One of the main reasons law firms don’t leverage automation to save time, resources and reduce errors is that they think automation is too complex, and they are not wrong. It can be.
In this week’s conversation, we explore some of the least known software solutions that law firms could leverage to increase their team’s productivity and save money along the way.
We talk about auto dialers, voicemail drops, affiliate marketing solutions, and email processors. Plus, we discuss the recent ruling of Michigan’s court on a law firm’s fake Google review allegation and what you can do not to have to worry about this kind of situation.
Warning: By the end of this episode, you may want to automate everything in your operations, even the things that should be handled in a more traditional way. Could you say we didn’t warn you?
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Send us your questions at ask@incamerapodcast.com
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Liel: [00:00:00] How automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency. Those are the words of Bill Gates. I’m Lel Levy, co-founder of Nanato Media and this is In Camera, a podcast where we know that before automation you need a data driven sequence to automate.
Liel: [00:00:47] Welcome to our podcast, perfect legal marketing conversations, Grace. Welcome back.
Grace: [00:00:51] Thank you, Liel. How are you doing today?
Liel: [00:00:54] Thank you for asking. I’m doing good. How about you?
Grace: [00:00:57] I’m good I took it out of your mouth. I know you always ask me.
Liel: [00:01:01] Yeah, Grace. So, you know, it’s been quite a week. We’ve been talking about it. This was mass torts made perfect. Hopefully, last virtual conference. Right. And I say hopefully not, because the conferences haven’t been great is just like it would be very exciting to envision that the next Mass torts made perfect conference can happen in person. So that’s among the things that have been happening. And I know, Grace also, you’ve prepared quite a presentation about tech for lawyers, and I’m dying to hear all about that. But before we jump into these Grace, I came across this morning with an article from Search Engine Land, which, of course, we are going to link in our episode notes. But I do want to go and read it, some parts of it. Great, because it’s super relevant to a topic that we just covered not too long ago. And it just really puts into perspective sometimes. And I don’t, I mean, it’s a little bit of a drowner, but at the same time, it’s a wake-up call to realizing how proactive we need to be for review management and generation. That’s the topic. So great. Let me start here by by giving you a little bit of context here. So Eric Goldman, who is an associate dean for research and professor of law at Santa Clara University School of Law, wrote about a case in Michigan like an actual case in court where a law firm had a one-start review left that had no text.
Liel: [00:02:35] We’ve all seen them. They’re useless, these types of reviews because they don’t necessarily help the user in any way. You leave a one-star review with no text in it and no explanation. Why is it that you’re leaving that review there? You’re really not helping neither the business and you’re not helping the users who are trying to decide whether you should go to that business or not. So. What happened here is that also the identity of the user was unknown, so it was one of those funny well, not funny, but just had like a nickname though too. That was the name of the user. So obviously that did not help the law firm to really identify who could have been this may be a legitimate client who left these negative reviews so we can proactively reach out and try to come to an understanding here. Right. So the identity of the user was unknown and the law firm claimed that the user posted the wordless one star review to their Google my business listing with the only intent to cause damage to the reputation. And here is what happened. This was the Michigan court statement. We concluded that as a matter of law, a one-sided, worthless review posted on Google Review is an expression of opinion protected by the First Amendment. What do you think, Grace?
Grace: [00:04:03] Wow.
Liel: [00:04:04] Yeah, a big blow, right?
Grace: [00:04:07] That is a big blow.
Liel: [00:04:09] And this is a good reminder, Grace, not just about this particular situation with review generation, but unfortunately, other injustices, if you may, that happen in platforms like Google, where you really cannot do anything as a business owner, like you’re literally powerless to give you a few other examples would be brand protection. Other advertisers not strategically targeting your brand to show their ads. That’s one. You cannot do anything about it. You can go anywhere you want. You’re not going to be able to win in court on that, specifically just on that fact. And then you have also, unfortunately, in Google ads as well, people who are committing deliberate fraud to attack your campaigns, exhaust their budgets so that they get better odds at showing their ads to real users. And this is extremely frustrating. In, for instance, us as agencies, we have a whole system. We invest so much time effort and hours Grace on creating these very thorough reports, tracking IPs, showing trends so that we can then report this back to Google in hope that they will actually take some action, which is really what we want is for them to stop that. The main thing that we want them to do is to start taking more proactive approaches towards identifying these fraud activities before they actually get to the actual advertisers and most importantly, the users. And so, I mean, this is just one example here, and it’s about reviews and the impact that they can have.
