Nick Werker

Kevin Daisey (00:31)
All right, Nick Worker, what’s up, man? My friend, welcome to the show.

Nick Werker (00:36)
Kevin Daisy.

Kevin Daisey (00:38)
Let’s go. Me and Nick have known each other for a little while. So, we’re recording. Thank you everyone for tuning in. Excited to have Nick here. I like to leave with a question, some, help for folks out there. Nick is deep in intake. We’ll get into that in a second. but Nick had just how important is intake when you’re talking to all the clients that you have. What you see on a daily basis, but

Nick Werker (00:40)
Good to see you, man.

Kevin Daisey (01:03)
Just share kind of like your passion for it and how important it is for law firm owners to take it serious.

Nick Werker (01:08)
So it’s

really funny. I talked to a lot of people in my network about how much I love LinkedIn and intake right now, especially in like the legal marketing community is the hottest topic. It’s the second hottest topic besides like AI mode overviews and like GEO, whatever acronym you want to call it. How important is intake?

Kevin Daisey (01:28)
Yeah.

Nick Werker (01:30)
You can have the best marketing. can rank number one for all your keywords. You can get all the referrals from Chat GPT. You can have the best referral network. You can even have the best set up CRM. But unless you have a fundamental understanding of intake and a process that matches the way that your internal workflows are, you can’t convert.

any of your marketing leads or whatever your terminology is to actual paying clients. So intake is one of those things that it’s like.

I think we’ve rebranded sales for the legal community because we were like, oh, you should do sales. And every lawyer was like, no, sales are bad. And we were like, okay, let’s call it intake. And now they’re like kind of buying into it. But like I mentioned to you before we were recording, a lot of what we do when we’re speaking to lawyers who are…

I’ll call it bootstrapped, right? Like new solo practitioners and small law firms obviously have an interest in keeping costs low and making sure that they’re giving the best possible experience to customers. A lot of them don’t have any intake process or know what questions that they should be answering at the start of a call about a specific type of case. So that’s where we come in. We do a little bit of consulting. We kind of get aligned with goals and help them understand the information that they’re gonna need.

and intake is vitally important if you want to make money.

Kevin Daisey (02:51)
A hundred percent. mean, you I’m in the marketing space driving leads and it’s working to my sales process to talk about intake, figure out what that’s like. And I don’t even ask questions about marketing and stuff like that. It’s really, I can see everything about where they’re at, how they rank, how they show up, what’s their, just based on what kind of marketing that we do here, but, intake.

If you got a form right now, how do you handle that? If you got a phone call right now, how does that handle it? If you had a chat come through or a LSA lead that you’re going to pay for, or a click from Google ads until a landing page, you know, how has this all been handled? And so that’s important to know because I can sign a client. They’ve been to five agencies. They want leads. We get them leads. Problem persists. They’re not happy. And so,

You know, it’s really important for us to understand is the client, invested in that and have they got a system in place already? or like you said, bootstrap, got a lot. have a lot of smaller clients that do reach out to us that we do work with, that are solo and they’re, you know, I’ll get these things like this. Kevin, I don’t want any clients calling me that don’t do blah, blah, blah, or don’t have this or that. And it’s just like, you know, they’re already coming in hot, like.

They feel frustrated that they have to take a call that clients not just perfect case for them. And it’s like, you know, they’re probably not doing very well at converting those calls that do come in. So.

Nick Werker (04:19)
We have the same problem. It’s like you want to get phone answering help, right? And people will be like, well, what happens if the case is no good or it’s not in my practice area or it’s this? And I’m like, well, you should have a process to refer that case out or pre-qualify it. maybe you know somebody who handles that type of specific case and you refer that out.

Nothing is going to be, I think, a perfect one-to-one fit every single time. I think that’s the nature of the law. But yeah, I think getting overly concerned about what you don’t want is a negative outlook and your intention should be to focus on what you do want and how to address everything that comes in. You know what I mean? Like have a plan. This is kind of what we’re talking about and this is what intake is about in general is having a plan and having a process in place.

So it’s like, what happens to your point, right? What happens if this type of call comes in and it’s not the perfect case for me? Do I have specific criteria where I’ll take it anyway? Do I have specific criteria for I tell them politely, like, it’s not a good fit for us and you should contact X, Y, and Z? Or do I have like, I…

I only do family law and somebody called me for a criminal thing because they got a referral from a family member and then I have a referral network that I send criminal cases to because I know somebody. It’s like if you don’t have that plan, you don’t know what you’re going to do. And then you ignore the person and they leave you a one-star review and you’re baffled.

Kevin Daisey (05:44)
Yeah. And people do leave bad reviews and not even hire the firm. And then your lawyer is like, but they didn’t even hire, we didn’t even work with this person. uh, and so you’re tell Google that, um, and you know, good luck getting in a hole with anybody there. So, uh, even though it may come off eventually, um, it may stay for forever. So, um, how the, how you, they interacted with your business, right. And so, um,

Nick Werker (06:10)
That’s exactly right. That’s the definition that Google states as what qualifies for a valid review. It’s any interaction with your business.

