Acquisition Best Practices: Learning To Love Your Leads

Episode Notes

Transcript

[Music]

Intro:  Managing your law practice can be challenging.  Marketing, time management, attracting clients, and all the things besides the cases that you need to do that aren’t billable.  Welcome to this edition of The Un-billable Hour, the Law Practice Advisory Podcast.  This is where you’ll get the information you need from expert guests and host, Christopher Anderson, here on Legal Talk Network.

Christopher Anderson:  Welcome to The Un-Billable Hour.  I am your host, Christopher Anderson.  And today’s episode is about acquisition.  Always the most popular shows, but we’re going to talk about an aspect of it that we don’t get to talk about nearly enough.  The world, I’ve talked to you about this a couple of times before, though.  The world is full of vendors, companies that are more than willing to try to push you to buy more leads, right?  Lead companies that want to sell you leads that will guarantee you more leads, more visitors, more lots of stuff.  But that’s not where the best law firms focus their attention.  It’s quite honestly when you do focus your attention on just more leads, thinking that more leads equal to more money.  And to some extent there’s some truth to it, but it’s not the real truth.  It becomes wasteful.  And not even just wasteful, it can become counterproductive.  Because if you’re not properly managing the leads you’ve got, you’re leaving a lot of people who get a bad impression of your business because you didn’t treat them right.

Remember, in the main triangle of what it is that a law firm business must do, we got to focus on acquiring new clients.  That’s what we’re talking about today, producing the results that you promised.  We call it production and achieving the business and professional results for the owners, for you.

But today we’re going to talk about caring for your leads.  And I’m really excited to have Adam Reiman, the director of coaching and live events at Lawyer.com.  And today’s episode of The Un-billable Hour is got to love your leads.  And once again, my guest, Adam Reiman, he’s the director of coaching and live Events at Lawyer.com and he’s been — I’ve known Adam for lots and lots of years.  He’s a legal digital marketing expert and he emphasizes the best practices of intake and lead conversion.  That’s how I got to know him, and he helped me with that a long time ago.  And I still implement a lot of the stuff I learned from Adam.

He’s worked on site as a law firm coach for the past decade in hundreds of law firms, big ones, small ones, round ones, square ones, and different practice areas.  And one of the things I loved about learning about him and from him was that the secret shops like nobody’s business.  And he now claims over 2500 secret shops of law firms and still doing them.  And we’re going to talk a little bit about that today.  He’s doing law firm coaching and he emphasizes the people, the processes and software that drive growth in a law firm.  He’s also doing live marketing boot camps.  He’s done over 100 already for law firms and he also speaks at conferences.  He’s also amazing facilitator of legal mastermind session.  So that’s his intro.  I screwed it up.  I always do.  Never mind.  Adam, welcome to the show.

Adam Reiman:  Thank you so much, Christopher.  That was a very generous introduction.  I certainly appreciate it and it’s great to be get back together with you to chat a little off for marketing for the next hour.

Christopher Anderson:  Yeah, no, I’m excited to do so.  And I mentioned up front, though, that I’ve known you as a lead conversion expert and you hold yourself out of the lead conversion expert.  I really think you’ve got a lot to offer that.  How did you become a law firm coach using that expertise?

Adam Reiman:  So actually, that’s a great question.  It was a career choice, to be honest with you.  I was working for a digital marketing agency that you’re very familiar with, where I learned the amazing foundation that I’ve built a career on.  And you get to a point in your career where you want to find the areas where you can be most effective.  Something clicked several years ago where I just said, hey, how can I be most effective and help law firm owners build their businesses?  And I felt that through coaching, which I strongly believe every law firm, no matter what shape, size, or whatever condition they’re in, could use an outside set of eyes to help them grow their firm.

(00:05:06)

And so I have hyper focused my career now on just that.  I know you touched earlier on lead generation and world domination and all of those things as far as let’s just get more and more leads, rather than let’s take the leads that we’re getting and treat them like Faberge eggs and push them through the pipeline and sign up more clients than ever before.  Yeah, it was just a career choice for me where I started to hyperfocus on the things that I felt would be most effective and helpful in the space.

Christopher Anderson:  Excellent.  Yeah.  And it makes a lot of sense.  And you’ve also ended up working with Lawyer.com.  What’s the connection there?  How did you end up with Lawyer.com?  What do you do there?