Liel: [00:05:54] Now, the article goes on and explains here the story about another business that one day unexpectedly, just all of the sudden started to get bombarded with worthless one starred reviews, just one-star review after the other, after the other, after the other. And that started depleting the average reviews score for the business. They don’t specify whether it was a law firm or not. And then six months down the road, the author of the article went back to search for that business. The business was gone. Right? So it’s, these are very sad stories. But a wake-up call to remind ourselves of the importance of actually having a proactive review management system in place that is actually encouraging and asking for reviews from real genuine clients customers. So you can actually always keep on generating good positive reviews. So if this were to happen to you, whether it’s one or whether it’s a wave of one-star reviews, this can actually not have such a devastating impact on you. And I also think, Grace, even though this is a very recent article that just got published today, I also think that there is potentially a chance here that with the new developments and the new reporting system that Google just released a few weeks ago that we talked about, there is now more willingness from Google to actually address illegitimate reviews and help businesses give a little bit more control as to what could be a legitimate and what could be an illegitimate review, maybe doing a little bit more of research on the profile of these people who are leaving to things and trying to identify if any of these are actual real users or if they can be just fake accounts or whatever that is.
Liel: [00:07:46] But, yeah, I read it and it reminded me about what we’ve talked. And, you know, it kind of plays a little bit devil’s advocate to what we were mentioning on that review, on that episode about reviews where we said, you know, negative reviews. It’s not always the end of it all, but we were referring to reviews that actually had comments. And you could actually engage in a conversation with a user and also kind of walk away to potentially get to a positive resolution with a user and get them to change it. But when you’re in a situation where you just get a worthless review, no way to identify who the actual user is. The situation is a little bit different. And when this happens as a wave, then it can be a very, very serious problem. Right. And the best way that we can tackle and address it is by being prepared with good reputation, reputation management systems in place. What do you think?
Grace: [00:08:40] Yeah, I mean, it’s it’s a blow to your business, as you just said, because, I mean, that’s when you get inundated with negative reviews that averages will start to reduce the highest reviews you have. And the more that you get all of these one star, one star with no information, how are you supposed to combat that? And the only way to combat any of that is what we’ve always said, which is to have a good review process already in place, make sure you ask, you make the ask, and that you fix anything you can in terms of if you already have a one-star review in there and somebody said something and you know who it is, fix it. You know, don’t wait a couple of days. Don’t wait even five minutes if you can. And there’s tons of systems out there to help you with that.
Liel: [00:09:26] And as we’ve mentioned back in that episode and in many other episodes that we’ve talked about, reviews always respond. Even if they fail to leave a comment, even if they probably don’t have any interest to connect with you. It does show, however, that you’re in control, that you’re listening and that you’re going take these one-star reviews lightly, and that you are doing as much as you can from your end A, to try to find a positive resolution, for that matter. And secondly, try to identify who this person is to start with. Right. Because I think it’s one hundred percent fair if somebody with a name that cannot be identified or that you cannot find on your database comes and gives you a review. I think it’s perfectly fine for you to go back into your Google my business and leave a comment there, write a response saying we could not find your record with us by the name that you left this review, but please feel free to reach out. We would really like to have a conversation with you and find out how is it that we can make things right for you or help you or whatever that is right. So I think it’s one hundred percent the right thing to do to disavow the actual review by telling them, as of now, we don’t know who you are. You’ve never done business with us. But that doesn’t mean that we are not interested in listening to what you have to say.
Grace: [00:10:49] Exactly. Cover yourself. Yeah, I mean, coming and going. So, I mean, again, always answer. That’s what you and I have always said. And you always need to respond and you need to respond prompt and professional.