Kevin Daisey (06:18)
Yeah, no, hundred percent. So yeah, having a plan for this stuff and having the right things in place and technology tools, you know, things have changed so much, man. It’s, I’ve said this a lot on the podcast is exact same words. People are used to Uber and Domino’s and all this instantaneous gratification and notifications and where’s my information and what’s going on. And it’s just so rapid. It is so fast that

they get a different experience from the call, a law firm or an agency or whatever. And so we got to get on board with, with what the normal consumer out there is expecting. So, and they’re also probably in a bad situation. They’re calling a lawyer, probably the first time. So, you know, it’s. They, they’re whatever situation they’re in is probably not a good one unless they’re, you know, calling.

a state-planning firm or they’re trying to do something that’s more of a future thing. yeah, empathy on the phone, how you handle the call, they’re in a bad spot. you know, there’s a lot of other things that you got to think about, like what’s the process, the call scripts, you know, all those things have to be figured out. So, it’s huge.

And then I think, some of the top firms that I’ve had on this show, like they, they’re constantly looking at their metrics and like tightening them down and response times. And, you know, they have lots of data and dashboards because they’re bigger, they scale, but listen to them too. Like, you know, if you, this podcast or other podcasts or any of these folks that are out there talking about this stuff, you can learn a lot from what they’re doing because they do have the scale.

Start to look at just the small tweaks that make a big difference. And the small firms, you know, can learn.

Nick Werker (07:59)
See, that’s my favorite thing to look into is like at heart, I’m a marketer, right? Like I run all the marketing here and I don’t subscribe to like first click attribution, last click, multi-touch, because it’s like not representative of a customer journey, right? And there’s multiple offline

marketing efforts that you can have out there, especially when you’re a lawyer, Like billboards are really popular, but I do like and encourage using data as it pertains to your internal processes, right? So like say part of your intake, you have a three-step intake process. A lead comes in, you answer the phone call or it’s like a direct response type of thing. You get a form filler, you get a chat.

Before the phone call can be made, like say it happens after hours, you have an automated email that goes out. You have an automated SMS text that goes out and an option for the person to book a calendar. That’s like the three step process that goes out.

You need to know how effective each of those things are. Like what’s the percentage rate of people who respond to the email versus engage with the SMS text, right? Like 65 % of people are texting you back and 35 % of people are emailing you back. Got a better shot at text messaging. If every time you get a client, to schedule an appointment on your Calendly or whatever calendar integration you’re using, they have an 80 % chance of actually showing up for the meeting as opposed to a 30 % chance if you just try and call them back. Then these are the things that you build into your intake process. Sure, you can look at click-through rate and where traffic is coming from and invest more in those channels to be more visible for how people are actually searching for you on the demand side. I just…

I’m one those people who’s very data skeptical as it pertains to specific channel marketing. And I really love when people get granular about like call tracking to make sure that, what’s their answer rate? What’s the response rate? What time of day are people calling the most so that you can put things out there in order to capture them? And one of my favorite things to do and I do this internally here and it informs a lot of what I put out there for marketing is I’d listen to the actual sales calls. So like if you have a law firm and even if you’re solo, get a call tracking software and listen to your sales calls, even if you’re the one doing them, it just helps you so much. Like you can throw it into chat GPT too and get insights and there’s programs like Gong out there. they were the first to do this.

Nick Werker (10:42)
But they give you specific insights on where like the conversation drops off and maybe you don’t say this thing in this way, or maybe you cover pricing in a different way. And it informs your intake process and you can make changes on how you talk to people and whether or not you try to match their tone or joke around or, you know, like.

Nick Werker (11:04)
There’s strategy behind everything and you can inform like you’re going to be your own person at the end of the day. Every conversation is going to go differently no matter how much of a script you have or questions that you need to ask. listening to your phone calls will give you the contextual human insight onto what’s actually working.

Kevin Daisey (11:21)
Yeah, huge. yeah, we just started using a system called Avoma, which is records of calls, like video call kind of like this. And, I got trigger words too. So we built out like a template. And so if I’m like, Hey Nick, tell me about your, your law firm. Like, give me an overview of your law firm. Well, the word overview is a trigger and then it’ll organize everything that they talk about the firm. How many attorneys or revenue, all that will be all in my notes, all sections. But then you can also look at.

yeah. How long you talked, how long they talks, the tones, the things that you missed. I didn’t, I didn’t ask them about their intake completely forgot. on the next meeting that I have with them, I need to make sure that I covered that. because to your point, we’re human and we’re going to kind of go and follow things along. So, super helpful to look at how you’re interacting with these, with your potential client and where you need to improve.

Yeah, there’s so much out there. well, Nick, wanted to, I don’t know if we even mentioned Nick’s with answering legal. and, most people probably know of your podcast and who you are, but, they also have some exciting stuff. We can talk about intake all day and we’re going to continue to kind of talk about it. but answering legal has been coming out with some new products and wanted to kind of get Nick on here to talk about what they’re up to, what they’re doing.

