If your law firm is not using client intake calls as a source of data to generate marketing insights, you are missing out on one of the best ways to collect the information you and your marketing team need to refine your law firm growth strategy. Intake calls tell you the terms clients are using to frame their legal questions, the primary drivers that nudge them to place a call, the referral sources that are working hardest for your firm, and more.

Types of Data by Client Relationship

Some of the information you may want to track for client calls may vary depending on whether the call comes from a new prospect vs. a former client who needs your law firm’s services once again. Many of us tend to think of intake as the “first contact” interaction, but for marketing purposes keep in mind that “customer loyalty” can be just as impactful as new client recruitment, and any new case presents the opportunity to glean new insights into how your ideal clients think and speak about their legal matters.

Differences Between Intake and Established Client Communications for Marketing Insights

Some differences that you may expect to see, and which you might want to take into consideration as you think about the marketing implications of your client intake process, include:

First-time prospective clients: These calls will come to you primarily through your law firm’s “outreach” methods. These usually include some combination of local SEO and keyword targeting; if your firm has begun to establish a name for itself, you may also be seeing significant “word of mouth” referral business. Some law firms also leverage their social media accounts very effectively to generate these first-time calls.
Current clients: Obviously a current client is not an intake call. To the extent that their communications with your law office provide data about the client experience and especially their satisfaction with clarity and response times, however, these calls can prove extremely useful in helping your law firm make minor adjustments to its day-to-day operations. Often “tweaks” that seem minor from the perspective of your office can have a significant impact on client satisfaction, leading to improved Google reviews, increased referral traffic, and so on.
Returning clients: Intake calls from previous clients who want to work with your law firm again are a gold mine of information. Listen carefully for what worked well the last time, what the client valued most about their experiences, and (less flattering, but extremely useful), why they find themselves in need of legal services again; this last item in particular can have very different implications depending on your practice area.

One reason to pay special attention to what you can learn from calls with current and returning clients is that our interactions with these groups tend to be less structured than the formal intake process, which has a natural “flow” thanks to the kinds of information a law firm needs in order to decide whether to take a case, and the kinds of information the law firm will need to provide so the client can also make a decision.

Why “Intake Plus” Is Your Best Approach to Evaluating Client Call Data

These interactions are valuable sources of information that can readily be grouped into predictable categories, which makes them great for developing pictures from aggregated data and a phenomenal resource for tracking changes over time. What initial intakes do less well is present the opportunity for your law firm, or your marketing team, to encounter the sometimes surprising client perspectives that can emerge in a more open-ended conversation. Focus on intake, but make it a practice to keep notes and watch for patterns emerging in your conversations with established clients.

Comparative Data

There are a few types of information your law firm can reasonably expect to collect from all callers, regardless of whether they have ever signed an agreement with your firm. Keywords and signal phrases will fall into this category; you may notice that some clients become more “sophisticated” in their choice of terms and in the complexity of the questions they ask as they develop greater familiarity with the legal process; for lawyers who handle appellate cases, making a note of the stage in the legal proceedings at which a client begins to use more technical legal vocabulary can be extremely useful to your SEO team.

You will also want to keep track of the ratio of first-time calls to contracted clients per case type (if you have more than one practice area) and keyword. This information can provide clues to whether there is something about your intake process that appeals more to clients in one practice area than another. To make the most of this comparison, you will also need to be tracking why callers leave the process instead of continuing; you will not always have that information from the perspective of the prospective clients, but you should, at minimum, be able to track the percentage of clients who advance per case time, and the percentage of clients (also per case type) who do not advance due to your law firm’s qualifying criteria (e.g., the case does not look viable). Correlating clients’ keyword usage against any combination of these can yield potentially important insights into differences in the way that clients who do vs. do not advance frame their own legal issues.

Understanding Intake Data: Analyzing What Your Firm Has Collected

For obvious reasons, the people most qualified to review call data and take it into standardized intake practices and potential adjustments to your marketing strategy will be marketing professionals. With law firms, however, the nature of the attorney-client relationship is such that the details of client calls cannot typically be shared with third parties. Transcripts, even anonymized transcripts, generally contain too much privileged information to be shared directly.

