Butts, Not Bots

Episode Notes

Transcript

Conrad Saam:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. This is Conrad Saam and Gyi and I are sitting with Ted DeBettencourt. He runs Juvo Leads and has been a longtime acquaintance and business partner of both of us. He’s also one of our endorsed sponsors and I think what you’re going to hear coming up is why it’s kind of a validation of our endorsed sponsorship model and here’s why. You’re going to learn a ton of information, not really about a pitch for Juve Leads, but why he believes their mousetrap is better and how this actually has an impact on things like conversion rates, things like doing a great job for your clients, communicating really well. How do you go about making sure that a live person who doesn’t work directly for your firm can do intake in a way that maximizes what you get out of that. And that’s why we’re really excited to sit down with Ted, sit back, turn up your headphones, take a listen.

Announcer:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, teaching you how to promote market and make fat stacks for your legal practice. Here on Legal Talk Network.

Conrad Saam:

We are here with Ted DeBettencourt from Juvo Leads. Gyi, we’ve moved to this sponsored endorsement model. Can you just remind our dear listeners why we’ve invited Ted to be a sponsor and what that means for the listener?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, look, we talk about it all the time, but there’s this quote unquote ecosystem. We want to deliver value. We also want to amplify the companies that both Mockingbird and Attorney Sync work with and that we stand behind and we’re doing that in a way that’s an incentivized sponsor model. And so if you’re listening to this and you want to sponsor Lunch Our Legal Marketing, if we don’t know you, we’re not going to let you on because that’s important. But we also want to be completely transparent that in order to support the show, to support the summit, to support all the hard work of folks that produce the show, we do take sponsors and we are super grateful to all our sponsors and we are particularly grateful today to welcome Ted.

Ted DeBettencourt:

Gee, thanks for the warm welcome. Conrad, I appreciate you guys letting me be here today.

Conrad Saam:

It is awesome to have you. Now a couple things just to kind of preview what we’re going to talk through. Number one, Juvo does entirely human poweredly, like actual humans interacting, correct, Ted?

Ted DeBettencourt:

Yeah. Our motto is butts not bots. That’s butts in the seat, not bots in the cloud, real people answering chats and messages twenty four seven, 365.

Conrad Saam:

And I want to get into this. I mean, we’re all so excited about automation and AI and why humans? Why does it matter to the law firm?

Ted DeBettencourt:

At the end of the day, firms hire me to get more leads in cases. And by using humans, I can get them more leads in cases. I can use AI and I can drive my cost down, but that will cost me 30, 35% of my leads. By using people to answer chats, LSAs, form submission follow-ups, I’m able to have real life conversations with people, empathetic conversations. When someone’s been in a car accident, when they need a lawyer, they want to tell their story. They have legal needs, but more importantly, they have emotional needs. Those emotional needs are being heard. They want to tell people what’s going on. They want to make sure they’re in the right place. So by using people, we’re just able to have better one-to-one conversations. And those conversations result in more leads and more cases. But most importantly, it stops the people from shopping.

So if someone chats with a robot, they don’t feel like they’ve been heard. So they continue shopping their case until they feel like someone’s listened to them. While having real people, people know that they’ve been heard. They feel like they’ve been listened to. So we’re able to convert a lot more leads and cases by using people. At some day, maybe people will get more comfortable with robots and that time we’ll switch. But for right now, I just see it’s not so much that AI can’t do what we do. It’s that people know it’s robots so they don’t feel like they’ve been listened to. Let me throw that back on you. Have you guys ever listened to a phone call come in from an intake where it’s an AI answering service and the person just gets ticked off like, “Is this a robot? Is this a robot?” Then they hang up.

It happens in the same way in the chat. We’re very big on having empathetic conversations and turning those conversations into leads, but more importantly, we need to get the prospect to stop shopping their case and turn it into a case for our firms.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. I think one of the reasons that we have deployed Juvo in many contexts with our clients is the, and we can dive into it, but it’s flat out just the ability to convert better.That’s what everybody’s primary metric is. And so when I first really thought about this, the LSA messaging thing was like the bane of everybody’s existence because the context matters so much. And I think even in response to the debate of human versus AI, the context is what matters. And I’ll give you my example. So you gave the example of someone’s had somebody, a family member was in a car accident, they’re dealing with probably one of the worst times of their life. It’s a very emotionally driven conversation. Another context might be like, “What time is my deposition tomorrow?” And that I’m like, “Yeah, bot could potentially respond to that. ” And so I think we’re going to find as we move forward, context matters a lot here and there are many, many contexts that people still want to talk to people.

