The LHLM Summit Is Coming. Here’s a Taste.

Episode Notes

Transcript

Mary Ellen Murrah (00:00)

if you don’t have women on your leadership team somewhere, that’s a huge disadvantage to the firm in general because you’re just missing that perspective of somebody who may be thinking the way that your clients are thinking. And I don’t think it’s inauthentic. I think it’s very authentic, in fact, to say that the women on your team develop incredibly strong relationships with your clients and work very hard on behalf of your clients.

 

Conrad Saam (00:54)

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. This is Conrad Saam from Mockingbird and my grandfather was an orchardist in Tasmania.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (01:02)

That’s a good one. And I’m Gyi Tsakalakis with the AttorneySync, and my daughter recently won her softball league championship.

 

Conrad Saam (01:12)

Did you post that on social media?

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (01:14)

I don’t know, did I? I haven’t seen my wife probably posted something about it. Okay.

 

Conrad Saam (01:15)

I don’t know. I

 

Well that’s good. I will I will implore all you parents not to post your kids’ GPA on social media.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (01:24)

Yeah, GPA

 

1. And you know, we do those ⁓ first day and last day of school with fac I try to keep the facts out. Blur the facts, but you know, it’s an interesting thing ’cause it’s like, you know, and some parents they’re very conscientious about like, you know, putting the little emojis over kids’ faces and stuff. And I get it, like it’s scary world out there.

 

Conrad Saam (01:30)

Yeah.

 

Well, my approach on the kids’ privacy was an agreement with my wife that I never named them. And thus ⁓ any of our listeners or my social media people know that I refer to my children as spawn. I have spawn one, two and three. And ⁓ yeah, that’s how that’s how we dealt with the privacy thing.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (02:01)

But faces were okay.

 

Conrad Saam (02:03)

were

 

okay. Yeah. Beyond overzealous parents talking about how amazing their children are, what are we talking about here, Gyi?

 

Gyi Tsakalakis (02:11)

We’re talking about some awesome speakers that we have at the upcoming Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Summit.

 

Conrad Saam (02:19)

Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Summit, August 11th through 13th in Nashville. We would love to have you join us. We have Mary Ellen is going to be talking about women in the workforce and how that actually is dramatically different for your firm. And then we have Kerri Coby White talking about the hot topic, intake.

 

Conrad (02:39)

for better or worse, many law firms, especially the face of the law firms, look like Conrad, the middle-aged white guy. Why is it important to look a lot more than just the Conrad look?

 

Mary Ellen Murrah (02:52)

You’re absolutely right. At Vista, we go into so many firms and that is the prevailing look, right? Sea of middle-aged white guy attorneys and then

 

The support team is so often women, right? It’s like a sea of women case managers and intake specialists. And those are the folks who are really getting the intimate relationships with your clients. You know, they’re the ones who are talking to them, hearing about their case at the beginning. They are the ones who are talking to them through treatment. They’re the people that develop those deep, deep relationships with your clients. And a lot of times they’re not even on your website. They’re not on your social media anywhere. ⁓ You’re just seeing a sea of

 

again, middle-aged white guy faces. And for many people, if you take into account that those people are developing such deep relationships with your clients and you put them on your website, you highlight them on your website, you put them on your leadership team, you tag them on your socials, know, kind of highlight some information about them, then they become brand ambassadors for your firm and your reach gets even further because as, you know, we like to feel like our work matters, right? So as the case manager or paralegal who is working so

 

intimately with these clients when I see a feature on me on social media or I can tell somebody, you can go find me on the website. I’m here. There’s a little bio about me. I want to share that with other folks. Right. I want people to know that the firm I work with has invested in me, cares about me, even took a picture of me to put on the website. You know, instead of just here’s the attorney drop down and then there’s no team, there’s nothing else. Nobody else works there. The people that you talk to, you’re never going to actually see anywhere online. ⁓ That is so common.

 

Conrad (04:27)

Do you have any data on, for consumer facing legal, on the end decision maker, gender wise?

