“I’m an MBA and I’m always gonna go back to the ROI. For the price that we pay, it returns a good investment.”
I went into the law profession a little bit late in life. I was about 45 years old when I decided to become an attorney. I went to law school, passed the bar down here in Florida, and started my own practice. Right now, we have a law partner and a paralegal in the practice with me. Things are going pretty good! I work in primarily three counties here in Florida - Hillsboro, Pasco, and Pinellas. That’s where the majority of our cases are at, along with all the smaller municipalities that are in the area, as well.
The majority of our work is in the Family Law area, primarily in Paternity and Divorce cases. We also do Civil Litigation and handle Criminal Law cases, mainly for existing clients. We have Estate Planning clients, too.
I was looking for ways to increase the incoming business into the firm and I had a consultation with one of the representatives at LegalMatch. They explained the service to me. It was certainly reasonably priced for the county in the area of law that we selected, so we decided to give it a go! It has worked out pretty well for us! Our ROI has been pretty good. We have certainly been pretty happy with being a member of LegalMatch!
At first, I was doing this mainly on my own. I initially started with LegalMatch as a sole practitioner, but since we've got a process in place, it has really improved the service considerably when I was previously trying to do things on my own. Since we put a process in place to handle the LegalMatch inputs, our experience with the service, even though it was good before, has dramatically improved since then.
Initially, I was doing this on my own and I would call clients as they came in. It just took up way too much of my time. I wasn't timely with it, but since I've actually got an assistant, she calls a client and she books them on the calendar. She calls the clients in a timely fashion. We get all those console slots back to back, so they minimize the amount of our time that they take to do the consults. Then we are able to process those in a much more efficient manner. It has given us a better conversion rate. Having the assistant call them and set these consoles up as opposed to me calling them directly really worked well for me.
I’m an MBA and I’m always gonna go back to the ROI. For the price that we pay, it returns a good investment. We have to factor in the amount of work that's taken to convert a potential client to a paying client, but nevertheless, it turns out to be quite a good return on investment!
LegalMatch has certainly increased our case volume. We're getting between three and six cases per month. There's some variance there each month. Some of that may be attributable to the pandemic, as well. There were certainly some kind of strange things that happened when the pandemic started. Some attorneys are doing better, but others are doing a lot to hang in there and just doing what they can.
We're a newer firm. When I started, I was a sole practitioner and then my law partner and I merged our firms and we added a staff. Since I've been an attorney, I have been on an increasing growth curve. That growth curve goes with the pandemic. It keeps increasing. Business for me has been increasing during the pandemic. There was certainly a period there especially around mid-March where there's really a fall off, where people were confused and not knowing what was going on.
There's been a considerable amount of economic hardship in this country and the ability for people to pay attorney's fees is something that I think is felt by a lot of people. Fortunately, we've been doing okay. Our business has continued to increase during the pandemic. Generally, we have definitely seen an increase in our caseload consistently, despite the pandemic.
New attorneys can fight for that top spot on Google, which is probably gonna take them years to get. They can try random Facebook ads, too. A lot of those though require your own input, your own advertising, your direct mail and it costs you an arm and a leg for basically trying to compete in that space. It is hard! LegalMatch takes a lot of the marketing problems away from you and delivers leads right to you, which can be valuable for any attorney, as long as you can convert those leads.
Attorneys have an opportunity to be put face to face with a lot of potential clients to sell your services to. At the same time, you're perhaps giving a little bit of an opportunity to give these people, if not some substantive legal advice, at least a little bit of guidance on which direction they can go if they can afford your services. All of that in the end will help you build your brand and perhaps get you a client down the road through a referral from those people. It's definitely worth doing!
Attorneys need to understand that they still have to put in the work. There's still quite a bit of work that's involved in it, but it's a good way to get yourself in front of potential clients.
I would tell LegalMatch attorneys to get a process in place to deal with the influx of LegalMatch clients. They may preferably get somebody other than themselves to schedule the consults. Get them all scheduled back to back on days that you have time. Set aside time to do them to minimize the impact on your day. As you're doing them, don't brush off people simply because you think that they're not gonna be a paying client. Give them a little bit of guidance if you can. If you can help them out, take time to listen to their issues. Sometimes, some people just need to talk to somebody and need a little bit of quick advice to get them set on a good path, even if they're not gonna pay you. You can explain to them the benefits of hiring you, an attorney.
The templates can certainly be very handy along with the phone app. They allow me to quickly respond to postings. The resources that LegalMatch offers make it very quick and easy for me to respond to any given posting that pops up on my phone in a timely manner, to get my service out there in front of people. I will be sitting, watching TV with my wife late at night and I am posting. I’ll come in there and I'll quickly respond to it, then I'll hear my office phone ringing five minutes later.
LegalMatch has been giving me a lot of potential clients. It's about finding intake in order to drive the business forward and to ultimately drive future revenue. You have to be signing up clients today to really be having prospects. It is certainly useful to any business and critical for new attorneys to have that influx of new clients.
LegalMatch is the only lead generating system that I use right now. I certainly see other ones. They'll just keep sending me stuff and recommending that I sign up for a premium membership, which I generally don't do because our caseload is sufficient. We're looking to handle the influx that we have now, as opposed to trying to increase that significantly through some other type of lead generation service. I see them, but I don't know how effective they are.
I get around three to six cases a month and these cases can generally range between 2500$ on the low end and probably 10 grand and even higher. I haven’t done the Math, but I know we’re generating. It's not exactly a uniform distribution between those numbers. The raw numbers on the upfront costs are well better than ten to one.
The interface is pretty and easy to work with. Having the app is a good thing and the fact that it generates a pretty significant number of the influx of clients for us. Those are the things that I was really looking for.
LegalMatch is definitely worth it! It's a good service. Our intent right now is to continue our contract after our initial three years are up. It's definitely bringing in business and has a pretty decent return on investment. From a business perspective, it's definitely a good service to get into, so I would recommend it.