Liel: [00:11:01] That’s the thing. And then so, so that comes through. And then if you do have a good and strong and you’re working towards review generation as you should, then there’s going to be one or two other positive reviews that are going to show up also in between. Right. These potential worthless reviews. Hopefully, you won’t get any of them. But if you are getting them, well, at least you’re going to also, the users are going to start seeing that there’s good positive reviews that are coming through from people who are actually living real and genuine comments. And that you’re responding back in that you’re acknowledged that, yes, you’ve worked with them and you’re happy to hear that they had such a good experience with your business. And so, you know, people are going to be able to tell, I mean, something’s wrong here with these reviews, not with a business that’s the worst-case scenario. If you are if this actually is happening to you, Google is not removing these reviews for you. You still need to have some level of control over the situation. And I think that’s it.
Grace: [00:12:01] Completely agreed.
Grace: [00:12:02] I mean, reviews are the lifeblood of your business. Everything is word of mouth. And if it’s not word of mouth and it’s posted online, then you need to take care of it seriously.
Liel: [00:12:12] So tech for lawyers. Grace, tell us about it.
Grace: [00:12:16] Yeah. So as we were talking about before we started the podcast, this particular presentation, I actually gave Ed Lake of the Lake Law offices. Now, by the way, and.
Liel: [00:12:29] New Brand, congratulations.
Grace: [00:12:31] And yes, so starting May 1st, we’re going to have an office in Puerto Rico and he has the one in New York. So he gave the presentation that I made and it’s called the top tech, Twenty five tech stack for lawyers. And it basically goes over all these different things that are out there for lawyers to help them just automate their business and everything that they’re doing because there’s so much. Right.
Liel: [00:12:59] One hundred percent, Grace, like, you know, it can be very overwhelming when you have to make decisions of all of these things, and most of the time people don’t make them all at once. But I think just by going over the presentation that you created here, you’re giving actually some really good ideas. So I’ll let you walk us through some of these. And we can also look at some of the examples that you are recommending here.
Grace: [00:13:27] Yeah. So I’ll start kind of where I’m coming from. Obviously, I represent a few companies that Ed owns and is the CEO and founder of and that includes, you know, leaders in Mass torts when it comes to mass tort case acquisition Game Changer Publishing, which is the book publishing company that Ed has partnered with. And we are basically putting out thought leadership books and assisting lawyers with publishing them. And then, of course, which, you know, Liel, is persist software and the software is just an automation tool that will take all your leads, prospects, clients in your database, your current case management software, and automates the entire communication process by calling, emailing and texting. So, of course, for me, that’s where it starts. Even if you don’t start there, if you don’t or don’t have the capacity to think about handling something like persist, because in truth, it’s very simple to use and very simple to integrate with your current systems. But you may not be there in your mind. You may not be comfortable with that. You may not be ready to move forward because like you said, what do we do, especially as lawyers? We don’t, we kind of resist change. And it’s not on purpose. It’s just you’re trying to do the practice of law. You’re trying to work on clients, help your clients, not think about the next piece of software that you’re going to implement in your systems to make yourself more efficient. That’s not how we think. You’re here to help. You’re trying to help. And so that’s kind of where people like myself come in. And where are law firms slash software company comes in? It’s because we have implemented and done this so many times and we’ve worked with people at pretty much all kinds of their levels within the law firm.
Grace: [00:15:17] What do I mean by that? Well, depending on if you have one lawyer and two intake people or one hundred lawyers and a thousand intake people, systems like this are always going to benefit you. It’s just which ones should you use and what do you have time to assess and where do you start? That’s where we kind of come in when it comes to the automation components because if you start with persist software, it’s going to automate the three components that I said calling, leaving voicemails, text messages, and emails. So my presentation actually starts with auto dialers. I’m not calling them necessarily a power dialer, I’m not calling it an IVR, which is interactive voice response. I’m calling it autodialer because auto dialer encompasses sort of all of those things that I’m mentioning, which is it will automatically call. Based on a sequence or a list or whatever it is that you have that you purchased the software for. And it’s usually outbound and it can include an interactive voice response, but what it does is it dials automatically. That’s when an autodialer is at its most basic, simple, and we all need auto dialers. There should be no reason anyone is manually calling. Really, ever again, I mean, think about when you click a phone number on your cell phone, other than when you first put in that number in there, there’s no reason for you to manually call somebody, correct?