 

Mary Ellen Murrah (04:36)

⁓ I don’t have specific data I could quote at this moment. However, anecdotally, I have heard at other conferences that oftentimes it is the women in the household that are making some of these decisions about who to hire. As a woman in a household, when I see a billboard and there are women featured on the billboard, when I look at a website and see that there are women featured on the website, when I see

 

social media and things like that. I want to support that firm. I want to support firms who are promoting women and promoting people that may be not always promoted.

 

Conrad (05:17)

One of the questions that I have on this is the authenticity, right? Like authentic marketing tends to work better than inauthentic marketing. How do you make sure that this is an authentic push and not just, we’re kind of glazing over the fact that we’re not run by a woman.

 

Mary Ellen Murrah (05:36)

Right. Well, I would say that whether or not a woman owns the firm, if you don’t have women on your leadership team somewhere, that’s a huge disadvantage to the firm in general because you’re just missing that perspective of somebody who may be thinking the way that your clients are thinking. And I don’t think it’s inauthentic. I think it’s very authentic, in fact, to say that the women on your team develop incredibly strong relationships with your clients and work very hard on behalf of your clients.

 

So highlighting that work, it’s not inauthentic to your firm. Just because they don’t own the firm doesn’t mean that they don’t care about your clients and that they’re not incredibly important to your clients.

 

Conrad (06:18)

Interestingly, you mentioned leadership. This is more anecdotal. Four years ago, we were four white guys, middle-aged white guys. We are now one middle-aged white guy and three amazing women. Small data point, the agency is entirely different. I’m so much happier and we are so much more profitable.

 

I mean, it was not deliberate, like it wasn’t a let’s get rid of the boys, but it’s been really fascinating for me to watch the agency flourish when it has been a much more representative group. It’s been great.

 

Mary Ellen Murrah (07:01)

Yeah, mean, tiny test case there, but, and I’m certainly not saying get rid of the boys. Like, please don’t hear that. I’m just saying, let’s add women and other voices that aren’t typically in the leadership team because it does elevate all of us. We can only have the perspective that we have. I don’t know your perspective as a middle-aged white guy. You don’t know my perspective as a middle-aged gay white woman. like we, you know, we can make each other better by having those two perspectives in one place.

 

Conrad (07:27)

Let’s talk about women ownership. Okay. So you have a woman owned law firm, right? And we’re starting to see that like slowly, slowly, but do you think it’s important to, mean, there’s a spectrum here. You could really lean into the, and we’ve had firms like this. We are here, we’re women owned. We are here for women. Like this is our entire positioning and, and, and, let’s celebrate that. Or on the other end of the spectrum, like,

 

We are attorneys and don’t think about us differently because we’re a woman owned attorney, law firm. Where do you fall on that spectrum?

 

Mary Ellen Murrah (08:05)

You know, I think it can be a yes and, right? I want to know, and I tend to seek out women and minority owned businesses. So it is important for me to know that. So I think putting that somewhere on your website, I think is important to know, because I think there is a certain group of people who are looking for that and want to support that. At the same time, sometimes it drives me crazy when there’s a conference that’s maybe for leadership and we have a separate breakout that is for women. Like I, as a woman leader,

 

want the same treatment and want the same access to everything that everybody in that room has access to. And I don’t feel like I need a breakout for that. So I think that it’s important for us to take women attorneys seriously. I’ve heard the thing at a conference where someone refers to a woman attorney as like a chichi attorney, because it’s somebody who ⁓ dresses up fancy or like wears a lot of makeup or maybe like puts things on social media that are ⁓

 

very indicative of their life outside of their law firm. And there is a certain subset that thinks like, that’s so stupid. I don’t like that. I mean, I think like you said earlier, it does come down to authenticity. If that’s who I am in my life and that’s what I highlight on social media, great. Then the people who are going to seek me out, I am attracting those people that are going to be attracted to that. So I feel like there can be a balance there and there can be both. We can have…

 

some campaigns that lean towards the women-owned business and highlight women and some campaigns that just lean into us being great lawyers.