And look, you don’t have to take my word for it, like you said, you can listen to the call transcripts. Excuse me, you can look at the chat transcripts.

Conrad Saam:

Ted, how do you get the … This is one of the hardest things I think. How do you get people who don’t work for the law firm? They’re basically hired gun to exhibit empathy over and over again as like that is foundational to their job.That feels like a really hard thing to get people to that place. You know what I mean?

Ted DeBettencourt:

Yeah, it is. And the same way you do it in a phone intake team. You train, you train, you train, but after you do training, it takes about an agent about three months to get fully trained and start taking chats. Aside from that is the same way you’d argue to do that on the phone answering team. You listen to every call, you grade every call that comes in and you grade them on multiple touch points. Are they being empathetic? Are they saying the right thing? Are they answering questions? The other factor we have to grade for is speed. So we need to be fast. You don’t have to really grade for that on a phone as much. I mean, if you have a 30 minute phone call, maybe how long a phone call is is a factor.You don’t want phone calls taking 40 minutes. But generally speaking, if someone says all the right thing, they’re empathetic and they sign into a case, the speed is less of importance.

So we often hear people talking about speed, but for us it’s about the score for the chat. So what we do is every chat that comes in, we grade on a 12 point scale and my agents are hired, fired, promoted, demoted, and bonused based on how empathetic they are, how well they follow the rules for the firm and how fast they are. So the same way you judge a intake team, tracking, scoring is what we do for our chat agents.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And we’ve been talking a lot about chat and again, I’m always like thinking about the potential client, thinking about the audience. You also support SMS text, right?

Ted DeBettencourt:

Yeah, in multiple ways. So on big thing that we know is that there’s a few companies out there that say they’re AI and sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t. A lot of the ones that say they’re AI and they’re more just like a glorified form, they don’t really have a way to text people because it’s purely AI and the pure AI text is pretty much garbage right now. So we know that every year since we’ve offered text messaging and we started in 2015, in 2015, the inbound text messages for our PI firms was under 1% of our leads. We have firms now where overall as a company, 21% of our mobile leads now are coming from SMS. Each and every year, the percentage of leads that come in from text is increasing. So that’s a huge boon for our clients because younger people want to start a conversation with a law firm to text.

In addition to that, there’s a lot of other ways that we text on behalf of firms that is picking up a lot of speed. For example, when a form submit comes into a website, most firms take about, they say five minutes, but on average we see about a 30 minute response time to a form. So what we do now is when a form submit comes in, we send them a text message three seconds after it comes in. Someone submits a form, “Hey, my name is Bill. I need a lawyer.” Instead of waiting for Bill to send that same form to three other firms and sent back and waiting for that 30 minute response time to a firm, we text them back in three seconds. “Hey, Bill, this is Amy from the name of the firm. Sorry, you’re looking for a lawyer. What happened? “We can qualify that lead and even sign a retainer in chat in SMS rather three minutes after it comes in.

So not only can we make their chat leads better by having real people, but we can make their form follow-ups faster and better by doing it all via via SMS and doing it instantly once they come in.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And the one thing that I’ve noticed, because again, as we’ve been talking about here, everybody is in this automate everything, efficiency above all. But then when you watch, I’ve seen some automations that even try to accomplish what you just described, which is like a full intake to retainer experience. The automation alone can’t … It breaks all the time for a variety of reasons. And anyway, I just think that’s just something for people to think about and there’s a lot of different ways to do this, but the idea of being able to be able to support a law firm from their initial text and like you said, I mean, we see the same thing. People want to text and to be able to take that experience all the way through to retainer and then like you said, just compare it to what you’re doing from an automation standpoint and see what performs better.