They’re obviously known for taking care of your phones 24 seven and, Nick, I guess tell us a little bit of background about yourself and answering legal. And then we’ll kind of dive into what you guys are up to.

Nick Werker (13:59)
Yeah, I love it. for the softball there. I was actually playing slow pitch last night and you just like threw me a lob. I’m not that good. I don’t hit home runs, but like, it’s some line drives. ⁓ and I jog around the bases and that’s my exercise. Yeah, I’ve been with answering legal a long time. We originally started out and it wasn’t a crowded space, you know, like answering phones. There was like Call Ruby did a really good job.

Kevin Daisey (14:09)
Alright, alright.

Nick Werker (14:24)
But largely we were the only answering service that really dedicated ourselves to answering for lawyers. And we just, like there was such a demand for it that we just started building our systems to be able to handle intake and routing and like the way that we answer the phones and training our receptionists to like understand what people are talking about when they call in the weird thing, right? Is

buyers, over time, in a market get more educated on how they’re going to buy things? And so people will call in and say, oh, I have an MVA. And the receptionist would balk and be like, what’s an MVA? Or I have a Chapter 13. And it’s like, what’s a Chapter 13? Divorce is a little easier. I’m pretty sure divorce is more common thing. But over the years, you have to evolve, right? The market is always changing.

And so we’ve had to upgrade our technology. So we do, we do a lot of things now, like over the past couple of years, we’ve developed direct integrations with all sorts of legal CRMs and non-legal CRMs that people are using and Zapier and all that stuff. Because to lawyer’s credit, like I’ve been, I’ve been in this game a long time. I’m, working here 11 years. and I remember like Lexicata. I don’t know if anybody knows what Lexicata is, but it’s now Clio Grow.

and nobody was integrated. Like you just got your messages from the service. Nobody was really using a CRM. They got paper and filing cabinets and receptionists and all that. So what we came out with now is like AI is huge and we have a really great, I was going to say sick. we have a really great, software engineer team, I guess is what you would call them. And they had the idea to build.

an intake chat bot for lawyers websites. And there’s a few out there that I think do a really good job, but they’re

not really fundamentally run by AI. And so what we did was built. there’s somehow, I’m not a software engineer, but I do have a fundamental understanding of how it works. So this thing is laid over open AI, which is the model for a chat GPT. Right now it’s on GPT 4.1 mini. I know for sure. I think that’s the best conversational one. Again.

I’m not the best AI forefront expert in the world. I’m just a marketing guy. But, so here’s what we did, right? Is we put that in the chat bot and then developed a way to steer a conversation and also lead with empathy and match the chatter’s tone. So essentially what it does, and like we have a cool bunch of demos for this. think I sent it to you is. So I was on a call yesterday with Jordan Ostroff from The Lei’d Back Life and.

Kevin Daisey (16:38)
Yeah, I saw the demo. It was really awesome. Yeah.

Nick Werker (17:03)
And what’s the name? Carpe Diem Consulting. Such a great guy. And he’s got a big personality. So I was like, just play with the chatbot, do it. Like I just threw him to the wolves, right? And he’s writing all this stuff. And the bot that we built for this test website is largely for criminal defense and personal injury because you have to customize it. You have to tell it information. So, like, say you wanted to use the chatbot, Kevin, I could feed the

Kevin Daisey (17:07)
Yeah, Jordan’s awesome.

Nick Werker (17:29)
the chat about a bunch of information about Array Digital, your services, who to contact about what, your phone number, your business hours, your address, all the stuff that it could possibly know about your business. It’s kind of like a custom GPT in that way. And then it’ll flow the conversation and continue to ask questions in a specific cadence and like steer the conversation back. So, say you try to, you’re like, Hey, I need SEO, PPC.

LSAs, all this stuff, right? It’ll say like, great, like we’re so happy to hear that. We offer the following things in terms of that. What’s your first name? And the person says like, well, where are you located? I’m here. And it’ll be like, I’m in Chesapeake Bay of Virginia. I’m pretty sure that’s where you are. May I have your first name? You know, it’ll keep trying to steer it back to get the information.

What Jordan did was he threw a complete curveball because in the script it said it would do an estate plan. I was kind of nervous. I was like, don’t know if this thing is built to answer estate planning questions. He starts asking questions and throwing it like, Jordan, but my friends call me Jor. It was like, okay, Jordan. It didn’t mess up his name and call him Jordan, but please call me Jor. Then he started asking questions about an estate plan.

Nick Werker (18:41)
And it was like, like I understand you move states and that’s like, you know, X, Y, and Z. Can you upload the current version of your estate plan so that we can see it, get an overview. And then when you come in, we know like what the assets are on the estate plan and why you need to change it and how we can help you change it, which state you came from, which state you’re going to. Jordan’s a lot of fun. So like he had me laughing the whole time.

