Unlock the secrets to building the perfect law firm phone team on the latest episode of Your Practice Mastered Podcast. Discover strategies to enhance client communication, streamline operations, and boost your firm's success. 

Tune in to learn how to create a stellar first impression and keep clients coming back. Don't miss out on these essential tips for law practice excellence. Listen now to transform your phone team into your firm's winning edge.

Our channel offers expert advice on law firms, entrepreneurship, and success strategies. Hit "Like" and subscribe to stay updated with our latest content.

Let’s Chat About Growing Your Law Firm. 

www.Yourpracticemastered.com/Connect

That's all they're going to talk. Yeah. But that's again, if you think you're supposed to get your agent to talk seven hours or eight hours out of eight hours, it's stinking thinking, just doesn't happen that way.

​

Introduction to Building the Ideal Phone Team

---

There'll be in the New Client Pipeline. There'll be in the Workflow Pipeline. There'll be in the Profit Pipeline, depending on where we are.

Understanding the Roles Within Your Phone Team

---

Richard James: The first one is obviously Inbound, so we have Inbound New Leads, it's pretty obvious where they come in via the phone or Email or whatever format you've got leads coming in.

If you're paying for a company to generate leads for you and you're paying per lead, they're going to have their way of sending them to you. Again, I've done deeper dive training on this, but this is the one thing that you would have a new agent do. Now, listen, let me stop here. This is for you.

And so I just want to get your mind clear on the different roles you would have somebody doing. So, if you're never brought a phone person on before, they're going to do all of these things in the beginning until we figure out what the capacity is based on the flow that you have in your firm.

If you've got five agents, you need to be figuring out how you're divvying up the work and where the capacity lies to maximize the conversion. This doesn't change depending on the number of agents that you have. It just changes how you're going to manage them. So, I want you to think about this depending on who you have in your team.

Okay. So again, Inbound, these are the inbound leads that are coming in. Unconverted Leads. Anybody who didn't set an appointment because we either didn't get ahold of them or when we did get ahold of them, they didn't set. And so Unconverted Leads, that's a list from, yesterday or today and yesterday, all the way to could be years ago, depending on your practice area of people that we're going to have to be calling and texting and Emailing and reaching out to.

And you're just measuring their overall satisfaction. If they're Green, nothing happens. If they're Yellow, somebody is notified. If they're Red, the owner probably has to get on the phone with that client right away. And so that's just proactive Red, Yellow, Green Calls. And there is an order that you should think about this.

The Importance of Sequential Skill Development

---

Richard James: So, if you're just getting started, you should focus on Inbound conversion to maximize your set rate and outbound dials and communication to the Unconverted Leads. Those are your first two areas of focus. And then, once they master the first one. So once I master the 11 steps and the Inbound process and they're nailing it, then you can have them do the outbound dials, Unconverted Leads.

You have to set up systems to manage that and measure that. and, you know, so, it's a little bit more complicated, requires more on you. Requires more on them, depending on whether you're going to have them take a credit card, or you have to set up links for people to be able to pay. It depends on how you're going to do it.

And then Red, Yellow, Green is going to stir up the hornet's nest. If you've never called your clients proactively, you're going to start calling them and you're going to find out real fast people are aggravated. So, until you get this under control, that's not the first place you want to start.

Again, what I said something was really important. You should have them do one job until they perfect it. And they're not allowed to go on to the next job until they perfect it.

Applying Puppy Training Principles to Team Training

---

They ask them to do the skill, you give them a treat. You do it five times, if they perform the skill well, five times in a row, they move on to the next difficult skill. If they perform the skill three to five times, or let's say four times out of five, but not five, they still have to stay on that skill till they get five out of five.

If they have three or less, they really have to move down to the skill before and they got to go backwards and retrain the other skill because it meant that we didn't engage the training because they build on one another. And it's the same thing with your team. You shouldn't let them go onto one skill until they master the first skill.

To master one skill and they're not working likely 40 hours a week. You're not getting all 40 hours from them. So, if you get aggravated about that and you feel like I'm wasting money, you've got stinking thinking, okay? Because you're going to have to pay this person to train and practice and not actually do the work until they master it.

And so there's a period of time it takes them to do that. It could be four days, it could be four weeks. I don't know, it depends on the complexity of your practice area and what you're asking to do and how good of a training system you have. But you need to let them master that skill before you move on to something else.

Trust me, it's a lot better to train them right the first time and make sure they master it before you move on to the second task, okay? And so that means whether you have one agent or you have five agents, you've got to think this way about it. Now, there's a couple other scenarios here.

