176: Best Of from TGR Live! 2025 - Intake Case Study +200% with Attorney Ben Leader and the Intake All-Stars

I had never really even heard of an intake department or familiarized ourselves with intake in any way. Our paralegals and our attorneys were essentially our intake team at that time, and so we essentially rolled the dice a little bit, and we said, rather than spend more money on marketing and just keep pumping more and more money into these campaigns that aren't really working, we're going to pull those funds back and reallocate them to intake. And so what we did was we pulled this six figure campaigns worth of funds out of our marketing department. We moved those over to intake, we hired an intake manager, we brought on lead docket, and we started working with an intake Optimization Company, all to kick off 2022 so we knew we had issues. We really didn't know how to fix them. Intake was something that just kind of fell into our lap, and we said, let's give it a shot. So two years later, after focusing on intake, how did we ultimately do it? We saw a 200% growth in our signed cases and 180 plus percent growth in our revenue. And I think the most interesting thing about this, these growth charts, is that in 2022 we actually spent six figures less in marketing than 2021

good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever time you consume your podcast content. Welcome to the 10 golden rules of internet marketing for law firms. Podcast. I'm Jay Berkowitz, and I'm the host of this podcast, and today we've got a great episode. We're bringing you some of the fantastic content from our annual conference, TJR live 2025 growth strategies for law firms. And the panel we're going to meet today is really, really great. My friend Ben leader is an attorney with a very successful law firm, and he decided to double down on intake. He focused all of their assets on improving their intake, building an intake team, intake coaching, intake tracking, and so you're going to learn how they went from I think about 40 intakes to about 225, intakes. Really, really amazing. When you focus what my mentor says, what gets it, what gets measured, gets attention and improves. And I think that's the big lesson today from Ben. Then we've got an all star panel on intake for law firms. So why are we sharing great content from our 2025 conference? Because I wanted to take a minute and tell you about 2026 bigger and better for 2026 we're going to be in in Delray Beach again, the opal grand is a really beautiful location. It's a really gorgeous hotel right on the ocean at Atlantic Avenue and the Atlantic Ocean and Atlantic Avenue, if you haven't been to Delray Beach, it's really cool. There's about 100 bars and restaurants where we'll be visiting partying, opening, opening night party, big cocktail party, rooftop cocktail party on the second night of the conference. So I hope you can join us. March, 16 and 17th. And by the way, it's beautiful in South Florida. March, 16 and 17th. So if you haven't already made arrangements to come to tgr, live 2026 I hope we see you. March, 16 and 17th at the opal grand in beautiful Delray Beach Florida. There's information at 10 golden rules com right on the homepage, click over to the tgr live growth

strategies for law firms page, and without further ado, please meet Ben leader and the all star intake panel.

My name is Ben leader. I'm a managing partner at Elrod Pope law firm. We're a personal injury law firm based out of Rock Hill South Carolina, just below Charlotte, across the North Carolina border, and we handle all types of pi cases throughout the Carolinas. Jay, thank you for having me, and thank you for this opportunity. Jay is one of the best in the business, a true professional in every sense of the word, and I'm extremely grateful for the opportunity to share a little bit about our story and our journey with everyone. I think in large part, Jay invited me to speak here because our firm has grown in an unconventional way over the last few years. It was not a result of any more marketing or any new campaigns or ads that we ran, but it was really a result of us, pivoting, honing our focus in on really diving deep into improving our intake process. We grew 200% in our signed cases over the course of two years, and it was really by just focusing what was already in front of us, which was our intake. So I'm going to share with y'all little bit about our journey, a little bit about our firm, how we grew the way we did, and I'm ultimately going to leave with 10 key takeaways that I hope y'all can take home and implement at your intake departments to help clean things up and run more efficiently. I think a lot of what I'm talking about, most people are probably already doing, which is great. Some of you are probably already doing all of this much better than we are, which is great, but I'm hoping. Full that my ultimate goal is that everybody in this room may be able to walk out of here with at least one or two takeaways that you can take home and implement and help clean up your intake departments. Very brief background about myself. Born and raised in Rock Hill, South Carolina, went to Clemson University for college and then Campbell University for law school in Raleigh. Met my wife there, Lauren, who is a family law attorney in

Charlotte. We've got two boys, ages two and five, so we are in a very hectic and chaotic phase of life right now, but wouldn't trade it for the world that's my dad on the right. Been extremely blessed and fortunate to get to practice law with him for the last decade, to get to learn the practice of law the right way from him. He's been a great mentor and a great role model to me, and very blessed to have been able to walk into an opportunity where I didn't necessarily have to build a firm from the ground up. I was able to step into a firm that had a great reputation and had been around for 40 years, and, you know, help clean things up a little bit and find my role there. And, you know, find a way to add value. Brief background about the firm itself. We've been around for 45 years. This is our 45th year in business. We've got eight attorneys, four partners and around 25 full time staff, six office locations throughout North and South Carolina. When I first joined the firm, back in 2014 we were signing, on average 165 cases a year, and from 2014 to 2020 we were right on that 165 number, I think the most we ever signed was 180 and the the least we ever signed was 150 so we were pretty tight, pretty consistent. What you would think would be a good thing. But unfortunately, it was not because our good years were great and our bad years were terrible, and there was really no in between. And the difference was whether or not we had one or two large outlier settlements each year. The years that we would have a seven figure settlement would be a great year the firm was very profitable. The years we didn't were terrible. Years we were bleeding and struggling to break even. And it was a very stressful way to try to make a living up and down, just very much a roller coaster. And so for for eight years, we kind of lived this, this ride, and rode, rode the roller coaster, up and down and up and down. And then in 2019 we had a good year. And then covid hit in 2020

and so, like many firms, I think we struggled during 2020 and kind of chalked it up to covid. And in order to tell the full kind of story of our growth and our journey, I think it's important to talk about where we've come from. And you know, when things weren't great, which was just a few years ago. And so want to look back to a snapshot of December of 2021