Ted DeBettencourt:

And on the comparison front, I live and die on AB split tests. So some things in life you can easily AB split tests, Coke versus Pepsi, give it to a hundred people, don’t tell them what you’re drinking. Some things it’s harder. How do you get an AB split test an SEO agency? You can’t really do it. My service, fortunately or unfortunately for me, fortunately right now, you give us a split test. You can put half the traffic with MyChat, half the traffic with another, run it for 30 days, run it to a third party tracking tool. We push all leads to a spreadsheet, let the competitor do the same. And then after 30 days, we can sit and live and die by our data. When we first started doing those, I’ll be honest with you guys, we didn’t win them all. We lost a bunch.

It was scary. I remember losing our first one and crying myself to sleep at night saying,” We don’t have a company. We’re going to lose. This is horrible. “And then after it took, I want to say the next day we woke up, but no, it took a month to put my big boy pants on and go back to the table and say,” All right, why did we lose? What can we do better? “And then really kind of reconfigure some things, handle things a little bit differently and keep iterating and getting better for our clients. So nowadays, we always win AB split test because we stay on top of it. We live and die on that. We live and die in the data. But I love split tests for us and comparisons is a good thing in my industry for what I do.

Conrad Saam:

Ted, when you’re doing a split test, who sets that up? I’m Bill the lawyer. This sounds like I listen to this podcast, that’s a great … Am I leaning on my agency to do it? Are you guys setting that up for … How do I actually make that happen?

Ted DeBettencourt:

Sure. Well, there’s a few ways to do it. So either the agency can set up the split test or we can set up the split test. Split tests are pretty easy. There’s two ways to do it. How it has to be for a chat split test, it has to be cookie based. So we’ve had some chats where if I start a chat in Juvo and then I go to another page, then it flips the coin again and it could be us or it could be somebody else. If you do it that way, you’re going to have a bad user experience. So as long as you do a fifty fifty cookie based split test, meaning you track it by AP address and there’s a million softwares out there, we have one internally if the firm doesn’t want to do it, we share all the visitor data at the end to ensure it’s safe.

So every time a visitor comes to site, if they see us or they see one of our competitors, if they go to different pages, they still have to see that chat company because if they’re jumping between, it’s going to be a horrible result for the client, for the user and not a good data for the firm. So the first thing is making it cookie based. Part two is don’t pull the data from the Juvenile dashboard, don’t pull it from the client’s dashboard. And third, God forbid, don’t pull it from your CRM. I’ve never had a test go well where a client’s like, let me look in the CRM. And then midway through like, oh yeah, we forgot to tag half these leads. Okay, well let’s not do that. So every time we do a split test, we require no ifs and buts having learned this lesson the hard way.

Every time we pass leads, we pass them to a third party Google sheet spreadsheet. Every Juvo lead that comes in is going to a spreadsheet. The same, whoever we’re competing against that goes to a different tab in the spreadsheet. Then afterwards you can look at the raw data, the clients can look in and say, all right, maybe this lead was good or this one was bad, but I want to have the raw data in a spreadsheet so it can be analyzed in a fair comparison because if you don’t do it that way, once it gets in the CRM, good luck making heads or tails of that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And Ted, you mentioned, we’ve been talking a lot about performance and data. You also from on your side, and you just mentioned this, but you have a dashboard on the back end so folks can, from a lawyer’s experience, I want to go and see my Juvo leads I can log in.

Ted DeBettencourt:

100%. Yeah, they can log in twenty four seven. I have some firms that use us as the defacto CRM. We’re not. It’s more just, here are the chat leads. We’re often calling in calls and forms as well if they want to use us as a defacto CRM, but most clients are using a CRM lead docket, smart advocate, Litify, HubSpot, doesn’t matter what it is we pass them to their system.

Conrad Saam:

Let me ask questions about best practices for chat. Location on a page, how aggressive it should be, what does that look like and how do you make sure that chat isn’t just cannibalizing phone calls that we’re going to come in anyway, right? We get that question all the time.

Ted DeBettencourt:

Yeah. That was the number one question I get when I first started 10 years ago, that was the only question. We do split tests so we let clients see that data. So the first split test we did was a gentleman, Joe Pioletti who runs a bankruptcy firm out in Illinois. He said that exactly thing to me. I love that you

Conrad Saam:

Still remember this. The early client stories are so … I still remember all the weird crap I did for some of my earliest clients. That’s great.

