.

Right? Like there are all these solutions to help you get more work done and more that revenue on your bottom line, actually greater profit margins. But, the thing that’s exhausting you after being in this industry for a while, and you know, I had been in car repair now, here I am answering an intake, scheduling receptionist service industry, which the vast majority of the clients that I talk to are attorneys.

If you are feeling overwhelmed and like it’s too much work and you can’t possibly fathom, you know, taking on more cases, you don’t want to think about bringing on a partner or more staff, et cetera. My prediction is that is really all the other things outside of the legal work that are exhausting you.

So are you trying to do your own marketing? Are you trying to get to every call? Are you answering every email or have you outsourced some of that frontline to gate keepers? Do you have someone who’s a paralegal who’s helping you? Do you have a great marketing agency who is an expert that costs far less than the opportunity cost of your time?

There’s an econ major and you have to calculate where the exhaustion is coming from, and you may be fatigued as a lawyer, not because of legal work. Right? So that is something that’s really important to get to the root of. And you may actually really enjoy building a business or the practice, or you may really enjoy practicing law or being, you know, in court at trial, whatever the case may be, whatever it is.

Write down, what’s blocking you from doing more of that during your day. Then all the other things that you’re doing, and you really have to confront the assumptions that you end up making around what you’re necessary for. And that Eisenhower decision matrix comes to mind, right? Like what’s critical to do now to delegate.

Right. And I think that a lot of people think more is on their plate that only they can do then is really the case. And if you start handing it off, first of all, your processes and systems are far better documented because you can’t delegate it unless you’ve documented it to some extent. But it’s critical for the long-term growth of your firm and mental health and just happiness that you’ll experience when there’s not so much on your shoulders, because you think, you know, the onus is on me for everything I’m pinching pennies, and I’m going to be responsible for A through Z at my firm.

Nobody, if you look at your most ideal from that you could become, do you see the principal doing everything? The answer is never, the answer is never. So like think if that really highly successful person has managed to delegate. And I bet they’re not just citing things, willy nilly, blindly. So can you, right? So can you delegate things? That’s the way that like the happiest business owners operate.

And also not to mention too, like, even if it is something that you asked, I mean, I don’t know, I’ve never met someone who’s like, man, there’s nothing, I like more than answering a shot that goes to the site. But even if that happens the case, it’s just like, you have the switching costs too.

And like, you know what, we’ve kind of talked about it. I mean, I think we’ve kind of hinted towards it, but like, you know, the time to response is such a critical factor to be able to satisfy that in a way that’s going to maximize your opportunities with leads that are coming your way. You really have to have kind of continuous availability to just drop everything that the, you know, it doesn’t matter if you’re on the way to court or if you’re in the middle of a consultation with us, like a client or something like that.

If you’re not getting back to that person in five minutes, they’re calling the next person on the, on the Google list. Right.

I’ll tell you sort of like the customer service secret. If you’ve ever worked at a big company with a big customer support department, the most important thing to do is to respond.

You don’t have to solve it. You don’t have to have the sales consultation right there. So, so two things come to mind. One is you have 82% of potential clients say that, like they expect an instantaneous response to a service or a sales inquiry. Right. But the problem is like, you’re demanded to deliver an instant response, but leads are not always a good fit.

So you’re like great. I have to hop to, but only, you know, 40% are gonna, maybe 60% are gonna schedule a consultation with me. And then another half of that are gonna move forward. If I’ve got my marketing campaign pretty dialed in, well, why did I have all those calls? And, oh, when it comes to screening, by the way, I sort of know it when I see it.

That is actually the biggest problem where we see a lot of ownership still from the firm owner saying, I really need to talk to this person. I need to answer my own calls because I have my secret method recipe of asking them the questions. And it’s like, okay. Do write those questions down and give it to someone and just see, like, how did they do if they ask those same questions, sometimes it can be extremely effective to A.) Build more professionalism because you’re not answering your own phones and you want to look like, you know, more professional well-established from where the attorney doesn’t answer their own phones.

And secondly, like, you actually have something that’s scalable because if you were to get, for example, COVID, or you have to go to trial or someone’s out on maternity leave and the person you assigned to that, has their own special sauce. Maybe you have someone who’s doing that and they haven’t written it down.