end of the year, 2021 we were coming off a two year decline in signed cases. From 2019 to 2020 we saw a big drop. And then from 2020 to 2021 we saw an even bigger drop. Signed case numbers were going the wrong direction. We were really starting to feel the sting of that with revenue. 2020 wasn't great. Unfortunately, 2021 ended up being even worse. And those you know, the dip in sign cases, I think, was really starting to hit us on the revenue side. The worst part about all of this is that we had no solutions. We had no answers. Despite being in existence for 40 years at the time, we had no centralized marketing data. There was nowhere we could look to to say, you know, what can we pivot these funds to? What's working, what's not? We really didn't know where to start in terms of trying to right the ship and turn things around, but we felt tremendous pressure at this time. I was the youngest partner in the room. I just had my first son not long before this, and I remember lot of sleepless nights, you know, wondering, is the firm going to be around five years from now? If not, what am I going to go do? And so it was a very bleak time at the firm, and we felt tremendous pressure to figure out how to fix it. I remember sitting through probably a dozen or more pitches from various marketing agencies and vendors. TV in particular, was something we were looking at a lot back then, and the year before, we had completely whiffed on a significant marketing campaign, a six figure campaign that we really had nothing to show for it, and so we were looking to reallocate those funds towards something else and something that was going to drive more leads and more cases to our firm. We were very close to signing a contract with to do TV that year, but something just didn't feel right. We felt like we had been in this boat before. We were spending the same cycles that we had always spun, and that if we, you know, move forward with TV or billboards, we were

probably going to end up back in the same spot again. I had just joined a pilma mastermind group at the time and had had a first meeting, and intake was something that was put on my radar for the first time. I had never really even heard of an intake department or familiarized ourselves with intake in any way, our paralegals and our. Attorneys were essentially our intake team at that time. And so we essentially rolled the dice a little bit, and we said, rather than spend more money on marketing and just keep pumping more and more money into these campaigns that aren't really working, we're going to pull those funds back and reallocate them to intake and so what we did was we pulled this, you know, six figure campaigns worth of funds out of our marketing department. We moved those over to intake. We hired an intake manager, we brought on lead docket, and we started working with an intake Optimization Company, all to kick off 2022 so we we knew we had issues. We really didn't know how to fix them. Intake was something that just kind of fell into our lap, and we said, let's give it a shot. So two years later, after focusing on intake, how did we ultimately do it? We saw a 200% growth in our signed cases and 180 plus percent growth in our revenue. And I think the most interesting thing about this, these growth charts, is that in 2022 we actually spent six figures less in marketing than 2021 and same with 2023 we spent less marketing than we did in 2021 so this just shows that there are tremendous opportunities within intake. If we can do it, I'm living proof that anybody in this room could easily do it as well, and that it was right in front of us all along. And so how did we do it? In simplest terms, I think we did it by removing the friction in our intake department. You know, friction is not a word you hear a lot in terms of law firms, but I've found that it runs rampant throughout the practice of law, but in particular on the intake side of things.

You know, one way, I think a lot of you are probably wondering, What does friction really mean in terms of a law firm, and I've got a great example, fortunately, of what friction is. I think this is a great example of friction in an intake department. Unfortunately, this great example comes from my own firm, and so this is a shining example of why we were in the position we were in. But this was an actual process we had in place at our firm an actual phone call flow chart that we had posted next to the phone at our front desk. And so the receptionist at the time was any number of three or four different people that would sub in and out, which was a big problem in and of itself, but they were tasked with following this chart to try to figure out where to route potential client calls. As you can see, it could depend on what type of case it was, it could depend on what time of day it was. It could depend on, you know, what day of the week it was complete disaster. And looking back on it, it's laughable that somehow we thought this was a good idea. But it's also not surprising at all that we saw a tremendous amount of abandoned phone calls during this time period, people were placed on hold and they ultimately hang up. And it's no surprise why. I'm sure the receptionist was trying to figure out how on earth to interpret this chart. She probably would have had a better chance at winning the lottery than actually getting the right person on the right phone call on the right day and time and whatnot. So this is a perfect example of a law firm completely overthinking something that doesn't need to be complicated. Our new chart is simple as it gets, answer the phone in two rings or less, confirm the client's name and number and get them routed to intake as soon as possible. How on earth we got to this point? I don't know, but I think it's worth examining your processes within intake and make sure they don't look like this. As far as how we did it, I'm going to go through

10 key takeaways that I think were crucial to driving our growth and helping surge that signed case spike. The first is the most obvious. I think you have to be willing to invest in intake. This is something we had never invested in prior to 2022 really hadn't even been aware that this department existed at law firms, but I've primarily invested in intake in three different ways. First is hiring people. We hired an intake manager. We've hired intake coordinator as well to assist her. The second way is investing in the tools that they need to be successful. For us, that's been lead docket, a lead management system, some centralized system where your leads can be put in real time, where I can look at them, they can look at them. We can hold each other accountable. And then lastly, we've invested in expertise. And what I mean by that is we've brought on some consultants to help us clean up our intake department and do the things that I simply am not educated to do myself. Intake is something they don't teach in law school. I had no formal experience, you know, training sales people, and suddenly, as a managing partner, you know, I'm managing an intake team that I really have no business, you know, managing myself. And so what we did was we looked to an intake optimization company to help us figure out how to get the infrastructure set up properly, how to get our processes and training set up properly so that our intake team is set up for long term success. And out of everything I've done, I think hiring an intake Optimization Company was probably the best. Decision we made, they have just provided so much value to our firm over the course of two years, and still are providing great value to us today. I firmly believe that intake is the best ROI you will possibly see at your law firm. This is not a place to be cheap, but my opinion, good intake team members are very hard to find. They're worth overpaying. They're worth over staffing the department in intake is

a high burnout job. It's very difficult. Requires a lot of different people skills, sales skills, technology skills. So if you find somebody good in that role, you need to do whatever you can to keep them happy. So you got to be willing to invest in intake. I view intake as equally as important as marketing, equally important as client management, client satisfaction, case management, it truly is one of the key pillars at our law firm, one of our foundations for success. Second key is you got to know the truth. You actually have to know how good or bad your intake department really is very hard to do that from an internal position. And for us, the way we did that was we had an intake audit completed. That's what really started this journey for us. If you leave here with any takeaway, to go back home and do I think it is absolutely worth every penny to have a high quality intake audit completed, and I think a lot of the folks you'll hear from next may be able to even help with that. So for us, the audit took place in early 2022, this, again, was something that was, you know, let I was led to by a mastermind group that I was completely unfamiliar with. And this company monitor our leads. They listened to our calls. They really tracked our every move for an entire month straight, our intake team had no clue this was going on, and at the end of that month, they put together a really thorough, detailed analysis and report for us that went over all of our strengths, weaknesses, all of their findings, and compared us to the our competitors as well. Very eye opening, really a jaw dropping report that still pains me very much to think about and talk about, but to cut right to it, here's what we learned from our audit. Again, this never gets any easier to talk about, but over the course of that entire month and early 2022 18% of our incoming phone calls never reached a live caller. 18% don't

