Automating Admin Tasks

We took what used to be a highly complex, annoying process and boiled it down to like a couple of clicks. Boy, your podcasts. I am one of your hosts, John Fritz. And I'm joined with my co-host, Dan Sterbisch. Dan, what's going on today? Well, John, not a lot. Just settling in through it to a new week. We've got Thanksgiving stuff going on. So the kids only have two days in school and taking off a couple of days toward the end of the week and just relax and, you know, soak it in trying to shed some other responsibilities right now so I can take better care of myself and be more at peace. You know, spread a little thin lately, but feeling good right now, how about you stuff? Yeah, you sound rather chipper today and I like that. You know, so you probably don't have four sick kids at home right now, you're probably getting some good sleep, so that's good. Yeah, we did, I did get a little sleep the past few days. So, you know, two days in a row, which is unheard of in Mo. So. Yeah, well, I had a great weekend. I was, I did some, some deer hunting, which I love to do once a year. And, you know, I was in a deer stand at five o'clock in the morning in 30 degree weather, or probably less than that. And then I made it back home to have a martini with my wife at about 5'30 that same night. So, there you go. It was on the best of both worlds there for a quick minute, but did you get one? I did, I got my first, I got a six point buck this year. So I got my first buck. So, yeah, my brother-in-law did too. It was like the first one they've gotten in probably 20 years. So we were all, we historically were just making fun of them all the time, telling them they were just going to have their drink in the woods. And they finally get his dad. They finally got one and had it butchered. And apparently it was like 80 bucks or something to get it, to get it, I'm not a hunter. So I don't know anything about this. Yeah, that is a bad price per pound. In the end, in terms of filling your freezer. Yeah, and my whole family loves deer meat. So we obviously process everything and eat everything throughout the year. So it's a win-win. Wow, what an efficient way to go. And we've thought about getting a cow, but maybe that's a little more traditional. Or perhaps less traditional. Maybe it's more the more modern way to that, I don't know. So, what do we have on tap for today? I know we're going to talk about automating some administrative tasks or what do you want to go? Yeah, so I was, I think it was one of the Facebook groups. I don't remember who it was. I think it was one of the estate planning groups where they were talking about all that somebody was saying, oh, I'm going to start a solo practice. Can you guys give me some ideas about the things that I should be aware of as I go out there that I might not be thinking about. And somebody, one of the top uploaded comments or liked comments was like you are going to have to do a lot more admin stuff than you probably realized. And I have just, it struck me that I just never found that to be extremely true, like maybe early on it was, but like we were talking about this a little before the show. I think I started automating a lot of the most irritating, like admin tasks pretty early 'cause there's so many easy low-hanging fruit. So I thought we would talk about some of that admin stuff and is it a myth, is it true? How do we deal with this admin thing in a small firm practice without hiring like 10 people to do all of it? - Yeah, but I think you're clearly an outlier when it comes to the traditional person starting a law firm. I know that for me personally, when I started my firm, about six, I guess I'm coming up on seven years that for the first year, I was kind of trying to just figure things out on my own. I had almost, I mean, I don't even know if I had zappy or even connected or even started with that, right? I mean, I kind of got, 'cause it's kind of just waiting through the muck in the dark basically. And then slowly, and for other reasons, not being plugged into great groups like the maximum lawyer and whatnot or different lawyer in the beach, all these different groups that are talking about automations. Now, if I would have had that access to that or been plugged into that kind of network to start, I think my administrative headaches would have been much less throughout my life cycle of my firm. - That's a good point, because I actually got hooked into the maximum lawyer and lawyer on the beach community before I even started my firm. They're actually the ones that kind of motivated me to start the firm is, I started listening to the, I don't remember exactly how I found it. I was just looking for like podcasts about, I didn't remember what I was doing for best, but I ended up finding the maximum lawyer podcast and started listening to that at least a full year, year and a half, maybe two years before I started my firm, I was listening to that almost every day, driving to and from work and just dictating voluminous notes, like hundreds of pages