Community Table: Managing Communications As Client Volume Grows

Episode Notes

Transcript

Christopher T. Anderson:

We don’t have a big intro, Joshua like music plays. It is community table wonk.

Joshua Lenon:

So all that choreography you sent me was just a practical joke. I did my step kick ball change practice.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Well, we do that later in the studio with a green screen so that

Joshua Lenon:

Oh, okay. Alright, good.

Christopher T. Anderson:

And of course the dancers, which I’ll talk to you about that later. Yeah.

Announcer:

This is Unbillable Hours community table with Clio, a monthly virtual round table where lawyers discuss issues their practices are facing and receive feedback from lawyer and law firm management consultant, Christopher, T, Anderson. Join the conversation live every third Thursday at 3:00 PM Eastern. Today’s conversation centers around an attorney whose firm is not communicating sufficiently to its clients.

Christopher T. Anderson:

For everybody listening, we are really excited to have the community table sponsored and collaborated with Clio and Joshua Lennon of Clio. So we would like to welcome him. He’ll be a guest host for many episodes, maybe not every single one of them, but many episodes along the way. So always feel free to come on the show and ask him questions, tell him what you think, whatever. That’s all fair game here at the community table. But remember the show is about asking us anything. And if you’re just listening for the first time, remember you can be on the show live every third Thursday at 3:00 PM Eastern. But meanwhile we have with us and probably hopefully has something that she wants to pose to stump the chumps here on the show. What can we do?

Caller #1:

We’re growing again and in some of those growing pains, it seems that our communication amongst our teams and with our clients is suffering. So I kind of just want some, I guess, general best practices for triaging calls right now because we’re understaffed with lawyers as well as paralegals. The paralegal situation I think will be alleviated in a couple of weeks with our recent hiring. But with lawyers, we are still understaffed. So all of us have pretty high case loads currently and it’s just we’re in court a lot. It’s really hard for us to get back to the client directly.

Christopher T. Anderson:

So I want to clarify your question. Your question is about internal or external communication?

Caller #1:

External primarily with the clients, ensuring that we get timely updates and responses to clients in keeping things from falling through the cracks.

Christopher T. Anderson:

So let me ask you about a couple of things that you have in place right now and then I’m going to let Josh take a crack at this. But I just want to get some clarifying questions. First of all, what are your current policies? You said timely. So let me just clarify what you mean by that. Is this for new information or for responsive information?

Caller #1:

Responsive primarily.

Christopher T. Anderson:

So in other words, client has called and is looking for an answer to something.

Caller #1:

Yes.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Okay. It might be a hard question to answer, but are the majority of the client’s requests of an urgent nature or I haven’t heard from you in a while. What’s going on?

Caller #1:

Primarily the latter.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Okay, very good. Joshua, let me welcome to The Un-Billable Hour. First of all, since this is your first time on the show, on the community table, if you don’t mind, just give a little intro for yourself and then start to attack El Aretha’s question.

Joshua Lenon:

You got it. So my name’s Joshua Lennon. I’m the lawyer in residence at Clio, which is a fancy made up title for the fact that I work for a legal technology company that knew nothing about lawyers. And so they brought one on board to just answer questions about lawyers. And I’ve spent over a decade now teaching this legal technology company about the specific needs of lawyers, both while they practice and as they run their business. And I’ve been fortunate that I also get to take my learnings from this legal technology company and bring them now back to the legal community, which is an opportunity that Christopher has given me here. And so I’m attorney admitted into New York. I’m certified in privacy law. I have been a part of cleo’s annual legal Trends report, which is the legal industry’s only big data report into the practice of law.

And Christopher has been kind enough to ask me to bring some of that knowledge here. I think you actually have a great question and it’s one that we’ve taken a look at over the course of our legal trends report where we have been interviewing clients on their perspective needs, but also surveying lawyers on how they’re trying to communicate with these clients. And so there are a couple of key points that we’ve discovered over the years and then there are some tips and tricks that might help you. So the first is a timely response is easily one of the highest concerns for clients when hiring a lawyer. They are trying to reach you and I think there are two reasons for that. One, they’re going through something, right? Every client’s going through something, it’s probably the worst day of their life and it’s your Tuesday. So I think there are a couple ways to break down the problem.

The first of which is asking for what are they contacting you? And you’ve said they’re looking for updates. And so updates don’t necessarily have to be a face-to-face communication. Our own research has shown that as technology has become more used for communication, especially since the pandemic lockdowns in 2020, that an update doesn’t have to be I come to the office to get that update or it’s over a telephone. We can do some asynchronous communication. It’s not as preferred as that face-to-face, but asynchronous is still acceptable. So one of the things that you can take a look at is what are my communication channels? And I encourage my clients to go towards kind of these asynchronous ones. A lot of firms are looking at implementing texting as a part of their communication channels. It allows for those short quick communications. We do see that people still expect like a timely reply, but maybe not an instant reply.