It gave me a lot of confidence too, because like I’ve done my own internal testing, but you don’t know how users are going to use it, right? Until you put it out there. So it’s in beta right now and our customers are liking it, but a lot of what we’re doing is like implementation and training it. And you have to do one-to-one training. Again, it’s like building a custom GPT. So we have to train the bot and then give it to the attorney and then they run their own testing and say like, I wanted to say this instead of that.

Or I’d like it to respond in this way instead of this way. Oh, I forgot. I have to add this specific thing about this type of case that I handle because of who knows what reason. ⁓ What’s been really cool? The feedback so far has been really good. And there’s kind of, to my luck and prosperity, no one out there who’s really doing something like this. And again, it’s free.

Kevin Daisey (19:42)
Yeah.

Nick Werker (19:56)
for anybody, you don’t even have to be answering legal customers. So if you’re a lawyer watching this, yeah.

Kevin Daisey (19:59)
I was about to ask that next, like, what’s the deal with it? How do you get it? How much is it?

Nick Werker (20:03)
It’s bizarre because they came to me with this project. They’re like, hey, this is how we developed it. All that. Like I’m working with the product and the dev team and talking to the CEO. And we’re like, okay, like how do we go to market with this? Right? Like what’s our pricing structure? He’s like, just give it away for free.

Okay. Who do we give it away to for free? Like customers, like you have to become a customer in order to get it. Nope. Just give it away to lawyers for free. We have this whole press release coming out about, why we’re giving it away for free. I won’t get into that right now. There’s, there’s a specific reason and, and it’s a good one, but to me, it’s really cool because it’s like AI is really changing law firms.

And instead of being like gatekeeping this process from law firms and saying, oh, pay me, we’ll show you this, that, the third, just here you go.

It’s the best thing that we could offer possibly for free. We’re not selling your data. There’s no, I don’t know, there’s like terms and conditions that say we’re not selling your data. All that. How do you get it? So I’ll send you a link, Kevin, that would be great if you put it.

Kevin Daisey (21:00)
Yeah. How’s my lawyers listening to get access to it and check it out or check the demos out or sign up.

Nick Werker (21:06)
Yeah, so

If you just go to answeringlegal.com, you’ll find it under the product section. If you want to be really fancy, it’s answeringlegal.com slash AI dash chat bot. And you schedule a demo. We’ll hop on a zoom call with you for like a half hour, tell you like what the capabilities are, get aligned with the goals of your firm and how your internal processes work so that we can kind of match it to that. And then we’ll talk about the questions that you want to get answered. And then we’ll set up custom endpoints to go to your CRM via direct integrations.

Set up a Calendly integration and then upload. So we do like a questionnaire. I would send you, like say I was putting it on your site. I would send you this, it’s basically like a Google form, right? We use a different form posting thing. And you just answer questions about your business. So who gets this type of lead? What’s the name of the business? Where are you located? What type of cases do you handle? What’s your pricing?

Kevin Daisey (21:56)
Sounds like my intake form for a new client. Questionnaire.

Nick Werker (21:59)
Exactly.

It’s exactly that.

Kevin Daisey (22:02)
I love how it has Calendly integrated into the chat. So when you pop up the chat on the website, you’d talk to it, do all those things. And when you’re ready to schedule an appointment, it literally just loads right in there. And you’re just like click, choose your time. Right there. Done. It’s like, that’s pretty sweet.

Nick Werker (22:20)
I think that’s a user experience tactic too. You know this, you’re in marketing. One of my main goals when I build a resource on the site like that is to make sure that it doesn’t take you off of the site. I’ll see lawyers websites sometimes, like you go to schedule a consultation and it opens a separate window in a non-branded, non-embedded Calendly form. Then what happens when they fill out that? They’re not on your site anymore.

Kevin Daisey (22:40)
Yep.

Nick Werker (22:44)
And you want to keep them engaged. That’s time on site. Who knows what the SEO metrics are for Google. They lie. They tell you one thing. They do another. I just can’t imagine a world that it’s not better to have somebody on your site interacting with things than it is to bring them off of the site onto a non-embedded Calendly. So it was very cool for us to be able to get it in there.

Kevin Daisey (23:04)
You’ll definitely lose. Yeah.

It’s the point where you’ll lose again, you’ll lose people. Maybe, you know, if you’re small and you’re, you won’t, may not notice it, but I bet the bigger firms, you know, with a lot of traffic and to definitely say that’s, that’s losing cases. So for a small firm, you lose one case because of it. You know, could be 5,000. could be a hundred thousand dollars.

So, you you pay to get their attention. You might as well keep them there. Yeah. Yeah. I looked at a site, just today actually, and, PI firm out of, San Francisco area. They’re getting good traffic. The main rating is good. They rank for everything. No leads or anything reported. And, you know, it’s just looking at their stuff. It’s like, none of the buyer like journey information, the things you would need to make a decision are on their, their practice area pages.

