Our personal injury law firm is growing rapidly and we can no longer handle the personal injury cases ourselves. We formed a partnership with a large personal injury law firm to handle the cases and our focus is now on getting as many new clients as inexpensively and efficiently as possible.
Contents
- 1 Where Our Personal Injury Clients Are Coming from
- 2 The Difference between Google Ads vs. Our Website and Other Marketing
- 3 The Need for Tracking Leads and Continually Re-Contacting Leads
- 4 Call Intake Staff Training
- 5 Call Intake Scripting Software For Law Firms
- 6 Lead Tracking and Conversion Software For Law Firms
- 7 Call Intake, Conversion & Retainer Services for Law Firms
Where Our Personal Injury Clients Are Coming from
Approximately 48% of our personal injury clients previously came from our website; 48% from niche marketing for motorcycle accidents; and 4% from referrals.
These percentages have changed because we are now advertising with Google Ads. Since marketing takes a lot of time and advertising just takes money, we expect to keep increasing our Google Ads budget.
The Difference between Google Ads vs. Our Website and Other Marketing
There is a big difference between leads from our website and marketing efforts versus Google Ads.
Potential clients who call from our marketing efforts, website, or referrals have already decided on two things:
- They know they want to hire a personal injury lawyer: and
- They already decided that they want us.
Leads from referrals or marketing efforts
Potential clients who call from referrals or our marketing efforts call because they know of us and want to hire us.
Leads from Our Website
Potential clients who call from our website are also pre-sold to some extent. They call after they decided they like our website and the 1-800-HURT-911® brand and they want us to represent them. These leads are usually retained immediately by email within minutes.
Leads from Google Ads
Google Ads produce leads who do not know who to hire and they haven’t been exposed to any reason why they should hire us. This is another reason branding in the title of Google Ads is so important.
Some leads aren’t yet convinced they need to hire a lawyer. Some are at the very beginning stage where they thought they would just look around a little on Google before they decided to do anything.
Google Ads is different in four ways:
- There are many more leads, as many as you want to pay for.
- There are many tire kickers looking around, clicking on Google Ads.
- Of the legitimate clicks, some are potential clients who haven’t quite decided to hire a lawyer yet or who to hire.
- Potential clients only see only a tiny snippet of an advertisement. They haven’t seen our website and don’t know anything about us so they aren’t yet convinced they want to hire us.
Problems WIth Google Ads:
- Much money and time are spent speaking to potential clients who do not become a client on the first phone call.
- Sometimes, several callbacks are necessary to retain a caller.
- Sometimes, callers never become a client because they hired someone else; we didn’t try to call them enough times, or we forgot about them.
The Need for Tracking Leads and Continually Re-Contacting Leads
Calls from Google Ads (and other advertising) present the need for the time-consuming process to track the calls and make sure that potential clients have been continuously called, emailed, and sent text messages until they are retained or tell us not to call again.
Velocify provides the following statistics:
- Calling a potential client within a minute of lead generation can increase your likelihood of conversion by 391%. Each minute reduces the probability drastically. Calling 30 minutes later reduces the chance to 62%.
- More than 50% of all leads are converted after the first attempt but 50% of all leads are never called back after the first attempt.
- 6 calls are the number of times a lead should be called if not retained. 93% of converted leads are contacted by the 6th call attempt.
CRM Contact Relationship Management software for lawyers does lead tracking, call intake, and conversion which makes this job less time-consuming, easier, and will prevent us from forgetting to call potential leads.
CRM software should also allow personal injury lawyers to automatically send and receive template emails and SMS text messages until a client is retained, declined, or unsubscribed.
There are also services that will handle the call intake conversion process for mass tort and general personal injury lawyers.
I’m just now starting to look at the available lead tracking, call intake, and conversion software so this article doesn’t yet describe the differences or indicate which one we will choose to go with.
Call Intake Staff Training
Call Intake Scripting Software For Law Firms
Call intake software can be used to provide a script for call center operators to enter information.
