Billie Tarascio is the principal attorney at Modern Law, a family law firm in greater Phoenix, and Access...
Sam Glover is the founder and Editor in Chief of Lawyerist.com. Sam helps lawyers understand the economic,...
Aaron Street is the co-founder and CEO of Lawyerist.com. In addition to his work growing Lawyerist’s community of...
Published: | January 17, 2018 |
Podcast: | Lawyerist Podcast |
Category: | Marketing for Law Firms |
In this episode, Billie Tarascio explains why intake is the key to her firm’s success, and how her firm uses empathy and data to strategically optimize the intake process.
Billie Tarascio is the principal attorney at Modern Law, a family law firm in greater Phoenix, and Access Legal, a legal technology company providing do it yourself resources for self-representing family law litigants.
Modern Law’s tips on how to choose an attorney
“Decode Your Divorce” by Billie Tarascio
Speaker 1: Welcome to the lawyers pod cast with Sam Glover and Aaron Street. Each week Lawyerist brings you advise and interviews to help you build a more successful law practice in today’s challenging and constantly changing legal market. And now, here are Sam and Aaron.
Sam Glover: Hi, I’m Sam Glover.
Aaron Street: And I’m Aaron street and this is episode 155 of the Lawyerist podcast part of a legal talk network. Today we’re talking with Billie Tarascio about optimizing your firm’s intake process.
Sam Glover: Today’s podcast is brought to you by Ruby Receptionists, LawPay and FreshBooks. We really appreciate their support and we’ll tell you more about them later in the show.
Aaron Street: We spend a lot of time interacting with small firm lawyers all over the country and asking them what some of their biggest challenges are and marketing as a broad category seems to be probably one of the biggest and most recurring themes that lawyers indicate is a problem for them and I think in anticipation of your conversation with Billie today it’s probably worth thinking through a little bit about what that means because I’m not sure that all small firm lawyers actually think about the concepts of marketing in a way that will help them solve it.
Sam Glover: I think that’s a very good way to put it.
Aaron Street: From my perspective I think of the problem lawyers actually have is a client acquisition strategy problem not just a marketing problem and what I mean by that is I think there are two separate but related phases in getting new clients. One is a marketing function of getting your name out there whether that’s through content marketing or advertising or speaking or whatever, which is to get the attention of prospective clients and to get them to contact your firm. Then I think there is an intake and sales conversion process about getting of those calls and emails that come into your firm to turn into clients and I think too many lawyers think of getting new clients as marketing and the reality is marketing is only that front end step of getting people to reach out to you but then there is a sales conversion an intake process which is both getting those contacts to schedule a consultation call or email and then in that consultation getting them to become clients and those are sales functions those are intake conversion functions.
Sam Glover: Yeah, and I can feel some of our listeners feeling uncomfortable with that.
Aaron Street: With the sales word, business talk and law.
Sam Glover: Yeah, I mean I’ve kind of lost patience without Like if you’re not willing to think about it as sales than I mean good luck I guess but a lot of the stuff that you can learn from sales is really helpful but yeah intake is sort of the beginning of where marketing meets sales and turns into it and Billie’s got some really interesting thoughts on it.
Aaron Street: Yeah, and I think the thing to take away from this little conversation is if you’re having client acquisition challenges in your firm, if there isn’t enough coming in it could be because your marketing efforts are insufficient and you’re not getting enough people to contact your firm but it’s just as likely that there are opportunities for you to improve by working on your intake and sales conversion functions of getting the people who call or email your firm to convert into consultations and then clients at higher rates using a variety of client experience experiments and intake improvement experiments. Not trying to sell them a used car like that’s not what this is about it’s about providing valuable legal services to clients who need them but you need to convert people into saying yes and that involves practices and principles that sales people understand.