What in God’s name are you going to do? Right. Like you have to have things documented so that other people, besides you, maybe you share in it, you don’t do all of it, can screen those people and then they schedule the consultation, but here’s the secret thing I’m getting back to with customer support in, in providing the instant response, you buy yourself time and you actually stop the search.

So if I am looking for a divorce and I contact family law attorney. And I have been divorced and I have contacted a family law attorney. So I know exactly what this process is. Basically, you know, you are going to stop looking as soon as you get in touch with affirm and they say, you know, either you’ve got a warm transfer and you talk to someone, right there. .

Fantastic. Or yeah, you have a scheduled consultation you’ve asked those questions. I’ve answered them as a lead. And you say, look, you know, are you, already separated? Do you have kids? Blah, blah, blah. How serious are you? Like you could even ask them like, Hey, how did you hear about us? And then B) How ready do you feel to hire an attorney?

Boom. Right? Like how great is that to ask, to say like, why, why should they not have to answer that question? They might say I’m a one out of 10 and you’re like, okay. You know, you’ll talk to the intake specialist or you’re a nine out of 10 and you’re like, I am on my way out. I have everything already filled out in all my forms. Can you help me look them over? And I need to get a divorce, blah, blah, blah. We need to separate our assets.

Boom, your intake that right. So uncontested say that, say the magic word, whatever it is, then you schedule the appointment and you’re like, having a great conversation. You have the same information every time because they’re using that system, that intake form that asks the same questions and gets sort of expected answers.

And in the meantime, between that first call and the scheduled consult, that person is just having such peace of mind and relief, a sense of relief and the Cleo report, Clear Legal Trends report talks about this too. When you are in contact with an attorney that there’s already this sort of like wall that comes down, the stress that, that comes down and you think, all right, I don’t have to keep hunting.

I got a guy, right. And that conversation will happen and it will proceed as it will proceed, but just answering and doing nothing else other than, steering that conversation right or wrong? Yes. You’re the lead. No, you’re not. We’re going to refer you or no, we’re not going to refer you to anyone because you’ve been through four lawyers.

Like that’s the decision point. It’s the response point and that’s where everything else can flow from there. And that’s in your control.

Yeah, this is actually really interesting to you. Just remind me of something. I’ve never shared this on the podcast before, but basically we have a couple it’s it’s interesting, cause you know, when we’re talking to clients and trying to help them out with their intake process, we have people that are like a pretty wide variety. So we had a situation where, and this can range from people that are paralegals or people that haven’t passed the bar, but we had a recent situation where we had a recent law grad who had been promoted to associate, and this was the person who was responsible for answering these calls. And we actually had huge problems because she was so excited to leverage her degree on these intake calls that she was completely messing up the sales process.

And like one of the pieces of feedback we get, sometimes it’s like, Oh, what’s going to happen if somebody asks a legal question, I’m going to get disbarred and all that stuff too, it’s like, you shouldn’t be answering any questions of that nature if you can avoid it on intro call too, because that’s just going to lead you in a position you should never, you shouldn’t tell anyone legal advice until you have them in a position where they can write a check for you.

Let me tell you something else. So I completely agree with that. I’m so glad that you brought it up and it brings back home the point that like you are in complete control of that conversation. And if that person is asking questions that are outside of that intake process, It is the job of the person who’s on the phone to steer them back to that process and say, you know, I really ask these questions for a reason.

We need to get this information. I can’t answer these things for you now. That’s what I’m trying to evaluate. If I can get you on the phone with the attorney and that’s the same thing, they also say, if you charge for consultation. Oh, why can’t you just help me figure out if I wanted to merge or, or if I want to pay for the consult, maybe it’s $300 or whatever it is. Can you tell me a little bit more before I put my money down? It’s like, you know, from your answers, it seems like you could be a good fit for the firm. We take cases like yours. We’ve had 20 years of experience, whatever it is. But we do an evaluation because our firm is selective and, you’ll be scheduled for a consult. We’ll review the information and you’ll get a confirmation the morning of it, that it will continue and we’ll charge your card at that time, whatever.