Nothing. You know, you can tell they’re just made for SEO, but yet you drove someone to it and you’re missing all the stuff that they need to make a decision. So they got to go somewhere else, Google reviews or, or wherever. And you’re, making them dig for it. And so, just small things like that, that I see right now, people, their attention span is, is nothing. So if you get them there, you better do your best to convert them in these, something like this chat.

phone number with trial tracking and all that stuff, you gotta have it all.

Nick Werker (24:27)
I love stuff like that. and I’ll nerd out on this with you all day. ⁓ And people, people have the wrong idea about how to capture leads on a website. So a lot of sites that I’ll go to will have really poor like navigation slash call to action slash, call it a lead magnet, whatever you want to call it on a page. Right. And people are like,

Nick Werker (24:51)
How do I contact you? It’s frustrating. I would leave and find somebody else too if I didn’t have anything like that. People’s responses to that used to be like pop-ups, like fill out this pop-up. That’s invasive, know? People don’t want that. It’s spammy. You give them the opportunity and the choice, right? Then you’re not forcing them to do anything. It’s the same thing like we talk about intake. It’s not pressure, it’s opportunity. And…

What I personally like about our particular chatbot is that I think we have the capability to do it, though we don’t recommend that you do it. Is that it can pop up and prompt the user and say, like, hey, I’m Kevin Daisey from Array Digital. I love you. Will you love me back? We could do that. We’re not going to do that, right? But it doesn’t auto pop up and like,

Nick Werker (25:40)
interfere with somebody’s journey on the website. The best practice that I’ve found is like the law firm logo in the bottom. And then we can put like a little bubble that says like, hey, if you need any help, click me, like Clippy the Word Art guy from back in the day. If you’re old enough to remember when we all used Microsoft Word. I think lawyers actually still use Microsoft Word and there’s like plugins and things for that.

Kevin Daisey (25:48)
Yeah, most are on Microsoft, I think. I’m on Google, but…

Nick Werker (26:07)
I’m a Google Docs fanboy.

Kevin Daisey (26:09)
Yeah, for sure. Well, no, I agree with you. Um, there’s… I see all the chat bots. I know most of the people that are the owners are involved with the companies for the most part. Some are good. Some are great. I hate the one that just pops up right in the middle. Soon as you get on the site and it’s like, do you have a case? Yes or no. It’s like, you know, it happens to me every day. Cause I’m on law firm websites all day. And I just, I would hate that if I was getting ready to start reading something on a page and it’s like,

Do you have a case or not? It’s like literally like if you hit no, it’s like, does it like send you off somewhere else? Like, you know, it’s like.

Nick Werker (26:44)
Like, Aren’t you supposed to tell me whether I have a case or not?

Kevin Daisey (26:47)
I’m like, I’m trying to figure this, this sh*t out. That’s why I’m here. So I just don’t like that. Um, and I can imagine.

Nick Werker (26:54)
I have a friend

who’s wrapped up right now in a whole like…

like lead gen thing. I don’t even know what you would call that. Like it’s the, what’s the word where you buy cases from a third party and he’s like consulting with them. And I’m like, I don’t know, man, that’s a, that’s an ethical gray area for me. ⁓

Kevin Daisey (27:13)
That’s like unbranded.

I would say unbranded lead gen. So, um, I had a firm. Yeah. We just signed a firm that’s been doing that for about three years. Completely destroyed their brand, their SEO, their ownership of their own lead sources. They’ve destroyed by doing lead gen for like three years straight. Like 170 grand a month. So like, you know, and, um, unbranded. then, you know, the firm’s not mentioned, there’s no trust built. There’s no brand.

Nick Werker (27:16)
Yeah, that’s exactly what it is.

Kevin Daisey (27:41)
And then there are low level leads that lead that their case values have decreased and decreased and decreased. So now they’re just, it’s like they’re churning. They had to hire like seven people for intake because of the volume of crap that comes through. That’s not even quality. So overhead goes up, you know,

Nick Werker (27:57)
I talk about this stuff on LinkedIn

all the time with people it’s like

To me, I’ll say it like this. Customer services is the name of the game for me. Your brand is your customer service. It is your marketing. It is your intake that makes up your brand. And it’s also, people need to understand that part of your brand is what happens after the sale. It doesn’t just end when somebody pays you. So I just can’t imagine.

And this is why it’s such a problem and why… This is why I love talking to people like you is what I’ll say. Because there are so many bad actors in the legal space. There are a lot of good ones. I’m not saying everybody’s bad, right? Like I can name 50 good ones off the top of my head, but there’s a lot of really bad stuff out there. And I know that it works.

Kevin Daisey (28:40)
I’m not so good once

Nick Werker (28:45)
I know it works. I spend a lot of time on legal content and interacting with all that stuff. I still got the ads of the AI generated people who say, I’m going to make an AI generated version of you that speaks Spanish. And when the Spanish speaking customer shows up to the consultation and you don’t speak Spanish because you’re not an AI generated avatar that breaks down trust and destroys your brand. And people get, I think it comes from

a lack of visibility to like people like yourself, you know, like you’re doing a good thing with a marketing company, but you’re not spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on ads where these lead gen websites that have been around spamming people and taking advantage of lawyers have been around forever. And they just, there’s no like, in my opinion, like

white hat way to market that they’re not going to rank above, but they can spend a ton of money to generate those leads. And then they convince people that that’s a good business model. And it’s just lies, deceit, it’s FUD. That’s why I love talking to people like you, other marketing agencies dedicated to legal that actually consult and find out where a law firm should be online and offline and get involved in their intake process.