Optimizing Your Phone Team's Workflow

---

I talk about that again in the workflow section and serving your customer or client, but just know that the basic rule of thumb is you're going to have to create space to meet with your new agent on a daily basis to help them understand how to deal with those client service calls. And you're going to want to make sure you're creating links for appointments.

And so you should have scheduling links for them to be able to manage. Think through this logically, the easier you can do this, make this for them, the better off they're going to be. Now, the next thing you want to make sure you're going to have to consider is Warm Hug Calls. These are also called reminder calls.

So when you set appointments, somebody's got to make an outbound call to the appointment for the new prospect on your calendar to remind them about the call. And we call them Warm Hug Calls, because they really should have access to the notes about what their hell and their heaven was. And they should be able to say, Oh, Hey, we know that you're just got a notice of foreclosure and we want you to be rest assured.

Look, your competition doesn't listen to to your client the the prosepect and they don't do this. So you want to beat your competition. You got to make sure you do this, which means you got to make sure your agent does this, which is why you got to make sure you train. Now those calls happen and they can happen either by the single agent that you have, or they can happen by another team member. but.

Depending on who's making them, they've got to be considered in your ideal phone team, okay? So these are the six basic functions of an ideal phone team. I'm sure there are more you can think of, but these are the six primary functions. Now, if you've got one single agent, you've got a time block out their time of how they're going to manage this.

And you've got to give them some direction. And again, you shouldn't have them doing any one thing, until they've mastered the one thing you have them doing already.

Mastering Capacity and Efficiency

---

How much capacity they have, meaning we know that this is taking up all their time. Let's assume you've got one agent, you're a small firm, you're going to have them do all six of these things. Great, you've balanced out their time. What should it look like? So let's talk about how you're going to measure your agent from a capacity perspective.

So remember, you've got phone calls, you've got Emails and texts, right? And maybe you have some social media connections. So, you've got to figure out how much in percentage wise you're going to have them do. And what you're call cadences are going to train about that in another series, but basically measuring when your agent is at capacity.

If I was just dealing with an agent who did nothing but phone calls and didn't get into texting, didn't get into Emails or anything else. I will tell you, you should have about 180 minutes of talk time a day. If you're exceeding 180 minutes of talk time a day, great. You've probably got a really efficient system where you're using a dialer of some sort.

That's all they're going to talk? Again, if you think you're supposed to get your agent to talk seven hours or eight hours out of eight hours, it's stinking thinking just doesn't happen that way. The time in between dials, the way that it works, the interruptions, just life being a human.

The only way you maximize that, get the talk time closer to the eight hours is by using a dialer. And even then you'll be lucky if you get 60% or 70%, even if you had a full on dialer system with thousands and thousands of leads for them to dial on a regular basis. That would be a maximizing it.

They've got to switch to a different system. They've got to think a little bit about what they're going to say or grab the template they're going to use. It just can get complicated, right? Now you can automate some of this with different systems and the more automation you can build in, the better your talk time will be.

But when you're determining, Hey, is my agent at capacity? If every day that you've asked them to do Inbound calls, you've asked them to make outbound calls Unconverted Leads, and they're doing Collection calls and doing regular Green calls and doing reminder calls. And they're dealing with new clients inbound, and you've got a smaller firm and they're doing all that.

And they're maximizing at 180, 190 call minutes talk minutes a day. And they're not getting through all their work. That's a signal to you, you need another agent and your firm isn't maximizing its capacity and your ability to grow. Because your agent is burned at the edges and they can't get any more done and you have to add another agent.

How many reminder calls are there? And how many client calls Inbound did you receive in a course of a day? And you got to break that down and look at it, which means, yeah, somebody's got to be paying attention to this. Which is, oh my gosh. Yeah, that means there's work. And if you're being the lawyer and you're trying to run the business and you're trying to work with the clients and do a law at some point. This is why you have to charge the right amount so you can create some profits so you can create somebody to help you manage this, great person to help you manage this in the early days is just an executive assistant or a virtual assistant that can help keep track of all these numbers and work with the phone agent to make sure that they're doing what they're supposed to be doing to get you the report.

So when you meet with the agent on a weekly basis, you can review how they're actually moving forward, okay?

Conclusion: Maximizing Your Law Firm's Growth Potential

---

And how you should then be thinking about capacity. Of course, if you have any questions, be happy to answer them for you. Hope you found this helpful.