Liel: [00:16:52] Yeah, that’s right. You’re not actually typing in numbers to call. But Grace, just so to understand a little bit better, what is the use of an autodialer? So I totally understand the concept, particularly when you are doing marketing and getting a ton of firm submissions where people are sharing with you their contact details and you need to start doing an outreach to them. Right. And start OK. I’ve told them that if they have experienced issues after using Zantac, they should get in touch with us because we can help. And so they submitted a form submission with their contact details. They’re interested. So now it’s your, the ball is on your side. You need to now start getting in touch with these people and get them that information qualify them and see whether you can indeed help them or you can or if not, throw them through another path so I can see how the dialer being used there. Right. Because it just makes your life easy. You’re collecting the information and then you are actually using A.I. basically to help you organize who gets called first, because I’m sure there is a lot of criteria’s here that you can set up yourself, whether it’s by, you know, how long ago did the form was received? What other steps have already been completed? Has the person already received an automated text message or something? So you build all of these things in a way that it makes sense based on what you’ve seen that is most effective with your whole process of getting someone from a lead to an actual site case now in over a period of time, that obviously also makes sense and has worked. There is a proven track to work, and that’s really where there is a lot of value on the software, if you ask me is because there is not a lot of companies that actually have the data points to help you make those decisions.
Liel: [00:18:46] Right. There are software is there that may be able to help you, but they’re not going to be able to solve for you certain pieces of the puzzle here, which is how long should you wait, how many times you should try? And that’s where your expertise and your experience using this platform really is going to give answers to questions. I don’t know why you are going to have to spend a lot of time and money and effort testing out until you actually find out. And the reality is that even when you’re following your best practices and already got our data, you still need to optimize it. There’s no there’s no nothing. Set it and forget it. Here in digital marketing and in general in operations, there’s always going to be improvements, tweaks through external factors that are going to influence this, the performance of campaigns, something that may be working beautifully. One man just doesn’t perform the next one. And so you need to figure out, tweak things around and make them work. So Grace. You’re not going to believe this. But at the end of all of this rant, there is an actual question that’s a good use of the dialer. How can someone who’s not necessarily getting a lot of inbound inquiries and such, but wants to use a better system for, I don’t know, calling existing clients or organizing existing appointments, like how does the auto dealer fit in all of these?
Grace: [00:20:12] So, you know, I’m a huge proponent of integration and not purchasing. If you know, especially if you’re it doesn’t really matter where you are in the life cycle of your firm. For me, it’s about integrating all of your systems as much as possible. So to answer that question, an autodialer can help somebody that doesn’t have a lot of current leads or anything that they have to call out or a lot of inquiries by mining their current database of people and reminding them that you’re there making that client outreach as part of your strategy, especially if you have a small list you need to maximize whatever it is you do have. And so to do that, an autodialer will help you because an autodialer could also have what’s called a voice mail drop or a broadcast. If the person doesn’t answer the phone, it leaves a voicemail. That’s what persist does. So am autodialer, which is a component of persist, it will leave this voicemail behind because they didn’t pick up. And it can be something as simple as, hey, we noticed it was your birthday today. Hey, we noticed that you haven’t we haven’t spoken to you in a while. Here’s an update on what’s been going on in the legal world. So it is specifically meant for communications at a rapid pace and in a way that makes sense and efficient for everybody. Right. Because if that person doesn’t pick up. Maybe they’re at work, there could be any number of reasons, but now they have a voicemail or potentially a text message, right? Let’s say you have that you’re using persist or email, talking to them, telling them what this campaign was about, why you reached out to them. And again, if you have a small list, you could just be reaching out to them to let them know and remind them that you’re there and there to help.
Liel: [00:22:05] I guess you can also use the autodialer, right, or the same principles in auto dialing for text messaging, which is, I think, another fantastic method of communication, particularly when you say, you know, reminders, sending a happy birthday message or something like that. Sometimes that’s better delivered over a text message. I think so. I also think that people are more likely to read a text message than answer a phone call from a number that they may not recognize. So that’s why sometimes I think one route is better than the other. But I also like what you’re saying here, where you are actually having the option of leaving that voicemail, possibly almost calling, knowing that you were going to be leaving a voicemail, which is something that you need to always be counting on.