Adam Reiman:  So I met the team of Lawyer.com about ten years ago.  They started coming to our live events.  I had always kept very close relationship with them.  I loved the domain.  I always kept very close ties with them.  And in relation to keeping in contact, referring business back and forth, I always felt that the lead generation services and their reputation management system, our lawyer line service, which does a full intake for our law firm if they’re interested, I thought those services were top notch and kept in contact.  And then after the following, after deciding to make a career change, landed here and couldn’t be happier about the decision.  It’s an entrepreneurial organization, always doing creative things and creative thinking to help law firms grow, we build better businesses.  And that was a turn on for me.

So coaching and live events was a gap in their service offering.  And Colleen, who is the president, and I started talking and here we are.  We launched about four months ago.

Christopher Anderson:  Super.  And we’re going to talk about the live events right at the end here and give our listeners a chance to get in on that.  But Lawyer.com does provide leads and I don’t want to suggest, and I don’t mean to suggest that that’s not valuable.  It is very valuable to get leads.  But if you over emphasize, and I think we both agreed on this earlier, if you over emphasize just more, more, more, that’s wrong thinking.  Like you said, I love what you said, treat your leads like Faberge eggs because they are, they’re precious and it’s not just about, I mean to me, some of the things you get out of that right are that, if you treat your leads well and convert more, then your cost per converted lead goes down.  But you’re also improving your reputation in the marketplace because you’re treating your leads well.  And whether or not they end up becoming clients, they speak well of you because they got a good experience.  What are you seeing because you’re out there coaching, you’re talking to law firms.  What are law firms getting wrong in the lead conversion world?  What are they doing wrong in converting the leads that they do have?

Adam Reiman:  All of those things that you touched on a little bit earlier, right?  I mean, I’ve worked in and with so many law firm owners over the last 15 years or so that I have seen virtually everything.  And I think the number one thing that stands out, there are a lot of small, look the world of legion, you can now, you can pass the bar and you can invest a small amount of money in a lead generation company and start to get leads.  It’s really the shift is on.  Historically, it was always content, content, content, blogging and social media, doing all of those things to organically generate leads.  Well, now you can go out and buy leads for pennies on the dollar.  But what I see is, and still to this day, it boggles the mind, 90% of law firms out there don’t treat the leads with the certain TLC that is required to see them all the way through to signing up more contacts into contracts as they say, it’s everything from a lack of follow up to a lack of empathy and building rapport with the prospect to let them know that they called the right place, offering the prospect some unique competitive advantages as to why they should do business and hire your law firm today.  It’s all of those things, and it never stops.

I just secret shopped a law firm yesterday, actually ten law firms yesterday, and I’m getting the same exact results.  It was ten firms, and my scorecard, they averaged a 37 out of 100.

Christopher Anderson:  Wow!

Adam Reiman:  Yeah.  One of them, I told the prospect in the secret shopper call that I had broken my arm in an accident and I was hit by a taxi cab.  And she didn’t even say, I’m sorry.  She didn’t even say, I can’t believe that that happened to you.  She said to me, Christopher, which arm?  That was her response, which arm?

Christopher Anderson:  She just said the middle one.

Adam Reiman:  Right, right.

Christopher Anderson:  Goodness gracious.  But, yeah, the law firm owners, they don’t even know this is going on.  They have no idea.  They’re just wondering, like, well, my conversion rate is down.  Let’s get more leads.  Right?  And they have no idea.  I remember they used to tell a story about one that you secret shopped a long time ago that were actually like they were sending people to the firm down the hall or something.

(00:10:06)

Adam Reiman:  Yeah, and a lot of that stuff hasn’t changed.  It was a multi-office building with one receptionist for five or six law firms, and she was filtering leads to the firm that was spiffing her for leads.

Christopher Anderson:  Good for them, I guess, but bad for the others.

Adam Reiman:  Good strategy, smart idea.  And she’d done it for like three years.

Christopher Anderson:  Oh, my goodness.  That’s amazing.  So I’m going to go deeper here.  We’re about to go into a break, but before we do, just want to hit like when we keep saying TLC treating the leads well, what are we talking about?  What’s the quick hit here?  What should firms, we talked about what they shouldn’t be doing, kind of we’re going to go deeper, but what should they be doing?  I mean what does TLC mean?

Adam Reiman:  Yeah, so it’s just the basics, right?  I mean, started out by answering the phone with your firm name.  This is the–

Christopher Anderson:  Not law firm.