It’s really important that you maintain control. And so often. This happens actually at other times during the lawyer client conversation, right? So that’s lawyer client, but even posts or during work line conversations, think about billing. They’re pulling on your heartstrings. Again. They say, I can’t pay my bill. Can I pay 75% of my bill? You know, they have outstanding balances and you keep working for them and you let them take advantage. The point being, if you lay down the ground rules and you stick to them – I’m thinking about my new puppy and how I’m training this little guy – like if you laid on the ground rules early, I’ve got a 10 week puppy, but this applies to leads to you’re much happier later on that client or puppy behaves much better, later because they know the ground rules and you can refer back to them. And you said, look, I told you, you know, the, the payments due. I told you, we have a process when you work with our firm, you follow our process and you, you seem to agree to that you did in writing.

The biggest problem is if you let that client run the show in the beginning, then they’re going to think they were on the show as is understandable, the rest of the time.

Yeah, there’s also the other thing too. It’s like, if, if you’re taking that kind of a position from the jump, the absolute worst case scenario is you say no, or they say no, and then you’ve, you’ve lost yourself, a nightmare clients down the line.

So, you know, in theory, if you have these, these hurdles set up and, you know, you can obviously have a range of what those are gonna look like, but then you can think about a point where the people, you know, you might not get everyone, but a hundred percent of the people you are working with are going to be on board.

And that’s one of those things too. It’s like just strictly from, I guess a skills and talent acquisition perspective. Even if you were able to do this every single time with the level of accuracy, you’re not going to be answering calls all the time, right? It’s like, you know, you’re splitting your time with lawyering and running the business.

And like in a lot of the cases, too, even if the person isn’t the lawyer that you are, they’re a much better intake person than you are at the end of the day. That’s, that’s their job. It’s not yours.

Absolutely. And you should be, you know, sort of not siloed, but, specialized in your practice so that you can practice at the highest level of your law degree basically.

Right? So like, you don’t want to be spending your time doing admin work or messing around on Canva with social media graphics or whatever it is like. Sure. Maybe it’s fun, but is that actually what you should be doing to bring the most value to your firm? You’re a business owner now. Right. And, and, you know, I would also say with clients, make sure that, you know, the questions to ask too.

Bring in the best clients and then avoid those sort of troublemaker clients. If you get that gut feeling, right my feeling has always run, right? Like you’re getting that feeling for a reason, but also do exit interviews. So it’s critical that you are evaluating at the end of it, like was that client is happy as we expected to make them?

Are we happy with the fact that we accepted them as a client? Are they going to bring in other clients like, what’s the referral opportunity there? And what do we change about our marketing mix? Did we learn anything that we’re getting clients from a certain channels, certain referral partner, whatever advertising campaign, and we want to scale it up or roll it back because the clients who are coming through there are either a really good or not as good match for our firm. So if you’re not doing that, I think it’s important.

And the last thing I’ll say. Is, you know, around process for intake, there should also be sort of one line for someone to write in after that consultation. Like, do you get that sort of red flag feeling? Does this person sound to mandate? Are they complaining like crazy about every lawyer they’ve tried to work with in the past? You know, as Maya Angelo said, when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. Right? Not, not like, believe them all later on when you’ve been trying, struggling to work with them. Believe them the first time and make a decision and move on. Yeah.

And I got a question too, as far as this kind of feedback loop. And then one of the things I definitely want to get into is just like, you know, you guys have such a wealth of data available as far as when somebody is dealing with, you know, maybe one channel, maybe a couple of channels, at what point do you guys recommend the clients you’re working with to determine whether to change things, whether it’s a script, whether it’s a channel, whether it’s an approach?

Well, I think that we’re very engineering heavy here, and we’re all about testing. So you never know what you’re missing unless you open up that opportunity, and a great example of that is chat. So there’s sort of two parts to your question and I’ll try and address both of them.

So one is the channels that you’re opening up for people to get in touch with you. Okay. And the other is how much are you iterating on the conversation flows that happen during those conversations? Right? The calls, chats, texts, whatever.

What all start out with saying is that if you have a website, you should absolutely be. Putting website chat on there and seeing what are those conversations? Are they a value don’t assume that your high net worth estate planning clients don’t want to chat in because you know, there are tons of people who are using this technology.

