The law firms that grow consistently aren’t the ones with the biggest marketing budgets. They’re the ones who know what’s working and do more of it. Trouble is, it’s harder than it should be to tell which parts of your marketing strategy are working.
Table of contents
- It’s a Repeating Pattern
- Is Your Law Firm’s Marketing Working?
- 1. What happens in the first five minutes after someone fills out your contact form?
- 2. Can you trace your last 10 clients back to how they found you?
- 3. How many tools touch a lead before they become a client?
- 4. What breaks when your office manager goes on vacation?
- 5. If I gave you $10,000 extra for marketing tomorrow, where would you spend it?
- What to Do With Your Answers
It’s a Repeating Pattern
Your marketing report says 47 new leads came in last month. Your intake software shows 12 consultations scheduled. Your case management system shows 8 new matters opened.
Which number is real? And what happened to the other 39 people who supposedly contacted you?
Most lawyers I talk to can’t answer that question. Not because they’re bad at business. Because their systems don’t connect.
The pattern is always the same. Leads come in one door. Clients come out another door. And somewhere in the middle, people vanish into a black hole that nobody can explain.
Is Your Law Firm’s Marketing Working?
Here are five questions that will tell you if you have the same problem.
1. What happens in the first five minutes after someone fills out your contact form?
This is the question that matters most.
When someone fills out a form on your website, does anyone get notified immediately? Does it go into a queue that someone checks twice a day? Does it sit in a folder until your assistant remembers to look?
I worked with a California law firm that was getting plenty of leads but signing very few cases. The problem was simple. Form submissions went to a shared inbox. The shared inbox got checked when someone had time. Average response time was four hours.
We changed one thing. New form submissions triggered an immediate text message to the intake coordinator. Response time dropped to 45 minutes. The number of signed cases went up dramatically because people actually got called back while they still cared.
You don’t need fancy intake software to fix this. You need to know the answer to the question.
2. Can you trace your last 10 clients back to how they found you?
Pick your 10 most recent paying clients. For each one, can you answer: How did they first hear about you?
Not how they think they heard about you. Not what they wrote on the intake form, but what actually happened. Did they click a Google ad? Find you through a referral? See you speak at an event three years ago and finally need a lawyer?
If you can trace fewer than half of them back to a specific source, you’re making marketing decisions blind. You might be spending money on ads that don’t work while ignoring the referral source that actually sends you good clients.
The fix is simple but tedious. Ask every new client how they found you. Not on a form. In conversation. Write it down somewhere you can find it later.
3. How many tools touch a lead before they become a client?
Count them. Website. Contact form. Email. CRM. Intake software. Billing system. Case management.
Now ask: Do these tools talk to each other?
In most firms, they don’t. The website lives in one world. The CRM lives in another. Intake has its own system. Billing is separate. Each tool has its own version of the truth.
This is why your numbers never match. Marketing counts everyone who fills out a form. Intake counts everyone who schedules a call. Billing counts everyone who pays. They’re measuring different things at different stages, and nobody built the bridge between them.
You don’t necessarily need to integrate everything. But you do need to understand where the handoffs happen and who’s responsible for each one.
4. What breaks when your office manager goes on vacation?
Every firm has someone who knows where everything is. The person who remembers to check that inbox. The one who knows the workaround for the billing glitch. The human duct tape holding the systems together.
What happens when that person is gone for two weeks?
If the answer is “things fall apart,” you don’t have a system. You have a person. And that’s a problem for two reasons. First, people leave. Second, people make mistakes when they’re tired or overwhelmed or just having a bad day.
The goal isn’t to replace people with software. The goal is to make sure your firm doesn’t depend on any single person remembering to do something manually.
5. If I gave you $10,000 extra for marketing tomorrow, where would you spend it?
This is the real test. If you know exactly where that money should go because you know what’s working, you have a system. If you’d have to guess, or you’d spread it around and hope something sticks, you don’t.
Most lawyers fall into the second category. Not because they’re unsophisticated. Because nobody ever built the infrastructure to track what actually works.
What to Do With Your Answers
The good news is you don’t need to fix everything at once.
Start with question one. Figure out what happens when a lead comes in, and make sure someone responds quickly. That single change will do more for your practice than any amount of advertising.
Then work backward from your paying clients. Figure out where they came from. Over time, you’ll start to see patterns.
Related: “More Leads Won’t Fix Your Law Firm’s Marketing Problem”
Art Nikashin is a marketing systems architect who helps law firms and commercial real estate companies connect their marketing spend to actual results. He has implemented 13 CRMs and spent 11 years figuring out why leads disappear between “contact us” and “signed client.” Find him at thecrowsignal.com or on LinkedIn.
Image © iStockPhoto.com.
Sign up for Attorney at Work’s daily practice tips newsletter here and subscribe to our podcast, Attorney at Work Today.
