Law Firm Client Intake

Nermin Jasani [00:00:01]:

Hello and welcome, law firm owners, to another episode of the wildly successful Law Firm podcast. This is your host, nurme or Nerms, whatever is easier for you. Today we are going to talk about intake forms. I am obsessed with intake forms. I know a lot of you say I know I should have one, but I don't have one. And I want you to know how important intake forms are for the growth of your law firm. You might just be thinking, well, that's just a piece of paper on a Word document that I print out and give to my front desk person, to my admin, to my call team, whoever it is, and they just complete some information. And that's that actually the intake form is one of the most important forms in your practice, okay? It's more important than, like, the actual consult form.

Nermin Jasani [00:01:05]:

It's more important than any information that you might be getting once the client has hired you. The intake form, when done the right way, is going to tell you where your client came from, how they found out about you, the kind of case that they have, and if this is someone that you should follow up with or not. So I know that a lot of you are maybe using intake forms that are not that technology proficient. Look, I just spent the entire previous episode talking about technology. Having an intake form that is a Microsoft Word document or a PDF document is I'm going to say it garbage. It does you no good because it is not tracking any data. And that intake form is data rich, baby. There is so much information that you should be collecting that you should be getting, and if you're not, you're losing out.

Nermin Jasani [00:02:09]:

I'm going to give you some examples here on why your intake form is so important. Let's say you do a billboard, okay? I don't work with the billboard attorneys, but I think this is a pretty clear example. If you've got a billboard along the highway in three different places, you have a call team and your call team asks which it should be, asking, how did you hear about Smith and Smith Law firm? And they say, oh, I saw your billboard. And you get that response 100 times. Now you have data. Now you can see of the hundred people who called in who said that they saw you on the billboard, you can see how many of them actually hired you and what their case settled for. Let's say of the 120 hired you, not a terrible conversion rate. It's pretty normal.

Nermin Jasani [00:03:09]:

Of that 20% conversion rate, you can see that their cases settled between 30,000 to a million dollars and the average case settlement amount, or the median range, was 200,000 to 300,000. And the amount that you spent on those three billboards was 100,000. You can see that that was a profitable investment for you, even though you got 100 calls and only 20 hired their case settlements, amount, amounts, justified having the billboards. Okay, I'm going to give you another example. Let's say you're doing SEO and you get three calls. And the three calls callers say, oh yeah, we found you on Google. Well, that's great. You now know that SEO is working for you, right? You can now put that in your intake.

Nermin Jasani [00:04:15]:

You can see, okay, I got three calls in. And then did they schedule a consult, yes or no? Did they hire you after the consult, yes or no? And if so, how much did they pay you? How much was their case worth? Right? If from those three calls, only one person hired you and their case amount was $1,500 is what you charged them for, whatever thing that you did, but you paid $10,000 for SEO, then that shows you that SEO is not working. You can now stop spending money on SEO because you were tracking this data. I'm going to tell you why else it's so important to track this information. A lot of attorneys I work with, especially family and estate planning attorneys, I adore you, but you have no idea who your client buckets are. And the problem with that is you're doing all of this marketing, networking groups. You've got SEO, you've got Facebook, you've got Instagram, and you're talking about the broadest area of law, family law, estate planning, and you are talking about these things that are very sensitive without actually touching on the buckets that actually bring in the greatest amount of revenue. And here's what I mean.

Nermin Jasani [00:05:34]:

If you are a family attorney, if I stop and ask you, okay, who are your clients and where do they come from and what do they hire you for? Most of you are going to look at me with a blank face, or you're going to come up with some bullshit number that you have convinced yourself of, which is, well, we do 50% child support and we do 50% divorce. And then I'm going to start digging into the numbers. And the numbers will never lie, right? I'm going to dig into the numbers of the past twelve months of cases that you've actually done, the people who have paid you. And I'm going to start to see, oh my God, 30% of your clients have been prenups. Why are you not talking about prenups in your Instagram? Why are you not doing Facebook lives about prenups? Why are you not mentioning prenups in your networking group? Then all of a sudden you feel like an asshole because you have missed out on this huge opportunity of easy work. Because prenups are significantly easier than doing divorces, than doing child custody cases. They are a nice flat fee that you get to charge someone and you get to call it a day, but without having that intake information, without having that very specific question that you ask, which is, what kind of case is this? You will never know what you should be focusing on. And you will always think in your head, oh, my business is 50 50.

Nermin Jasani [00:07:04]:

You're not even thinking of prenups as its own bucket. You're like, oh, that's just family work. Actually, it's not. It's completely different. And when you actually have a template, an intake template that asks these things, you will start to see so much information that it's not only going to allow you to generate more revenue, it's also going to cut your costs. And that's why intake forms are so unbelievably important. Every single law firm needs to have an intake form. And because I adore you, I have gone through and created five different kinds of intake forms.

Nermin Jasani [00:07:49]:

I have created an intake form for immigration attorneys, for personal injury attorneys, for business and corporate law attorneys, for family attorneys, and for trademark attorneys. Tons and tons and tons of hours and time and effort has been put in to creating this intake firm. Now, you're probably thinking to yourself, okay, so if it's not a Word document or a PDF, then what is it? It's a firm that's built on the airtable. And once that form is submitted, it goes into a spreadsheet in the airtable. And that spreadsheet can be filtered to look for trends and patterns for your clients. If nothing, it becomes a database so that when you hire someone like me, you now have information. You now have data. We can look in like 2 seconds and see who's calling in what marketing is working, what are people hiring you for? How long is it taking before they schedule a consult? How many people are just hanging up on you and have no desire to work with you once you tell them a price? We can now figure out all of this information in 2 seconds by looking at the spreadsheet, where for most people, when I say, hey, are you tracking your call data? Hey, are you tracking where your clients came from? Most of you just say, well, I know I get a couple of calls a month, and that's from SEO, okay? A couple of calls a month versus 20 calls a month is a big deal.

Nermin Jasani [00:09:31]:

And being able to track the data of 20 calls a month to three consults to one hire from the whole year, that's going to tell you that you're wasting your money on SEO. And unless you are capturing that data, it's impossible for you to guess it. And if I get one more lawyer who lies to me about their data, I'm just going to lose it. So I want you to take a look at these intake forms that I have added. If there is an intake form that you want me to create, I will happily create it for you. One of the ones that is on my quote unquote to do list is to create one for estate planning attorneys. So I know that that's one that I will be working on, and it might be available by the time this is published. I don't know.

Nermin Jasani [00:10:24]:

It just depends on how much time I have and if I want to do this or not. But take a look. These intake forms are are you ready for this? $20? Yes, $20. In fact, I have an entire section on my website called $20 and 20 minutes. It cost you $20, and it takes you no more than 20 minutes. And the reason that I did this is because I wanted people to be able to implement this really quickly without being stopped by technology, without being stopped by their own oh, let me just buy this and never use this again kind of thing. So take a look. The link is below, and if you have any questions or you have any suggestions, reach out to me.

Nermin Jasani [00:11:16]:

I'm here for it. All right, thank you for listening in. Lawyers.