Grace: [00:22:51] Exactly. And you know, that also the component of an autodialer with a voicemail drop included, meaning the person doesn’t answer the phone. It leaves a voicemail that also takes that away from the agent having to manually leave a voicemail. And that’s right. Is truthfully state that it’s going to be in the campaign sequence that you’re looking for. So let’s look at it up from that perspective. I have a campaign set up as a brand new campaign. I want that person when it first comes in to get called within five minutes, the system will do that. The system will send them a text, the system will send them an email. They don’t answer. It leaves a voicemail. And the next time it calls it’s X number of hours or the next day, depending on best practices. And it might not leave a voicemail because guess what? I already left a voicemail.
Liel: [00:23:40] Or maybe you were going to attempt the second call on that same day. And then if that doesn’t get answered, then you will leave a voicemail. Right. So there’s a lot of ways that this can be built and customized. So, again, you know, that’s why I think building up and creating these sequences in a way that it’s effective requires expertise to a degree. And I think that’s why it’s important to having the right partner to help you implement and configure these things so you can start seeing results and good benefit from using this technology from the get go and avoid making errors that, you know, it’s there’s nothing wrong with making them. But if you can actually get the help of someone who’s already made them and know why you should avoid them, why not take it? Right.
Grace: [00:24:26] Yeah, that’s why you and I are we’re constantly you know, obviously we believe in our product and the things that we sell, you know, Nanato media. You know, you’re a great digital marketer, particularly in the Spanish marketplace with that’s your focus and that’s who you are. And for me, it’s software and on the legal side of things and making sure people are integrated, automated. And even if you don’t use us, that’s why we constantly tell people on this podcast you need to create a partnership with somebody who does understand this stuff because it needs to be tailored for your use case, for your business, for your process. And you have to look at.
Liel: [00:25:04] There’s one tool here that you were mentioning on the type of software that law firm can use, and that’s for affiliate marketing programs. And I’m really interested in hearing because this is not a conversation that we’ve ever had here and we should probably do. How do you apply affiliate marketing techniques or an affiliate marketing strategy for a law firm?
Grace: [00:25:25] So obviously you can get into some potential issues if there’s money being passed through the affiliate program. So I for this particular section that we’re going to discuss right now, I’m not going to use anything having to do with money. I know generally speaking, particularly in the marketing world, it is money for affiliates. Right? That’s what it is. It’s you’re going to get a piece of this if you sell this. That’s the way it works in affiliate marketing and affiliate marketing software and programs in our world. Right. You’re in my world. However, in the legal world, a lot of times affiliate marketing programs cannot have money tied to it because it’s illegal to do so. Let’s say, you know, or you’re not really allowed to share fees or you can’t give fees out for whatever reason. So for our purposes in this conversation, I’m going to refer to the affiliate marketing program and what it can do in terms of creating a referral generating world. For lack of a better term. So that’s the way I see it, I saw this particular program for lawyers and that’s why I included it as one of the tech stacks. If you include an affiliate marketing program and you basically are promoting that your law firm is best known as a thought leader in this space, let’s say you do motorcycle accidents and that’s your focus.
Grace: [00:26:54] You are a niche law firm and you do this really, really well. Your affiliate marketing program can push this out to other lawyers and law firms out there and have them be aware of the fact that you are a thought leader in this space and they could, in theory, refer this back to you. So an affiliate in this sense, I’m referring to it as more of a referral, less of an affiliate, but it can be done nowadays. You can do this stuff in D.C., if I’m not mistaken, and I think Arizona as well, where non-attorney reps can be represented and that might fall under actually the sales and commission programs that I list in here. But it could be, in theory, an affiliate marketing program if they were actual lawyers and they refer them back to you. So that’s kind of how I looked at it. And I mentioned some down here that are very direct to software like referral rock, software lead dyno everflow. Those are true affiliate marketing programs and they can be modified for the legal world and legal services. I don’t suggest that for everybody, but it’s just another tool that could be in your sort of basket of tools potentially.
Liel: [00:28:12] This is definitely a conversation worth exploring. And as you said, of course, there’s a lot of legal boundaries there as to what and what limitations you have and how you need to adjust that to make it work within the way that you handle referrals. But I think it’s definitely something that it doesn’t need to be overseen. I think there is some massive opportunity there for law firms to explore. Now, Grace, it would be almost impossible for us to try to feeding all of these different solutions that you’re suggesting here on this presentation, on one single conversation, as each one of these slides could be its own conversation for us. But why would you be, what I mean, which are your your favorite? In addition of those, we already mentioned.