Adam Reiman:  Yes.  This is the only industry, service industry I’ve ever been involved in where people that’s how they answer the phone, typically.  So it just starts from the get go.  Right?  But when I say TLC, Christopher, it’s offering this person a level of empathy and putting yourself in the prospect’s shoes, which essentially means they are calling you often times on their worst day, not their best, and putting yourself in that person’s shoes and thinking about how you would like to be treated in that situation.  Right?  Think about your personal injury, bankruptcy, family loss, criminal defense on the BDC side, where you’ve just got folks that are desperate for help.

And in a lot of cases and family loss, especially people, they’ll wait a year or two years before finally saying, I can’t take it anymore, and they’re going to pick up a phone and call somebody.  So you’ve got to put yourself in that prospect’s shoes and really offer them some empathy.  Let them know that they called the right place and that you’re going to help them solve their problem.  It’s very, very basic Reception 101 stuff.

Christopher Anderson:  You think so, but it is–

Adam Reiman:  But you would think, but thankfully it keeps guys like you and me in business.

Christopher Anderson:  Indeed.  All right.  Yeah.  We are going to take a break here.  I’m talking with Adam Reiman and we’re talking about lead conversion and treating your leads with TLC.  I love that expression or treating them like Faberge eggs.  He’s a director of coaching and live events at Lawyer.com and when we come back, Adam, I want to go deeper now.  We’re going to go to each sort of step along the path from when the prospect first raises their hand to the last moment before they become a client.  But first, we got some folks who pay for this show.  Let’s hear from them.

Law firms spend approximately 20% of their time drafting legal documents manually.  Lawyaw saves you valuable time by generating sets of documents and court forms simultaneously, helping you reduce errors and finish work faster.  Use intuitive features like conditional logic and e-sign to simplify drafting and improve client experience.  Learn more at lawyaw.com.  That’s L-A-W-Y-A-W.com.

Think of tasks you never catch up on email, meetings, accounting.  What if delegating those could save you an average of 15 hours each week?  BELAY has helped busy attorneys save time for a decade.  BELAY is giving Un-billable Hour listeners their book delegate to elevate.  Harness the power of delegation to elevate your business.  Text law, that’s L-A-W 255123 for your free copy.  Get out of administrative weeds and back to growing your firm with BELAY.

All right, we’re back with Adam Reiman.  He is director of coaching and live events at Lawyer.com and we’ve been talking about treating your leads like Faberge eggs.  And I said what we’re going to do in this second part of the show is we’re going to go a little bit deeper.  Because I really think that has to be unpacked because it means,you know Adam, you described it as really basic stuff.  But if it was really basic, I mean it is basic and that it’s not.  My goodness.  It shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody.  But if it was so basic, everybody be doing it and they’re not.  So let’s go through it step by step.

So, first of all, a lead comes in, either they’re responding to something with referral.  Let’s put the referrals aside.  They’re responding to an ad.  They’re responding to a Google paid search or a banner or a social media posting, or even just SEO.  They’re arriving at your site.  But they raise their hand, they fill out a form, they call in.  What’s the first thing that the firm should be doing?  Because I think firms screw it up right here.  So what should they be doing?

Adam Reiman:  Well, first thing, thank them for calling and ask them how they found you.  And then after a very brief first name, last name, email address, phone number, ask them what they describe your situation to me, what happened?  What inspired you to pick up the phone and call us today.

(00:15:04)

Christopher Anderson:  And if it’s a form field, let’s say let’s say you filled out a form or something and you’re reaching out to them in response to it.  Should you be calling?  Should you be emailing?  Should you be SMSing, which we didn’t talk about back in the day, but it’s bigger now.  What should you be doing and how much of it should you be doing?

Adam Reiman:  It’s a great question.  One of the sessions that I teach in my intake Fundamentals program is an entire class on what the best practices are in following up with the lead.  I live by the old adage of you pursue or follow up with a lead until they die by or unsubscribe.  And that’s a simple philosophy and I’ve got a pattern that you can follow. In the first day, you should call a lead that you can’t get in contact with three times.  You call them within the first few minutes, you call them within an hour, and then you call them within four to six hours.  In conjunction with those phone calls, Christopher, you should be sending out autoresponder emails.  And in this day and age, again, as you mentioned, we didn’t talk about it back in the day, text messaging.  Should be a combo platter.  You should try three touches in the first day between phone call, email, SMS.