Ted DeBettencourt:

Yeah. It was weird. If I put chat on my website, you’re just going to steal my phone calls. I said, “Joe, what do you mean?” He said, “If someone comes to my site, they chat with you, they probably just would have called me anyway.” I say, “Joe, I hear you. Let’s do a split test and see if that’s true.” So we did a split test for Joe is every time a visitor came to the site, we flipped a coin and if they were in group A, it’s by cookie visitor. If they were in group A, they saw chat and they also had the call and the form tracking. If they were in group B, they had call on the form tracking as well. So we turned this on and wanted to see if group A with chat or group B without chat got more leads.

After the end of the 30-day free trial, the group with chat had 2,800 visitors approximately for both groups A and B. The group with chat on had 59% more total leads. So we were able to prove to Joe and that because of chat his leads went up about 60%. So if a client ever wants to do that, we’re always happy to do it for them. Nowadays, I’m not seeing a lot of firms not using chat. It’s more they’re using a chat competitor. So it’s how are you better? So then we do a chat AB comparison against that and let the data lie where it may.

Conrad Saam:

This is some data that I’ve looked at from ourselves. I have not done this analysis for a four years, five years, maybe it’s four years. The notion that, yeah, okay, so I can get more leads if I have chat available. I get that. People want different ways to connect with you and if you give them options and you don’t do it in an obnoxious way, that makes sense. Having said that, do those different contact types convert at different rates? So is it better to get someone on the phone as opposed to chat from that ultimate conversion, which is, I want to turn this into a consultation or a client, right?

Ted DeBettencourt:

Yeah. Phone’s going to be the best because we can convert and we do convert a lot of people from chat into a lead into a case. We sign retainers through chat. So we’ll convert a fair amount, but a lot of people are like, at the end of a chat, if a firm’s letting us sign retainers, we say, “You want to sign a retainer here or you want to talk to someone?” A lot of people say, “Well, I want to talk to someone first.” I get it. I don’t blame them. So what we do is we transfer all chat leads to a phone call because we know a lot of people still want to talk to someone, especially when they’re going down the buy cycle. When they’re starting a chat, they’re usually not quite ready to make a phone call. That’s why they start a chat.

So it’s more top of the funnel and phone leads are a litle bit further down the phone. What I do know is that chat leads at transfer to phone calls convert into cases at a higher rate. So if we transfer a hundred chat leads to a hundred phone calls, it’s making up a number, a hundred phone leads from a chat transfer, that’s going to close into a case at a higher rate than just a hundred raw phone calls because by the time we transfer them to a phone, they’ve already been down the phone a little bit. They’ve shown more commitment to turn into a case.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

My whole thing on all this stuff is give people options, reduce the friction. The second that you’re like, because this is what lawyers do. Lawyers listen to this and they’re like, “Oh, Ted him self-admitted people want to talk on the phone so I’m going to do phone only to drive everybody to phone.” And you’re missing the point. There are people that otherwise would have engaged your service had you given them a different option than the phone alone. And you’re going to find there are, as Ted, I’m sure your data supports this, there are plenty of people that in different context and depending on what they’re looking for and the practice and their issues that they’re facing, want to be able to do it via text and chat because they’re busy and they’re doing something else just like the rest of us. And so I think that’s an important thing for people to realize is that if this or thinking like phone or chat or phone or text is the wrong way to do it, put yourself in the position of your next client and make it easy for them to interact with you the way that they prefer on their terms to the best of your ability.

Ted DeBettencourt:

And can I touch on that for a little bit?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. I was trying to tee it up for you.

Ted DeBettencourt:

Softball. So all the firms used to tell us, “Ted, I just need to treat you to transfer on the phone.” And that was our philosophy forever. And shout out to Rob Levine. He was a big one that- Providence,

Conrad Saam:

Rhode Island.