It’s kind of why I love it here is we actually understand the goals of law firms and try to get aligned with them instead of being like, if you don’t do this, you’re going to lose all this money and you’re going to have to close up shop and go work. Like that’s just not a way to operate.

Kevin Daisey (30:13)
Yeah, no, I appreciate that.

Being like, I think the one thing like for, you know, I talked to any law firm that reaches out. It’s like, I still handle those conversations for the most part. And as we, I’ve had sales teams in the past and I’ve, you know, we’re, we’re trying to build that backup right now, but it’s really wanting to understand the law firm, ask the hard questions, and get a good sense of them so that we can make sure that we can help them and take care of them and that they’re going to be able to,

to do the right things to take care of the leads, answer the phone or whatever it is, how are going to handle that? And so having a good understanding of where they are as a business in their business life cycle, if you will, or are they very unsophisticated and they’re hardheaded and they’re not going to listen, or are they truly trying to take care of the client and they care and they want to do the right things to your point, their brand, or I would say like even

the culture of your firm, that is your marketing. That is everything. Right? So if you have a sh*tty culture, because you’re that kind of leader, that’s just, you know, as a hard ass or whatever, then when someone does pick up the phone or someone does answer a client, if that culture is not good and strong and like they want to be there, then that is your marketing. That’s your brand. That’s, that’s how you’re going to be represented.

You can just go super deep on it, guess, but you got to care about all those things and because it will catch up with you no matter what.

It’s easy to say, I think, you know, how do you make a good culture and how do I take care of this? How do I influence my brand?

Nick Werker (31:45)
That’s why I love, I really do love like putting out good content and talking with lawyers is that there’s still a misconception that if I’m a talented lawyer, I went to the best law school, I have experience in prosecution. I’ve got all these things that make me special. They could all be true.

It doesn’t really matter. And a lot of, and I think this is pervasive of all businesses, a lot of people who go into business don’t have this understanding that

if you like you use the word culture, I really like that. If your entire culture from start to finish in the way that you obtain, consult with, and then ultimately do work for and report on and, iterate for your customer. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how good your marketing is, right? Like you can go online and post. We got all these number one rankings for this law firm.

Their PPC is down, the CAC is down 80%, the LTV is up 95%. We’re crushing it. But unless that’s tied to like real business metrics or servicing the client, and we talked about this earlier, Sure, we can talk about phone analytics, we can talk about call analytics, but like what’s the actual like survey your customer after they’re done working with your firm or while they’re working with your firm, right? Like what are you happy with right now?

Nick Werker (33:10)
What are you not happy with? What can we improve upon? And then you take that information and you are open-minded and not just saying like, I went to Harvard. I’m a prosecutor. I’ve never lost a trial. Like that doesn’t matter if your customers aren’t happy. They’re not going to recommend you, which is a low-cost acquisition for a case. They’re not going to leave you a positive review. Ultimately, you’re not going to be able to change and keep up with

someone who’s going to enter your market and really understand those things. So I think it’s incumbent upon us, people like me and you, to teach lawyers that. And I think we’ve done largely a very good job over the last decade. I can only speak to the last decade because that’s where I’ve been. It’s definitely gotten better. I still see, like I attend a lot of webinars because I like to get educated and I network with people I like to support. And I just like…

Nick Werker (33:58)
I see these lawyers who are just in these tough situations, who are like, I don’t know how to get cases. ⁓ My cases aren’t converting to paying clients. I’m spending all this money on marketing and I’m not happy with it because I don’t understand. Like they’re showing me, my traffic is up, but like that doesn’t move the needle for my business. ⁓ my form fills are up, but they’re not helping me convert clients.

Nick Werker (34:22)
I’m getting all these negative reviews and I don’t understand why. It’s incumbent upon us to point them in the right direction and be like, hey, this is the information that you need in order to make a decision. Here’s how we empower you to get that. Because ultimately, they have to do it. But a lot of people, I think, do want to do it. And they do want to get there. And they just need a little bit of help. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Kevin Daisey (34:41)
No, yeah, it’s, um, I see it all, all day. Cause I, I get it. have a lot of solo firms that reach out and they’re like, need help. And my business is down X percent. And I’ve worked with three marketing agencies and they’re coming in and kind of, you know, burned and, and confused and, um, kind of in a tight spot, like you’re, you were saying. Um, but everything they say is coming from a place of, you know, like everyone’s out to get them and

they got some bad reviews and you know, the marketing doesn’t work and blah, blah, blah, blah. So, and some of them, I don’t know if they are interested or they’re just too in the weeds that, you know, and they’re bitter and they used to be good and they, talk about, you know, their experience and they’re the best in the town and everyone should be using them. And, you know, they’re just in the wrong mindset, you know, and that’s going to detract.

