Law Firms FAILING At The Single Most Basic Lawyering Task
Come on people. Seriously?
What’s the fundamental requirement for practicing law? Aside from an overinflated sense of self-worth, it’s “having a client.” Even if the client is invented out of wholecloth solely to exploit the corrupt forum shopping policies of the Northern District of Texas, it’s still “a client.” Whatever the specialty, lawyers need a client.
It also helps if you’re trying to get paid.
But, in a frightening finding from Clio’s 2024 Legal Trends Report, most law firms are botching this most essential of tasks. A staggering number of firms are not answering the call. Literally.
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Following up on an exercise they performed for the 2019 Legal Trends Report, Clio set up a “secret shopper” survey, contacting 1,000 law firms by email and another 500 by phone to gauge how they handled potential new clients. The results? Grim.
A full 67% of firms didn’t respond to emails, which was somehow worse than the already abysmal results of the 2019 test. Unless the hypothetical client’s email read “Hello friend. I am a Nigerian Prince and I need your legal advice to collect $1 million from my home country,” there’s no excuse for simply ghosting them.
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Now this graphic is set up backward from the last one, but that’s showing 48% of the firms either didn’t answer the phone or failed to call back. That’s almost 20% worse than 2019. Not only are they missing out on clients, how will they ever know that someone out there is trying to reach them about their extended warranty?
It’s almost Halloween, so let’s add to the nightmares. Of the folks who DID respond, the answers mostly sucked.
A quick response doesn’t mean much if the email isn’t helpful—and compared to our study in 2019, today’s firms are much less likely to provide the information that prospective clients are asking for. Only 2% of law firms in 2024 referenced similar legal situations or case law that our shoppers were looking for (compared to 27% of law firms in 2019).
This is, of course, a reputation killer.
And it’s not just the negative impression, but missing out on creating a future evangelist in a world where reviews and word-of-mouth still go a long way. No response might as well be a one-star review.
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Firms invest thousands of dollars in marketing campaigns to attract new clients, only to lose them due to poor or non-existent intake procedures. The first interaction is a critical moment, and if that goes wrong, potential clients take their business elsewhere — or worse, try to handle their legal problem with ChatGPT.
Speaking of AI, because it’s 2024, that’s one of the proposed solutions to this problem. Chatbots can give a potential client immediate feedback while greasing the intake wheels. That said, only 7% of law firms use chatbots and, not surprisingly, only 7% of lawyers believed that clients would prefer to communicate with law firms via chatbot.
And clients don’t want to be trapped in chatbot hell any more than they want to be caught in a Byzantine phone directory. BUT clients are much more willing to initiate their journey through a chatbot than lawyers might suspect with 61% of clients surveyed saying they would engage with a chatbot as a point of contact as long as they knew a human will eventually be available.
And AI, like a junior associate, never sleeps.
Even without chatbots, firms can develop automated intake forms — which, the Clio report notes, can then automatically populate Clio Grow, the company’s CRM product — to collect key information and leave the client with a sense that they’re at least making some progress on their problem. Armed with this information, the firm can then evaluate which cases align with their practice areas and… you know… respond to the client.
If lawyers can’t accept anything less than the human touch, Clio’s Lawyer-in-Residence Joshua Lenon pointed to virtual receptionist services like Smith.ai or Ruby that can handle incoming calls.
Whichever route firms choose to take, they should probably do something.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