of like, dictated notes of like, "Oh, that's a great idea. I need to be doing that." - And just, if we're not for those resources, I probably would have been going in blind too, but I did feel remarkably better prepared, I think, having that kind of thing out there. - Yeah, big crops to those groups. - I mean, when you start out, I mean, you know, the basic stuff, right? I mean, you know, you're probably, I mean, I was answering my own phones for a while and then I was just like, you know, I just like didn't want to answer the phone anymore, you know, that's the classic kind of thing, where you, you know, because you get like, you know, stuff that, you know, you get three different types of calls, you get calls that are not related to what you want, you get crazy people and then you get, actually calls that you want, right? But the calls you don't want and the crazy people just destroy your mental capacity to deal with the people you do want. And so you have to have somebody else basically doing that job for you, right? Whether it's a call system or not. But yeah, and that was one of the major things that I got off my plate like from day one, because I had heard about, you know, Smith AI and Ruby Reception and all these things through Maximum Lawyer. And at the time that I started my firm, this is kind of like, well, if we're starting from like front to back of the law firm, like in a client journey experience, like the intake process. I knew that I didn't want to be answering the phone from the day one, because I wanted to present this kind of more professional, you know, appearance, I didn't want to be the guy answering the phone. And I didn't really want a, you know, like a call tree, you know, auto attendant. And so I started looking through Smith AI as a virtual receptionist. Yeah. And at the time that I started, they had like tailored plans or maybe I talked them into doing a tailored plan. I don't know what I was. But they would, they would answer 10 calls a month, which at the time was more calls than I was getting. So, which is kind of where it's just to look back on now. But at the time that was more calls than I was getting. And they were charged to like, you know, seven, at the time like seven or eight bucks a call. So it was like 70 bucks a month to have somebody answering the phone from day one. And it, and it scaled as the call volume, you know, 10X or 15X or whatever we're at now. It, it scaled dynamically throughout the whole, the whole way. And that's one of the advantages of a virtual reception service. So that was an easy admin win from the beginning. I feel like. - Yeah, yeah. So let's talk a little bit about the basic automations when it comes to, you know, intake, you know, the calls coming in, right? I know on my end. So we have, you know, our calls, we have our intake specialist internally. Who answers all of our calls. She fills out a job form that's that we created to be basically just make it really easy to collect the information that we need for that, for that screen, right? For that call. Is this a case that we want to accept? She submits the job form online. It hits the button, a zap zaps it into pipe drive, creates a new deal, the new deal in pipe drive, automatically sends them an email and a text saying, "Hey, you know, we're reviewing your case. We're looking at the, you know, looking at everything." And, you know, here's a, here's a great, here's, you know, what is it? What to do when a loved one passes away are kind of PDF, probate guide, right for everybody. So, and then we kind of decide on, if I'm going to, you know, basically we either schedule a consultation in that initial call that she takes anyways, or my intake specialist will sign it up herself, depending on the level of the call. So, that's kind of our basic setup for automations on intake. Yeah, yeah, very similar on our end. So, like, and this was something that we, that I had set up pretty early. But if you have like a CRM, like I know you use pipe drive, or we use, I picked up while I'm in the next from, from day one. So, I knew from the beginning that I wanted the data from our phone calls to be going into our CRM. Like, if somebody called, I wanted a record of that call, and I wanted a new case set up in there. And, fortunately, that's a really easy zap. Like, if you're, if you're like getting started and you're trying to learn how to do, like, the, like, I think we have a zap that's like, 'cause Smith AI has their own Zapier connection, right? Yeah. And of, if you're using Smith AI as your receptionist and paying your whatever it is, honor bucks a month for your, and calls or whatever you need when you're first starting out, you can set that zap up real easy. It's like step one is just like call received in Smith AI, step two, create lead in Lomatics. Like, that can be the whole zap. Yeah. And it works pretty well. So, that's what, we have something similar to that, where, you know, call comes in, and the nice thing that Smith does is they will categorize it as if it's a new lead or an existing