even know where to begin with that, but out of that, 18% more than half of those callers were first time callers. And again, this was just one month our firm had been around for 40 years. There's no telling. Over the course of however many decades, we missed 20% of our calls, half of which were, you know, possibly new clients calling us, and so we always were focused so heavily on marketing and whether it was working or not, and what's next, and what can we spend money on? And it turns out all along that our marketing was working a lot better than we realized, and it was our internal friction within our our department and our intake or lack thereof, that, you know, was causing us to lose out on cases. Another big takeaway we had is that people were being left on hold for way too long. That's something as a managing partner, you're not going to necessarily hear about a lot. Somebody's going to hang up the phone and they're going to call another law firm that can help them immediately. And so without doing an audit, I would have never found out a lot of these things. I would have never known how many abandoned calls we were having each and every month. Another big takeaway for us is that they immediately noticed that the lead volume we were receiving was far higher than what was reflected in lead docket. And so what that meant was that a number of our leads, for a number of reasons, were not being entered into our system, and that is a major problem. Not having every lead in your system leads to inaccurate data, and you need to know what's not working just as much as you know what need to know what is working. So extremely insightful findings that we got back on our audit. I hope that everybody in this room is in far better condition than we were a few years ago, missing 18% of your calls. But again, that's something that nobody's ever going to call you and say, Hey, I tried calling your firm and never got anybody. They're just going to move on

and you're never going to know about it. So highly recommend having an audit done. I think you can have a high quality one done in today's world for several $1,000 I think the ROI that you're going to get back on that is 10x or more just based on the future cases you're going to capture from that information. So highly, highly recommend an intake audit. Key number four, we've heard this theme a lot throughout the conference so far, is that you have to know your numbers. I'm sorry. Key number three, you got to know minimize attorney and paralegal involvement. We also heard this yesterday, but for us, this is as simple as it gets. But for some reason this, this topic in particular, can be a little bit controversial. A lot of attorneys like to view themselves as the best closers in their law firm, and they think they need to be intricately involved in the intake process. That's how we operate. Rated for decades, we thought we were doing people a favor by, you know, offering an attorney to meet with them or to speak with them. And we, you know, we made it our goal to have every call that came in be touched by an attorney at some point in the process. And what we thought was doing a courtesy for people was really just delaying the process and dragging it out. And the data couldn't be more clear for us that the more we remove attorneys and paralegals from intake, the better our numbers get. The more we let our intake team actually go to work and do their jobs, and the more we get attorneys out of that process, the better our numbers get. I think there's just inherent bias that's involved, and I'm guilty of it as well if I've got a doctor's deposition the next morning at 7am and it's 330 in the afternoon, and I'm prepping for it, and somebody comes into my office and asks me to handle an intake for somebody that slipped and fell at a grocery store. Signing that case at that moment is probably not going to be my top priority, and I'm probably going to do whatever I

can to get back to that deposition prep, and I think that inherent bias runs rampant at every position at your firm and paralegals are the same way. And by by trying to force intakes on attorneys and paralegals, that bias is ultimately going to result in more cases being turned down that could be profitable for your law firm. So try to try to keep attorneys and paralegals out of intake to the extent you can. There's always going to be exceptions, big cases, certain reasons that you want to have the face of your firm involved. But as a general rule, the less they're involved, the better our intake numbers have been key. Number four, like I said, this has been another theme throughout the week is that you have to know your numbers in order to make database marketing decisions. We had no ability to make database marketing decisions prior to 2022 because we had no centralized marketing data, and so we had nowhere to turn to to know where to pivot funds to. But I think you'll find that the better your intake department gets at capturing this data, the better your marketing department is going to look as a result. And the reason is that your marketing can start making database decisions based on the information that's being gathered in intake. And so you know, if somebody's new, a new marketing coordinator or director at your firm, I think the best way that they can make a really good first impression is to look at intake and figure out, Is there room for improvement here? Because that can immediately show results versus, you know, a long, long term campaign. I think the number one way to make sure you have accurate data, that you know your numbers and that you're making database decisions, again, is to enter every single lead into your system, whether it's a good lead or a bad lead, or a friend that had a family member that you know is never going to be a case. It still needs to be entered into your system. The second you start making exceptions, you'll fall

into the same trap we did, where you're only entering your wanted leads into your system. Your data is skewed. You lose the ability to follow up with that client, you lose the ability to market to that client in the future, and then you're working with inaccurate data from there on. So couldn't be a bigger proponent of making sure that that data is 100% accurate within your lead system. Key number five, every percentage matters this. This is in relation to conversion rates, what I call wanted conversion rates. If I had to choose one metric that I think is the most important one of everything I look at at my law firm on a regular basis, it would be our wanted conversion rates. I think that's where that is the easiest way to move the needle and drive revenue into your firm is to improve your conversion rates. These are leads you're already paying for. These are marketing efforts you've already paid for. They're at your doorstep. They've proactively reached out to your law firm, and all you have to do is capture them, and the way to do that is to convert at a very high rate. This is not easy. Conversion rate is something that we've been working hard on for three years now, and we've seen some improvement, but we are just now starting to scratch the surface on where we need to ultimately go. Just to show the course of the last few years, this is our conversion rates. Again, by no means perfect. We still have plenty of problems and plenty of areas for improvement ourselves, but back in 2022 we were converting less than 60% of our cases. 59% I think. And if you would have asked any one of our attorneys at that time, you know, out of all of your wanted leads, how many do you think that you're signing? We would all set all of them, 95% of them. I mean, we were, we were confident. We were signing the cases we wanted. The problem is we didn't know about the leads that we weren't signing because they were never getting to us because they were falling

through the cracks. And so anytime I hear, you know, an attorney that doesn't really focus on intake, or have an intake department say something like converting 95% of their leads, you know, I'm immediately skeptical, because I've seen how difficult it is to do that. And for us, it's really been training that has probably been the biggest driver of. Of this growth and our company helping us hold them accountable, listening to calls, rating the calls, providing feedback to them. I mean, it's been a long, steady road. It did not come easy or quick, but in terms of the numbers, just to show you, kind of the results from that chart broken down in terms of cases and revenue. So 2022 we were at 59% last year. 2024 we were at 75% pleased that we're in the 80s this year, and hope to remain in the 80s this year. But over the course of two years, we increased our wanted conversion rate by 16% which is fairly modest. I don't think that's anything to be bragging about by any means, but it made a huge difference to our business. And if we would have continued to convert at our 2022 rate, we would have signed 229 less cases over the last two years. It brought in an extra 80 cases when we upped it to 69% in 2023 and then it brought in an extra 149 cases by bumping that up to 75% last year again, cases that we're already paying for, leads we're already paying for people that are already at our doorstep. So we signed 229 extra cases over two years simply by focusing on intake that was more than we had signed in an entire year. You know, for that eight year stretch, in terms of our average fees. Our average fees hovers right around $15,000 and so just easy math, based on, you know, our average fees, and factoring in some fallout, we fully expect to bring in more than 3 million in revenue from these additional signed cases. And when I talk about intake being the best ROI you'll find at your firm. This is exactly what I mean, you know, 3 million in revenue that was on the

table in front of us that we just had to capture.