- Prestavi formerly Compass – Personal Injury Demo of Compass
- Vanilla Soft
Lead Tracking and Conversion Software For Law Firms
- AttorneyLeverage – appears to focus on mass tort leads from landing pages; charges $49 per case
- Bitrix24 Legal – they actually have a free plan
- Captorra
- ContactEase
- Introhive
- Law Ruler
- Lawmatics
- Lead Docket – Sophisticated automation, easy to use, and easy to look at. Integrates to input data automatically from many lead source applications and output data to Filvine, SmartAdvocate, and Needles, and possibly others.
- LegallyCRM – starting at $39/month (located in Poland)
- Lexicata
- LexisNexis InterAction
- Litify
- Loop
- OnePlace
- HubSpot CRM – FREE forever (no catch) for up to 2,500 users and 1 million contacts (not specifically designed for law firms)
- Send and receive SMS text and MMS picture messages from HubSpot CRM and Workflows in real-time from local phone numbers $30/month – this definitely needs to be added to HubSpot CRM to increase conversion and ROI
- How to send text messages from HubSpot CRM
- Key features of HubSpot CRM for personal injury law firms
- How to set up and customize HubSpot CRM for law firms
- SalesForce.com starts at $25 /user/month. I was told that the Sales Cloud is the product I would want to answer calls from advertising and retaining clients and that they have templates to set it up for law firms. Integrates with SmartAdvocate.
This article by Inbound Law Marketing reviews 13 CRM’s for law firms
This video shows how Captorra automates client intake
Call Intake, Conversion & Retainer Services for Law Firms
Why use a specialized call intake conversion service to answer your phones and retain your clients?
The vast majority of personal injury law firms are horrible at answering the phones and retaining clients. I know because I ran a group TV advertising campaign with 22 law firms. The lawyers who did well listened carefully to me and followed my instructions. Lawyers who complained did not follow my instructions. When I made test calls, I found they were not answering their phones quickly, putting callers on hold too long, scheduling clients to come in on another day to meet with the lawyer, and other problems.
I have been answering the phone for my personal injury law practice and have always answered on the first ring even in the shower. For the last year, my partner has been answering the phone. He’s almost as good as I am but not quite. Now, we’re increasing our advertising budget and we just can’t answer the phones anymore.
Call Intake and Retaining Clients
- Alert Communications – Call, Intake, and Retainer Services for Law Firms
- Consumer Attorney Contract Services
- For Law Firms Only | ICE Intake Conversion Experts – ICE answers the calls from mass tort and personal injury advertising and can also retain your clients according to your intake criteria. ICE is for lawyers expecting to retain at least 25 cases per week. When they retain clients, they only charge a reasonable flat fee for each qualified and retained client. This provides an incentive to get every potential client and put your personal injury law practice on autopilot. Started by Gary P. Flakowitz, Esq. Captorra is a partner in ICE so ICE operators are trained on Captorra CRM software and use it so you get some of the features at no charge. I know Gary because he was the attorney in charge of case intake at a personal injury and mass tort law firm with 150 employees owned by a friend of mine.
- Intake Solutions of America
- Legal Conversion Center – This call intake center will answer calls for personal injury lawyers and get electronically signed retainers for callers meeting your qualifications.
- Legal Intake Professionals – This call intake center will answer calls for personal injury lawyers with high or low call volumes. LIP will soon start offering retainer services.
- Persist – converts stale leads into retained clients
- Rapid Sign Now will send someone to get a retainer signed when you can’t get it signed electronically.
- We used to send an investigator to get retainers signed. That’s still a good way when you can’t get it signed electronically.
Intake Consulting
- Maximum Intake Consulting – develops and implements customized intake procedures and provides coaching/training for employees who answer the phone.
Read more articles about advertising for personal injury lawyers
Read about how advertising for personal injury lawyers with 1-800-HURT-911® will increase your caseload so much that you will need a personal injury call center.