What this means for your law firm is that you will likely need to discuss with your marketing team what kinds of information they need, so that your law firm can develop a process for identifying and cataloguing the appropriate information as it is collected during intake calls, so that the strategists at your marketing agency can access the data they need without compromising the confidentiality of your clients’ information. Law firms generally have a couple of options for addressing this particular challenge.

Practical Solutions: Leveraging Technology

The first option is a technology-first solution: Comprehensive, potentially custom-coded call tracking software that records calls, generates transcripts, and then tags those transcripts according to parameters agreed on by you and your marketing team. In this situation, you would normally be forwarding the tags only, e.g., keywords, location, case type, primary client concern, meeting scheduled or not (the specific tags you might want to track are a good topic to discuss with your marketing team). Ideally, whatever software you use should be able to scan transcripts with enough sophistication to consistently return a list of terms each client used in describing his or her problem, without surfacing identifying details.

Potential Software Challenges

This operation can be more complex than it may appear: Simple semantic search will tend to be based around terms your law firm has already entered (or that your marketing team has supplied), and will usually try to flag likely synonyms of terms from your own list. This method will indeed increase the total number of possible keywords your software can extract from calls transcripts, but it will also miss plenty of possibilities and may return a high number of “false positives” (i.e., phrases that look like they could be alternate keywords, but have only a tenuous relationship to the client’s actual concern).

Adding Sophistication

A more advanced version may be able to add context scanning to identify possible keywords from the way the terms are presented in the conversation. There are LLMs (large language models) already in consumer use that offer this type of capability to some extent, although we all know they are not perfect, and of course user input (i.e., your instructions) will obviously affect their outcomes. You may want to talk with a member of your marketing team to see whether there is a program, or a particular prompt for an existing tool, that they would recommend.

Considerations

How compelling you find the technology-first option will depend partly on what your call-to- contract ratio currently looks like, as well as how confident you are in your intake staffing. Although you can probably expect the transcript generation stage to be relatively constant across practice areas, the same may not be true for the scanning and tagging phases; some practice areas are likely to see a higher degree of variability in both the range of terms clients use for describing their legal concerns and the diversity of the legal scenarios the software might need to recognize in order to sort the collected data effectively.

The Personal Approach

The other solution to the same challenge is to invest in hiring and training an intake specialist who can take notes on the specific phrases callers use in describing their legal problems and framing their questions, and who can then use a simpler call tracking software to record when new phrases appear, the frequency with which familiar keywords are used, and basic-but-useful information about client location, referral source, and so on. There are a number of law firm CRMs that are in a good position to offer this type of functionality; many of them will let you sort and categorize according to multiple distinct criteria, which should give your marketing team a good opportunity to assess whether there are clear differences between referral sources as far as the terms clients are most likely to use.

Be particularly careful in this latter correlation; it can be useful, but it is important to remember that there may be more than one explanation for why keyword phrases “cluster” by referral source. Identifying a correlation is most useful when you can also determine whether the terms most referenced in calls from any given referral source are also terms your digital content strategy is targeting on the platforms sending you those referrals. If the answer is yes, then you have a good sign that your content strategy is already working as intended, but the information does not necessarily indicate what refinements you might want to make. If the answer is no, then you do not necessarily have a measure of your current content strategy’s effectiveness, but you do have some options to consider incorporating into your content going forward.

How To Decide?

I tend to lean toward the “intake specialist” solution, because a truly well-rounded intake specialist can do much more than simply collect useful information. As the first human contact with a law office, intake specialists have an enormous impact on a client’s initial impression of the firm and, often, on whether the client decides to move forward with a booking. I regularly remind my law firm clients that a marketing strategy gets calls, but the intake process lands contracts.

That said, whether one approach makes more sense than the other for your own firm will depend on a variety of factors that no one can really assess without knowing the specifics of your current process and priorities. Before you decide to go “all in,” make the time to schedule a careful review of your law firm’s unique needs with a marketing agency for law firms whose insights you trust.