 

Conrad (09:37)

Yeah. mean, a tactical hint for all of you listening, there is the ability to say woman-owned business on Google business profile. There is an ability to say gay and lesbian friendly business on your Google profile. ⁓ And there are lots of people who use those as filters. Yeah. OK. Talk to the middle aged white guy business owner. ⁓

 

Mary Ellen Murrah (09:54)

Absolutely.

 

Conrad (10:02)

Make the pitch. What can you do tactically? Give me three things tactically that as the prototypical law firm owner, you should be doing to push women forward from a pure craven marketing perspective.

 

Mary Ellen Murrah (10:18)

Okay, number one, if your website is just a sea of middle-aged white guys and we don’t have anybody else on our team up there, I think you are doing yourself a disservice. So let’s get our team members up there so that we can have something that pushes to our clients that says, meet your case manager, meet your whatever it is, the person that’s working with this firm. And that’s if you don’t have women on your leadership team. Number two, get women on your leadership team because they are gonna help you make better

 

⁓ marketing decisions, better operational decisions, and maybe not better, but just give that perspective that we talked about earlier. And number three, if your social media channels are constantly highlighting the verdicts that your attorneys get, while that may be something that you want to highlight to showcase that you are an expert, make sure that you’re also highlighting other folks on your team who can then reshare that and hit their entire network of people that you may not have even reached with your original post.

 

just because you highlighted somebody who maybe wasn’t one of your attorneys who’s really excited to be featured on social media.

 

Conrad (11:22)

All right, last question, and not necessarily women specific. What is the biggest, most obvious mistake, low-hanging fruit thing that you would fix at law firms if you could?

 

Mary Ellen Murrah (11:33)

Intake, intake, intake, intake. People spend so much money to get these leads in and then they fumble them when they’re in the firm. ⁓ We treat that as a lower level position. We need to be treating that as our sales team, the people that are generating business for us. We need to be training them. We need to make sure that those processes in your intake department are tight because there is so much leakage that happens there.

 

that even just fixing those, making small tweaks to fix those can make a big difference in your profitability.

 

Conrad (12:06)

Well, at the risk of being a Craven promoter of the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Summit, we have two women talking intake at the summit, Kerri Coby White and Amanda Hankins.

 

Mary Ellen Murrah (12:16)

Amazing, two amazing people.

 

Jay Ruane (12:20)

Hey, it’s Jay Ruane and I wanted to invite you to join me and hundreds of your legal marketing friends at the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Summit in Nashville this August. I’m excited for this event hosted by Gyi and Conrad because I’ll be talking about analog marketing, and I’m going to give you my foolproof system to teach your firm back at home to connect with and nurture referral relationships that drive new cases to your firm year over year.

 

And if that’s not enough, later that night I’ll teach you a 15-minute fry talk on a system you can use to brainstorm anything with your team back at home. So join Conrad and Gyi and me and all the best and brightest minds in legal marketing this August at Acme Feed and Seed in Nashville for the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Summit. I’ll see you there.

 

Conrad Saam (13:17)

I’m here with Kerri Coby White. ⁓ we are talking intake. We’re talking intake at the Lunch Legal Marketing Summit. Let’s get right into it. AI and intake. Tell me how those things do well together or not.

 

Kerri Coby White (13:30)

Sure. Well, I am very much of the opinion that AI absolutely shouldn’t be doing the intake. So I will debate anyone on the virtues of AI for intake. What I’m telling my clients regularly is that the future of intake is not AI, but it sure as heck is AI powered. So I want my teams to be empowered with AI tools, AI tracking, AI feedback, but I don’t want AI agents answering the phones. We’ve just spent the last

 

decade drilling into people about empathy and true client experience. This is not the time to put a robot on the phone.

 

Conrad Saam (14:07)

So what are so let’s get really tactical.. Favorite tools. What so using AI in intake, what do you what do you love? What what what would you consider at this point kind of proven?

 

Kerri Coby White (14:17)

Sure. So and I’m so glad you asked that because I’ve been telling people for you know, n until this year, we were living in beta. Everything related to AI was ⁓ was a testing period, and I believe everything should be tested. Well, the data’s in, and it’s very clear that humans don’t like talking to robots yet. Now, I fully expect that will change. Young people are more and more hesitant to talk to real humans. So I do expect that that will change. But what we’ve learned from the data is that humans are tolerant.

