Your onboarding process walks new clients through the steps of signing up with your firm and becoming an established client. Ideally, it will be smooth and inviting for clients, staff, and lawyers. But firms juggling multiple duties and a patchwork of tools and software often face problems.
Clients feel neglected and confused. Legal workers feel stressed. The firm as a whole suffers.
This is one reason lead management software for lawyers is growing in popularity. By helping your team with each step of the intake process, it allows you to:
- Bring in more leads
- Optimize your marketing budget
- Manage your intake team
- Generate revenue from references
- Give potential clients the attention they deserve
After investing big in legal marketing — including in some of the most expensive keywords in Google Ads — firms are learning they can’t afford to neglect any of the leads their efforts generate.
Lead management software packs a powerful punch. But it works best when it's fully calibrated to your legal case management software and your entire legal onboarding process.
You can watch the webinar to learn how to connect your legal software for greater success.
Here are 5 common problems with client onboarding and how to use legal software to fix them:
1. Pace of Intake Doesn't Match Capacity
We know what happens when intake is too slow: the work dries up, and firms flounder.
But what about the reverse? When you invest in innovative new tools to automate lead management, you need systems in place to meet the needs of all those new clients. Otherwise, it’s like doubling the speed of only the first part of an assembly line — you’re setting yourself up for pile-ups, stress, and overwork down the line.
If your conversion rate grows and caseloads increase, you also need legal work efficiency tools, like case management software, to help you fully scale up your practice and provide more clients with the service they deserve. Otherwise, you might need to hire more help or become pickier about the clients you sign on.
2. New Clients Feel Abandoned After Signing-On
If you have strong intake but weak follow-through, your new clients might worry you’re neglecting them.
The process of chasing leads can be intensive, with intake professionals reaching out regularly. Obviously, you can’t keep up that cadence for long — and most clients would be annoyed if you did. But you should still be able to provide timely updates and respond promptly to client questions.
Case management tools can help you continue to provide attentive service to clients throughout the entire life cycle of their case. With automated updates, workflow templates, and easy client texting tools, you can let your clients know they’re on your mind.
3. Abrupt Hand-Offs
It makes sense for different professionals to deal with different stages of the new client journey. But without a good hand-off, clients can feel like they’re bouncing around to different people. They’re never able to develop a relationship with any individual or build up a sense of trust. Even worse, clients often have to repeat their story again with each new person.
To build greater client confidence, create more reassuring hand-offs between team members. Make sure incoming clients understand each person’s role. And look for software that immediately begins to capture client details and makes them accessible and clear to all relevant staff members. It will ease client frustration if each new person they meet already knows their story.
4. Duplicate Data Entry
When you use a patchwork of software systems that don’t talk to each other, your staff wastes time doing menial data entry. But even worse, every time manual entry is used it opens the door for human error. If you put in a phone number or email address wrong, you won’t be able to reach your client. Or you could make an embarrassing mistake that will frustrate the client and make them question your professionalism.
Instead, use tools that allow you to populate data fields directly from webforms of other channels, and then keeps one central repository of truth throughout the entire process.
5. Data Gaps
When you’re making decisions about marketing and lead generation, you need real data. Which channels are giving you the best final return on investment? Which are lagging behind? How has revenue by marketing source changed over time?
But this information requires connecting your earliest intake data with your final outcomes. Before modern legal software, you could only know these answers by painstakingly updating spreadsheets. Fall behind, and you leave big gaps in your data, leaving you to make your marketing decisions off of outdated or incomplete information.
But a cohesive system can keep a constant tally of this information and feed you real-time numbers. By using lead management and legal case management software that talks to each other, you can.
Watch the webinar to see how one firm saved $250,000 a year on their advertising costs by using their data to better allocate their marketing investments.
The Solution: Connected Legal Tools
It’s difficult to give clients and staff a smooth onboarding process when you’re using a hodgepodge patchwork of legal software. To get the most out of your automation technology, look for tools that connect with each other.
New technology allows you to create a holistic, end-to-end client experience. Integrated tools allow you to:
- Scale up your legal practice
- Save time and reduce staff stress
- Improve service to clients at all stages
- Get the larger picture of your marketing outcomes
Watch the webinar to see how firms are improving the client onboarding process.
Sam Tabibian, managing partner at the firm Lyfe Law, explains the changes that happened when his firm implemented connected legal software:
“From my perspective, utilizing Lead Docket and Filevine enables me to not have to do as much work as an attorney. It frees my time to spend with family, grow the firm, or better plan and organize our software. I went on a longer vacation and everything ran without me having to be there. I had peace of mind and it made a huge difference.”
Watch the webinar or schedule a demo to learn what a connected legal work platform can do for your firm.