Grace: [00:28:57] My favorite to honestly have to be picking the right e-signature platform.
Liel: [00:29:04] Yeah, I was I was eyeing that one.
Grace: [00:29:06] Yeah, that is so important and people have no clue what a pain it can be. Well, I’m sure they do actually. And that’s part of my been always been a huge pain point for me. I have gone through at least 10 different e-signature platforms to find exactly the one that works for me the way I want it to. That includes Hellosign, DocuSign, assuresign, signnow, pandadocs, esign. I have literally gone through every single one of them. See how it integrates with Salesforce, see how it integrates with litify, see it and integrates with CRM, how it integrates with smart advocate, all of them. OK, and so for me that is a huge deal. What can I have that automatically inserts the information from one place to the next and in the right spot and then sends it out by email to the client to be signed? What is the easiest for them to use and for me to use? I personally settled on. SignNow. Why? OK. Why I settled on sign now, because sign now works clean with Zoho CRM. It auto-fills using a zapper app from Zoho forms, and as soon as it’s done, it’s signed, it then attaches itself along with the form into the client’s record in Zooh CRM
Liel: [00:30:30] That’s superimportant Grace. What you’re saying here, in your case, the keys here, what I’m hearing is how it integrates with the platforms that you’re already using. And I think that’s always going to be super critical. You need to make sure that it lives well in your ecosystem. It doesn’t matter just if the user experience in the ease of use of the platform is fantastic. If it doesn’t integrate, that can be a big burden because that means you are going to have to put a lot of manual work into getting something processed. Right. You see, that’s, I think, one of those things that when you’re growing, you tend to oversee and you to say, well, you know what, it’s OK to do it on my own, because anyhow, to automate this and to create a configuration is going to take a lot of hours. And so, you know, why automate something that it takes me 10 minutes to do it manually. But the reality is that as you start growing, if things go well, right. You start adding 10 minutes and 10 minutes and 10 minutes and it becomes a lot of time. Right. And it also creates the opportunity for things to fall through the cracks. It’s very easy for you to forget to do one or two. And then what happens if people don’t get their contracts? That’s very meaningful in terms of not just the impact on your business, but going back to the reputation management thing, to the experience of the actual user. And so it’s not just deficiencies, due diligence. It’s also about just making sure that the systems that you have in place are actually efficient to the point that you are minimizing, if not eliminating, as much as you possibly can, errors. And so I think that that’s one element that sometimes we leave outside of the decision-making process.
Grace: [00:32:19] When we’re looking at something, there are three main points to any e-signature platform. We look at one, how does it integrate with my systems? Right, and that includes cost and licensing, in my opinion, that has to include that. And why? Because do I need one user, you know, if I have one email address that all my people come and actually get the distribution group from right. Let’s say, you know, invite legal and take services. Right? Well, all of my people get the email from info at legal intake services so that any of them at one point can respond to somebody if they need to. So how many licenses do I really need? In theory, I should only need one, but if I want each one of them to be able to send from their own instance or log-in inside of the CRM. What does that mean for your licensing and your integration on that e-signature platform. And Hello sign, it lets you have to have licenses enough to cover the people that are using it, but it lets you send it from one specific one and integrates really nicely with litify and Salesforce. That’s hello sign. So that was the one I suggested for somebody that I was working with to integrate, persist with, litify, I suggested they use hellosign because of the cost and their process. But for me, Hellosign didn’t work because it doesn’t integrate with the whole system cleanly. Sign now works best for me because of the way it gets sent and the cost. So there’s a lot, there’s really three things. You got to look at the integration piece and cost. How is it going to look inside of your CRM? How is going to get in there? And that’s I know that’s part of integration, but I think about that as a separate component because you may have to deal with the API. Like you said, we don’t I don’t deal with APIs if I can help it, even though we’re a software company, because it costs too much time.
Liel: [00:34:20] Yeah, it’s resources-heavy.