 

Of AI voice agents, again, different than conversational AI chat bot type things. Humans are very comfortable with AI chat bots. But what they don’t like is anything more than transactional when it comes to an AI voice agent. So if you’re putting AI on the phone, it should absolutely only be to remind someone of an upcoming appointment, schedule ⁓ a consultation, but they shouldn’t be doing the intake. Now, where I like to use AI is

 

Absolutely in listening because it can give us a lot of insight into how people are are are thinking and feeling. ⁓ I don’t have it yet, but I I want technology that is giving me signals in real time about objection handling. So I’m still looking for that technology. And I don’t mind the AI agents on the chat bots. I think that they do exceptionally well, but the AI voice agents I say they need to stay on the shelf.

 

Conrad Saam (15:41)

Okay. ⁓ so the mid size firm that may not necessarily have full fully staffed in house intake, nights and weekends, holidays, etc. There there’s a there’s a really difficult balance here, right? So you’ve got the fully staffed firm and then you’ve got I find the the the the human powered outsourcing, it’s a really hard, underpaid, rough job

 

Kerri Coby White (16:08)

And they don’t do a great job anyway. And so

 

Conrad Saam (16:10)

And they’re never going to, right? Like it you just can’t. So so where do you where do you where do you draw the how do you hand handle for that mid sized firm that doesn’t have enough scale to have a full staff 24/7 but also wants to deliver a better a better experience in human voice, or is human voice the better answer?

 

Kerri Coby White (16:29)

Yeah, so I mean I I I like I said, I’m gonna always defend the human voice as the better answer. However, there is a time and a place for using AI when necessary. So the first question I tell every firm, no matter their size, but this is especially important for our smaller firms why are you using AI? And there are lots of reasons. If you’re using AI voice agents in particular, because they speak a language that you don’t have someone on staff speaking, that they’re available when you can’t have

 

routine staff on on call, you know, fully trained regular staff in-house. ⁓ if it’s a time that that the availability for the talent isn’t there, those are all valid reasons. So if the option is use voice agents or miss phone calls, I’m gonna tell you to use voice agents. But I’m also gonna tell you that chances are they’re not gonna be as effective as humans. Call centers are all using voice agents for their overflow because as ridiculous as it is to me,

 

Call centers still miss calls. And so one thing I can guarantee you when it comes to weekends, overnights, holidays, the AI voice agents aren’t going to miss calls. So if you begin your AI exploration, AI implementation by asking the question, why are we using this? I just want it to be for the right reasons. I’ve yet to hear someone say, because it gives my pr potential clients a better experience. So there’s that. If it’s purely for cutting costs,

 

Hey, I’m a business owner. I get that part too. But at what expense? We do have to look at the balance of what it means for our brand and what we’re actually selling. If what we’re selling is trust in a moment of crisis and you’re putting a robot on the phone with someone who potentially has, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars of value to your firm, then you should consider who you’re putting in the front line. So start with the end in mind. Why are we using this and make sure it’s a good reason? And those reasons there are valid reasons.

 

Conrad Saam (18:26)

Okay, talk to me about intake overall, key metrics for running intake. Like you’re you’re a intake management expert. Let’s let’s go to that. What what are the what are the key metrics you’re looking at to run in?

 

Kerri Coby White (18:36)

There

 

we have to know absolutely all at all times how many leads did we generate and how many of those leads were engaged. What I mean by that is that if we can’t actually take a lead and get them on the phone, they’re not engaged with us. If you’re spending money on high volume, low cost form fills, you’re going to have a higher volume of unresponsive leads. And I don’t like to count my team as ⁓ ineffective if they’re not.

 

⁓ if they’re not able to engage those leads. It means I have to improve my system so that I can engage more leads. Depending on the type of campaign that you’re running, I want to see fewer than 2% unresponsive leads. I do not consider leads that sound good as qualified until we get them on the phone. So the first one is leads to engaged. I want 90% 98% of leads engaged.