The next one I'm going to hit really quick. You are going to hear from the AI attorney himself shortly. And I always joke around that if I'm doing things that Justin was doing three or four years ago, I think I'm doing pretty well for myself. And so I know Justin's going to hit on some AI, but I just wanted to touch on it, because I think with intake in particular, a lot of people think of AI as AI voice trying to interact with the potential client and maybe not necessarily show an empathy or being able to sound clean like a human would. And we're not there yet. At least my firm's not there yet we still very much rely on people for the intake role. But I do think there's tremendous AI opportunities within the intake realm that are going completely unnoticed and ignored by a lot of firms. And I'll just touch on two, three quick ways we use technology and AI to help leverage our intake team. The first one is that we use call transcriptions and summaries. Don't worry, this is a ghost call thanks to Chris Mullins, so no client information on here, but we use a lead docket at our firm, and it's integrated with call rail, and so every incoming call that comes from one of our marketing sources is recorded, transcribed and summarized on here. This call was six minutes and 20 seconds long, rather than sit there and painfully listen to a six minute call, I can pull this up in 10 seconds, read the summary and know exactly where this lead stands or what happened with it on the right side, this is from a screenshot from call rail. It actually uses AI to even rate the sentiment of the call, and it's amazing how accurate it typically is. And so you can see the fairly positive, slightly positives. There's also red brown faces. And I find myself a lot of times, if I'm in call rail, I immediately just jump to the red faces and listen to a few of those, or check the summary. And, you know, try to figure out, was this an us problem, or is this something outside of our

control? I'm a huge fan of these, these call summaries. I think most of this is widely available technology amongst a lot of different platforms, regardless of what lead system you use, or your case system that you use, I think you should be able to get these type of summaries done fairly quickly with AI, and for us, they didn't charge anything extra to have this service with call rail, another quick way that I really like using Tech with intake is to automatic, automate the contact and marketing sources. For us, we've learned that you simply cannot rely solely on a potential client or your intake team to capture accurate marketing data. I think a lot of times, clients may not necessarily know exactly where they found you from or they may tell you one thing and the data shows another thing. And we still require our team to ask these questions and to dig deep into how they found us, but we found that it's far more helpful when you have an automated starting point there. And so for us, when the lead comes in, all of this is automatically populated into lead docket. It'll tell us our marketing source, our contact source, the team can go in and change that if they need to for some reason. But on the digital side, in particular, I think it's hard for clients to be able to tell you how they found you other than the internet. And this will tell us, you know, this came from an LSA ad. This came from one of our Google My Business profiles. And then the other piece of this, I. Really like are the UTM tags. Couldn't tell you what in the world a UTM tag actually is, but I know that it will tell me what content we have out there that's driving leads to our office. And so you can get a good idea of what's performing well and what's really moving the needle in sign cases, just by automatic, automating these contact sources and having the UTM tags automated into lead docket. Key number seven is a very simple one for us. We've had tremendous success with incentivizing our intake

team. Again, this is a really hard job. I think it has a really high rate of burnout for a good reason. You got to keep your intake team motivated. Got to keep them hungry, got to keep them moving in the right direction. And for us, the best way we've come up with doing that is by incentivizing them. And I know every every team, every person, probably is motivated by different things, but fortunately, we've learned that our intake team is very easily and highly motivated by perks. And so in particular, the conversion rate, is something that we've really focused on, you know, setting bonus thresholds with conversion rates. For example, this year, the metric that they're expected to hit is 80% wanted conversions. However, if either one of our team members were to exceed 90% there's bonus thresholds that kick in at that point, and we try to do that for as much as possible. Some ways that I've seen people successfully incentivize intake folks that have been with case sign ups, and I'm less high on that one, just because sometimes that may encourage them to take cases you may not necessarily want. And that's why I like focusing more on the conversion rates. But another thing is independent sign ups. Four or five years ago, our attorneys were involved in every intake. Now I think it's probably less than 20% of the intakes that require attorney involvement, and part of the way we were able to wean them off of that was to incentivize them when they're able to get a case signed up without having to pull an attorney in to close that lead, so to speak, much prefer to walk into a client meeting having them already signed a contract, being a client and being able to dive right into their case, versus having to pitch them on selling the firm again. So you got to incentivize your intake. I think you can come up with a lot of different ways of doing this, but really finding out what motivates your folks is a good starting point. Sure

doing a great job. A couple of things that we struggle with is who on intake decides if it's a wanted case or not, because there can be some game gamesmanship there, right? You have these non lawyers signing it. What are you paying them? 2550 bucks for a signer. That's exactly right. And do you ever track or worry that they're going to sign something just for that? 25 or 50 bucks and it closes without a recovery later on down the road.

So, yeah, questions. Great question. So for us, one of the ways we help with that is we do require it to pass a 30 day process before their incentive would kick in. So and we typically try to get rid of a case very quickly if we think we're not going to be able to get a good result for them. So pushing it out so that the incentive is not immediate. But more importantly for us, I think one of the things we did with our intake company was we painfully went through a basically an all day project where we mapped out every case type we had, and mapped out our criteria for what makes a wanted lead. And so with car accidents, I think it was probably the easiest to structure for them to where they almost have, like, a check box, where, if it, you know, client went to the emergency room, clients receiving follow up treatment. Client has accident report, you know, is not at fault. That's the case we want every time, and we can always, you know, vet it out down the road if we need to. But I think, and that's really our bread and butter or car wreck. So for us, we've been able to kind of map out that criteria and try to have them stick to that checklist, and that's been very helpful, but it has not been as easy on things like workers comp or premises liability. We still find our attorneys being more involved in those than the others. Hopefully that helped answer, what's that? Yeah, so we change it constantly. At this year, the conversion rates are the big focus. And I will actually pull the details. I don't remember exactly what it is. I know if they hit the 90% it's a pretty sizable bonus for our team. I want to say it's 5000 each, which you know may not be much for a lot of firms. South Carolina. Money goes a little further. I think, for our independent sign ups, they get $25 a piece for those for meeting wanted case goals. Last year we had like $350 quarterly bonuses and $1,200 annual bonuses. But, I mean, they've got the potential between all of these