And do prefer it. And you’ll only know if you put it up there and see, does anyone engage? Right? What we see typically is that there’s one chat for every four calls. So, you know, how many calls you got today? You know, how many calls you probably got this week that are not spam or sales calls that are decent and relevant?

That is something that immediately can give you data that’s actionable. It also is great for content, by the way, because all the questions they ask are going to be the questions they put into Google to find your site or explore their problem. And you want to be writing on those. So that’s a pro tip there, but you also want to make sure that certain systems are set up to be open.

If you don’t even know that they are so commonly, we see your phone is ringing too many times before you hear it ring. And there’s wait and see, or you have business texting enabled on your voice phone system. And you know, you’ve never seen a business text. Where are they? You better go find out, right? Because someone’s texting you and they might write a review on Google that says, one-star, couldn’t get in touch with them texted and never heard back. Well shoot. Avoidable, right?

Now that second part of it is how much are you iterating? One of the things that we created last year, if I can keep track of time, don’t hold me to that. I think it was last year that we rolled out the chat funnel with AB testing. Basically the different steps of the questions you’ll ask a lead, or we will ask a lead through the chat sequence. So you start a website chat, you say, yes, I’m interested in estate planning and you know, yes, it’s me and my spouse are going to make this decision.

Do you have, you know, X, Y, or Z net worth, whatever it is, whatever questions you want, where do you live? Zip codes, state, doesn’t matter, whatever screening you’ve got to make sure this is interesting to you as a client. What’s the order of those questions. Are you asking hard questions first or, or hard questions later?

A lot of that actually. Is really interesting to see the conversion rates through the funnel and you can test and move and switch all these things and see what is the drop-off at each stage? And are you getting sort of premature drop-off early by asking a really hard question? We’re constantly looking at that with our clients and saying like, how do we understand and implement the sequence of the conversation to best align with your goal?

If you want to really, to come through, not going to be that many hard hitting questions. If you’ve got leads out the wazoo and everyone’s chatting with you, it’s going to be really hard to book a consultation. You need to jump through some hoops. Right. So it should be iterative and listen, it’s not going to be perfect from day one, but it will absolutely be better than letting them go to voicemail or hear dead air or get in touch with someone who takes a message and there’s a, post-it floating around in someone’s home office.

Yeah. So never too. I didn’t even get the chance to kind of talk about this, but like, you know, so many of these situations where it’s like new we’ve set up, there absolutely needs to be, you need to be available on any channel where clients want to contact you, but like, it’s really tough to get these things all centralized and that’ll be it up to a point for another episode.

Right? The last point is sort of like you need systems that work with your other systems. I know we were going to talk about this. Like does Smith connect to your CRM system, Slack, phone, your website host? Yes. All of the above. And like the whole point is you should pick the best programs for you and pick the providers that work with them because you know, software and solutions are modular right now. So, take advantage of that.

Yeah. And then, you know, I know you guys do a tremendous amount of education over on the site. So like, you know, if somebody wants to learn a bit more about this, like what’s the best kind of way to take a next step?

Right, so we’ve got actually sort of two sites, now. We’ve got Smith.AI and you can go to smith.ai to sign up. You can get a free consultation. We’ll talk about aligning with your business goals and your budget. We also have Academy, so it’s the Smith AI Academy. Academy.smith.ai. And that’s actually a banner on our website. If you listened to this soon, if not, you’ll see the big link in the global navigation at the top. Academy has a lot of expert videos around topics of marketing, lead conversion, and intake, business operations, everything from running better, Google ads to hiring outsourced bookkeepers specifically to law firms. So I hope you’ll check that out.

And then finally, if you are interested and I hope you’re interested in exploring how Smith AI can help you, because we really make a meaningful impact,. Check out the reviews online. And if you don’t believe me, the code for listeners here is LFGPod so L F G as in George, who is our head of agent operations, POD LFG pod a a hundred dollars off for your first month.

All right. Awesome. And then we’ll have that in the show notes for anyone who’s interested in, yeah, Maddy this hour absolutely flew by. So we’ll have to have you back on, but thank you so much for taking the time to speak to our listeners. Thanks so much for having me. It was great to be here.

