Treat your intake process as the lifeline of your law firm
Increasing intake capabilities allows your firm to increase your caseload, therefore increasing overall business and your bottom line. Looking at it in this perspective, your intake process is what breathes oxygen and life into your law firm. Optimizing the intake procedure for your staff and simplifying it for your prospects is the foundation of best practices in enhancing your intake process.
Regardless of the size of your law firm, the new case intake process is essential. As the first direct communication with potential clients, the intake process can make or break the likelihood of a prospect retaining your firm. From the initial conversation, to all follow up communications, and ultimately to their signing on as a new client – your law firm needs the proper tools to help increase the volume of cases you can accept, while also improving and maintaining the highest quality client experience.
The SmartAdvocate app, available for iOS and Android devices, allows you to undertake the intake process on the go, now allowing your staff to complete the intake process and sign up the new case from locations such as the client’s home or hospital room.
Establish a consistent and accurate intake system to accept cases that make the most sense for your law firm.
A one-stop intake solution creates a strong foundation for your law firm. No longer will your staff have to integrate various tools to process new cases. With SmartAdvocate’s New Case Intake Wizard, your firm can establish a reliable intake system that runs with increased efficiency and accuracy. SmartAdvocate offers a plethora of key tools so your intake process runs like a well-oiled machine, providing a consistent and quality experience for both your staff and potential clients.
Law firms are increasingly implementing forms of automation throughout their operations to enhance overall accuracy and efficiency. Automation is particularly helpful during the intake process, shown in key features such as SmartAdvocate’s Intake Scoring.
Intake Scoring automatically qualifies leads in real time, based on the answers to questions you have established for each cast type. SmartAdvocate will automatically generate a score and indicate, depending on the threshold your firm has set up, if it passes the score you deem appropriate to take on the case.
Not only does SmartAdvocate allow you to implement this standard of consistency throughout your intake process, it also provides conflict checks. The system will alert your staff if and when they begin inputting information on an individual who already exists in the system. These cross checks and automated tools increase the overall accuracy of your intake process. The management of potential clients and ensuring you collect all the necessary information to best handle their cases is essential in setting your law firm up for success.
Conditional questions guide your staff to ensure they obtain required information, allowing them to focus on building rapport with prospects.
In order to quickly and accurately record the information from potential clients, you and your intake staff should be utilizing conditional questions. The power of conditional questions ensures your staff is guided through the proper succession of questions for each case type.
Certain intake questions only need to be asked of a prospective client in certain circumstances. Your staff will no longer be required to make these determinations. Conditional questions can automatically ask follow-up questions based on the prospect’s answers to previous questions. This provides your intake specialists with the peace of mind that they are being prompted for all the required information they are to obtain from the conversation, allowing them to fully focus on the conversation and building rapport with the potential client.
Nurture a high quantity of contacts through the use of automation and mass communication capabilities.
Once a potential client has made initial contact with your firm and you have received the preliminary information for their case, they should be passed through the established follow-up protocols that your firm has set in place. Mass communication capabilities is a key tool from which your firm can greatly benefit. Not only does it help to enforce a standard of consistency so all prospects receive the same high-quality experience from your firm, but it also allows your staff to handle more contacts and cases.
By having formatted text and email messages prepared and ready to be automatically sent out en masse, your staff can follow up with large numbers of potential clients without expending additional time or effort. These templates are further supported by automated workflow procedures, so a potential client never falls through the cracks again. For example, when your firm receives an e-signed retainer in response to an email or text, a task can then be automatically created and assigned to the appropriate staff member to follow up with that new client.
Fuel your practice with the help of robust features and dynamic tools provided by SmartAdvocate’s legal case and document management software solution.
Treat your intake process as the lifeline for your law firm. SmartAdvocate is unlike any other legal case management software, for the tools it provides help enhance your intake process in order to better fuel your law firm for success. It is a true one-stop solution for intake, not requiring any additional systems.
If you’re interested in seeing how your intake process can grow through the implementation of useful tools like Intake Scoring, mass communication capabilities, automatically generated tasks, numerous integrations and more, contact us for your free, live demo of SmartAdvocate.
Our team of experienced Business Development Specialists is ready to walk you through how SmartAdvocate can not only enhance your operation, but be customized to your law firm’s specific workflows.