incentives combined. I mean, they. Make an extra 15 $20,000 at the end of the year. And sounds like a lot of money, but, you know, average fee of $15,000 it's just a no brainer. In my mind. If you know, those incentives help drive, you know, even an extra case or two. And I think it's been far more than that. But I'm happy to share the specifics. I can pull it up afterwards and give you kind of the details. Key number eight, listen to your phone calls. We talked about this a lot, I know, but this is, hands down, the most painful task I've ever personally been through in terms of managing a law firm. Again, it started at that pilma mastermind meeting. I got home and I was like, I didn't know you could listen to calls through Google LSA ads. And I sat down and listened to about an hour's worth of calls. I was sick to my stomach. We ended up dropping our answering service. We ended up switching to a new company. We ended up terminating a 17 year employee based on what I heard in that phone call. And so if you have never listened to your phone calls, highly encourage it. It's not an enjoyable process, but I think it's extremely insightful. And for us, it was really eye opening. You know, what we think our training says and what was taking place in reality were two very different things. And had we not started listening these calls, we would have never known this. And sadly, you know, there was a death case that was involved in one of these calls that our firm is not, you know, did not end up taking because it was handled so improperly, and so listening to your calls can really open your eyes to where your friction points and problems are. I had such a bad experience doing that that I can't force myself to do it again. I don't think I've listened to 10 minutes worth of calls since that day, but we do pay a company now to monitor our calls to do quality control and call control, and they rate our calls using score cards and provide feedback to me and our team for

improvement, and they're far better at doing that than I ever would be. So I think it's well worth to pay somebody to monitor your calls. Key number nine sounds cliche, but just want to drive home the point that with intake, this is not something that you can just automate or set it and forget about it. Intake is something that requires constant tweaking, innovating, holding yourself accountable and really rolling up your sleeves and being willing to spend time and resources on it. So highly encourage everybody to view intake from a different lens than you may have thought about it before. View it as one of these key pillars at your law firm. Invest in it, and I think you will see the results from it for us. You know, people always ask, How long have you been working with an intake company? Because most people, I think it's two or three months, maybe six months. We're going on two years. And I have no plans to stop anytime soon, because we have gotten so much value out of this, and they continue to provide so much value each and every month, and just helping us capture cases. Now, I do think there's a ceiling with intake. I mean, you can only convert so many cases. I mean, you can't convert more than 100% and so there will be a point where, you know, we probably do cap our growth with intake, and we're starting to see some of that now where we're having to focus more on getting more wanted leads into the firm, and we're capturing what we've got now at a better rate, still, still some room for improvement. But most firms, you know, like I said, think they're up here, and then when they have that audit done and get the results, they're actually down here. I have never recommended this audit to somebody that wasn't blown away with the results and wasn't ultimately, really glad that they they went through with it. So you got to constantly stay on intake. The last key I've got for you here today, it's really more so about your mindset than anything else, and it's

just that you need to change your mindset when it comes to intake. You need to view intake is the sales team that it truly is. And I don't know why there's such a stigma associated with using the word sales and law firms, but that's what intake is. It's a sales department. It's the frontline sales department of your law firm. It's the foundation for your firm's success. If you invest in it and put time into it, will pay off. It will show results, that you will find growth opportunities. However, if you just view intake as just answering the phones, and it's an afterthought for your firm, I guarantee you you're leaving significant money on the table. And our firm's not a huge firm, and you saw what 16% improvement did. I can only imagine. You know, with some of the larger firms out there, what even one or 2% improvement in conversions would equate to in terms of revenue? Ultimately, in my opinion, the practice of law in general is ingrained with bias. There's very much the mindset, especially in South Carolina of it's always been done this way, so this is how we need to do it, and with intake, I think that is not a recipe for success. I think that is a recipe to end up in the exact same boat we were in, you know, three years ago. So I would encourage everyone here to go home after this conference, have an intake audit done, start tracking your leads, every single one of them, and start listening to your phone calls, even if you just do it for. Week or two, and I think you'll find some really insightful information in there that will lead your firm to growth, just like us, more than happy to answer any questions anybody have. Okay, great. We got some. All right. Okay, sounds good? Yep. Appreciate it.

Okay, are we ready? Ready to play that call? Go ahead.

Hello, I was calling to set up a consultation.

Okay, can I get you now? Our daughter? What happened?

Ma'am, our daughter was in a car accident Saturday night, and she's now in the ICU. She suffered a traumatic brain injury. You know, we're just, you know, wanting to seek some legal advice. She wasn't driving. She was a passenger.

Okay, tell me some Tell me a little bit more about the accident. How did it do? You know how the accident happened?

Yeah, I did speak it happened. And I did speak to the sheriff that was on the scene of well, the deputy sheriff, and he said that the job had lost control of the vehicle, and that it flipped several times, but she was the one with the most severe injuries. They had to use the jobs of life to get her out of the car

at this moment. How old is she 18? She's 18. Okay, so we are gonna have to have her fill out the paperwork, but that that's not a problem at all. We can wait, like, for her to get a little bit more responsive, and then, like, you know, before we have maybe, like, a day of rest or something like that, before we bombard her with paperwork and things like that.

Good question. I'm sorry. Let me just kind of stop you right there. She's had a traumatic injury. So basically, she's in a coma, like state. She's not able to do anything.

That's very true. My I don't we can definitely get a power of attorney to have one of you all, maybe even both of you all, handle her affairs. I just don't know if she needs to be responsive so he can sign that up as well. Or since, you know, let me talk to the the attorney. He hasn't made it into the office just yet. I'm gonna ask about that power of attorney to see that she needs to be aware of. Because I know she's only 18. I know that's legal age, but like, you know, I don't know if there's seen that. She's still yours child. I don't know if we actually need that or not, but did you have any questions for me?

No, yeah, just you know, when you speak to the attorney or have the attorney call us. Thank you.

Okay, definitely, I'll definitely have him give you a call as well, so you can, you know, speak to him and get his voice put, like a voice to his name as well. But, yeah, he should be in around, I believe, like 1030 11. So as soon as he gets in, I'm gonna stop him and let him know about this so he can give you a call.

Okay. Okay. Thank you so much. No, know.