Caller #1:

We have a client portal, we use texting through our client portal and other channels. The big issue is clients are calling in and the staff is basically making the assumption that the attorney’s too busy and they’re just not giving us the lawyers all of the messages, or they’re not really being proactive with getting a response or an answer for the client. So then the client calls three more times. And at that point that I’m finding out that the client has called, they’ve called multiple times and nobody’s given them a response or they haven’t gotten a scheduled call. So I guess I shouldn’t have asked for best practices. I probably should have asked the direct this is what’s going on.

Joshua Lenon:

Gotcha. Yeah, I definitely think this is a conversation with your staff, but you’ve talked about how you’re understaffed right now both in terms of lawyers and paralegals, maybe it’s time to bring in a virtual receptionist, somebody who is just trained in answering calls, they can provide a coverage period until you feel like you’ve got the coverage that you need. I know of three off the top of my head, there’s Ruby receptionist,

Caller #1:

We’re good on reception. It is the legal assistant, paralegal staff. That’s the issue. They’re answering the calls, all of the calls are getting answered primarily, but then what the client’s not getting resolutions or a avenue to a resolution.

Joshua Lenon:

Then what I would recommend is you take a look at your task assignment system. Are they creating and tracking task associated with the phone calls? So that way you’ve got something where you can look at their workload and be like, Hey, this call came in yesterday, you set a task, there’s no answer. Or at least it hasn’t been marked as closed. Where are we on that? And so that gives you some insight and accountability using the tools you already have.

Christopher T. Anderson:

What are your internal communication tools? Are you using Teams or Slack?

Caller #1:

We use Google Chat. We also have a call log in our case management system where they’re supposed to log all the calls. Don’t, that’s not happening. Which is, yeah.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah, that could be a problem.

Joshua Lenon:

Are you using as your phone

Caller #1:

Provider? Vonage

Joshua Lenon:

Vonage has an integration with several practice management solutions where they’ll log the call for you. And so you should take a look and see if that’s available for you. And so that’ll give you logs that you can compare against these tasks. And you might even be able to use a task automation system like Call came in, hasn’t been marked, answered yes or no. Right? And generate that task for you if you really want to invest in technology for it.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah, I think that’s a really good suggestion. I’ve got a couple other SOP suggestions for you Aretha that because it’s funny. I mean it’s really funny how there’s something weird in the universe that has to do with law firms and law practice management, but issues come in waves and this month communications is one of the waves. It’s happening everywhere. As you know, I work with quite a few clients directly and that’s what everybody’s talking about this month. Last month it was hiring and it’s like every month there’s something else that’s a pain point. But you’ve hit on a real universal pain that’s happening right now. Clients are complaining about it, teams are struggling with it. So I’ve got a few things that have worked for folks, but this is the community table also, we invite everybody to share. So before I come in like John McLaughlin with the final answer, and if anybody doesn’t know that it’s because I’m old and you’re not, but what was your suggestion?

Caller #2:

So I’m big on communication and two things that have worked really well for me is this came to me when I was getting my nails done. And the reason it came to me when I was getting my nails done me, I know Christopher, I know you’re into that, is because I sat there, I said, I come every two weeks on queue. I have my designated slot, my designated time, huh? Why can’t I do something like this in my law firm? So the idea came to me where at onboarding, when a client retains the very first thing my legal assistant does besides opening the file, getting all the documents, she introduces the client to their, I call it their managing attorney of their file. And the legal assistant immediately sets up standing biweekly telephone calls with their assigned attorney on queue like your slot, Mr. Smith is Thursdays at three o’clock every other week.

It’s a fail safe if for some reason you and your attorney can’t connect, you know have that dedicated slot ready to go hold all your questions, make your list, that’s your time for you and your attorney to come together. You could do it more frequently, you could do it less frequently. But we found that every two weeks seems to be, and in fact our clients are like, I don’t need it. Stop asking me. I talk to you guys too much, right? I’m like, thank you. I take it as a compliment. And then the other thing that we, this month too has been a bit of communication. We implemented if, are you using Microsoft or Google?