Christopher Anderson:  Yeah, I told you this is a podcast and we’re not live.  But there is a wormhole that actually gets me instant feedback from the people who are listening to this in a week.  And it’s cool, I have the technology.  I’m not sharing it, but it works.  And so I’m already getting feedback from listeners.  Right now, I’m hearing it.  That’s too much.  That’s harassing them.  My prospects will hate it.  They’ll feel like we’re being pushy.  What do you say to that?

Adam Reiman:  Yes.  And I hear that all the time.  They feel like, well, that’s salesy.  That’s intrusive.  To all my coaching clients who push back on that, I say, listen, if you believe that you offered the best opportunity for this prospect to get on with their life and get their problem solved, you’d call them a hundred times and you have to have this internal belief, right?  It’s not an act of desperation.  It’s an act of, I’m here to help people, right?  And so that’s how I position it to my coaching clients and anyone who will listen.  There’s no desperation in that maneuver.  Law firm prospects are calling on a minimum five to seven law firms to get someone to take their case, right?  You’re either first to the trough or you’re the last to the trough, right?

And here’s what happens all the time.  I work for a company that generates a lot of leads for a lot of law firms.  So many times through the years, a law firm owner has come to me and said, Adam, the leads that are being generated stink.  And the first question I respond with is, how long does it take you to follow up with them?  Because one of the unfortunate things that’s happened in the legal space is the commoditization of legal services, because of billboards and advertising, television, radio, et cetera, et cetera.  And folks are simply googling personal injury lawyer in New York, and they’re going down the list.  You’re either first to the trough or you’re the last to the trough.

And what happens is most law firms delay, and typically what they answer when I ask the question of how long does it take you to follow up, they say 24 to 48 hours.  Right?  Now, we all know that you have a matter of minutes.  A lead starts to get cold within minutes.  Now you have a 400% chance of converting a lead if you call them in one to five minutes.  If you wait 24 hours, your conversion chances dropped to 17%.

Christopher Anderson:  Yeah, I just want to emphasize that.  So you said four to five minutes.

Adam Reiman:  Actually, one to five, really.  They start to go cold within one to five minutes.  If you think about what the law firm prospect has in front of them is they’ve got this amazing tool called Google where they can just go down the list.  You don’t put people on hold for more than 28 seconds.  You have to instantly be available to these folks.  And some folks say, well, we don’t answer them.  We generate an automated email and that slows down the process.  That only slows down the process if they’re a referral.  If they’re a brand new organically generated lead that’s coming to your firm for the first time, you have minutes to convert them into a potential new client for your firm.  And that’s what I preach.  And the data backs that up.

Christopher Anderson:  You’re saying that to get them like you say, the email is fine, it’s a good thing.  But that doesn’t count for getting to them in one to five minutes.  You’re saying it has to be live phone contact.

Adam Reiman:  Absolutely.  And in some situations, the worst of the worst are solo practitioners and litigators.  Right?  Because they’re tied up for six weeks at a time in a case.  They lift their head up and they’ve got 246 voicemails from potential new clients that they haven’t responded to in weeks and then they call digital marketing.  And say, well, all my leads think, right?  It just doesn’t add up.  They go cold in minutes.  The average, just so you know, Christopher, I participated in a study with a company called Velocify where we actually analyzed three and a half million leads from 400 different service companies.

(00:20:07)

Typically not all of those 400 companies, and these were law firms, but a lot were.  And I provided thousands of leads, six months’ worth of leads recorded for this study and that’s where this data comes from.  This is not just something that guys like you and me make up to entertain our guests.  It’s in reality.  The average law firm, Christopher, takes 3.6 days to call a lead back.

Christopher Anderson:  Wow.  Listeners, I want everybody to hear that because, all right, on one hand, you’ve got science that says one to five minutes.  On the other hand, you’ve got law firms on average are doing, what, 3.6 days?

Adam Reiman:  Yes.

Christopher Anderson:  It sounds like there’s a lot of room to be better than average with most law firms are so far off the mark just by doing just one thing, just doing this one thing, getting back to them fast could make a huge difference.