Thank you for listening to the Law Firm Growth Podcast. For show notes, free resources and more head on over to casefuel.com/podcast.

Looking forward to catching up on the next episode.

The post Why Initial Responsiveness is Critical for Law Firms with Maddy Martin appeared first on CaseFuel.

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About Our Host:

Jan Roos is the CEO of CaseFuel agency, helping law firms generate revenue through pay per click advertising. He is a legal marketing expert and is the author of the bestselling book, “Legal Marketing Fastlane.” It talks about PPC lead generation, a technique used to generate client leads for big and small practices.

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Law Firm Growth Podcast, where we share the latest tips, tactics, and strategies for scaling your practice from the top experts in the world of growing law firms. Are you ready to take your practice to the next level? Let’s get started.

This episode is brought to you by Sweet Process. If you’re looking to grow your law practice, who’s going to be taking care of what you’re doing today? There’s a reason that the fastest-growing law firms that we’ve interviewed on this podcast all swear by SOPs and that’s because that enables them to focus on new things without stuff falling apart once they leave the room. Sweet Process was designed from the ground up to help teams ranging from solos plus freelancers to enterprise-scale law firms create and manage the SOPs that allow your team to execute correctly every single time. And at the end of the day, that allows you the owner to work on your business, create a new process, or even kick back and relax every once in a while.

And for a limited time, listeners of the Law Firm Growth Podcast will be able to upgrade to a 28-day free trial by going to sweetprocess.com/lawfirmgrowth. Again, that’s sweetprocess.com/lawfirmgrowth. See what process can do for your firm by signing up today.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Law Firm Growth Podcast. So in this episode, I wanted to get down and dirty on a super common challenge that we see with attorneys that can really mess you up, from everything ranging from marketing all the way down to the intake and consultation process. And that is what’s referred to as the curse of expertise. So, just to clarify this isn’t anything that you get from opening a forbidden tomb or a sarcophagus or anything like that. It’s a bonafide and extremely well-studied cognitive bias that’s found in psychology. And some of the experiments are really interesting. I just love the design of some of these, and I’m going to take you through one of them right now, just to show you what we’re talking about.

So this experiment was for two partners. One of them would tap the rhythm of a song and the other would have to guess what the melody is. This is actually a really fun one to try with, you know, your partner or your kids. If you want to see what this effect is like later tonight or something like that, but I’m going to try it on you right now. So here we go. Try to guess what song this is. (Jan taps rhythm).

Alright. Did you guess what it was? I guarantee you’ve heard the song many times over the last year. And here it goes, “Oh, say, can you see ?” And then you get the idea. And I really have to apologize for my awful singing just now. But anyway, despite that being a song that everyone listening to this podcast has definitely heard at some point in their life, there’s almost zero chance that you actually guessed that. And unsurprisingly, that seemed to be the findings of most of these experiments that have been run. So, it’s really, really hard to guess that, and you’ll probably find unless that, you or your kids or your partner is like a musical savant of some sort, it’s almost impossible to guess.

But what I really like about this experiment is that it’s a perfect metaphor for a lot of things in life. When you have context, it’s extremely easy to know what’s going on. And without it, sometimes it’s impossible. And the curse of expertise is not being able to realize how impossible it is to figure out what is evident to you at the context that you have.

So the application to the legal consultation process is pretty easy to imagine, right? By default, most people speak at the level that they think at. And the curse of expertise in this case, will have you talking about concepts that are built on things that you take for granted, whether you know it or not.

So just like the melody in your head that you’re tapping out, you’re packing hundreds of hours of law school and case experience, life experience, into the statements that you’re making. Right. So you’ve essentially taken the information and chunked up so that you’re able to have a higher-level conversation.

And it’s possible that without explanation, that they’re going to have no idea what you’re talking about. And a lot of times people ask the question, “Why do so many consultations end with, ‘I have to think about it'”? And you know, one of many reasons is that, you know, if you’re not taking this into consideration, you’ve just taken their brain absolutely through the wringer. And this also extends to marketing as well, especially when people have a high degree of specialization. So when you’re specialized in a certain form of practice, as opposed to just being a family lawyer or something like that.