Sam Glover: Where the marketing and sales start blending together is on your website, in your Google search results, right like that’s where people start making decisions about whether to even enter into any sort of a transaction with you and so if you’re having trouble you want to sort of break that up into multiple pieces like at which point do you think people are falling off, have you spent a lot of money on SEO and you think it’s performing well and you’re not getting clients out of it? Well try and figure out why that is. Are people landing on your website getting confused and not filling out your contact form or are the wrong people getting there. If your phone is ringing and you still find yourself without clients or if your email inbox is full of inquiries and you still find yourself without clients, what’s going on there? Like are they all the wrong people, are none of them following up with you in which case maybe it’s you not them, the troubleshooting has to run through that entire thing.
Aaron Street: And Billie is in this interview going to provide a bunch of both kind of strategic ideas but also some kind of tangible practical tips on things you can experiment with because she’s run a bunch of data driven experiments on how she’s improved her conversion rates through her intake and sales processes again in an ethical way that supports the needs of clients. This isn’t about used cars or anything so Billie will offer a bunch of great ideas there but it’s worth stepping back and kind of mapping out for your firm and your practice, what are the steps the client has to take from being aware of you whether that’s through a SEO rankings or hearing you speak, to wanting to reach out to your firm to what happens when they do and are all of those things mapping to the process of turning them into a client.
Sam Glover: We’ve talked about data a bit, we’re going to have a quick sponsored interview with Joshua Lennon from Clio about tracking data and what you can do with it and then my interview with Billie, so here we go.
Joshua Lennon: Hello, I’m Joshua Lennon, lawyer in residence at Clio, the world’s leading cloud based practice management software for law firms.
Sam Glover: Hi Joshua, thanks so much for being with us today.
Joshua Lennon: Thanks Sam, It’s great to be here.
Sam Glover: You are here to talk about data and law firms and I think maybe we better tee that up by explaining whether or not most common law firms who may not be thinking of themselves as generating data, whether they have it. Do we have data in our firms?
Joshua Lennon: Law firms actually may have too much data. What’s interesting is that we collect all kinds of data in our law firms whether it be contacts or conflict checking, whether it’s the documents that we store on behalf of clients, whether it’s our own individual notes in case files even our billing information are actually all different types of data that can be used by law firms to guide their practices and their decision making.
Sam Glover: So we have a ton of it it’s just sort of stuck in places where we can’t necessarily get to it so how do we collect it and make it useful?
Joshua Lennon: I think what law firms need to think about is centralizing and standardizing their data so in the past we had those giant middle off folders that have been overflowing with our case files and while those were great for storing things in bank or boxes and filing cabinets it didn’t really make it something you could search against. So if you centralize your data into some type of online practice management system or a local practice management system that allows you to search across all those different types of data and extract that data so that you can do reports about it, that’s really the first step a law firm should be taking to make themselves data driven.
Sam Glover: I’m imagining basic stuff like I want to enter … I want to run a report to find out the average revenue generated by all my cases last year and that seems simple enough but give us some other examples like what can we do with the data once we have it in a useful format?
Joshua Lennon: Well what’s interesting about data is it allows you to leverage your gut feelings and drive really informed decision making so it could be that you may think that a judge just doesn’t like you and with proper data across all of your case files you can actually take a look at different motions that you’ve had before the whether or not they succeed, whether or not they’ve been challenged, whether he rules in your favor, if you are a criminal lawyer you can take a look for example at the arresting officer and what patterns might emerge from that arresting officer’s actions or reports and how that might impact your current client. You can even make business driven decisions based on the data that you have so if you take a look at your billing and you see certain payment periods that are more to your favor you can actually base your future billing practices on those. Organizing this information actually has a whole host of applications both in favor for your clients and in favor for you as running your practice as a business.
Sam Glover: Am I hearing you correctly that if I have been using practice management software like Clio for a couple of years and I’ve been inputting all my clients information, I’ve been using it for billing, I’ve been keeping track of accounts, I’ve been entering outcomes and all that kind of stuff, I probably already have a lot of data whether or not I’m actually trying to do anything useful with it.