caller, 'cause they have their own system of tracking, like, whether it's an existing call or whatever. And so, they'll label it in the zap of whether it's a new lead or whatever, and then you can kind of determine whether to create a new matter if it's a, or filter it, if it's a new, if it's a new lead or not. And then there you go. All of a sudden, you're creating a new matter for every caller, every new lead that calls in that you're getting data tracked on it. I give you set up a form, an intake form in Lomatics, which takes you like 20, 30 minutes to set up a basic one, maybe less, 10 minutes for a basic one. And then all of a sudden, you're, you know, you're doing a lot of your basic data entry during your console call rather than having another human do it. Yeah. So, that's kind of how a person calls in. The zap sends the data to Lomatics. They have our calendar link. So, like, we use another big admin area is scheduling. Yeah. And I picked up a calendar subscription from day one as well for scheduling and gave the link to the Smith people and told them, hey, if it's a new lead, use this link to book them. And there you go. Now, all of a sudden, you've automated and delegated, you know, phone call, reception, setting up matters in your CRM and scheduling. Like, those are three major areas of admin that you've just gotten off your plate with for like, what is it? 50 bucks a month or something, not including the CRM or less. 100 bucks a month. Yeah, I mean, in this day and age, I mean, calendar, I think, is the best bank for your buck when it comes to scheduling. I mean, there's their functionality, the price point, everything, you know, build, being able to build different links for different types of scheduling, whether it's a 15 minute console or whether it's, you know, now one hour discovery call or whatever it is, you know, time blocking certain area. I mean, I can, no one schedules calls on my calendar through calendar, you know, on Fridays. Okay, they don't schedule them before nine o'clock and before or three o'clock on, you know, during the week. So, you can custom block it out. It's a great tool. I mean, if you're not, it's great for scheduling and doing those kind of job tasks, for sure. So, let's talk about one of the pieces in that it would be, you know, your engagement agreements, right? You know, I know there's still lawyers out there, lots of them who are either emailing a PDF that they are kind of, you know, it's their standard format. So it's like, here's my PDF to the client to physically sign and send back to them, right? I mean, so obviously automating the engagement agreements is a huge, very easy thing to do. You know, we use DocuSign and PowerForms. I just did, I've used that for, you know, six years where, you know, all you do is click on the button and it pulls up the most recent, you know, representation agreements. DocuSign it, you know, and then it comes back to me. And then you can pull trigger and you can basically set up triggers off of that, right? You'd sign this type of agreement, then this triggers us to a zap, right? So, yeah, engagement agreements are definitely another huge admin area where, you know, if you didn't have some kind of automated system doing it, like, you're the person that would have to be, like, manually sending those out. And if you're not sending them for eSign, like, oh my God, then now all of a sudden, you're talking about, you know, mailing them stuff or emailing them a PDF, like you said, that's a lot. Yes, like, we handle that in Lomatics where I think pipe drive has a similar thing, but you may have to pay extra for it and it's probably not as good as DocuSign. Like, we have, Lomatics just has native integrated eSign. So like, we create an engagement agreement template and give it a little conditional logic. Like, if it's in a state plan in case than this, if it's probate, then this language. And then you, you know, on your intake form where you're setting, oh, this is a practice area of probate or, you know, traffic or whatever your practice area is, you just set the engagement up so that it kind of swaps in and out provisions based on what kind of case it is. And then we have an automation in Lomatics that as soon as they reach the stage of send engagement, it just fires the engagement to them from text and email and it'll send it to them every couple of days until they sign it. So like, all the steps in there, think about that. Like, you've automated the preparation of the engagement of making it read how you want it to read. You've automated the sending of the engagement. You've automated the follow-up of the engagement. The, hey, did you still want to work with us? All that can be done with a decent CRM system pretty easily. That's several different admin tasks that are now, like, built into an automated computer flow that you just don't have to worry about anymore. And it's so freeing to get to that level. - Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I mean, and you think about it in the, in, you know, the first