Why do some openings land with potential clients and others fail? The mistakes made are dumb ones, says Connor Gallic, and easily fixable. Here’s his legal intake script for those first crucial seconds after you answer a cold call.
A potential client just got rear-ended on the highway. Or arrested. Or handed a layoff notice. They are scared, they have never hired a lawyer, and they are calling four firms off the first page of Google. Yours is one of them. You have about 30 seconds to prove they reached the right place before they hang up and call the next law firm.
Most Intake Training Ignores the First 30 Seconds
Instead, it teaches your staff to qualify the matter and write down the details. Useful skills, both, but they come into play after the caller has already sized you up. My company answers intake calls for small firms all day. I hear the openings that land and the ones that lose the caller, and the losers fail in the same few spots. Every one of them is fixable.
The Legal Intake Script Breakdown
Seconds 0 to 5. Answer like a person.
Pick up fast and lead with the firm name and a first name.
“Thanks for calling Harper Law. This is Marcus.”
Done. In those five seconds, the caller learned they dialed a law office and that a live person answered. Nothing else has to happen yet.
The failures here are dumb ones. A pickup on the seventh ring. Two seconds of silence after the hello. The recorded greeting that makes them sit through “You have reached the Law Offices of Harper, Bishop and Associates, please listen carefully, our menu options have recently changed.”
Recite your letterhead like a disclaimer, and you have already taught a scared person that they interrupted you.
Seconds 5 to 12. Acknowledge before you ask.
Give them one human sentence before any intake field.
“I am so sorry that happened. We deal with this every week.”
You did not promise to win the case. You told a frightened stranger their situation is normal here, and they can breathe. That one line converts better than any qualifying question.
The classic miss is the marketing question. Asking “how did you hear about us?” is for you, and you are asking it at the one moment the caller does not care about you at all. That question belongs on the form, not in the first 30 seconds of your intake call.
Seconds 12 to 22. Ask one open question, then shut up.
“Tell me what happened.”
Now let them talk. A person in trouble needs to tell it their own way before they will hand you names and dates. Two opposite mistakes live here. One is the interrogation: name, number, date of loss, opposing party, rattled off before the caller finishes a sentence. The other is the swamp, dead silence, while a panicked stranger circles the same story for four minutes, and nobody steers.
One open question, lightly steered, keeps you out of both ditches.
Seconds 22 to 30. Say what happens next.
End the opening by pointing the call somewhere:
“OK, I can help with this. Let me grab a few details and get you to one of our attorneys.”
Now the call has a direction, and the caller feels themselves moving toward help instead of toward another voicemail.
The endings that sink you are the ones that stall. Hold music in the first minute. The fee talk before you have heard the problem. And the worst one, the quick brush-off, where you half-disqualify the caller in 30 seconds because the case sounds like someone else’s practice area. “We might not be your firm, but I can point you to one that is” will land fine once they feel heard. But the same sentence said at seconds five to 12 sounds like the door shutting.
Why 30 Seconds and Not the Whole Intake Call?
The back half of the intake call has its own craft, and plenty of people have written about it. Intake, though, is front-loaded. Look at voicemail: about three of every four callers hang up instead of leaving one, and a clumsy live answer sets off the same reflex. By the time you reach the part of the script you actually rehearsed, the caller has already made up their mind.
Teach the beats, then get out of the way.
Answer Like a Person
None of this works as a rigid, laminated legal intake script.
You name the four beats, so your team learns the shape and then talks like themselves inside it. A grieving widow and a furious contractor need the same four moves in completely different registers, and a person reading a card cannot do that. A person who knows the beats can.
So, take whoever answers your phone and run them through the four moves on real calls until it is reflex. Front desk, answering service, software — any combination, it does not matter. The tools keep changing, and the 30-second arc has not moved. Answer like a person. Warm them up before you grill them — one real question. Aim the call at the next step.
Nail those, and you have already done the hard part, before anyone types a single field.
More Intake Tips on Attorney at Work
- Fix Your Law Firm’s Sales Process and Maximize Your Income by Sasha Berson
- Law Firm Intake: Save Time and Convert More Clients With These 3 Tips by Karen and David Skinner
- Legal Broadcasting Co. Podcast: Is Your Intake Ready When It Matters Most? With Nick Werker and Tony Prieto
Image © iStockPhoto.com.
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