Okay, so this, this is a real call. It's not a ghost call, it's not a mystery call, and it's was only three minutes in this what you heard, because it was originally like maybe seven minutes and eight seconds, but we cut out a lot, just so that we didn't reveal the name of the firm. So Mike Morris said yesterday that we're not here at this event to talk about all the great things that are happening. We're here to talk about all the ugly things that we don't usually want to face so that we can face it and we can fix it. That makes sense everyone. So for all the firms out there that are thinking that this doesn't happen at their firm. If you're listening to your calls all the time, then it probably isn't, because you're listening and you're fixing it. But if you're not listening in to your calls all the time on a regular basis, it is happening, maybe not the same example, but it's definitely happening. It's definitely happening. So the main thing you have to do is listen to your calls. Now, the other issues with this is that the reason that team member is there is because of the concept that some of us talk about of just get butts in the seat, or you're at a restaurant and you there's a bartender. Or there's a waitress that seem really great, so you just hire them and get butts in the seat, and there's no onboarding trading, there's no training at all. There's no systems, there's no processes, there's no screening questions, there's no empathy training, sales training. In fact, the owners of the firm don't really understand the purpose of intake, so that's what happens. And this is also a demonstration of very likely clients as well, not being treated with empathy, because we don't know how to do it. So this person that works there, this review and critique isn't about him, it's not his fault. He was just hired to do a job, but he wasn't set up for success, but this is a perfect way to get a one star Google review. So you want to make sure

that the people that you hire understand empathy what it is and what it isn't, and how to pivot in critical thinking and to remember the desired outcome of prospective client calls a qualify is to sign them up so your firm can help them so and what I mean by pivoting is listening to the person's voice and knowing when to just drop everything, Stop what you're doing and just be human to human, not the process anymore. And the word sales is not a bad word, and the concept of one call close is not bad. You're supposed to do that. So scripts and sales and one call closed, that's what you're there for. That makes sense everybody. So hiring family and friends, I don't recommend it. I don't recommend it at all. Doing disc assessments definitely do that, but it's not exact science. You have to train people have a really good onboarding process. Role play with them, teach them what a law firm is like. This person has no idea what a law firm is, or what this particular law firm does, or what cases are, or what kind of cases, if they've never worked at a law firm, you have to train them about everything. I think one of the other really important things are is when you listen to call recordings, make sure that your team also listens, because your team doesn't really know how bad they're doing. They have no idea. They think they're doing great, but when they listen to their call, it's eye opening. So how many people think that this is this is not happening in your firm at all? Anybody? Okay, so how about firms that this is happening. Are you putting processes in place to to prevent it, to stop it from happening? Yes. Can someone share? Can one person just share what you're doing for everybody else? Go ahead, right

Audience Member 1: here, I listened to the calls. You suggested that to me last night, but we have been listening to the calls just the LSA ones. Though we don't have the capability of not LSA yet, so that's an issue.

Audience Member 2: One thing that so we got a one star review. It's the only one star review we have. It was prospective caller that called and said they wanted a defamation case. And I listened back to the call, and it was clearly someone who was not stable, quite honestly, and it just wasn't handled with empathy. I have realized, and Rich has realized, is we have the wrong people in the wrong seat in that situation. So we just hired a new intake person that we're very we took them from another firm, and we're very excited about her. And one of the things that I do think that you hit on is the empathy is pivotal, and having that person have empathy, and then you get to the next step, which is the closing side of things, right?

I mean, it's really important. Then, when you're looking for people, that you just have a list of everything that's really important, and empathy is definitely important, but not everybody knows what it is and what it isn't. So you want them to demonstrate it to you, and you want to make sure that you know what empathy is and what empathy isn't when to provide empathy and when not to provide empathy and critical thinking skills and pivoting skills and sales skills and just everyday love, care and concern, kindness. So set your folks up for success. It's not perfect. Listen to the call. Goals. It's not so that you can get upset with them. It's to say, Okay, here's what we have to fix. And for everybody here at this event, any law firm that wants empathy training, I'm going to do complimentary empathy training for your firm. It's a firm wide event via zoom. You just need to let me know before you leave today. Okay, all right.

Thank you, Jay. It's been an amazing conference. So far, I've had a pleasure and thank you everyone for being here. My name is Ted de Bettencourt. I run a company called juvo leads. We're a human powered chat company. We use real people to answer chats because we believe it's more empathetic. Chris was saying we were able to have a lot more empathy and sympathy with the chatters when they come in when there's been a car accident. And how our business works is we give everyone a free 30 day trial, and then after that 30 day free trial, we sit down with you and say, how many leads did you get? How many leads did you get last month? Did we get you more leads? Because we give everyone that free 30 day trial. We're very big on numbers, letting the numbers tell the story. So you make your buying decision at the end of that 30 day free trial. Because we're so numbers based, we tend to work with firms that really know their numbers, the bigger firms, the firms that run the masterminds, the firms that have their own conferences. The Mike Morris is the Mark laniers, the Rob levines. Those are our clients. But I'm not here to talk about myself. I'm here to do what was said yesterday, give away your secrets and share and sell your expertise. So here are some secrets I want to give away. Our main function is we're chat on the website. But about a year and a half ago, and we play a short video of the lawyer to start a conversation real people. But about a year ago, a client asked us to help us with their LSAS. I said, Well, I don't really know how we can do that. It's just a phone call. But about a year and a half ago, they released LSA messages, so we try to API into Google to answer those and the API doesn't really work. We try to get the SMS messages when a notification came came in, but about 7% of those SM and SMS, SMS notification messages just don't send. So then we realized the only way to do it, 100% of the time do well, is to have our team

manually log in to an LSA account and answer those messages for you. It is a very labor intensive program, so this is something you can literally do yourself. The difference is, is my team gets the email notifications and they audit your account every 15 minutes to make sure nothing is missed. LSA notifications went down for five days of the since the New Year's during those days, my company and for my clients, was cleaning house, we were getting all the LSA messages because no one else on the market was seeing those LSA messages. So LSA messages are very important, and we didn't know how important they were at first, but oh, the slides are right here. But what we learned is that when we reply to messages fast our clients, ads show that badge on it typically replies in a few minutes. We thought that was cool, because that's a, you know, conversion action. What ad would you rather click the one that replies in a the firm that replies in a few minutes, or the firm that replies in a day? So obviously the one that replies in a few minutes. But even more importantly than that, what we saw is that they're ranked higher. And when you rank higher, you still get a lot of more LSA phone calls, but you also get more LSA messages. So not only are we pulling up the number of messages you're getting by responding to them fast and having that badge, but you're also getting a lot more phone calls. So we don't answer phones. You guys still got to answer your phones with empathy, not like that one we just listened to. But answering the messages fast is very important. And here's a little case study for a firm. We answering their messages around January 16, we started answering their LSA messages. Took us about a month for their LSA campaigns to show the typically replies in a few minutes, but as soon as that happens, or not, as soon as about a month after that, their total LSA leads tripled. So not just their LSA messages, that's the red bar, but we dragged up their LSA