There’s an example that comes to mind that comes from way back in the day. And we haven’t run an immigration campaign in years, but this is one of the examples that came to mind that’s totally along these lines. So we had an attorney that was running immigration campaigns in the New York City area, and we were running this on Google AdWords. So the terms that we were targeting ranged from more general terms like “immigration lawyer”, but we also were targeted the specific visas and their colloquial terms. Right.

So the thing is there’s a lot more money to be made from getting hired to help a wealthy person apply for an EB-5 visa with investment than there is to have helped somebody apply for a green card or, you know, God forbid, an asylum case. And not to say that’s not important work to do, but for the most part, I mean, I want to say for the most part, but for the client, we were working with it, wasn’t what they were looking for.

So when we’re running all these different keywords, we found that the keyword “EB-5 visa” got almost zero search volume, zero clicks, and almost zero calls. In comparison, the term investor visa got a lot more. Why is that the case? Because EB-5 is a term that lawyers use, not people that are looking to hire lawyers, generally speaking.

And one of the very, very interesting things that I’d like to add is that there were some people that came from the keyword “EB-5 visa”, but the type of conversations that they were having were almost always price shopping or somebody who had hired an attorney previously and was looking to jump ship at that point because guess who had told them what the word EB-5 meant? It was another attorney.

So speaking at the level of attorneys is actually really bad for attracting clients in a lot of instances. That’s just one example, but one I think that comes to mind. So I’d actually go so far as to say that the stuff that impresses other attorneys is actually more often than not going to distance you from the average consumer. And, you know, that’s totally alright, if you’re looking to build a practice that’s entirely based on referrals from other attorneys. But if you’re pursuing a more retail strategy going direct to the market, you absolutely need to take this into consideration.

So there’s another concept in psychology that I kind of want to introduce at this point that relates to this. And this is the concept of processing fluency. So processing fluency is literally the amount of effort that it takes your brain to process information, whether that’s visual, auditory, video, smell, you name it. Right? So if you see a lot of the trends in the stuff like app design and user experience, you’ll see like the biggest companies in the world like Google and Facebook are trending towards a very simple, very flat design.

And the reason for that, and a lot of split testing goes into this, but overall it’s because it’s easier for the brain to process, which means there’s less friction on the experience to the end-user. Because at the end of the day, your brain hates doing work. It doesn’t make you a lazy person. It’s true for all of us.

And there are parallels for this in pretty much every domain, you know, pop music is popular for the most part, because it’s easy to process, right? When you hook somebody up to a brain scan, you see dopamine being released when you’re listening to pop music, because your brain anticipates the next note and predictably it’s usually there. In contrast, a lot of people become anxious when they listen to jazz music because it’s really unpredictable, right?

I mean, jazz is absolutely a beautiful art that takes some time to appreciate, but it’s the same thing with more popular art as well. Like things that are easy to understand are usually more popular and we’re all bringing this full circle is going down to the written and spoken word.

And this is something that has been around for years in the marketing space. Direct response copywriters have been split testing written words since the late 1800s with direct mail. And it’s a known fact that simple language sells, beyond the point of discussion. The best copywriters in the world generally recommend writing at no higher than a seventh-grade level. And it’s even better if you can get it down to a fifth-grade level or a fourth-grade level, believe it or not. Now, I know a lot of you might be thinking, won’t this be turning off my sophisticated clients? Don’t those people want to hear the flowery language that proves that I’m an expert and all that stuff.

And the data generally points to no. One of the biggest direct mail industries to this day is actually financial services. And even with, you know, super sophisticated high net worth clients, simple copy ends up winning because of that principle of processing fluency. A sophisticated person may understand what you’re talking about, but in the process of doing that, it’s going to make their brain work, which it doesn’t like.

And if this is down to getting somebody to read a headline or, you know, anything outside of a one-to-one conversation, you’re going to be adding friction to the process, which means I’m just going to keep scrolling on my Facebook feed. I’m going to go to the next listing on Google. I’m going to go to the next listing on Avvo.

