Law Firm Growth Podcast · Jan Roos - Legal Marketing Expert, Author, and Speaker

Contract Rate - Beyond Intake

·28 min·2 clips

If you miss the five-minute window, the two best callback windows are 11 a.m. to noon and 4 to 6 p.m.

1. The Law Firm Growth Podcast episode "Contract Rate - Beyond Intake" is day two of the Fast Start for the host's book Beyond Intake, and it centers on contact rate, which he calls "the invisible metric." 2. The host, whose name does not appear in the transcript, is the author of Beyond Intake and runs a firm whose team has put 250-plus law firms through this process and operates a call center for clients. 3. His thesis is that low contact rate gets blamed on lead quality when it is a process failure firms control, and he frames the Donald Rumsfeld "known unknowns" model around law firms not knowing the metric exists. 4. He cites the Wharton lead response study (roughly 2008-2009), where a 5-minute versus 30-minute response meant a 100x drop in reach and a 20x drop in qualification, and the 2019 Clio trends report, where only 40% of emails and 56% of phone calls were answered and over half of firms skipped voicemails for 72 hours. 5. He defines the KPI as people spoken to divided by unique leads (65 of 100 is 65%) and names speed to lead as the top lever, backed by Slack alerts that tell his call center to dial webinar leads within five minutes. 6. The "double dial" means calling twice in a row so a local number isn't mistaken for a robocall, which he links to what he calls the "moral imperative" that "if it's worth doing any work for a prospect it's worth doing all the work." 7. After a missed five-minute window, he says tens of thousands of dials point to 11 a.m. to noon and 4 to 6 p.m., and he recommends following up for at least three, five or ten days, citing Morgan & Morgan's multi-week call sequence. 8. In the "Michigan story" from 2020, a two-person estate planning firm's secretary told an account manager on Zoom that she had called every lead and no one picked up, and the host uses it to argue for "trust but verify" and the rule "if it didn't happen in the system, it didn't happen." 9. He proposes bonuses of $50 to $100 per closed client and $10 to $20 per show for frontline staff paid $15 to $25 an hour, and notes the best-paid sales person in tech is usually the top closer, the reverse of the law firm model. 10. He also recommends hiring from call center, financial and insurance backgrounds rather than legal ones and gives 50% to 80% contact as a realistic target, citing Mike Whalen's Lawyer Forward and Jim Collins's "right people on the bus." 11. Law firm owners and intake managers who want to raise lead conversion.

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Law Firm Growth Podcast