Clio legal trend report 2019 "Answer the Phone!"

Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. So I'm still going through that Legal Trends Report and it's, it's really fascinating. So I went through last, last week's blog, we went through the billable hour and how much time attorneys are spending not really getting compensated for their hours. And this second part of the Legal Trends Report by Clio, which is an app that works with practice management with attorneys, it was interesting. I loved how they went about it. I loved how they got the data. And one of the big factors, and I'm going to show you a screenshot of a slide that they showed, they started out right off the bat, like, how do attorneys and how do clients get their attorneys? And so let me share my screen so you can see. What they found. I don't think this was that eye-opening, but for me, I kind of just assumed this is how most people get an attorney. I know when I've had to hire like an attorney for my business, I asked around, right? I moved to Florida, I needed an attorney. So I asked, where is a good attorney? Just ask some of the people that are local to me. And they gave me a referral and I went with the referral that I felt was the best. And this doesn't surprise me. This is how most people find their attorney. They, they do get referrals. Some of them search on their own and some of them go for the internet. So I'll show you in the next slide. It's, it's interesting, the statistics on how we go about finding our attorney. So they got their referral, they find the attorney. What's the first thing that they want or expect from their, from their attorney when they reach out? So the first thing most of the clients expected is a timely result, timely response. They expect the attorney either to answer the phone or the law firm staff to answer the phone. They expect the attorney to call back. And they really expect— their expectations were that they needed to be listened to. They wanted the information to come back at them and be easy to understand. They want to understand the whole process. They don't want to just go in blindly. They want to know exactly the steps that are going to happen. Because don't forget, when most people contact a law firm, they're contacting a law firm, they're usually under distress. They may be going through a divorce or something else. If you're talking about your estate, it's not always easy to go and talk about that. It might be the easiest case to go over if you're like planning your will and all those things. But sometimes that's even a difficult circumstance under different scenarios, right? So most people, when they contact the law firm, they want to know the steps. So they find that these are— this is an important thing. They want to know exactly what's going to happen in the process of whatever they're going through. Maybe they're going through— maybe they're in some kind of trouble and they need to have the attorney represent them. So they want to know what's the steps involved so they know where they're going and what's going to happen in the case. So then the next thing after that would be they expect the attorney to answer every question. So they're expecting the attorney to just listen to them and answer. They want to know what it's going to cost for the whole case. Those are the things that kind of freak out a client, right? They want to know what's the cost, what's this cost going to be to me? And usually attorneys are pretty good at giving you like levels, but a lot of times they won't even have that conversation in the initial callback. So clients actually want to know that stuff upfront. They want the attorney to have a friendly tone. They don't want them to be short or just not just so businesslike. They want to feel like the attorney cares about them, and they expect to get a meeting request. They want to talk and have a meeting in person or on a Zoom. More likely, they want to be in person. This is all the data that they extracted, that the people at Clio extracted from talking to clients of attorneys. So This one was unbelievable. So expected response time. The red line is the percentage of expectations met when firms respond. And you can see that it's 100% expectation. It really went down to whether they wanted it in a week, few hours, 24 hours, 40 hours, and some of them didn't get back to them until more than a week. So some of these law firms are taking a really long time to get back to their customers. So the consumer is expecting a response in 24 hours, but the law firms are taking a really long time to get back to the client. That's where there's a problem with customer satisfaction when it comes to law firms. So if your firm's kind of stagnant, like we talked last week about a stagnant law firm or a law firm that's losing clients, the way— if you're just starting out, the way to really get yourself higher, get above the rest of the competition, answer the phone. meet the client expectations, and you're gonna shine above other law firms 'cause your competition is doing this. And this is eye-opening that 79% of the consumers expected a phone call back within 24 hours. Remember, they're in distress most of the time when they work with a law firm. They're in distress. They really have something going on in their life that they really need help with, and they expect that phone call, and they're not getting called back for almost a week or more than a week. So what did Clio and the people behind Clio in this report, what did they do to Figure out what's really happening at other law firms. They actually took the time and got that information from the clients. So they extracted the information of what a client's expectations are, and they flipped it and they pretended they were clients and they called law firms to see who calls back, who answers the phone, who calls back, how long it takes to answer the phone, how long it takes them to call them back. And they contacted a variety of law firms. They contacted firms from For personal injury, they