Joshua Lennon: Absolutely.
Sam Glover: Yeah, but if I’m not already using the law practice management software then I might have a preliminary step of organizing what’s in my probably paper files or spreadsheets into a more useful format.
Joshua Lennon: That’s true but even then that may not take as long as you think. Most people carry all of their contacts in their email program for example like Outlook and that can just sink into a practice management platform so there is a little bit of effort in getting the information in but then once you have it, it can actually save you time and effort when it comes to making data driven decisions.
Sam Glover: On along the same lines you are conducting a webinar very soon called the data driven law firm in which people can learn, lawyers can learn what kind of data they can get and what they can do with it. This will be on February 6th at 11: 00 am Pacific, 2: 00 pm Eastern and you can sign up for it, it’s free at clio.com/datadriven all one word that’s clio.com/datadriven, and Joshua replays will be available right?
Joshua Lennon: Absolutely, yeah if you go ahead and register at that link which will continue to be live, you will receive recording of the presentation and all of it adds up as well.
Sam Glover: Thank you so much for that information, again go to clio.com/datadriven if you want to sign up and Joshua thanks for being with us today.
Joshua Lennon: Sam It’s always great to be a part of the Lawyerist podcast. Thank you.
Billie Tarascio: Good morning Sam, this is Billie Tarascio from Modern Law.
Sam Glover: Hi Billie, thanks for being on the podcast for your second time I believe.
Billie Tarascio: Yeah, that’s right it’s been I don’t know, maybe at least a year but it’s great to be back.
Sam Glover: It’s good to have you back. First of all, I wanted to check in on something that we talked about a while back but maybe you better set the stage for us because we had talked about your do it yourself online documents’ portal but maybe we could briefly recap and tell us what your firm does and how you ended up building this thing and what’s happened with it since we talked to you about a year ago.
Billie Tarascio: Okay, sounds great. I’ll try to make a long story very short. When the firm opened it was … I am a family law practitioner and I opened the firm which is now known as Modern Law in 2010 here in Arizona with access to justice mission. As time went on and we began just really testing all aspects of the firm it became pretty clear that it was going to be difficult to have any sort of a low cost model that also provided attorneys great benefits and great wages and had a profit margin that I wanted the law firm to have so a spin off company was created, Access Legal to make sure that that mission was still fulfilled while the law firm was able to evolve into a healthier business. One of the first projects that we took on was developing technology that would allow us to deliver specific documents in a Microsoft Word version through questionnaires so online document automation and we would use that tool both forward facing to make it available to the public and internally to automate the law from drafting.
Sam Glover: Yeah and so the external facing one ended up being called Access Legal people can go see it right now and accesslegaldocs.com, right?
Billie Tarascio: That’s right.
Sam Glover: And you’re still using this internally, right?
Billie Tarascio: Yes we are. When clients hire Modern Law, they receive a questionnaire in their email box, they fill out that questionnaire and the answers auto populate the pleadings that we created in the backgrounds. Now that sounds like an older type of thing but when we did it wasn’t quite as easily accessible as it now is.
Sam Glover: Last we spoke you were kind of if I’m recalling correctly the external facing Access Legal had had sort of an unexpected effect like it was … you felt like people were going there or seeing what was involved and then saving up the money to hire you which meant that the portal itself was kind of a failure but it wasn’t really hurting your ability to get clients in the door.
Billie Tarascio: That’s exactly right, so what we found was I thought that making these very practical tools available to the public who didn’t have an attorney would be very valuable to them but it really isn’t. If it’s not accompanied with a whole lot more it really isn’t valuable so Access Legal and Modern Law, both owned by me continue to kind of ramp up our offerings of what can we do to make things valuable to the public so we started offering webinars, I wrote a book that’s basically a DIY manual of start to finish, what to do procedurally, things like how to put together your file and now we’re also offering a seminar that I will probably turn into a course. None of these things on their own really did the trick of giving people what they wanted so we’re in this constant evolution to provide the best tools possible to people who are representing themselves.