kind of part of the, the client experience, right? Is, you know, is the call coming in, the rep agreement, and then, you know, for some of our practice there is, you know, PI obviously not, but, you know, we, it's part of our probate law firm. I mean, for, you know, every single case that we accept it, you know, in our firm, which is all probate cases, right? We require an upfront advance payment, right? So we have some sort of advance payment made, which is an easy, you know, click on this link, you know, it's an automated, you know, link that's sent to the potential clients, you know, as part of a, a templated email and text in pipe drive. So it automatically sends those, and they're able to just click on that, goes into law pay, and then they make their payment, you know, as necessary for that case. So we also have it set up where we do offer, you know, payment plans for certain clients that are unable to make, you know, we want to make sure that there's enough assets in the case that we're going to, you know, that we're not worried about not getting paid for our attorney's fees, right? So on those cases, some of those cases we'll make accept, we'll offer, you know, where people can't, are unable to make the required upfront payment, we'll offer them a payment plan, right? Which is also just basically, there's a special DocuSign. It's an actual installment agreement where they're agreeing to make installment payments, right? They click on that, they submit that, and then that triggers a zap, which then zaps their information into a payment processing platform called chargeover, and then chargeover processes the payment, and then automatically sends invoices. So automatically sends them the first invoice, and then they're followed up invoices every 30 days, and then I'm able to track that. All of the payment processing, or at least the installment payment people that are all in chargeover, I can see who's made their payments, who hasn't made their payments, who's on track, you know, if I need to follow up with anybody, et cetera. And the whole process is fully automated from that perspective on the payment side. - Yeah, and that's for flat-peat payments, like we have a handful of, I think we've pretty much gotten rid of like, almost all of our hourly billing cases, but for a while we were doing hourly billing, and like I remember at the firm I used to work out, like getting bills out was like a big administrative thing, like the somebody, I think it was an admin person would generate like draft bills, and then the partners would go through it and like strike out whatever they wanted to strike out or reword anything, and then they would hand it to the associate, and the associate would go through and review their time, and like make sure there was all whatever, and they would give it back to the admin person. The admin person would turn it into a final invoices, and the final invoices would get signed. It was like a gigantic like multi-step thing, and now we use Lomatic's time in billing. I know some people have gripes with it. I've never been able to figure out exactly what their concerns were, but at the beginning of the month, not so much anymore, but whenever we need to send out invoices for hourly time, you just click like generate invoices, and then you hit like a checkbox or whatever that generates all invoices for all cases that have time in the system, and then you can skim through it if you want, but most of it's more of a time, so it were my perially those time, and I trust her implicitly in terms of how she billed, so I'm not worried about it, but if you wanted to, you could audit all those entries and change them or strike them out of it. But as soon as you're comfortable with it, you just hit like send all invoices, and it will email and text them out to no matter how many people you have, it was a thousand clients. - Yeah. - It will send those all out, and then drip them reminders to pay however long you set. And I was like, I was just sitting there thinking like, we took what used to be a highly complex annoying process, and boiled it down to like a couple of clicks on a bad day. You spend 20 minutes on invoicing. I would want it on. And for some people, it's a huge administrative headache. It's like it doesn't, it doesn't happen. We just use good technology. - Yeah, I mean, and I used to, yeah, I definitely had that experience along the way where you know, 'cause I use file vine, right? And file vine's billing in time was absolutely horrendous. I don't even know what it is now, because they just had, they didn't have a native sync with QuickBooks. So like literally it was, they had these third parties creating, a custom sync that was different from which third party you got, right? So you could have a different sync than the guy next to you because they used a different third party. And then you're paying, they were charging either extra just to just import your time into QuickBooks in the proper way. So it was just like, this is terrible. And they may have done, I think they've