phone calls, so their overall LSA impact went up 300% since January, when we started answering their messages. So the obvious next question is, well, what if we just turn off messages? And here's why you can't. So this is a slide that I'm a little hesitant to show, because people don't always like it, and you probably shouldn't, but don't get mad at me. This is, this is on Google once a user submits an LSA message, and here's one I put four for Anderson Levine, sorry, Mark, I typed in on my phone I was in a car accident and need help. I'm in the hospital now. Soon as I do that, Google then prompts me to send that same message to three other law firms. Very sneaky. Google just took one lead and they sold it four times. Not a good practice, but we can use. It to your advantage. So how we use it to your advantage is you either have this lead, if you're Anderson Laverne stolen from you by one of these other firms, or you reply to your leads so fast that the competition can't get them on the phone. So when we answer messages for our clients, our LSA messages, what happens is, not only do we get our clients ads to show up in this suggested other firms list, and this is something you can do. You don't need us to do it. We get you on the phone before the original person of the lead, the original attendee of the lead, gets notified. So we found this out the wrong way. We had a client call us up and say, Hey, Ted, I'm really thankful you're stealing leads from the competition and sending them to me, but please don't do that. That's gonna get me in trouble. I kind of panicked. I'm like, we're not doing that. We don't do it all. Our leads are specifically for our clients. So we went through and we saw what was happening. We're like, oh, Google is we're getting our clients on the phone with leads when they originally intended to send them to somebody else, the client forgot. They clicked that send three messages button there so they didn't even know what

happened. So although this is pretty devious of Google taking one lead and selling it four times, you can use it as a sword, and that's exactly what we do for our clients at juvo, leads, refunds, replies, real people. Oh, my refunds and replies when you have a lead come in, if it's a bad lead out of practice area, out of state, if you tell that lead right away that they can't help you, you can't help them, Google will refund you for it. Doesn't happen 100% of the time, but a lot more than if you ignore it because you can't fight it. Ai reads it and tries to determine if you can help it. So if you have a bad lead, come in, tell the person via the message your PI firm, oh, that divorce law case. I don't want to help you with it. I'm sorry. We can't help say it politely. Google will look for the words in your response and we'll refund you on it. Real people. If you try to automate this with email notifications and different systems, be careful, because the email notification system that Google uses to let you know that an LSA message comes in, goes out a lot. It just fails. And here's the worst advice I've ever given, and I hate giving it, but it's true, if your LSA account is dead, one way to pick it back up is to turn on those general inquiries button. It stinks. You get junk, but you show Google that you respond to not only your phone calls fast and your messages fast, it will move you up the rankings. And not only will you move up the rankings for the junk leads, but you'll get more of the leads you want. And last point, what's next? A month and a half ago, Google just released GBP messages again, this time through SMS messages, since we see that LSA messaging response time is a ranking factor in LSA, we're predicting and Google's hinting that GBP response time will be a rankings factor in local search. Get ahead of this. Go to your GBP, put an SMS number in there, and either answer those text messages yourself, or have a company like juvo

leads or one of the other chat companies out there answer them for you. It will help your local rankings. I'm outside. You have any questions? Let me know.

Awesome Ted. Thanks so much. Ben, come on back up. Have a seat. Have a seat. Ben, come on back up, please. So you saved some questions for Ben, hopefully in the panel. Be happy to take questions now. Thanks, sir. So intake what questions we have? One in the middle, we're going to get mics just so it's on the video recording. We haven't figured out yet the what we'll do with the video recordings. Actually, right beside you, hand came up first, right beside you, Andre

Audience Member 3: Ben, I wasn't clear, are you doing your intake with an intake, an outsourced intake service, or are you doing an in house, or were you using out another service to audit your intake?

So it's kind of three fold. We do have two internal team members in house that handle the bulk of our intake. Calls themselves. We do work with an external consultant that was the one that provided the audit, and also is the one that constantly monitors our calls and continues to kind of help us optimize things moving forward. And then we also have kind of an answering service that's kind of our worst case scenario kicks in when you know they're on the phones, or we just aren't in a position to be able to take a call or late nights and weekends and things like that. So it's kind of been a three prong approach for us, but the heart of our team is internal. And, you know, I think that's very important.

Audience Member 3: And does the call go directly to intake, or did it go to a receptionist? First it

goes through reception and then directly to intake? And, you know, in the past reception would end up hearing the entire problem from the client before transitioning it to intake. And I think now it's, you know, get the call to intake as quickly as possible, but making sure we have the name and number is essentially their role.

Audience Member 4: My question is, for instance, I do Personal Injury and Criminal Defense, so. How do you quote a fee? Because both in California, at least, I believe only a lawyer can quote a fee,

so in terms of the the fee agreement, correct? Yeah, I'm not aware of any any reason that we're not able to do that in South Carolina. I know North Carolina actually is a little bit different on that front. But you know, our standard fee is consistent across the board all the time.

You come across that before, no for

Audience Member 4: instance, in a criminal case, though, fee can vary. So how would I mean, I don't know,

training, training,

correct? Hello, can you hear me? Yes. I mean, it's the same idea as you want to have a salesperson train. The right way to have the confidence and the knowledge to be able to say what the fee is and get the payment right then and there. That's what you want. But you need to hire the right person and train them and listen to calls and get them do better and better and better, but yeah,

on the chat side, about 50% of our Crim firms, if it's a lead, we'll say, you know, prices start at x. For us to be able to help you with this, but it's really just a filtering mechanism. If the firm gets a lot of people that they don't think are going to be a good a good potential fit, usually we don't start with that. It's a secondary filter we put on one

in the back, please. Hey, Brett,

Audience Member 5: go straight back. I grabbed them. I'm sorry. Is

it my turn? Yes. All right, good morning. I am a smaller firm personal injury. I don't have an intake department. I'm listening. My eyes are open. I'm making a lot of changes based on Jay's advice and others. And we, you know, we've added lead docket and call rail for the LSAs, like other people have said in here. But what if you don't feel like you have enough leads on a daily, weekly basis to hire a dedicated intake person? I've got people from my office handling that sometimes me to my chagrin, but is it something that you do ahead of time, anticipating that this will increase the lead conversion? Because I'm just wondering if I have enough incoming to justify hiring somebody for that? Does that make sense?

Yeah, I mean, I would one thing you want to do is take a look at the volume that you do have, so you can get an idea for sure what that really does look like. But if you don't hire somebody, you risk losing cases. You can have intake, the intake sales person do other things. Just make a list of other things that they can do if, for some reason, there's not enough leads coming in. But that would be Plan B. It wouldn't be their priority. So maybe chasing leads, any loss leads at all for any reason, going back towards them and calling them past clients to do check ins and see how they're doing, helping to create a referral program. So there's a lot of sales type things that they can do, but it would be second to inbound leads.