No matter what, if you get the lead or a call phone, whatever, they’re just in a bad place and they need to step back and go, okay, I’m the problem and I need to make some changes and I need to listen to others, uh, surround yourself with other law firms that are successful. And, you know, you’re going to hear some good stuff. And that’s why I have like the mastermind that I started, uh, there where we just talk about this kind of stuff. And, but the lawyer that has to come around to the, realization that they need to do something different.

Marketing company can’t fix it. Answering Legal can’t fix it. At the end of the day. you have to make those changes and, and attract the right people and get the good reviews, referrals, like those things will happen. Unfortunately I do see a lot that I’ve talked to that are just not beyond help, but they’re in a, they’re in a bad spot and they feel like they used to crush it and now they’re not, and they don’t know why. But it’s pretty apparent why.

Nick Werker (36:27)
The whole time you’re talking, I’m thinking like, because obviously I talk to people in a much different regard. They heard about us, they understand about an answering service as a solution, and they understand the differentiator between hiring and answering service that’s like completely outsourced and not trained and answering for everybody and long wait times. And they understand like…

the what I’ll call like table stakes of why answering the phone is really important. And there’s studies, right? Like some people are super educated and they’re like 65 % of my leads come from phone calls. And so I need to have a system to back that up.

Again, I think it’s incumbent upon us to educate lawyers as business owners because they come in with these blue sky expectations. And to me, it’s funny because if I came in to a law office and said like, well, I have this case, I really want it to be a million dollars. I looked it up and someone with my similar injury got 1.5 and can you take a cut on your commission

Nick Werker (37:29)
until you prove value to me? And you know what I mean? Like they would get frustrated because that customer is coming in with all these preconceived notions, right?

Kevin Daisey (37:38)
Man, it happens to me a lot.

Nick Werker (37:41)
And so they come in with like blue sky, right? And a lot of what I combat is like, what you’re saying isn’t wrong. It’s not at all wrong. But, nothing in the world is going to make you 100 % happy. There’s no 100 % perfect solution for everything. What you want to be looking for is someone who’s willing to take accountability and fix problems as they come up because we’re all human.

If you want to use AI for everything in marketing, good luck. You still have to do all the input yourself. The other thing that I want to touch on is…

And I’m guilty of this too, is I’m so idealistic that if it’s not done the exact way that I believe it should be done, I’m one of those people that says, well, if you want it done right, you should do it yourself. And that’s just not the smartest use of your time, right? And let’s talk about small law firms here, right? Because that’s mainly mine and your audience. A small law firm should not.

Until they reach a certain threshold of employees and culture and revenue and profitability, like look at your P &L and see where you’re ready to grow, right? But you’re not ready to hire three receptionists that can cover three eight hour periods of the day and answer all your phone calls. You’re not ready to hire a six person in-house marketing team because it’s just not going to pay. You’re not ready to hire a five person intake team,

as a solo practitioner. these are things that you can get help with. And if you have a trusted partner who has your, your vested interest at heart or your best interest at heart, I screwed up that idiom.

Then, like there’s a trust factor there, right? Nothing that like me and you as a vendor do is going to be perfect. If it was, we would be wildly like with Jeff Bezos at his wedding last week, you know? The thing here’s, do you? The thing that helps me seriously is that like we own mistakes, we’re transparent.

Kevin Daisey (39:37)
I guarantee you everything.

Nick Werker (39:45)
It’s not your fault. It’s maybe it’s our fault. Let’s work together to fix it. Maybe we misunderstood. Maybe a mistake was made. Maybe this thing doesn’t work for your business that’s evolved anymore. And instead of playing the blame game, like take accountability, address the problem, iterate. And I think that’s the best thing that I see out there is, is accountability. And I think that’s the problem that

Like you face this problem all the time on a deeper scale, I think, because the investment for a marketing agency is much higher than the investment for like an answering service. But I have the same problem. People will come and they’ll say, well, I had an answering service before and they overcharged me and it took too long to answer the call. And the message in the call center went down and the support was never available. And like they’ve been burned by

some bad actors. I’m not going to say, like I said before, not everybody’s perfect. But like, it’s that blue sky principle thing, right? Like if you find a partner that’s willing to take accountability and help you make the tough decisions and help you pivot, I think that’s the most valuable thing in the world because that’s like any employee that you’re going to have. You know, if I brought you in here, I would, I think you’re going to do a great job, Kev. I really do. I think you’re going to be 95 % correct. But I also,

Nick Werker (40:59)
Like think you’re going to be 5 % incorrect. And that’s just the nature of work. Let’s do it. I would love to work with you,

Kevin Daisey (41:02)
You want me to drop? All right. Sweet. I’m out. Let’s go.