done some revamping in recently, but I use a platform called Minute7. It's actually, it's QuickBooks, it's Intuits, one of Intuits, just companies they bought along the way. It's a very simple program to enter time and expenses. So everybody enters in there. It automatically syncs everything into QuickBooks. And then I go into QuickBooks and I just pull up the invoice. It's, I just add everything from there and send out the, you know, the invoices. So, huh. That is a platform I have never heard of before. So I'm gonna have to. Minute7? Yeah, never heard of that. Yeah, I mean, I guess it was, it's a small kind of this like, you know, basic functionality, but it does exactly what I wanted to do. And it took me a while to find a program to do that, to interlay over QuickBooks, 'cause I want everything. 'Cause we do a lot of analytics tracking through QuickBooks. Everything is done through there when it comes to all of our skews, profitability, you know, margins. The number of, you know, all the data that we track is all done through back end analytics through QuickBooks, you know, their systems. So, gotcha. Well, that makes sense. So, yeah, so that, I mean, those are just some examples about like how that, all the way through that initial glide path can be more or less completely automated from an admin standpoint or easily and cheaply delegated to, you know, outsource or receptionist. I mean, like that whole sequence, like that we just talked about there, you could probably knock out for, well, and you can make it even cheaper too. 'Cause like, I'm a big app sumo junkie. I just like watching their deals and seeing what apps are coming in for free or discounted rates. And they have a, they have a native app called TidyCal, which we actually use for the podcast for scheduling, which costs like 30 bucks for a lifetime sub and it's like a calendar competitor. It doesn't have all features of calendar. Like, and we still use calendar 'cause a couple awesome features like routing forms and so like that. But it's like calendar light for a $30 lifetime fee. So like if you want to bake in, you know, scheduling links and self-scheduling or virtual reception scheduling, like it doesn't have to be any more expensive than a $30 one time fee. - What's to come? - So, you know, I love the mindset of you get what you pay for most of the time when it comes to tech products. Where's the catch add on these things? 'Cause you're like, you know, you have documentarrow, right? Or that you like and use, you have these other things that are $30 like, I'm, where's the catch? And I'm always looking for the cat. Like $30, their time use or like $100 for lifetime use for documentarrow, like, where's the catch? - I mean, there is a catch with all of them. It's just how big of a catch it is depends on, you know, depends on your personal situation. Am I, I think our audio and video are disconnected? - Yeah, I don't know about it. It'll work itself out. - Okay, I'm sorry. - So yeah, so like, to give the tidy Cal example, like tidy Cal, it doesn't have all the features of Cal only. Like, I don't know that it has like, team, I'd have to look through it. I don't know that it has like team scheduling stuff. I don't know that it has like, it doesn't have routing forms, for example. So like, one of the things on Cal only is we give, we give Smith a routing form. So they basically check a couple boxes and it will intelligently send them to the correct booking page depending on is it a client, is it a new lead, is it a attorney or whoever it is. So they don't even have to think about which link to use. It just, you know, finds the right link for them. But I don't even know if that's necessary 'cause their system logic is pretty darn good. But, I mean, that's really the catcher that is just, it doesn't have quite as many features. But if all you need is like, I need a link to let somebody schedule a Zoom meeting or phone meeting and have rules on when they can schedule. Like, tidy Cal will do that for 30 bucks one time. - Yeah, you know, documentary, I've been thinking a lot about what the limitations of it are relative to a tool, like Gaville, for example. And the main limitations are that you have to build your own data source. Like, with Gaville, like it has, you know, it stores the data in the like data warehouse tab or whatever. So if somebody submits a form, well, you can go pull that same form back up and all the data's there. Whereas you can't do that with documentary. It has to be connected to a data source. Like, that's why we have air table. We build it on top of air table. Whereas you could build it on top of anything, like Cleo or, you know, my case or whatever. As long as you have a place to get the data out. Or even if it's just a simple intake form, you could use that, but it wouldn't save the data, right? So, documentary doesn't have a storage of database and it doesn't have an automation engine. So like, let's say you wanted to automate like 15 different templates, whereas a tool like Gaville, you just prep all those templates