Like many small law firm owners, Deena Buchanan found her team spending lots of their time sifting through leads for their business—valuable time that could have focused on paying clients.
The Wrong Clients Were a Bottleneck
At the time, Buchanan Law focused on representing employees who faced discrimination or retaliation from their employers. It’s an area where many people call a law firm feeling mistreated, but only a few of those cases are valid. “For every 100 inquiries we received, only 5-10 of those cases would look like they possibly had legal merit. And, only 2-3 of those would end in an engagement starting. Most people’s claims weren’t ready yet or didn’t meet the legal requirements for a case.”
In 2020, Deena joined Lawyerist Lab, a business coaching community for solo and small law firms. She knew she needed to improve how she ran her business for everyone’s sake and that higher profits would be a pleasant result. Through her work in Lab, Deena narrowed in on the bottlenecks in her firm and how she could solve them. Client intake was near the top of the list.
That’s when Deena discovered Lawmatics. Lawmatics’ client relationship management software promised to help Deena’s firm drive efficiency and increase client engagement leading to more revenue. It delivered on that promise—and more.
Lawmatics Made Qualifying Clients Seamless
Before Lawmatics, Deena’s team would send a Google form to potential clients to collect information. Once submitted, the team would manually review the form to determine if it was complete, resulting in lots of back and forth to gather the information. With the correct information, the team could qualify the client. If they didn’t have a case or needed to wait, the team would write emails from scratch with dozens of variations to explain to the potential client why they couldn’t help them. When Deena met with clients for a consultation, she often realized she was meeting with people she could not help. Her qualification process was failing her.
“It’s what happens after the form that was the real game-changer.”
Lawmatics allowed her to automate her intake process. She ditched her Google form for an intake form created in the Lawmatics platform. “It’s what happens after the form that was the real game-changer,” said Buchanan. We automated the collection process. The system sent automated reminders to clients to complete missing information. After a few attempts, the system created a task for a team member to call the client and follow up. The team also created templates for the various reasons they couldn’t help clients—no more hand-crafted emails. Now, the team could tag the reason for the rejection and trigger the correct message.
“What previously took hours could now be accomplished in minutes. More importantly, I became confident in our system. I knew we weren’t losing cases simply because a team member had dropped the ball. I also knew we were meeting our obligations under the Bar’s rules by now having a written record with an email for every lead we rejected.”
Lawmatics Made It Painless for Clients to Hire Me
The team also built an automated process for collecting a signed engagement letter and any initial payments through Lawmatics.
“The system just made everything easier.”
Buchanan Law also offers a service where they will review a contract for a fixed fee. They set up a separate sequence in Lawmatics to send out the engagement contract and payment link and collect the information for the contract review.
“I’d arrive at my desk in the morning with money in my account and everything needed to complete the review. I could just focus on the client work and not the administrative headache that often accompanies it.”
Deena saw that clients realized the difference, too. “We noticed that the number of positive Google reviews went up because clients found working with us was so easy.”
Lawmatics Offered a Hidden Benefit: Managing Team Members
One thing Deena didn’t expect when she adopted a new tech platform was to help her better manage her team. Once the system is created in the platform, it is easy to assign tasks and responsibilities to team members and also track when and how they are completing them.
Deena explained that with Lawmatics, she could see when her team was completing tasks and what was taking them longer than it should. It helped her figure out that one of her team members was not in the right role, so the firm made some adjustments. The system gave Deena data that allowed her to manage the team and improve how they helped their clients.
Getting Started with Lawmatics
Like any new technology platform, Deena cautions lawyers to be patient because it will take time to learn and implement. She advises to start with a clear understanding of the problem you are trying to solve. Then, determine if you are actually telling the system to do that because it sometimes doesn’t match.
“I realized that sometimes I thought I was telling the system to do it one way, but I wasn’t talking to it the right way. Fortunately, Lawmatics has a great team of coaches who would get on with me and help me find the right way to set up the program.”
Her other advice is to just start by building one thing—what one thing would help your practice the most right now? It’s easy to get excited and want to build out everything at once, but that’s not always feasible. Instead, build the first thing and then expand from there.
She also noted that you often won’t know exactly what you want it to do until you get a process started. So, it’s best to start with a few simple things and then build more as you figure out what you need.
Finally, Deena complimented the Lawmatics team for their continuous development efforts. “They are always introducing something new and working to improve the platform.”
If you’re interested in seeing how Lawmatics can help your firm, learn more by visiting Lawyerist’s Lawmatics Review. Curious if business coaching could help your firm? Lawyerist Lab offers several options to help every firm no matter what stage of business they are in.