Sam Glover: And you feel like you’re getting closer? I think you called it a failure as an access to justice project but as a client generator it actually was sort of a success.
Billie Tarascio: I think that’s completely accurate I mean if my goal was so that people could access this information that they can’t get anywhere else better tools than they can get anywhere else and people are accessing them and using them then it really isn’t accomplishing what I thought it would but the law firm took off more and more people wanted to use us, it built trust, it built a kind of legitimacy in the community so from that respect it was not a failure.
Sam Glover: Have you done I mean it sounds like though you’ve continued to iterate on it you’re trying to figure out how to make it a successful access to justice tool.
Billie Tarascio: Yes and it goes beyond that, it’s the mission that we have of increasing access to justice and being a resource will never go away and so I don’t know what the best way is to do that you know the documents online may never turn out to be something that is super valuable to people and that’s okay but we will never stop figuring out how to bring more value to the public even people who are not our clients.
Sam Glover: Yeah, that’s awesome. I didn’t actually bring you on to talk about that I brought you on because I wanted to hear about intake and you are and this feels weird to say to me but knowing you and talking with you about it I know that to be true you are passionate about intake.
Billie Tarascio: I am passionate about intake.
Sam Glover: Why is that, what’s so great about an intake?
Billie Tarascio: Intake is the most powerful piece of the law firm, in that if I am watching intake numbers intake key performance indicators I can tell whether or not my law firm will grow or shrink in the next 30, 60, 90 days.
It is a better indicator than anything else going on in my firm and it is the easiest thing to fix and when it is wrong it has the most impact on the business so with all of that I’m really passionate about intake.
Sam Glover: I mean hearing you say that all actually seems obvious to me but it wasn’t before you actually brought that up like when you say you’re tracking those key indicators around intake, what are the numbers you actually look at on that?
Billie Tarascio: Well, it’s kind of a work in progress.
Sam Glover: Or is that like a secret thing?
Billie Tarascio: No, not at all a secret I talk about it all day. Initially at a base level you need to be tracking how many leads your firm is getting, you need to decide how you’re going to define a lead, how many of those leads come in to meet with you. Well, how many schedules come in to meet with you, how many actually show up and meet with you and then how many become clients so that is at a bare minimum the things that you need to be tracking but in addition to that there’s other things I want to be tracking. Things like how long are the calls, how long … how much time are my intake people speaking versus listening during the calls and at what point in the call do they start talking about price or coming in. How soon are they trying to schedule, is it a conversation or is it filling out a form.
Sam Glover: Okay so I feel like you just opened a whole box or a can of worms about intake that most people don’t think about and I realize we’re kind of jumping into the middle here but I want you to explain because I know a little bit about this and I think it’s kind of fantastic and amazing. I want you to explain how you think about the length of calls and what your intake people … just give me your approach to that.
Billie Tarascio: My goal … Well okay, we know there’s all this research in the last probably five or 10 years about listening and empathy. I mean if you’re if you’re kind of paying attention to these things you’ve seen it, it is probably the most powerful tool that we have because when people call us or any law firm they’re in crisis and they’re looking for a lawyer and the most important thing to them in a law office is does this law office care about me and understand me and the best way to communicate to your clients or potential clients that you understand them and care about them is by listening.
Sam Glover: Do you take kind of an extreme approach to that?
Billie Tarascio: I mean it wasn’t all my idea, I’ve just been listening to a lot of other people so it’s not like I came up with all of this on my own but you’re right I want my intake people to be on the phone for 40 minutes and I want them to listen for at least 30 of those minutes.
Sam Glover: You say intake people like you have intake staff you are not necessarily the one picking up the phone?