Ted DeBettencourt:

Providence, Rhode Island. He was a big one. We started talking with him. He’s like, “Ted, can you sign cases and chat?” I said, “No, we just want to transfer people on the phone. That’s not what you want to do. ” He kind of laughed. He said, “Ted, I think I know what I’m doing here.” I didn’t believe him, but we adopted that philosophy like, “All right, we’ll try doing it through chat.” His philosophy and one that I adopt now and I espouse, but it’s not from my original thought, he told me to do it and it works. Don’t force people to chat or to communicate in the channel that you choose. Meet people where they are. When you meet people where they are and communicate in the channel that they choose to communicate with you in, you’re going to have a higher success rate. So since that time, and we didn’t think it would work, but we did it because he asked us to.

We just saw the amount of retainers that were signing in the channels that they’re starting to communicate with us went up astronomically. Nowadays, for a lot of our firms, we’re even signing retainers in LSA. They started texting LSA. Sure, if they choose to use that as a channel to communicate with them, we’ll give them the option to call. But if they want to do LSA, sure, we get a retainer sign from LSA. We rob a ton of retainers signed through LSA nowadays because we’re meeting them where they choose to communicate with the firm. We’re not forcing them to mode jump or channel jump based on what is best practices for the firm. We’re meeting clients where they are and that’s been a huge difference for our business.

Conrad Saam:

Let me shift gears a little bit. You mentioned earlier in the evaluation of your agents, part of the evaluation process is how they follow the rules of the firm. I thought that was really fascinating. So let me extrapolate from that and you tell me where I’m wrong. I’m assuming you do a lot of work bringing a law firm on, understanding how they want to interact with people, what they do, all those elements. You then have to get that profile in front of your agents to be able to accurately represent that to the client. Do I do that roughly accurately?

Ted DeBettencourt:

Yeah, exactly right.

Conrad Saam:

Okay. So my question becomes, from your experience looking at this over and over again, if you were to give advice to law firms to craft those rules for the firm, to work with a chat vendor who’s going to work closely with you to represent you, what are the best practices or advice that you would give for defining those rules for the firm?

Ted DeBettencourt:

To set the stage a little bit, when I first started this business, the companies I was using to answer my firm’s chats, because I had a small agency, I hired other companies to answer chats. What they did is they had the same set of rules for every firm. They said, “You’re a PI firm, here are the rules we use.” And it wasn’t customized. So it was faster to get set up, but it screwed up a lot because if a particular firm had particular rules, they wouldn’t meet them. They would just say, “This is the way we do it. ” So we took the different approach. We have custom rules for every firm we do it. When we work with the firm to onboard them, we lay out our best practices and say, “Here’s what we should do, but if you want to add some variation, we can.

” And then we try to talk them down if they want to do something silly, but we ultimately go with their decision and give them the 30-day free trial and say, “Well, we told you you shouldn’t do this. ” It doesn’t happen much, but a chat shouldn’t be 20 questions. A chat should be eight to 11 questions finding out basic information. If your chat company is overqualifying leads by asking too many questions, you’re going to lose good chatters that otherwise would have been a good lead. But because you’re asking so many chats, the chat is no longer taking two to three minutes. It’s taken 15, 20 minutes because they’re having to answer 20 questions. You don’t want to play 20 questions in chats. You want to ask the obvious disqualifiers and then qualify that lead. If you’re signing a retainer, they can be more to that, but for the simple ones, get them in and get them out in three to five minutes there.

Conrad Saam:

How about mobile versus desktop? Do you have a different approach for chat that originates from a mobile device other than please pull over and stop driving while you’re chatting with us?

Ted DeBettencourt:

Great question. We’re just seeing a higher percentage of our mobile leads now are coming from SMS. So when an SMS comes in, we love it because there’s less questions we have to ask. We know people are going to be shorter. So if we have the ability to ask less questions we do and we can automatically skip one question, what’s your phone number? So anything we can do to reduce the number of questions we ask is a boon to us.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We’re here on lunch hour legal marketing. Conrad and are always talking about waste and advertising. I know that on your site you highlight some of your thoughts on waste and advertising. Talk to us about how Juvo leads from the experience of the Juvo customer can help mitigate waste by implementing Juvo leads.