with the right fields and upload them into the system. And then you check a couple boxes, I need these templates to be generated and it will generate all those. Whereas with Documentaryo, it's best used to the API. So like, you need to go into make.com or Zappier and like actually create the nodes that say, all right, this document will be generated when this condition is satisfied. So like, you have to build the engine. So like, there's definitely more, you know, more setup to it. But then Documentaryo is like 170 bucks, one time fee. So if you, you're gonna be building in make and you're gonna use the tool like air table or something anyway, it makes a lot of sense. It's really depends on who you are, what you're doing. But you're right, there are catches. They're usually apt-to-modials are missing some feature. - Yeah. - That is a main industry tool, apps. And sometimes it's something big, sometimes it's something small. I think at this point, I'm now on the enterprise level at Gaville, which I'm trying to get down from. It's of cost, you know, but it's a small firm. Yeah, I'm trying to get down from that. But yeah, I mean, you know, there's a fine line. There's always this kind of balance between cost and value, and actual true value, right? So it's, you know, I'm trying to, I always try to keep my costs, you know, try to reduce them, but like I realize that at some point though, that for the client experience that I want in the kind of the operations functionality, unless I'm, you know, unless I'm doing a lot of work building on the back end, right? Of, you know, kind of using cheaper products. And just, so cheaper products equal more time to build and function, right? You know, and then at least for me. So when it comes to my value build, it's like, I know where I am. You know, I want to present a certain level of client experience, which I think is, which what I strive for is state of the art experience, right? What is the best possible experience a client can have? And that just costs a certain amount of money to be able to put together. And you can always trim things here and there, but I think that for functionality standpoint, you know, having that great level of client experience is really important. And you know, I'm very cognizant about when it comes to new tech adding on one for costs, right? So I want to increase costs right on need too, but is it really going to, you know, go towards my core, my core functions? - Yeah, definitely, yeah, that's, that's, you know, critical in terms of adding, adding software. You can definitely get out a head of your skis and start thinking that every shiny tool is going to solve your problem. Like I had another post, somebody posted in the legal tech collective group this morning was about email. And she was talking about how she was exhausted by her email and she was trying to decide between a couple of email tools. It was, she was like, oh, should I be using superhuman or Spark and I sent back a response, where I was like, the email tool is not going to help you. Like you could buy all the email tools in the world and they're not going to help you solve your problem because the problem wasn't with the email tool. The problem was that there wasn't enough information going to the client. So like they weren't, you know, they're asking questions or, you know, the volume of inbound email is so high. So you got to examine like, why is the volume of inbound email so high? In general, it's more a problem of not providing enough information preempturally or before somebody asks then it is about, you know, automating those automating those outbound information, more about that than it is about, oh, did I respond to that, you know, stack of emails fast enough? Well, it's like, if you only had a quarter of those emails because two thirds of them are three quarters of them were never sent in the first place. It has a very different, different issue, you know what I mean? Yeah. Easy to think of tools going to solve your problems. So that's, we've kind of talked a lot about the admin on the front end going through, you know, the sales sequence, engagements, invoicing. But there's obviously admin components like all throughout the entire case lifecycle. You know, things that come to mind in kind of the middle case management phases would be like generating documents, tracking deadlines, you know, client communication, you know, updating them about the status of the case, things like that. We've talked a lot, a lot of these things on different episodes, but those are obviously all administrative tasks. And most of them are ripe for automation, right? I mean, you've talked about your use of your portal, right? With case cases. Case status, yeah. Huge fan. They have a ton of automations that you can build in. I mean, pretty much anything you want to do or send to them, you can send videos, you can send a checklist to them, you know, the client. And for the most part, that's fully automated on our end. We don't, if you're asking a client for the same thing in the