What About Non-Phone Data?

Obviously, not all of your law firm’s client interactions will take place via phone call. Many of your first-time contacts are likely to come through a social media messaging app, or through a form on your law firm website. I encourage you to incorporate data from contact forms especially, alongside the information gathered during phone calls, to develop a comprehensive picture of client concerns on intake.

The reason I recommend emphasizing contact forms especially is that you have an exceptional degree of control over the kinds of information they collect, and the ways that information is stored and sorted. How useful your website’s contact forms are as a source of marketing insights is a direct reflection of how you structure the forms themselves. To truly capitalize on the potential contact forms offer your law firm as a tool for data collection, be sure every contact form includes some version of the following questions:

Where did you learn about us? → Make this a multiple choice field.
What is your primary concern? → This question should be formatted to elicit a short-answer paragraph; make sure the wording of the question reminds visitors not to include personal information.
What is your primary reason for contacting us today? → Let this question be another multiple choice field; you will probably want to calibrate the options according to degree of urgency (e.g., “Seeking information” vs. “I need to schedule a consultation”).

Brainstorm additional questions with your marketing agency to tailor your contact forms to the particular needs of your law practice, and make it a point to incorporate the same questions into your phone intake protocol.

Build an Intake Process That Builds Your Practice

Law firms need a strategic approach to data collection that distinguishes between first-time prospects, current clients, and returning cases to glean high-value marketing and operational insights. Intake calls are one of the most valuable sources of the kinds of information you need to grow your practice. While this value is present for most businesses that operate via an intake process, for law firms finessing the questions used in soliciting information and the protocol used for storing and sorting data can be especially important in ensuring that your practice has actionable data you can forward to your marketing agency without compromising client privacy.

Annette Choti, Esq., has over two decades of legal experience and is the Founder & CEO of Law Quill, a concierge legal marketing agency for law firms. Annette authored the bestselling book Click Magnet: The Ultimate Guide To Digital Marketing For Law Firms, hosts the popular Legal Marketing Lounge podcast, and founded Click Magnet Academy where she teaches professionals to leverage the powerful LinkedIn platform. As a sought after speaker for Bar Associations, Legal Associations, and Marketing Conferences, Annette provides legal marketing insight along with an entertaining twist. Annette used to do theatre and professional comedy, which is not so different from the legal field if we are all being honest. Annette can be found on LinkedIn or directly through email at Annette@LawQuill.com

The post Turning Client Intake Calls Into Marketing Insights appeared first on Above the Law.

Some differences that you may expect to see, and which you might want to take into consideration as you think about the marketing implications of your client intake process, include:

First-time prospective clients: These calls will come to you primarily through your law firm’s “outreach” methods. These usually include some combination of local SEO and keyword targeting; if your firm has begun to establish a name for itself, you may also be seeing significant “word of mouth” referral business. Some law firms also leverage their social media accounts very effectively to generate these first-time calls.
Current clients: Obviously a current client is not an intake call. To the extent that their communications with your law office provide data about the client experience and especially their satisfaction with clarity and response times, however, these calls can prove extremely useful in helping your law firm make minor adjustments to its day-to-day operations. Often “tweaks” that seem minor from the perspective of your office can have a significant impact on client satisfaction, leading to improved Google reviews, increased referral traffic, and so on.
Returning clients: Intake calls from previous clients who want to work with your law firm again are a gold mine of information. Listen carefully for what worked well the last time, what the client valued most about their experiences, and (less flattering, but extremely useful), why they find themselves in need of legal services again; this last item in particular can have very different implications depending on your practice area.

Where did you learn about us? → Make this a multiple choice field.
What is your primary concern? → This question should be formatted to elicit a short-answer paragraph; make sure the wording of the question reminds visitors not to include personal information.
What is your primary reason for contacting us today? → Let this question be another multiple choice field; you will probably want to calibrate the options according to degree of urgency (e.g., “Seeking information” vs. “I need to schedule a consultation”).