So if you can convey the same information, using simple words, short sentences, short clauses, that sort of stuff, you can communicate the same thing while making it easy for their brain to process. And ironically, this is often a lot harder to do when you’re writing or you’re speaking. And there’s actually this, this old quote that I love, I thought it was actually Mark Twain, but I believe it was, oh, I looked this up for the podcast is actually Blaise Pascal, go figure. But he said, “I’m sorry, I wrote you such a long letter. I didn’t have the time to write you a short one.” Which I find interesting. But anyway, if you can pull this off basically, and take a complex concept and speak simply about it, not only are you going to be more persuasive to the high-end customer, but you’re also going to bring in people who may not have that level of fluency.

And I can guarantee you that those people have money too, both, in the collective and also as individuals. Not everyone who’s sophisticated spends their time reading or listening to talk radio or, you know, even has English as a first language. And those people, they have a lot of money in a lot of instances, right? So it’s worth pursuing those people as well.

And then one kind of last phenomenon, I haven’t really seen this study anywhere, but just something I’ve seen in a lot of personal experiences. Basically just a negative reaction to people using really high-level vocabulary. Right. And I wish I had a cool name for this, but just to put it super bluntly, some people get really pissed off when you’re using $10 words.

So to use a personal example, I’m always trying to avoid using technical language whenever I possibly can. And it’s kind of hard sometimes for me to do that. And it’s funny, even after trying this for years and years to make myelf, or tried to not use technical language, some people say, “man, that was really technical.” (Jan laughs).

So it happens to everyone, but you know, I’ve lost people in conversation. I see people losing others in conversation all the time when they make things more complex. And the way that I think this happens to be perceived in the realm of marketing is, and you guys probably have some experience with this, having consumed marketing podcasts is that there’s a type of person that comes off as trying to blind people with science.

Right? And I think it really comes off as self-serving and kind of implies on some level, you can never understand this because you’re not as smart as me. And that’s not everyone that’s gonna interpret like that, but enough people interpret it like that where it’s not worth doing. And I also do think that there is a type of person that uses big words to feel like they’re important, to feel like they’re better than other people. And if that isn’t you, I would recommend not using the $10 words, because there’s a chance that people might mistake you for one of those people. And at the end of the day, it’s just not going to lead you to be very likable and people want to do business with people they find likable.

So to wrap it all up in the end, being lawyerly and using a lot of really high-level language is just generally not going to be as effective and will also actually make you less likable, whether it’s conscious for the person telling you this, or it’s unconscious. And I want to wrap this podcast up with one last thing on the topic, and that is in the realm of choosing creative in general.

And one of the things that we used to deal with all the time was these really, I mean, I Wouldnt call them battles, but not fun to have conversations over intangibles. Like, okay, should we use this photo or do you guys like that photo? Or even, you know, headlines, ad copy, that kind of thing. It’s all subjective at the end of the day. Right? And one of the things that we would hear all the time was “I know my client,” but at the end of the day, if you’ve taken anything from the last 10 minutes or however long we’ve been talking for, is that you are not your client. And because of the curse of knowledge, you’re actually at a slight disadvantage to a random Joe off the street when it comes to guessing what your client wants, because of the curse of knowledge.

And I don’t want you to feel like your hands are tied knowing this, but you know, basically there’s another way. Right? And that’s by testing creative. So if you have an idea and somebody on your team has another idea, or heck, if you have a few ideas and you don’t know which one to go with, then you can always test it.

And this goes for images, copy, headlines or whatever. Always remember that you can test it. I love Mad Men as much as the next guy, but at the end of the day, it’s not really about the big pitch of the boardroom, that battle of personalities and the force of will and all that stuff to get your idea across anymore. At the end of the day, it’s better to know what clients actually will vote with. Watch people’s feet, don’t watch their lips. And you can always run a test on Facebook, Google, or whatever, and just kind of see what people are doing actually. Don’t guess just see what people actually do. So anyways, that’s probably a subject for another podcast, but I hope you enjoyed this one. And remember to keep it simple for your sake and for your client’s sake.

So I’ll see you next time. Tuesday on another episode of the Law Firm Growth Podcast.

Thank you for listening to the Law Firm Growth Podcast for show notes, free resources and more head on over to case fuel.com/podcast. Looking forward to catching up on the next episode.

The post How the ‘Curse of Expertise’ Could Be Losing Money for Your Law Firm appeared first on CaseFuel.