 

If you have a high rate of unresponsives, then you need to be looking at your speed to lead, your staffing numbers, your outreach efforts, your consistency and follow-up, all of those things. Fewer than 2% unresponsive leads. Next thing I want to know is quality of leads. Every single lead that we talk to, we need to determine conclusively do we want it or do we not. If we want it, it’s qualified. Period, end of sentence. If we don’t want it, then it’s unqualified. Period, end of sentence.

 

Every single engaged lead is one of those two things. Now I have a qualified rate, and that’s important information for the marketing team. They’re looking into the nitty-gritty of campaign metrics and all the things that are going to help them generate more qualified leads. We need to be able to communicate that information from the intake team. So if I have a high volume but low quality lead, that’s something the marketing team needs to know.

 

Once I have my qualified leads, okay, so if we had a hundred leads and 98% of 98 of them were actually talking to us, the next metric I’m looking at is qualified. It should be about 30%. That number goes up or down, depending on your referrals, your brand recognition, and of course the type of campaigns that you’re running. But generally anywhere from 10 to 40%, I know that’s quite a window. But if you’re generating 25% qualified leads, you’re doing quite well.

 

Once I have my qualified leads, I’m looking at conversion. So if of my 98 leads that were engaged, 30, maybe 25 were qualified. I want to make sure that we’re signing north of 90%. So if we had 20 qualified leads, that means 19 of them were converted. That would be 90%. If you’re a smaller firm, every one lead is a lot of percentage points. So be kind to your team in that.

 

As effective as we want to be on the phones, there’s someone who’s gonna call who’s kicking tires, has a brother-in-law who’s an attorney, ⁓ already has a settlement check in hand. Remember, this is not sales in the sense of outbound lead generation and conversion. This is inbound leads. Be kind to your team. They’re not gonna hit 100%. If you’re telling me you’re hitting 100%, I think you’re lying. Number one, and number two.

 

If you’re less than 75%, you are wasting money. You need to dial in the intake big time. If you’re like most firms, you’re actually around that 85% mark, which means you’re leaving a lot of meat on the bone. You’ve got qualified leads that you paid for and you need to convert them. The two things that you actually control in intake are qualified lead conversion. So the number of qualified leads that we sign and responsive rates.

 

the number of leads that we actually engage. Those are the two things that intake teams need to work really hard on.

 

Conrad Saam (22:23)

Let me ask you this. Have you do you incorporate lead scoring into any of this? Like these

 

are the let’s talk through lead scoring.

 

Kerri Coby White (22:31)

So in in my intake system, I use a very basic average, better than average, ⁓ worse than average or not qualified. So I’m gonna get just my basics. If my lead score, excuse me, lead costs are going up, but I’m getting more highly qualified leads, then I’m gonna sleep well at night. If my if my ⁓ campaign costs are going up and my quality of lead is going down, then we have a problem.

 

Every firm has a sweet spot. You know, you may have a firm that says, Hey, I have no problem paying $6,000 a case as long as they’re good cases. I know plenty of firms that would say that. The reality is that most cases are pretty minor. Across the country, the average value of a case is about $15,000. Now I’ll speak to the attorneys directly and say, you guys need to do a better job on finding the value in these cases. But if you are simply administratively running claims, it’s about $15,000 of value.

 

So I really want to see people increase the value from the lawyer side. So it sounds like a pretty basic case. It’s good, it’s not gonna be huge value. Pretty standard case is going to be soft tissue. Better than average is going to have broken bones or surgery. Catastrophic would have long term life altering care. And anything that is not requiring any sort of treatment, but it’s an injury, is not a great case. So those four things. Now

 

I’m in beta on my intake system to actually score with numbers. And ⁓ we’re making that very complex. I I want to say it’s across 12 points, which is not really for intake so much as it’s for better understanding the data within the firm. So when it comes to truly lead scoring, I’m okay with those four categories uninjured, unqualified, slightly injured, average, above average. That’s about it.