Caller #1:

Google,

Caller #2:

Okay, well whatever it is, they have these calendar online links. So I Calendarly or Microsoft Bookings comes with my Microsoft platform. So we added, every attorney has their own unique booking link. We added it to their automatic response email and their signature line and with a big asterisk and red to book a call with me, click here because I wanted to take it out of my staff’s having the onerous on my staff we’re also understaffed so that way I could put the power back into the client’s hands. So they could say, you have a mechanism, there’s a booking link, you need to talk to your attorney, book it. Now Christopher is going to say, okay Carrie, but now you’re letting them hijack your attorneys, your attorney’s calendar, who is the tail wagging the dog or the dog wagging the tail. But at the end of the day, certain other attorneys need more assistance with managing their time and their responsiveness. And this was the only way more urgently that I could think of to get it to work without relying on my already hair on fire staff. So between all three things, the staff, the attorney, the booking link and these biweekly calls so far that has been working good enough for us for now.

Christopher T. Anderson:

I actually wasn’t going to say that. I think that’s a brilliant idea and I also am going to know, accuse you and punish you in some way that I’ll figure out later for taking what was going to sound like brilliance for me and just putting it out there. So what I am going to do is augment it a little bit, but that’s just gold. It is absolute gold. That’s exactly what’s working and it’s one of the exact things that we’re doing and it depends on what your caseloads are. Like if you run a little bit of a higher caseload shop, it can be monthly, it doesn’t matter, but it should be a rhythm. So that was going to be my first point is a rhythm where your team just sets up each client. Now I think the second Thursday you can do by day of the month, whatever, but there’s just a rhythm where you’re saying, this client gets touched on this day every month, every two weeks, whatever your rhythm is.

And here’s why I make it better. Using whatever tool you have to communicate with clients, whether it is Google Chat I think is what you said, or teams or Slack or I don’t know, Joshua, you can speak to whether the Clio for clients has this capability. But what we encourage our clients to do is to create a parking lot. So whenever they have an idea that’s not on fire to drop it in there, the moment they think about it so that the lawyer before coming up on this regularly scheduled consultation time, regularly scheduled update time, can review what’s been dropped in the parking lot and actually prepare for the call for a little bit. And so a rhythm with a parking lot is a great idea. Joshua touched on the other one though that he also to steal some of my brilliance, so well done, which is asynchronous, like he said, it’s not ideal, but clients would rather get an answer sooner.

And if they drop stuff in the parking lot, we use Loom and or for some clients. And we’re starting to experiment now with actually allowing clients into our Slack. And again, I don’t know if you could do that in Google Chat, but we’re we’re experimenting with leaving clients into our Slack because Slack has its own built in brief video capability like Loom except it’s built in. But regardless where, and I recommend this is so much better than a text because it’s the lawyer’s face. You can have their background and it feels like the next best thing really to having and you’ve got their eye contact and their full attention to you. You can replay it. But so where you can address the things in the parking lot on a loom, maybe on the off week where you don’t have the scheduled contact, but asynchronous communication, whether it be by chat or loom, is better than nothing, way better than nothing.

And sometimes meets the bill. I know you said we’re covered on reception, but I do want to suggest something and that is that having, especially if your team is overwhelmed and not getting back to people, is the setting of expectations. And this is something that you don’t need to use your normal reception channel for. This could be an ea, a virtual assistant or whatever that can get that quick response back. And like I said, you can outsource this to a VA or whatever, but where you’re giving the expectations, thanks for the message, I’m going to let her know about your question right away. In fact, I’m going to drop it into your parking lot for you, but I can tell you it’s on trial out of the office herding cats for the next two days and her first availability to get back to you is going to be next Monday.

Is that going to work for you or do I need to escalate this to an emergency? And if it’s an emergency, I’m going to need you to tell me what the emergency is. This way they’re getting a quick hit, a little bit of juice and they’re also being expectations set. One things that lawyers are really bad about is that expectation set. A lot of people will respond, drives me absolutely batty when someone does this on my team for me, which is Christopher will get back to as soon as he can. What bullshit is that that gives the client no expectations whatsoever other than to stand by their phone waiting and then judging you on how little priority you give their case because it took you two days to get back to them. So you must really, and this is the comments we get back, is you guys don’t give a hood about, all you guys care about is when you send the bill that I send money.

That’s all you care about. You don’t care about me, you don’t care about my case, you don’t care about my kids. And it’s because you didn’t give them an expectation. Once you give it to them, then they can tell you whether that expectation is realistic and you give them the positive and the negative expectation. I gave you the positive, we’ll be able to get back to you. I can see that she has some slots on Monday. Will that work for you? And the negative not available until Monday, but that will be her first availability. Can it wait that long? And then the last one I wrote and then I want to speak to something that one of you said, it was unreal urgency. You have to train whoever this outsourced person is or if it’s someone on your team to dive into the urgency because clients have an urgency that is mostly, usually 90% of the time developed by their perceived lack of contact, not by the content of their need.