No, a hundred percent, man. mean, that’s, I tell lawyers this all the time and, try to transparency is one of our core values here. And, we try to live by that. We do lessons learned if we screw up something or we think we did, or we didn’t, but the client thinks we did. We do a whole lessons learned and we have a meeting with them, with all the people and say, here’s, here’s what we think happened. Here’s dates, here’s times, here’s whatever. In the sales process, like, I get this a lot.

Kevin, just, just like your story, I used to do this or I’ve seen this or a lawyer told me this. And I want this outcome. This is the budget that I have. Blah, blah, blah. And this is what I’m expecting. This many leads by this amount of time. Can you guarantee that right? Instead of coming with all this, information and you know, one of the things for one, I can’t guarantee him anything.

We don’t control Google, whether that’s pay per click or search or AI search, you know, that’s usually what we talk about now is AI search, GEO, whatever. And so we don’t really have control of any of that stuff. we, but what we do know is that we’re going to bust our ass. do the right things and we’re going to, you, do you want to agency that’s going to just work on the stuff or like one that is going to be there to pivot when things go down? Cause they’ll not, I told, listen,

Up into the right is unrealistic. Your stock market, your, your, all that stuff. You think it’s always up to the right now as, as it’s moments, how respond when it starts to go back down is the kind of partner you want because it’s going to happen. So this is not going to be a perfect relationship. And let’s go into with that, that thought in mind, you’ve been burned five times, blah, blah, blah. We can talk about all that and what they did wrong.

But we’re going to be there to respond and we’re going to look out for you. I’m going to do the best we can. Does it mean we’re have a hundred percent success? Absolutely not. So, and your budget is small and you’re in South Florida and you want PI cases, you know, there’s only so much you can do. So you can just say, Hey, we’re going to look out for you. We’re gonna do the right things. And I won’t sell you anything that we don’t think is going to be a, you know, put you in a better position. That’s the other thing. Domination

versus we’re gonna move you in a better position than you are now. How long is it gonna take to get to where you really wanna be? But there’s limitations, know? There’s work the firm needs to do. Your intake system sucks. You you need to work on your brand. You have new videos. You’re not investing time into your own marketing. The marketing company can’t just do all that for you. So there’s a lot of understanding and things that you have to go through. And sometimes we get a client that…

that doesn’t really connect. And we have lots of clients that, you know, it works out very, very well. And we go on a journey with them and we take them to multiple offices, multiple States and grow. So that’s what we look for. You know, not every client is going to be that, but you still have to run a business. You still have to pay your people and we have to take on firms and try our best. So.

Nick Werker (44:06)
That’s the game.

Kevin Daisey (44:07)
Deep conversations with Kevin and Nick. ⁓ People, hey, lawyers, look out for your vendors out there. Make it, you have a relationship with them. Jen Gore, I’ve had her on and she said she goes to conferences because she gets to see her vendors in person and meet with them and talk with them and guess who they take care of, right? Like she wants to connect with her vendors and have a relationship and, I thought that was really cool. So, yeah.

Nick Werker (44:08)
Yep. Always are.

Kevin Daisey (44:32)
For a lawyer out there, you probably have lots of vendors, of people you’re paying. Like, you know, they’re there to help you. Um, but if you don’t engage, you don’t show up, you don’t do your part. Um, you know, probably not going to go well either way.

Well, Nick, we are running on time here. Um, I appreciate the conversation today. We could definitely talk longer for sure. Um, I want to get a reminder for folks, um, by answering legal. And then of course, uh, your new chat bot, which sounds amazing and it’s free people. Um, so you have no excuse not to, to check it out. So, especially my solo firms. mean, I have a bench of, I call them a bench. It’s a bench of.

lawyers that are either just started or they’re about to start. And, they reach out to me and just ask you questions or whatever, but, know, set up a nice little free website, put a free chat bot on it. Like just, you know, get these things going. So, what’s the best way for them to find you again and check that out.

Nick Werker (45:32)
Sure, so you can find anything about us on answeringlegal.com. We have a bunch of products. If you go to the nav, it says products. If you want just the chat bot, is answeringlegal.com slash AI dash chat bot. You can call us at 631-686-9700. And if you want to talk directly to me because you don’t trust anyone else, I am Nick at answeringlegal.com. I will respond to you.

I will have so much fun doing it. You will make my day. And let’s chat.

Kevin Daisey (46:05)
Man, I appreciate it and, keep me posted. You guys have some new stuff coming out, the podcast and things like that. All right, let’s do it. So stay tuned everyone. And also Nick’s on LinkedIn. So go check him out. Follow him there. So I appreciate it. Nick’s thanks so much everyone. Intake is super important and it goes a lot deeper than just a phone system or a chat bot.

Nick Werker (46:11)
Oh, you’re gonna be on it, Kev. We’re doing it.

Kevin Daisey (46:32)
things that you need to think about. So we talked about a lot of stuff here, but look deep at yourself and your firm and how you handle things. And, it’s important stuff. So we’ll see you all soon. Thanks for tuning in. Amen.

Nick Werker (46:44)
Thanks again, Kevin.