Billie Tarascio: Right, I have two dedicated full time intake people and their job is just intake because if we go back to what I was saying before where intake is the most important thing that will impact my firm. Before I had intake people, I like most law firms had a paralegal or a legal assistant who answered the phone while they were trying to juggle 30 other things and that meant the phone was an interruption. The potential client on the phone was an interruption and they feel that and they can’t … my intake people cannot be present and give someone 30 or 40 minutes to listen to their life story when they’ve got 20 other things that are demanding their time.
Sam Glover: So you have intakes staff and you want them to average 40 minutes 30 minutes of listening, how do they make that happen? Do people just want to talk for that long or are they are you teaching them skills for keeping people on the phone?
Billie Tarascio: We’re teaching them skills for keeping people on the phone. Ultimately they need to be checked into the person so if the person wants to get off the phone by all means get off the phone but most people want the opportunity to talk and people aren’t listening to them so they are thrilled to have someone ask them questions like tell me more about that, how did you get here, has it always been this bad.
Sam Glover: I mean because most of us just are like we just want to short circuit it and get to the legal issue you’re like okay stop telling me your life story, here’s what you need to do-
Billie Tarascio: Exactly.
Sam Glover: And you pulled a U-turn and driven really fast in the opposite direction.
Billie Tarascio: Right and I do the same thing in my consultations. The less I talk the smarter they think I am, it’s remarkable.
Sam Glover: You are quite smart like that’s not a problem. We have to take a quick break to hear more responses but when we come back I want to talk more about intake and empathy and about your intake staff and how you approach it so we’ll be back in a minute.
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We’re back and Billie it strikes me that that style of intake essentially sitting on the phone and listening to people’s problems all day might be hard.
Billie Tarascio: Right yeah, you’re exactly right and another thing that we found is that people burn out. It is a short term position. The intake people do not have the benefit of … Because I really as attorneys I train my attorneys to do the same thing but the difference is that the attorneys get to see the process through, bring the problem to full circle and they’re not simply listening all day long to people’s problems and that is not something that people can do over a long period of time without their emotional bank account just running dry.
Sam Glover: Yeah, I can imagine. I think I’ve heard you mention this and this is what I think is even like the second or third level of cleverness of this is that I think you said that you feel like the callers are more likely to sign up with your firm not just because the staff have been empathetic but because by the time they get off the phone 45 minutes later they’re so exhausted that they can’t get their head around calling another lawyer.
Billie Tarascio: Invested is the term I prefer-
Sam Glover: Invested, there you go.
Billie Tarascio: They’re so exhausted but you’re right like why would I want to start over I have given these people my life story they understand me and it’s not just that we are throwing at them all sorts of other things to make sure that they understand that we are the best fit for them. They’re getting a book, they’re getting emails, they’re getting texts. They should feel so confident in our ability that they would never want to work with anyone else.
Sam Glover: How effective is this I mean do you track conversion rates or do you think about it differently than just how many people sign up?
Billie Tarascio: We absolutely track conversion rates and it’s very effective except when it is it and I can tell exactly when it isn’t by these numbers. The number of how many leads are scheduling, how many of those are showing up, all of those things tell me immediately whether intake is working or not and then you have to go back and listen to calls and do more coaching.
Sam Glover: So you will sometimes … you record those calls obviously and then do quality control sometimes?
Billie Tarascio: Absolutely, when my numbers tell me something is off and it happens quickly I mean within a week somebody … you can tell if somebody is really in a rut and having a bad week or they’re on vacation because they work remotely and they’re just really not checked in. I can tell immediately when things are not going well.
Sam Glover: It’s not just … you’re not … they’re not using scripts you’re trying to train them to do this and they really need to be checked in and engaged in this process.
Billie Tarascio: Yeah, it’s a hard job really.
Sam Glover: It sounds like one.
Billie Tarascio: It’s a hard job.
Sam Glover: How do you talk to people about that when you’re hiring them?
Billie Tarascio: We’re hiring for someone who is naturally curious and empathetic.