Ted DeBettencourt:

Sure. Let’s take a landing page. Let’s say you’re drunk PPC traffic to a landing page and you’re converting at 7%. That means 93% of the people you’re sending to your website aren’t converting into a lead. That’s a lot of waste. Clicks are expensive. You’re spending a lot of money. You put Juvo leads or you put any chat on that company some to varying degrees. You’re going to get more juice for the traffic you’re bringing them. So if I’m seeing a site that’s converting at 7%, you put me on that site, I’m at least converting that now at 10 to 15%, maybe not 15. We’re usually doubling conversing rates on average. So that’s what we see when you put us on a PPC landing page. I love PPC traffic more than organic traffic because the traffic’s hotter. So I can customize that landing page to have the chat speak to that person.

So if they’re coming to a motor vehicle accident page, I’m not going to say, “Hi, I’m on … Hi, this is Amy from ABC Law Firm.” I’m going to say, “Hi, this is Amy. Were you or a loved one involved in a car accident?” So I’m speaking to their specific needs and it looks like I’m genuinely starting a conversation with them. So PBC landing pages, I can clean those up and bring the conversion rates up pretty drastically.

Conrad Saam:

We are all vendors to the legal industry. I have found that we have some clients who work really well with us and some clients who work really poorly with us. What are the best ways for a vendor to get the most out of an engagement? I believe you need to proactively manage your vendors. What are the best ways that may or may not be true for you, but what are the best ways for law firms to make sure that they’re working tightly with a chat vendor to get the most out of that vendor?

Ted DeBettencourt:

Feedback, feedback, feedback. So the worst thing that happens to me is we’ll go live with the site. We check in and we’re at the 30-day free trial and then we check in at the end and they say, “Oh, Ted, I’m too busy to take the meeting. Things look good. Let’s keep going. ” Great. Sounds good. We think everything’s good. And then a month later, a few months later, our code’s removed and we’re like, “Hey, what happened?” They’re like, “Oh, we didn’t convert them.” I’m like, “All right, well why? What were wrong with the leads? Let’s take a look at them.” If we don’t get feedback and we’re passing, for example, we pass a lot of med mal leads to our firms, but a lot of firms say, “Ted, I convert one out of a hundred med mal leads. I don’t want to pay for these.” So what we do is we say, “Okay, fine.

Every time we send you a med mal lead, we’ll just call it as unqualified leads or it’s free.” So if a firm’s paying for leads that they don’t think are any good and we don’t know about it, we can’t make an adjustment. Happy to make any adjustments they want, but when we don’t get feedback, we don’t know what adjustments to make. So the more feedback we get from the firms, the better we know what questions to ask to make sure we’re only passing those good leads. Especially that’s at Magnify when we’re assigning retainers. If they give us vague rules to sign retainers and we’re signing a bunch of retainers, they tell us a junk, tell us what newer questions that we need to ask so we make sure we’re only signing leads that you don’t have to go back and unsign those for. As long as we get that feedback, we can optimize, but if we don’t get feedback, we’re in a litle bit of trouble there.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Let’s talk pricing. One of the things that I think a lot of lawyers are frustrated about, and I’ve noticed this too, is that certain vendors are very opaque about pricing and it’s not exactly clear and sometimes it’s variable and sometimes there’s additional fees. What’s your approach to pricing?

Ted DeBettencourt:

Sure. We’ve had the same aproach to pricing since we started. We’re probably pretty stupid about it and probably should update it, but we give everyone a free 30-day trial and they get to see everything in person. They get to see everything that we do to them for free for 30 days. We make a bold claim. You put us on your website, you get at least 50% more leads. If they don’t like us after the 30-day free trial, they walk away and they’ve spent $0. Afterwards they pay on a per qualified lead basis. Every time we send them a qualified lead that they tell us is a good lead. All they have to do is tell us the rules upfront. If it meets that criteria, it’s a lead they pay for. If it doesn’t meet the criteria, they don’t pay for it. Juvo is Latin for qualified.

We thought we’d be fancy and all lawyers know Latin, but no one knows what Juvo means, but it means qualified lead.

Announcer:

Awesome.

Ted DeBettencourt:

Rest, Ipsa, Ipsilla. I forget all those terms.

Conrad Saam:

I have learned something today.

Ted DeBettencourt:

Yeah. Juvo means qualified me.

Conrad Saam:

Never be able to use.