contacted estate planning. They had a little, little mix of different niche, niched-out law firms to see where, where the issue is, where the competition is. So they broke it down. But this is overall 56% of all law firms answer the phone calls. That's better than probably expected, but still not a real high percentage, right? And 39% went to voicemail. So this is from the insights from the 2019 Legal Trends Report. So this was really interesting to me because I'm wondering in myself, for myself, how does this correlate even to accountants? Do most accountants call back? One of the things they said at Intuit when we were up and talking about some of the statistics with the pro advisors when they did it at Scaling New Heights, they talked about how they were going to start to shift the way they were doing pro advisor leads because the pro advisors weren't calling back on those leads. So now they, instead of sending them out to the top person, they sent it out to a couple people. And really, it's the first come, first serve. If you're going to gain that client, you're going to be the first one to call. You're probably going to get the, get the lead and maybe turn it into an active client. So this is really eye-opening. So they took that data source and they started calling all these law firms. This is what they did for an evaluation. So they had certain criteria based upon the expectations that they learned from talking to the customers of attorneys. And they put that to use. And so they called all these law firms. And of these firms, 2 law firms out of the— I think it was almost 500 law firms that they had on this review— 2 law firms received an excellent. They responded within 24 hours. The business was professional and courteous. They were clear and easy to understand. All the questions were answered regarding the matter and the lawyer's ability to help in that matter. Detailed information on what to expect in the process and the next steps were outlined, detailed information on consultations, and the overall price was really explained to the customer. So those are the things that kind of take out— they alleviate the fear, right? The fear that comes in hiring a professional attorney. So that is not great results, right? If you're going to say this is the email scorecard, not great. What they found in this study was that most of the attorneys felt that email was just the best way to really correspond with the client, but the client was expecting the phone call. They wanted to talk to the person. They actually wanted to come in person and talk. So they're in a bit of a— usually in a bit of a trauma time of their life, and they needed to talk to the attorney. They wanted to have their fears alleviated. So that was part of this scorecard. So we got 20 law firms got a good rating. They found that they weren't confusing. At least half the questions were answered about the lawyer's ability to help, and some of the next process and some information there was passed along in that session. So that's 5%. 23% gave an adequate response. So they actually responded within 24 hours. That was key. They didn't find their information confusing, but at least a couple of the questions really weren't answered as far as the attorney's ability to help, and minimal information on consultations. And most of the time it just wasn't answered was how much is this going to cost us? And that's one of the things, it's, you know, we want to know what it's going to cost, what's the fee going to be. And this is something that I think the accounting industry is doing a much better job at because instead of doing that hourly thing, we're just out there and say, this is what your price is. So we've gone into that value pricing or fixed pricing for the clients. And that's one of the fears people have with talking to attorneys, right? You get on the phone, you're like thinking, oh God, is this $500 an hour right now? I don't really want to talk about the weather. I want to really talk about my case because time is money, right? Yeah. 71%, 284 firms did not meet the criteria for an adequate response, and they also didn't answer the phone or they didn't call a client back within 24 hours. That's not great. What is great about this information and this data is if you want to set your firm apart and really move yourself into a place where you're going to be able to grow and become one of those firms that's growing and trending upward. This is all you have to do is answer the phone and have a place or process at your firm in place so that you can take care of all those things that the client is looking for, right? Client is number one in this. So if you can set the, set the processes in place at your firm to really make your firm grow and move into the place of really taking that customer and treating them like a king or a queen and help them feel supported and let them know what it's gonna cost, you're gonna win the clients, right? So that's my advice to everybody out there, 'cause this is something even accountants, we can start to really move towards, the same exact thing, right? Start to think about taking care of the client and doing those things that will help elevate your practice, help bring you to another level, help you to grow, expand, and just be more profitable, and probably make yourself feel a lot better, 'cause you're gonna help your client. And that's what really what we're all in business for is to help our client. So on that note, if you want to reach out, you want to hire us to help you figure out where you need to— what you need to do to help your firm grow, please reach out to us. I hope this really helped. Even if you're not an attorney, but you're just watching this randomly, and maybe you're an accounting firm, these are things that we all need to kind of look at. I would love to do this for accounting firms to see what does a client expect and what are we giving back. I'd love to see some kind of report like this for accountants. So on that note, I hope everybody has a really wonderful week. Bye.