Grace: [00:34:22] And then three, the user. What does the user experience look like? I first started using Zoho sign because it for me on my side, it was literally click a button, send signature. It was super easy to use on our side when it got to the user. Oh yeah. They, they couldn’t figure it out there. Like, I don’t see where the button is. The thing’s not popping up. I can’t sign it. I can’t see it
Liel: [00:34:49] With all due respect to Zoho, which I think it’s there on a big mission, they’re trying to be the software solution for everything business. With all due respect to that, I think when you take that approach, you end up having a product that can be very clunky in many ends. And that is one of them is just not polished, in my opinion. I think.
Grace: [00:35:11] I agree.
Liel: [00:35:11] You can certainly use it for doing a lot of organization from the backend. But at the moment that you put it on in front of the user, I don’t necessarily think it’s the best.
Grace: [00:35:24] It’s not user friendly. Yeah, no. Yeah. Sign now is, sign now is super simple. I can text somebody and as long as the form looks decent enough they can literally click through it. Next, next. Next, next. Yeah. Heard the same about hellosign and I’ve experienced hellosign on that side. Same thing.
Liel: [00:35:40] Super simple. That’s super important. If the integration and everything falls right into place that’s good. That’s important. But what Grace is saying here is it’s enough to make you have to rethink a lot of what you’re doing if the user experience is not good, because if your users are not responding to it and every single time you sign a form, you get a phone call of someone who needs to be walked through how to do it, then your whole organization process is defeated because you’re not saving any time. You’re not actually being able to make life easy to you or to your clients. And it’s just not the purpose of how things should work. Grace, I think we have time for one more preferred or software that you would want to highlight from this very impressive list.
Grace: [00:36:25] So to me, the most important and people fail to know that this even exists is an email processor or parsing software.
Liel: [00:36:35] Yeah, that’s an interesting choice. Elaborate Grace, please.
Grace: [00:36:41] You know, I’m going to so an email parser, guys, for those of you that don’t know, it comes with most of the time the enterprise version, which is one of the higher versions of Salesforce. It comes with the enterprise version and professional version of Zoho CRM. I believe Smart Advocate has an email parser now, but I’m not 100 percent sure about that. We used to use a system called mail parser. It was that’s what it was called. And it was just a little piece of software that sat on our computer on a physical server. This was over ten years ago guys maybe fifteen, maybe twenty now. I don’t know. It’s been a while, but this has been around a long time. And email parsing software, what does it do? It takes the email that is sent to you, usually a lead. I use this strictly for leads cases and everything that comes into our system. I use an email parser for. And it extracts the data into somewhere else in our case, I have it extract the data from a lead form online, from an attachment, from a case that’s being sent to me by a vendor or even further than that, when I’m sending it to you so that it goes right into my case management software with specific statuses as I signed it. So an e-mail partner takes data from an email, whether it’s an attachment or the body of it, and sticks it where you want it to go by mapping the field across to a spreadsheet, to a CRM, to case management software or wherever you needed to go.
Liel: [00:38:17] Give us an example of how are you using these? For instance, you were saying form submissions and such. So when you’re getting firm submissions, they already come organized by fields, right? Like each question, it’s on sale and then that sale gets inserted into your CRM and it would kind of like create the contact and maybe even how to enroll it into a sequence based on the answers that were given in that form. But if I understand correctly, what you’re saying here with an email processor is basically an email that is basically, you know, think about any random email that you get is just text paragraphs. And so these software basically reads that or scans through email and then subtracts information for that to plug it the same way that it would do for a Web form. Is that correct?
Grace: [00:39:12] Actually, it’s exactly the same as that. Generally speaking, you could have leads coming in from a bunch of sources, a lot of sources. Right. And almost always they come in as emails, almost always. Right. So I might have organic sources somewhere here, but I might be paying for a lead or lead campaign somewhere else. How do you get all of this data without manual input into one place? Using email parser without having to use an API. If you don’t have a Web form that automatically integrates with the case management software, which is seems to be the case a lot of times. Right. Because you might be posting a landing page on Facebook or you have a digital marketing company like yourself doing leads for them. So how do I get that data immediately with the fields I need into my CRM? You can use an email parser.