Adam Reiman:  It definitely does, and it can over and over and over again.  But then again, if I talk to a law firm owner and say, hey, your conversion rate is about 10%.  They say, well, that’s fine, I’ll just instead of, you know, let’s work on improving your conversion of these 150 leads that you paid for last month, they will typically say, well, I’ll just buy more leads.  Mathematically, it makes sense.  Monetarily, it makes no sense.  Leads get more and more expensive every single month.  There’s so much effort in generating more organic leads, why not just take the leads that you’re getting and treat them like Faberge eggs?  Be there and respond and be empathetic.  Build rapport, sell your firm, set an appointment, sign them up.

Christopher Anderson:  Yeah.  And then, like I discussed earlier, aside for the math, because it doesn’t show up in the math right away, but you’re building a reputation as being a non-responsive firm that doesn’t care about their clients if you’re not getting to them.

Adam Reiman:  That’s right.

Christopher Anderson:  And that’s another bad thing.  All right, so that’s what we could do with the first part.  Get to them fast, get to them frequently.  Okay, so now you’ve gotten that information.  Your intake team has gotten them on the phone eventually, and they’re engaged to some extent, but they haven’t bought yet, and they need to think about it, or you’re trying to get them scheduled with an appointment with the actual attorney or whoever’s doing your sales.  What should that follow up look like?  Because that’s different, right?  You’ve had the conversation.  Maybe you’ve frozen a little bit by having a little bit of a conversation.  But how much should you be following up with them now in this second part of the funnel?

Adam Reiman:  They’ve set the appointment.

Christopher Anderson:  No, they’re thinking about setting the appointment.

Adam Reiman:  Yes.  So, again, and that does happen with some regularity where you can’t get them to set an appointment via scheduling or whatnot.  I would start triggering autoresponder emails educational in nature, not desperation.  Hey, we’re sorry you made the decision to not sign up with us, but here are five top five things that you consider why you should hire an attorney in your situation.  Educational in nature, and the follow up triggering should start immediately.  I would say I’ve got some patterns that show two phone calls a day, and again, a combination of four to six autoresponders.  93% of all leads, Christopher, will convert within the first six touches.  And so you have to have a pattern of six that you feel is most comfortable with.  Now, if they never respond, again, pursue them until they die by or unsubscribe, even if they’ve made another decision, add all of those people to your newsletter list and stay in contact with them.

Christopher Anderson:  Yeah, okay.  So now we’ve got them they’ve gotten them to book an appointment and they’re going to be talking with the attorney or the non-attorney salesperson or whoever’s doing sales in the business.  And then that conversation is about to happen.

When we come back from break, I want to talk to you about that process, about the actual conversion process.  I want to talk a little bit more because we’ve just sort of alluded to secret shopping.  I want to talk a little bit more about that and a couple of other things about what you’re doing.  But first, we’re going to hear from our sponsors one more time.

Male:  Let me tell you about David, a criminal defense attorney in Ventura, California.  His firm is probably like yours.  Client intake was inefficient.  His staff was at risk for burnout, and his client acquisition rate was just –.  Then he tried Lawmatics powerful client intake and automation software.  Within months, David’s lead conversion jumped by 200%.  If running your law practice is keeping you from practicing law, take Lawmatics for a free test drive.  Lawmatics makes automating your firm easy, Lawmatics.com.

LAWCLERK is where attorneys go to hire freelance lawyers.  Whether you need a research memo or a complicated appellate brief, our network of freelance lawyers have every level of experience and expertise.

(00:25:08)

Sign up is free, and there are no monthly fees.  Only pay the flat fee price you set.  Use rebate code Unbillable to get a $100 Amazon gift card when you complete your next project.  Learn more at LAWCLERK.legal.

Christopher Anderson:  All right, we’re back with Adam Reiman.  He’s the director of coaching and live events at Lawyer.com and we’ve been talking about treating our leads like Faberge eggs and we talked about at the beginning and we talked about the middle.  Now we’re going to talk about the end of the conversion process.  We’ve gotten them to have an appointment.  They’re talking with whoever’s doing conversion in the law firm business.  Let me just ask you first.  I mean, imagine you’re studying this from cradle to grave.  So what are what are firms doing wrong in this area in the conversion process?