Usually we’re talking about young women who want to know these stories, they want to know the background those are the perfect candidates for the intake position because we don’t want them trying to solve this person’s problem and most of us even after a few months in the legal industry, we think we have enough information to jump to solving. We naturally want to jump to solving which is another reason why you have to I think kind of move your intake people on to other things in your firm or help them find a different job because you want that curiosity that comes from being new to an industry.
Sam Glover: This all sounds very clever and neat and I am super impressed. I’m wondering if it’s so effective and I’m imagining you’re I mean I don’t know if you’re converting one out of every two people or what but do you actually have a more clients than you want?
Billie Tarascio: Yes, we spent last year at maximum capacity for at least half of the year so what happens when you fix intake you know if you map out your processes and you get intake and you get sales and then you’ve got your attorneys and your operations and then your finance piece the intake is at the beginning of that line and when intake gets really good then you have to fix all these other things before you can add more people and so that’s where he was trying to scale up on those other areas.
Sam Glover: You’re sort of staring into the fire hose trying to figure out a swallow all the water.
Billie Tarascio: Right, but what’s beautiful is we get to be really picky about our clients and that makes everyone like their job a whole lot better.
Sam Glover: A lot of lawyers talk about being picky about their clients and I think very few lawyers are actually able to do that so I’m wondering like I mean do you identify like nope this person just isn’t a fit for us and then you turn them away?
Billie Tarascio: Absolutely without a doubt. I was talking to one of my lawyers I think last week and I was asking him how things are going and are you having any client problems and his answer to me was so telling because he said I actually really like all my clients right now. That is what determines whether or not you have problem clients. Do you have a relationship where you like talking to them or do you hate talking to them?
Sam Glover: I feel like it’s … I mean we’ve done it too but deciding to only work with people who you actually like and enjoy working with is this massively transformative thing that you can do for your business.
Billie Tarascio: Massively transformative I love that.
Sam Glover: I mean it’s like how do you … so many lawyers are not happy with their clients and their clients hate them and they hate the other lawyer and it’s just … if you and especially in a family law practice you’re dealing with people at the end of their rope and one of the reasons I’ve always said I will never get into family law is because everybody seems to hate each other but apparently not for you.
Billie Tarascio: No, not for us but we’ve been so intentional about it. We close early on Fridays, we as a company do yoga together on Fridays, we have said we will not work with people we don’t like, we turn away clients who don’t agree with our values of whole health and moving forward and getting positive outcomes for restructuring a family and because we’re so intentional about that and vocal about that in all of our marketing we get great clients and we like our job.
Sam Glover: You’ve really embraced this idea of hiring and firing on culture and extended it to intake you accept and reject clients based on culture it sounds like.
Billie Tarascio: We do.
Sam Glover: I assume your intake staff then are also trying to figure out is this person a good fit for a firm not just listening.
Billie Tarascio: I don’t ask them to do that that is something that happens down the pipeline when we’re actually in the initial consultation.
Sam Glover: I see, so intake is really all about just getting them into the office?
Billie Tarascio: Right.
Sam Glover: Then once they’re in the office the lawyer who’s interviewing them and does everybody at the firm do this or do you also have like initial consultation specialists?
Billie Tarascio: For a long time I did the majority of the consultations and I really like doing that because I get to know who the clients are, what their issues are and can match them with the right attorney based on that attorney’s capacity and it’s hard for attorneys who are working all day on client projects to then transition into a consultation where they have to completely turn off their lawyer hat and check into their counselor hat and just listen. I do think there’s a lot of value in having a designated person who does the consultations but right now we’re at a point where everyone is really doing them which is great for me as the owner to step back but we’ll have to test that and see what happens.
Sam Glover: For listeners benefits, you’re saying a lot of things in the, you know kind of you’re assuming a lot of things in the background that I hope people are picking up on which is like that you … when you said something like we were at max capacity I don’t think most law firms know their max capacity is but it sounds like you have a really good idea of what that is.