Ted DeBettencourt:

I never use it except for these. So Juva means qualified. So the firms only pay for qualified leads and they only pay for the qualified leads that they say they want to pay for. So for example, those MedMal leads that aren’t any good, they’re free. They get to determine what they are. If we sign a retainer through chat though, it’s a hundred bucks, not 35.

Conrad Saam:

How does that feedback work? They say that they want … Is that like, these are the elements that we want and they pay for all of those or is it at an individual basis like, yes, we like John, but we hated Mary?

Ted DeBettencourt:

No, it’s an upfront basis. So they tell us on the onboarding, we sit down and say, “Tell us that are good leads.” So for example, if it’s out of state, all right, we’ll still send it to you and that’s a big point. If a lead isn’t good, we still send it to the firm, it’s just free. So one of our competitors, and I’ll punch up because they’re owned by internet friends.

Conrad Saam:

Oh yeah, do it. Do it.

Ted DeBettencourt:

I

Conrad Saam:

Know what you’re going to say. I’ve got the article for you.

Ted DeBettencourt:

Conman, if you check your back links on that article, 98% of those backlinks are for me sharing it because I like telling it when you tell people, not when I tell people.

Conrad Saam:

I forgot about this. This is

Ted DeBettencourt:

Great. I use that article all the time. So one of our competitors, what they do, internet brands, Engage, they started doing it. They said, “Hey, if a lead doesn’t match the law firm…” So let’s say the firm’s in Texas and they say, “This firm’s in Idaho.” If a Texas lead came in, they would sell that firm, that lead not to one firm to 15 other firms. So now that person that chatted on your website is now getting a call from 15 other lawyers saying like, “Hey, I heard you were in a car accident.” So now this user had their data sold and the firm didn’t even know about it. So huge win for us. We took half their clients when they started doing that. So I love the fact that they did it. Horrible for law firms. They’re basically stealing leads and passing to other firms.

And the problem is they’re not perfect. Their agents aren’t paid well. So when you don’t pay agents well, they’ll make mistakes. When they don’t make mistakes, what they do is they say, “Oh, Austin. Oh, Austin, maybe that’s in Idaho. This is probably not a good lead.” So they’ll take leads that they don’t think are for the firm that really would be a perfect lead and they’ll sell it to other firms. And the disincentive even further is they make more selling your leads to other firms than they do for the firms that they work for. So crazy service system they have and they call it their consumer assistance program, which is my favorite term for a name. And

Conrad Saam:

They opted everyone in with a quiet email. They auto-opted people in with a quiet email-

Ted DeBettencourt:

Middle

Conrad Saam:

Of the night. In the middle of the night. And the other thing, they’re so bad at the qualification. So the reason I know about this, the reason that I wrote about this is we had a client who called me really pissed off. They thought we had done it

Announcer:

Because

Conrad Saam:

We had their chat and all of a sudden they had signed a client who was now getting inundated by out- of-state lawyers trying to sell them their business and the end client assumed or believed that the law firm had sold the lead to all these other firms. It was gross. It was terrible and this happened multiple times. And so that’s why I wrote the post and that’s why-

Ted DeBettencourt:

Ted shared it like crazy.

Conrad Saam:

You’re welcome, Ted. You’re welcome.

Ted DeBettencourt:

Thank you. Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Now I don’t know anything about this story, but hypothetically, hypothetically, if they were fielding LSA messages and the LSA platforms sending that lead to four different lawyers and then the chat providers sending it to 15, that consumer in a worst case scenario could potentially be getting 60 law firms contacting them. Is that my math right on that?

Conrad Saam:

That’s your worst case math, but 15

Ted DeBettencourt:

Times 15. Yeah, theoretically. Engage doesn’t do LSAs. They probably should, just for that fact they could sell 60 times, but they don’t do that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Got it. Okay.

Conrad Saam:

We just lost another one. Did I touch on the LSA one? Yeah. What’s that?

Ted DeBettencourt:

So I love LSAs because as much as I love to bash when my competitors sell leads, but nowadays LSA is selling leads to three firms, three other firms, including the original firm, which is absolutely crazy to me.