Adam Reiman:  Well, the first thing even before that, Christopher, is they’re setting telephone appointments, which is a recipe for tire kickers, information gatherers, and people that go out and end up doing things on their own.  Do it yourself first.  So I am a huge advocate until you tell me otherwise.  And I know that the world of COVID shifted a lot of things to the Zoom world.  There is a study going on right now about conversion rates in Zoom.  I don’t have the data yet to back me up, so I stick to my old school belief that the best of the best are setting in person appointments.  And there is a process tied to that to making sure that they show up, because we know that there is, in some cases, a 50 plus percent no show rate in contingency fee-based practice areas.  So the key is what process do you have in place to make sure that they actually show up?  So there’s a whole series that you do there, right?

Look at the dental industry, right?  The dental industry had a horrifically low show rates for people that set appointments because people hate going to the dentist.  Right?

Christopher Anderson:  Yeah.

Adam Reiman:  That’s number one.  But number two, I’m not sure if you do, but my dentist now sends me and calls me a week before my appointment, two days before my appointment and the day of my appointment, they send me.  Not only do they call me, but they send text messages.  And that process has set the dental industry on its ear.  More and more and more people are showing up for their appointments.  And you have to have similar patterns in legal, and the most successful are working on that because no shows are a real problem, for sure.

Christopher Anderson:  Did you have a metric for us?  Because people are going to — I know they’re going to ask what’s a good show up rate?  100% is a good show up rate, right?

Adam Reiman:  I would say a good show up rate is 60% to 70%.

Christopher Anderson:  Okay.  Okay.  Because it’s not as bad as going to the dentist.  So that’s a good thing.  Okay, so, yeah, I’m glad you brought that up.  So, like, even before the conversion conversation, you convert 0% of the people that don’t show up.  Right?  So, okay, so that’s really important, as you said, hitting them like you talked about, calling them, texting them, probably emailing them just to make sure that they remember it, maybe do you give them some help to get there?  Like, what do you do in those cards, in those messages?

Adam Reiman:  One of your emails should include a picture of your building and a map to get there, plain and simple.  Here’s a map, here’s a picture of — here’s our office.  This is what it looks like.  Because sometimes you’re in major metropolitan areas and buildings all look alike.  Give them directions to parking, whether there’s anything involved there, just make it foolproof and easy for people to find you.  And so that should be part of your communication for sure.

Christopher Anderson:  Yeah.  Going back to math, I mean, we’re just — if you said 50% is kind of average and you can get that 70% that’s just like – that’s 20% more more opportunities, no more leads, it’s just 20% more opportunities just by fixing that part of it.  That’s right.  All right.  And now they’re in the chair and now you’re having because it should be in person.  They’re in the chair and you’re talking to them.  What are the law firms messing up there?

Adam Reiman:  So what I’ve seen in the hundreds of consults that I’ve sat through is attorneys still struggle with asking for the money.  And when that point is in the conversation right.  It’s almost like there’s a reluctance to ask for the money.  A lot of my coaching deals with that very issue.  How much and when do you bring up the money point?  And the bulk of the bulk, I should say the bulk of the attorneys that I’ve worked for convert in a kneecap-to-kneecap conversation with a prospect, you will sign up 70% to 80% of prospects that meet with your firm in person.  It is being done.  But yeah, the overcoming the when to ask for the money and how much, don’t overwhelm the prospect with your knowledge of jurisprudence.  Don’t road map out the case for them.  Get to know them on a person-to-person basis.  Let them know you’re thankful that they came in, offer them, say, hey, I’ve got a great solution in mind, and then you get to the money point.

(00:30:08)

Christopher Anderson:  Right.  Yeah.  Because let’s be honest about it, I don’t remember my law school teaching me anything about how to convert clients or any of the stuff we’ve just talked about.  But they’re not naturally — it’s not a natural conversation.  I mean, the conversation could be natural, but, like, you’re right.  They’re hitting the key components, like when to ask for the money and how to ask for the money.  That’s not natural.  That’s something to be learned.  Is that something that you teach on when you’re coaching?

Adam Reiman:  Absolutely, I do.  And again, it’s not like so you’ve got contingency fee-based firms where they don’t even want to talk about the percentages, and then you’ve got family, you’ve got your hourly base where they just are they struggle to they have marbles in their mouth when it comes to the retainer.  Right.  And you’re right, they’re not trained or coached in law school how to do this.  Law school creates technicians, which is amazing, but they don’t teach them sales and marketing.  And that’s the confident attorney has a willingness to lay the money question right out there on the line.  And you’ve just got to practice and throw it out there in different points in the conversation so that there are no surprises when you say, hey, my retainer is $7,500, based on the description of this case, when do you want to get started.  Push the contract across the table and just stop talking.  Right.  That’s sales.  And that’s one of the things that law firm owners and attorneys really struggle with.  I’m married to a lawyer.  My wife has been practicing for over 20 years.  She can’t even ask our landscape for how much we owe him.  She makes me do it.