Billie Tarascio: We do but that’s hard. We grappled with that all of last year because we were at max capacity and so the way that we do that is several ways we have meetings once a week where we talk about where we’re at. Everyone knows what their daily billable goal is and how much money really they should be bringing in each month. Now we had two paralegals last year who were just blowing it out of the water month after month after month and instead of just saying oh isn’t that great look how much you can do, that’s an indication that we’re above capacity and it was also we found that our paralegals were blowing their numbers out of the water and the attorneys were below their ideal number which told me I needed more paralegal help to match so that the lawyers could do more.
Sam Glover: You had a bottleneck basically.
Billie Tarascio: We have a bottleneck and one of the things we also do in that weekly meeting is not just look at the numbers but we ask everyone to identify their capacity on a scale of zero to a hundred percent where you had a capacity so it’s objective and subjective.
Sam Glover: I like that because it acknowledges that you know we try to quantify everything and it acknowledges that you know you may be overcapacity for reasons that have nothing to do with the number of pages on your desk or something.
Billie Tarascio: Exactly or number of cases which really is not a good indication of how full you are.
Sam Glover: How systematic would you say modern law is at this point like is the entire thing a system with the process that you’re able to identify problems and bottlenecks and build solutions to them and then test them and then identify the next bottleneck and just knock them down or are you still working on systemizing … systematizing things?
Billie Tarascio: We are absolutely still working on systematizing things but everything we do is with this mindset of what are we trying to accomplish, how are we going to measure whether or not we’re complicating it, what are the criteria we’re going to look at so on one hand everything is systematized to that and on the other hand it’s a complete work in progress and everyone in this office is part of the solution.
Sam Glover: Maybe to wrap up we could go back to the nuts and bolts of intake and I’m guessing a lot of our listeners are lawyers who are either answering their own phone or answering their phone with the help of a virtual receptionist or receptionist in the office. What’s the first couple of steps you need to take to get from there to where you are?
Billie Tarascio: That’s a great question.
Sam Glover: I totally just sprung it on you out of nowhere.
Billie Tarascio: That’s fine. I think maybe I guess it depends on your goal. If your goal … if you as a law firm owner are a solo and you want more work and that’s your goal then I think the most important thing you can do is hire an intake person.
Maybe that person’s part-time, my intake people are virtual, they don’t have to be here so you could hire a part-time person. Now if that’s not your problem if your problem is I can’t manage the work that I have then that’s probably not your first hire.
Sam Glover: That’s a good point. I take your point yeah if people are feeling like there … because I think a lot of people and we ask everybody like what’s your biggest challenge and a lot of people say their biggest challenge is getting clients in the door but I suspect after talking to you that a lot of them may also have the problem of getting those clients or getting those potential clients to turn into actual clients and intake maybe the process and it sounds like the way to do that as is to get somebody whose job is to actually move in take to have numbers that indicate whether or not intake is working and work with that person to make them more effective at doing what you need them to do.
Billie Tarascio: I think that’s absolutely true and I think-
Sam Glover: Did I sum it up well?
Billie Tarascio: Yes and there are people lots and lots of smart people are saying this, you probably have enough leads, you probably have a conversion problem and conversions a difficult word because it describes so many things but you probably have a conversion problem at a whole lot of different places so I think that’s a fabulous point.
Sam Glover: Very cool. Billie thank you so much for walking us through your intake process. I think it’s neat that you are passionate about it and I hope people have learned a lot from it.
Billie Tarascio: Thank you so much Sam I really appreciate it.
Sam Glover: Make sure to catch next week’s episode of The Lawyerist Podcast by subscribing to the show in your favorite podcast app and please leave a rating to help other people find our show.
You can find the notes for today’s episode on lawyerrist.com/podcast. The views expressed by the participants are their own and are not endorsed by legal clock Network. Nothing said in this podcast is legal advice for you.
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The Lawyerist Podcast is a weekly show about lawyering and law practice hosted by Stephanie Everett.