 

Conrad Saam (24:21)

Okay. And then and then following up with them differently. D do

 

you do how do you

 

Kerri Coby White (24:25)

Through. Yeah. So I think you there’s a sensitivity matrix that you have to really, I think, tap into when you’re dealing with highly sensitive cases. If it’s just somebody who is trying to get through their day, still going to work, still trying to get the kids off the bus while the car is being repaired, you know, that’s someone that you can follow up pretty aggressively. You have somebody who’s in a hospital near a a bedside of someone they love.

 

That needs to be handled more sensitively. So generally speaking, I have a pretty standard outreach campaign, but when you have a high, high value case, it should be handled very sensitively. And so in in those situations, I say kill all your automation and put on your human hat and do a great job.

 

Conrad Saam (25:05)

Let me talk about the people side of this. Who’s who’s the best hire for intake? Right. It’s a it’s a it’s a difficult job. Yeah. It’s undervalued in my opinion. It’s often underpaid. Who are you hiring to to get the the perfect person?

 

Kerri Coby White (25:21)

This pains me to say it because I know we desperately need good teachers, but there are so many unhappy good teachers that when I know a teacher looking for a job, I like them in intake. They are intuitively f ⁓ focused on individual needs, human needs. And so they tend to do a great job talking to people, but they’re also very effective when it comes to data collection, working in software systems, ⁓ wanting to win. Teachers are some of the most highly qualified people that I know.

 

And so I look for teachers. But other than that, I would say the the thing that I think so many firms are missing is the right degree of compensation to make this a position that is going to put the right person there. Somebody who is going to be high on EQ, emotional intelligence, as well as capable of communicating effectively on on your software systems, tracking data, managing ⁓ a lot of tasks at the same time. So pay what

 

this professional role is for. And gosh, if you get one more case a month because you have the right person on the team, then it’s going to pay for itself.

 

Conrad Saam (26:28)

So what’s the comp structure? Like bonus like how does it ha what done super, super well. I’m managing an MJ team. I’ve got ten people on my team. I’m staffed twenty four seven. How am I paying my people? Like what does that look

 

like?

 

Kerri Coby White (26:40)

So I have a a very sophisticated ⁓ incentive structure because I want to make sure that whenever I’m incentivizing, I’m not cannibalizing the team. And so I want to make sure that we have team goals so that we’re working together as well as individual goals that reward people for doing the work of intake, even if they don’t have a qualified lead on the call. So just because one person gets

 

you know, lucky and has a higher percentage of qualified calls doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re doing anything different. They just happen to be the person that got on the phone that time. So I like to balance the qualified conversion rate with share of the workload to make sure that we are ev that everybody’s participating and doing their best to bring the whole team toward the goal. And then once the whole team reaches a goal, then I look at individual incentives. As far as what that what that costs

 

Honestly, one of the benchmarks that I look for in life is I do compare it to what teachers are making out there on their schedule because we historically say that teachers are underpaid professionals. And I believe intake is a professional that is often underpaid. And so I look at what those rates are and I kind of use that for the benchmark in my market to see what I think is going to be fair compensation for the important work that intake is doing.

 

Okay.

 

Conrad Saam (27:54)

Last question, your intake staff, in house, remote, offshore. What are your thoughts?

 

Yeah.

 

Kerri Coby White (28:01)

So I I can’t say enough about some of the incredible offshore talent that I that I work with. They’re incredibly dedicated, loyal, hardworking, all the good things. I think it depends on your market as to ⁓ accent tolerance and ⁓ and and that that’s important. You know, if you’re in Miami, you’re gonna do great with offshore talent. If you’re in Iowa, maybe less so. So I think you have to know your local clientele and you have to listen to people to know if offshore is the way to go. ⁓

 

The other thing, you know, I I have college graduates myself and gosh, these kids need jobs and they need training. And so I think if you want local talent, you need to bring in new f new kids and really train them, invest in training these people. I mean, we can talk all day about some of the shortcomings of of these younger generations right now, but we have a responsibility to mentor and train them, which means getting their butts in seats in the office and learning around professionals.

 

so I like to see young people in the office working ⁓ alongside professionals who have been there done that.

 

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