Christopher Anderson:  Right.  That’s amazing.  Yeah.

Adam Reiman:  Can you get an estimate from our landscaper and how much it’s going to cost, how much we’re willing to pay to trim our trees?  Just tell them it’s $200, he wants it or not.  Right?  And so those are the sorts of things that lawyers really, really struggle with, is asking for the money.

Christopher Anderson:  That makes a lot of sense.  So listen, before we go, I’ve introduced you probably eight times during this as director of coaching and live events at Lawyers.com.  We’ve talked a little bit about what you might help people with coaching.  But what’s this business of live events?  What are these live events about and why are you doing them?

Adam Reiman:  Yeah, so it just comes from the hundred or so events that I participated in before I came to Lawyer.com.  And again, COVID really put a strangle hold on a lot of these things.  And I think people are hungry to get back out on the road and see people in person and go to conferences and learn things in person.  Some of the organizations tried to do remote conferences during the COVID era, and they were disastrous.

Christopher Anderson:  I hate them.  I hate them.

Adam Reiman:  So the one thing that I’ve always found with live events and some of our competitors do a really good job of offering their services over the phone.  But what I’ve always found, Christopher, the most successful way for you to learn about ways to grow and build double, quadruple, quadruple your law firm is to be locked in a room for two days.  Let somebody else tell you that your baby is ugly and to give them guidance on how to fix their business.  You need to get out of your firm for two days.  You need to work on your business, not in your business and I find that doing remote events, trying to pitch services over the telephone is extremely challenging.  And so you get them out of their office, you get them in a nice resort, you feed them, you offer some great breakouts opportunities to meet like-minded business law firm owners like themselves, to share ideas and to help them overcome challenges that they face in either plateauing revenue or flat growth or no growth.  And so it’s just an amazing way.

And I found the most effective way to help a large group of attorneys and business owners at the same time, and they’re a heck of a lot of funds.  So we’re really excited to be getting back out.  We’re going to be doing twelve next year.

Christopher Anderson:  Wow!

Adam Reiman:  Yes.  Starting in January in Las Vegas.  We’ll be in great cities like Dallas and Miami and Chicago next year at some of some fine resorts.  And we’re really super excited to get back out on the road and do some preaching.

Christopher Anderson:  Fantastic.  All right, well, Adam, that unfortunately brings us to the end of this episode of The Un-Billable Hour, and I want to thank our listeners for being with us.  Our guest today one more time has been Adam Reiman.  He’s the director of coaching and live events at Lawyer.com.

Listen, Adam, if people want to know more about these live events or just like, we went really fast through a bunch of stuff and they just want to ask you some more questions and learn a little bit more from you, get some resources from you, whatever, how can our listeners get in touch with you?

Adam Reiman:  I would be honored to talk to any of any of your listeners, and I would like to offer all of them a complimentary secret shop or phone call of their firm so I can give them a full rundown on their intake process, and I’ll give them some feedback on things that they can work on.

(00:35:02)

Yes, I’m open.  Call me anytime.  I’ll give you — my direct phone number is area code 602-828-4415 is my phone number.  You call me, text me, anything.  My email address is [email protected].  And feel free to send me an email.  I will happily respond to any and all inquiries, and I promise you I will follow up with you in five minutes.

Christopher Anderson:  Excellent.  That’s awesome.  Thank you, Adam.  And once again, this is Christopher T. Anderson.  I look forward to seeing you next month with another great guest as we learn more about topics that help us build the law firm business that works for you.  Remember, you can subscribe to all the editions of this podcast at legaltalknetwork.com or on iTunes.  Thanks for joining us and we will speak again soon.

Outro:  The views expressed by the participants of this program are their own and do not represent the views of, nor are they endorsed by Legal Talk Network, its officers, directors, employees, agents, representatives, shareholders and subsidiaries.  None of the content should be considered legal advice.  As always, consult a lawyer.  Thanks for listening to The Un-Billable Hour, the law practice advisory podcast.  Join us again for the next edition right here with Legal Talk Network.

[Music]