It’s just, I haven’t heard from a client yet. I need to hear from them, I need to hear from ’em today. And it’s like, why? What’s going on? We got someone else who can call you today if it’s urgent, what’s going on? Well I just need to know first next summer what the schedule needs to be. But so that rhythm, the setting of expectations and the use of asynchronous communication I think are three really good ideas that have been working for a lot of folks, particularly in family law that I’ve been talking to. Is that helpful? Oh no. Before I even I do that, I wanted to talk about staff interference.

This one has come at me out of the blue and it’s so funny, like I said, things are in waves. I had no idea that this was something to worry about until now I’ve got three firms telling me the same thing. They have staff and this is just training, this is positive training that who knew we needed to do it. They have staff who are telling clients, please don’t bother, just call me and I’ll get you an answer. And then here’s what’s happening. The client now calls back the next day back to the same staff member says, so did you get me an answer from now? What’s happening is the staff member didn’t get to forgot to get to and what did they do? Throw into the bus? They’re throwing the lawyer under the bus saying, I haven’t gotten a response yet from, but I’ll keep trying. Now what is the client here I talked to and she didn’t think you were important enough to give me an answer, but I’m your advocate. I’ll try harder. And now the client’s level of anger is going up and up and up and up. Meanwhile has no idea that there’s a question

Caller #1:

That’s exactly what’s going on

Christopher T. Anderson:

And you are now firm number four and we’re talking out of a very small number that, so this is going on. My interpretation is now this is going on everywhere. I’m not calling it nefarious, I don’t think it’s because the staff is trying to undermine you, but they’re making promises that they’re not keeping and they’re not taking personal responsibility for it. People have a real hard time with that when there’s no system to enforce it, which is why I really like Josh’s idea of some system that says, Hey, this automatic task got opened and it hasn’t been closed yet, but it’s also just training, right? I don’t care how busy I am, if a client has asked me, you’ve promised them an answer, you send me task a message or whatever. And then if I have an answered in, you set the amount of time, three hours, six hours a day, then you have permission to escalate with my assistant with whatever needs done.

But for God’s sake, the last thing you tell the client I haven’t been able to get, even if you have, you tell the client I haven’t been able to get with, but it is very urgent on my list to do that. So that can get back to you, but they never throw the lawyer under the bus. But that’s exactly what’s going on. And so that’s some training of language and accountability that needs to happen. Alright, well in that case, I’m just going to thank Joshua Lennon, the lawyer in residence at Clio, who is going to be a regular part of the Unbillable Hours community table sponsored by Clio. And we can’t be more excited to have Joshua. I will also drop Joshua, I’m going to put you on the spot again to come up with the dates for ClioCon in just a second. So if anybody is listening that is thinking about or has already decided, you should seriously think about coming to ClioCon because you get to see Joshua and me live and in person, and we’re going to be come by the Legal Talk Network booth, come by the Clio studios, see what we can do to help you there.

And we may put you on live as well. So Joshua, what are the dates of Cliocon?

Joshua Lenon:

They’re going to be seventh and 8th of October in Austin, Texas, but we also have our virtual attendance to where if you can’t make it to Texas, then you can log in virtually. You’ll get CLE, you’ll see all the keynotes. There’ll even be social events and networking opportunities in the virtual as well. We’re over 75% sold out though, so I do want to caution people that it’s a good time to pick up a ticket and secure your spot. And I’ve put the link in the chat. It’s Clio cloud conference.com.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah, but our listeners can’t come to the chat, but we will ask our producer on the line today to include that in the show notes. But if you could just say it out loud one more time for the listeners as well.

Joshua Lenon:

You got it. It’s Clio cloud conference.com. Clio is spelled CLIO. And we even have a promo right now for a hundred dollars off the ticket. And it’s Act Fast. One word, A-C-T-F-A-S-T is a promo code for a hundred dollars off your ticket.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Wonderbar. Thank you very much, Joshua. Alright, that is going to wrap up the community table for today. I’ll just remind everybody that you can also catch our Unbillable hour, our latest episode right here on the Legal Talk Network or wherever you get your podcasts. Also on iTunes. And if you want to be on the Unbillable Hour live, we are every third Thursday, every third Thursday. I don’t care if it’s a holiday, we’re here every third Thursday at 3:00 PM Eastern time. That’s when you can catch and be part of the show, come with your questions. But until then, everybody, thanks so much. We look forward to seeing you next month on the Community Table.

Announcer:

Thank you for listening. This has been Unbillable Hours Community Table with Clio on the Legal Talk Network.

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