same case at every single, at the same time, right? There's absolutely no reason why you or your administrative staff should be doing that. It should be fully automated to trigger setup, something, you know, this other ancillary thing changes whether it's a phase or however, you know, you track your cases. Those things should just have to be automated at this point in time. Now, the client communication, I think, is another huge one, is like, you know, communication, and course mine is always like the top bar complaint. Like, you know, it's the thing that most clients complain about is not having communication with their attorney, but it's like not that hard to automate it. Like if you're using a CRM or a case management system, some kind of like tool to track your cases. Like at least one of those properties should be like, what phase are we in of this case? And virtually all cases can be broken down into phases. Even if you're in like abstract, you know, complex litigation, like you still have like pre-lit, you know, discovery, retrial, trial, post-trial, like you can still break it into phases and provide the client with like lots of information at each piece of those, each phase in that case. What alone if you run like a highly procedural process driven practice like probate or trademarks or, you know, something like that. - If they plan to, I mean, yeah. - Yeah, exactly. Like each phase just set up an automated email in your system. Like every system can send automated emails pretty much. And if they can't, that system probably is connected to Zapier, just have a two-step zap phase change is, phases X in case management, send Gmail email that says this stuff. - Yeah. - There you go. I was on you, automated a huge value ad for your client and they're getting more information. - In admin task, off your play. - Along those lines of the communication too. And I found this is super important to keep clients happy, right? You know, we constantly, we track our client experience through case status, right? They rate us at every phase, phase change. They give us, you know, a zero to 10. 'Cause we want to make sure that we're providing the best possible services to our clients, right? So one of the most important things when it comes to client communication that I have found out is that not just the actual communications themselves, but creating that expectation of a time frame for everything, right? Hey client, we just filed our documents with the court. Expect 30 to 60 days in St. Louis County here, right? Hey client, we just got a judgment back from the court. It's gonna take at least seven to 10 days to get the original order from the court and the mail before we can send it to you, right? Constantly tell the client how long it's gonna take for each thing that you're doing so that in their minds, they register it. They don't care if it's three days, it's gonna take or if it's 300 days, they just want to know that if you don't tell them up front during these through optic life of the case, if you're not telling them constantly how long things are gonna take. After a week, they're gonna go, what's going on here? What's happening? You know, why is nobody getting back to me? Why is this taking so long, right? 'Cause you have not established expectations. Yep, yep, absolutely. All those emails that you get that are like, what's, you know, what's going on or just wanted a status update or whatever. Like those disappear if the person knows what to expect because you told them, and in bonus points, if you told them through an animation, because, so that's like a dual problem that you're solving there. Number one, you're solving the admin task of telling them what's going on and what to expect. And number two, you're also at the same time cutting down on unnecessary and bound emails that you have to deal, which is another irritating and a huge problem for a lot of attorneys. Another irritating issue is email management at the same time. So, all right, big easy wins there. I think we're getting close to time here for today's episode. So, let's do some tips or, you know, some tips of the week or for the episode. One thing that I've been working on recently is my drip campaign, right? I've been talking about doing this internally for a while, set up, finally set up a drip campaign for, again, it's all focused around new client intake, right? Conversions, right? So, the clients who I don't sign up directly on that call and that consultation, if they're not, yeah, I want to move forward, send me links right now, let's get it done, then they go into two columns, either a very interested column or a lukewarm column in pipe drive, which tells us how to set priority on followups, right? Is this person, you know, their lukewarm, or we obviously prioritize following up with the very interested people because those people are more likely to sign up, right? But we have is a automation through mailchimp. So, I created a, yeah, it's an eight day drip. Every day, there's a new piece of content, actually a really good value