LSA is probably the biggest driver of business for us because what we do is we mainly log into a firm’s LSA account and the API that you can use with LSA is buggy is all get out and it doesn’t work 20% of the time. So we know it doesn’t work. So when my competitors are using that LSA API and they’re failing, I’m stealing their leads because I mainly log in and call the firm. I call my firm with those leads. So I can beat everybody to the punch on every LSA lead. So if you’re not using me for LSA leads, I’m probably taking your business. Boom. Sorry, that’s kind of rough, but that’s- No,

Conrad Saam:

I like it. Listen, by the way, we don’t have many friends in the legal marketing industry. You’re not helping us make more friends, but I like the friends that we have. Let’s put it that way.

Ted DeBettencourt:

Fair, fair. I’m punching out.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

This was one question I had. This is more of a logistical question, but I noticed you, and you mentioned this earlier, but you have a lot of integration partners. If I want to, can I send full chat transcripts from Juvo into another system? Talk to us how that works.

Ted DeBettencourt:

Very simply. All the leads go to any system you want. Litify, Salesforce, what are the other big ones? Salesforce.

Conrad Saam:

What’s Salesforce? Do you have any

Ted DeBettencourt:

Compliance use

Conrad Saam:

Directly using Salesforce? Really?

Ted DeBettencourt:

I have a lot of firms using directly Salesforce. It’s not our funnest integration, if I’m be honest. No. No. But we do it a lot. It tends to be the bigger firms. Then some use Litify, which sits on top of Salesforce. Probably the smart advocates, the lead dockets those are the most common. Clio Grow. We pass all the data. We can even pass structured data to them if they want. They just have to outline exactly what data it is and we’ll get it set up. The only ones we don’t do is Needles. If you’re on Needles, you’re out of luck, but so is everybody else. They don’t integrate with anybody.

Conrad Saam:

What is the best platform to work with?

Ted DeBettencourt:

Beside from Juvo Leads.

Conrad Saam:

Sorry, let me rephrase that. We can do this again. What is the easiest platform for Juva Leads to integrate with?

Ted DeBettencourt:

Lead Docket.

Conrad Saam:

Lead Docket. All right.

Ted DeBettencourt:

There you go. I can’t speak to how good it is in the backend. I know people love Smart Advocate. People love Lead Docket. People love Litify. People use Salesforce. It ain’t perfect to integrate with, but once you get set up, it’s easy. It’s just the firm probably has to have a Salesforce integrator to do what you want it to do. That’s a little bit outside the confines of what I do, but if they have that person, it’s simple on our end.

Conrad Saam:

Okay.

Well, Ted, we’ve known you for a long time. It’s about time we did something like this. I’ll say for our listeners, and I’m going to speak for Gee because I know where his brain is, because we share half of a brain. We’re always concerned about how we come across as overly pitchy, but this is exactly why we wanted to have the model that we did where we can bring someone in, ask them hard questions, get some real value, not just talk about why you should buy my solution, but talk about best practices for something. And I think you’ve done a great job on that. So thank you really. Thank you for joining us today.

Ted DeBettencourt:

Yeah, pleasure having you on. And I’ll give a shout out. I remember I met you guys, shoot, 10, maybe 12, 13 years ago. I had a small legal marketing agency up in Boston and I had three clients and I went to a conference and I saw you guys talk. Conrad, I remember when you wrote your breakout of Fine Law article and

Announcer:

The

Ted DeBettencourt:

Fine Law got up there, guy and spoke. And then you got up there next. I’m like, who, what is he going to say? And he got up there and just started bashing him and it was the greatest thing I ever saw in my life. I was grinning ear to ear. I’m like, “I don’t know people do this professionally. Can you do this? Is he going to get in trouble for this? ” But unabashedly got up there and just was saying all the … And it was all right though, just saying all the horrible things. I just remember me sitting in the back just as a small agency owner trying to figure out the world and just grinning ear to ear, like, “This is so proper. This is awesome.” So I’ve looked up to you ever since. I appreciate that you doing that and kind of showing me how it can be done.

So I appreciate you

Conrad Saam:

For that. Thanks for sharing that story. There are things you’ve been out for so long, but again, it’s why we have … We don’t have a lot of friends, but we have very good friends. Let’s put it that way. Thank you.

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