Oh, good, yeah, you're going to

address that as well. Yeah, I was too, because we were actually in that exact same boat. When we first started talking about intake, we had a few more partners at the time, and it was an extremely contested issue, and many of our partners justifiably felt that we didn't have the volume or necessarily enough leads to really even justify hiring a full time intake person. At that time, we had that exact same concern, and then a year later, we brought on a second full time intake member. So I think you'll find that there's probably far more out there for them to do than you may realize. Now that was the case for us, at least. You know, our lead system was showing around 100 leads per month in it at the time, and a year later, it was over 200 with no more marketing. And so I think for us, we realized there was a lot more there for them to work with than we necessarily thought.

Audience Member 5: If, I'm sorry if I'm taking up too much airspace here, but from what I'm hearing, is having a dedicated intake person is like a net, right? Like things are not getting lost. You can scoop it up for stuff that's come in in the past, and obviously it's the first line of not letting stuff slip through, and that's why you're saying your intake and conversion went up because you had that net. Does that sound right?

That's exactly right. Okay. Thank you. Thanks.

Brett, David, yeah. Mike, over here, okay,

Audience Member 6: I guess I have two questions. So first one for Ben. And as far as the as far as the process, what you were doing before, was it an issue of capability with the attorney, or was it an issue of desire, or some combination of both?

I think it was a combination of both. It was really just kind of a short sighted mindset more than anything else, the attorney, if you know, they wanted to flip the switch and really sign a case up they could do so, you know, on any given moment, but it was kind of the, what I describe as more the volume work, or more the run of the mill work that people necessarily don't get excited about, but, you know, keeps the lights on, but may not, you know, drive home a big bonus for attorneys, at least that, you know, the problem was getting them to care about those intakes as much as they do, you know, the tractor trailer case that all seven of us are trying to call, you know, as soon as it comes in,

Audience Member 7: okay, yeah, I appreciate that. That answered my question. And then I guess, to the whole panel, in regards to high intakes, like those bigger cases that come in, the surgery case, that's a motor vehicle case, or whatever that is, what is the process that you've seen successful? Is it still the intake person is is attempting to sign that up? Should they be grabbing your best closer? And that person is immediately trying to get on the phone with them? Like, how have you handled it? Ben, like, what do you guys recommend as far as that goes? Because we're trying to figure out that process.

Well, if your process right now is, if you have, because we everybody's saying different names, we have intake and sales. I look at intake and sales is like, it's completely, it's all sales, whatever you whatever name you put on it. But if you have intake and they're doing an initial screening, and then you have sales like you call closers, then you would want to do that. You would want to get that high end case to the number two person the closer. But I recommend looking at having that one person do all of it. So the initial screening, which we call intake, and then the selling and the closing, just one person doing it all on one call, and not delaying the conversion at all,

shit, and just to touch on that. So on the chat side, we do it in book. We do it both ways. So what we found is that when we start chatting with the person, we can sign them right through chat through retainer. But what we've tried it both ways, we just try to patch them through to the firm, or we try to sign them no matter what. What we found works best from a from a wanted lead perspective, from auditing all our clients and getting the data, is that when we ask the client if it's a, you know, a car accident within 30 days in their state with injuries and they got an ambulance and the other party insurance, and they're over 18, we can literally sign them right there if they want. But we like to ask them, hey, this sounds like something we can definitely help you with. Would you like to talk with our team to find out more about how we can help you? Or do you want to sign a retainer right now? If we don't use the term retainer to say, sign a contract, if they sign, we'll send them a retainer and do it all right through chat. Probably about 40% of them want to do it right through chat. The other say, Hey, I'd want to talk to your team. So then we just literally call the firm, put the two together while they're still in the chat, to maximize the chance of that of that case signing

for us. We have an escalation criteria in place that certain types of cases, commercial vehicles, tractor trailers, broken bones, surgeries, things like that, where they follow a little bit of a different process and try to get one of us on the phone while they've got that client on the phone, if there's any way possible, and worst case scenario, they'll go ahead and send the retainer out, go ahead and try to get a spot scheduled within the next 30 minutes to an hour. And you know, the goal is that they'll get the contract sign it, have a meeting set with an attorney already, and may not necessarily shop around, but you know, if there's any way possible to get an attorney on the phone in that type of case, by all means, that's what we want to do.

I love it. Thanks, guys. Let's take one last question here, please.

Audience member 8: Hey Ben, question for you. I love the kind of story and history of the two years down lead then popping it back up with the building of the intake team. Two quick questions on that one prior to 2021 or 2021 you said that the firm been around 40 years or so, Mayor pops was involved. What did you see, or what was the cause, originally, of that downturn of no leads, or downing of leads? Because it seemed like, obviously, 40 years successful, and then all of a sudden, now you've got this dip. And then secondarily, just to kind of get the question out there, your marketing manager, what are the kind of roles and responsibilities that you put on them, or not marketing? Sorry, the intake manager, yeah.

So you know the first question, I think it was probably a combination of a lot of different factors, but our firm was a little unique. One of our managing partners was the attorney that prosecuted Susan Smith back in the 90s. I don't know if y'all remember that case, but it was a lady that drowned her kids in her car in a lake in South Carolina and claimed that she had been car jacked. And so that blew up on national news. And, you know, it was right around the OJ time period. And so for years, we didn't have to do a lot of marketing. You know, his his name and kind of notoriety brought in a lot of volume for us. And over time, you know, I've noticed the kids now they don't know. That case, they're not familiar with it. And so I think we fell behind the eight ball just not having to do a lot of marketing. And the competition, you know, skyrocketed during that period. And so, you know, we started kind of just seeing leads start drying up as a result of that. Another big part for us, I think, was the attorney and paralegal involvement, particularly the paralegal piece of that the paralegals were our intake people, essentially an attorney would get involved. But most of the calls were forwarded to paralegals who had primary jobs that were, you know, not intake. And so the person opening files or getting records would get constantly disrupted and asked to handle an intake call. And, you know, I think that was just a recipe for a disaster,

Audience member 8: and then your marketing man, or just me, intake manager. What are their like, roles and responsibilities?

Yeah, so she is actively handles about half the volume of the intakes itself. She also manages our intake coordinator and our front desk receptionist. I have all of those under intake. So she's really got a three person team, and, you know, I have her more focused on, I'd say, the day to day intake process, and then myself and our external consultants are really who I view as kind of the director of intake, you know. And I hope we'll get to that point we were just kind of starting so fresh that, you know, we needed to rely on others, I think, a little more, but so our intake manager, you know, is essentially, you know, runs our day to day intake operations and oversees everybody within the intake team, but in terms of actually looking at the numbers and holding them accountable, that's kind of where I come in and where, you know, we rely on consultants.

Thank you. Awesome. Thanks, guys.