add stuff in a newsletter site format that once they, once their deal is drug in pipe drive into one of those two columns, very interested or lukewarm, then they automatically are added as a potential client tag in the mailchimp campaign. And then once that happens, they're added to the seven or eight day drip campaign as well. So that they'll get materials. So, we'll follow up according to our schedule, get calls and texts and stuff like that on the followups, but every day they're gonna get an email, you know, at least seeing our name, seeing some great content, some five-star reviews, stuff like that, just to help the conversion process. Yeah, there you go. That's big. The, my chip of the week is get off the phones. Like if you're still a solo or very small firm and you're still answering the phone, like you don't need to be answering the phone, like we talked about, call, you know, send an email or reach out to Smith AI or Ruby Reception or back office beddies or any of these, like, phone virtual reception people. And see if any of them will work out like a small volume deal, like if you're getting 100 calls a month yet, you know, see if they'll work out a small call volume deal where you're spending a fortune. Even if you're small, like you can afford, like, you know, 80 bucks a month. And if you can't afford 80 bucks a month, you've got bigger problems than your admin, you know, call volume, right? Because they're marketing and selling cases more than, more than worrying about admin problems. But, you know, so get that set up and then go to the next step and write a super simple zap, you know, Smith AI call received, you know, filter by new leads, set up a new lead in my CRM. If you don't have a CRM, put it in a Google sheet, track your Google sheet leads. And if you want to really go the next step, just add us a third node, ooh, third node. And do a Slack node or a Google chat node or whatever your internal SEO communication information is like if your Google workspace family or firm use your Google chat, if your Microsoft Office, put it in Teams, just add a third node or you drop the summary of that call into a Slack channel or a Google chat channel or a Teams channel. And so now you have a live feed of the summary transcripts of every phone call that comes in who called when they call. There you go, boom, phones, admin delegated, give them your countily scheduling link or your ID call scheduling link. And boom, you're off the phones. You don't have to worry about phones anymore unless you're calling a client to, you know, for a meeting or something, right? - And just one quick, that's a great tip. Quick add onto that is, let's say you have somebody internally that's answering the phones, right? You have your paralegal answering or your legal assistant, whoever, right? You have your first hire, they're actually answering the phones. Do not have a call service, a backup call service for after hours, okay? You must have after hours service. When I first transitioned my team into answering the calls, I was like, well, I can just drop off, drop the backup service, right? I have somebody internally doing it now. I'm paying them, you know, they're doing it full time. And what I realized is that, even now, you know, at some point somebody said, well, you need to do that, right? So I'm like, okay, we'll all add that back in, you know, it should be just a couple calls extra, right? We'll see what's there. We have over 100 calls a month that are after hours calls, either on the weekends or after the time frame, after our, you know, our staff goes home for the day or, you know, on lunch, on their lunch breaks or if they're on another call with another client. So really just, the answering service is a must have, whether you have somebody in house or not, as well, 'cause it's so important to not, it's so important to be able to take those calls. So, and as a super brief second tip of the week, open phone just launched their visual call routing editor thing that's now like drag and drop bubbles, just like dappier or make or whatever. And so you can actually visually drag and create your, your call flow, if they're calling in during work hours or after work hours, you know, you can set different, who's it gonna forward to, is it gonna go to outside phones or is it gonna go to inside phones? So easy to set up now, like open phone, just, I don't get paid by that, I have a major props to open phone. (laughing) But that's it, that's it for this week guys. Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed the episode, leave us a five star review on Spotify, Apple Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts, that helps other people find us and enjoy the content as well. If you'd like to take the conversation offline, join us to the Legal Tech Selective Facebook group where we talk AI and automation and all kinds of fun stuff like that all the time. So, that's it for this week. Thanks again, John, good talking. Yeah, but always a pleasure to see you next weekend. See you later. (upbeat music)