Liel: [00:40:07] That’s right, Grace. That’s actually a good solution. So it could be for that kind of scenario where if you’re buying leads from ton of different sources and they’re not integrating to your CRM directly and they’re just sending you email notifications, right, like this newly generated business. Well, first of all, which is a terrible configuration. Hopefully it does integrate to our CRM or you get some sort of access to a dashboard with the option of then having those leads being pushed to your actual CRM. But if you were getting Web forms via email, then this can help make that connection. OK, we got a lead here. We have all the details here. Now, let’s plug that into the CRM. What I think this is very powerful for when you know is that right? I mean, there is an email of your company somewhere out there for general inquiries, and those general inquiries also need to be processed. And so this could really help you and facilitate the expedition of processing these inquiries by actually allowing you to scan, substract the information that you need from there so you can know how to respond back without maybe having to read the email. That’s powerful.
Grace: [00:41:19] It sure is. Exactly. And that’s the point, right? It’s automate everything you can. So that’s why to me, the email parser, as little as a thing is, it seems to to you and I, because honestly, we automate everything to us. This seems kind of stupid. Honestly, it does. It does seem kind of dumb. But I’ve been, I come across so many times where there are so many different emails coming from so many different sources. And it’s hard for people to understand that you need to integrate it here. Here how to map fields. Yeah, one of the easiest ways to do that is just use a system that does that for you already. And I use you know, I use the native mail parser in CRM and for anything that requires something, maybe a little more complex, including a webhook, I use mail parser because it allows me to integrate using an API. If you know enough about that part of it, it’s part of the male process or parser.
Liel: [00:42:15] Yeah, Grace, that’s really good, but it’s time for takeaways. So where should we start?
Grace: [00:42:22] I think we should start where don’t forget about your reviews and answering every single one. That was our first conversation, right?
Liel: [00:42:30] Yeah, I think I think that really was, as I’ve called it, a wake-up call that there is a threat. Right. We a lot of what happens in the digital world, we build and hope on people’s morals and goodwill. But when that’s not there, when sometimes don’t things don’t work that way. You need to stand up for yourself and know how you’re going to react. So what you’re going to do and most importantly, have a system in place that’s going to support you coming out of that.
Grace: [00:43:04] Definitely. I mean, you need to know you don’t know what you don’t know. Right. And so the only thing you can do is respond to things that you see.
Liel: [00:43:13] Very good point.
Grace: [00:43:14] So I think the second one would be there are a lot of programs out there. There’s a lot of software out there that can help you automate everything, whether you’re at the initial stages of being a law firm or a mature law firm, it doesn’t matter. There’s tons of things out there that can help and benefit you. But you need to speak to somebody like Liel, or myself. That truly cares about where you are and how to get you to that next step. Because there’s so many things to think about when it comes to software. So get a partner, figure something out, if you can’t figure it out, reach out to us and we will help you figure out who your best partner could be in terms of. Automating processes so that you don’t have to do it manually anymore.
Liel: [00:44:01] 100 percent agreed, Grace. We have one more take away Grace.
Grace: [00:44:06] So my final takeaway is. Think about things as if you were a business, not just a law firm, and it will help you so much more than you can imagine right now. And it’s because most of you that go into law and become a lawyer, you’re there to help. And that has nothing to do with what I’m going to say next. But you’re there to help. But you have to help yourself as a business to help others.
Liel: [00:44:37] The only thing that I will add and really applicable to all of them is when making these type of decisions, whether it’s for automation, whether it’s when implementing your reputation management process, I think one or two steps ahead. Right. Don’t just limit yourself thinking again. What do you need right now? Think about the scalability of things. I don’t know. What do you think?
Grace: [00:45:02] No, you’re right. You’ve got to look at the whole thing that right as a whole and then fix and decide where you want things to go, not just because it’s the cheapest, not just because it’s the or most expensive, not just because you think it’s going to work. You’ve got to look at all the different components where you are in your business, what’s going to work for you and how is it going to best help you be more efficient and be useful for the user and easy for them to use.
Liel: [00:45:32] Grace, thank you very much. I mean, this really is a terrific presentation. There’s a lot of information here. So, yeah, as I’ve said, we can easily at any point come back here, pick another couple of slides here and make another conversation, because there’s is really, really some good ideas here that can help you get creative. And most importantly, think outside of the box, write things that you may have not thought that you can use software to implement for your law firm. You actually can you’ll be amazed as to how much you can get out of it.
Liel: [00:46:05] Well, Grace. But we’ll leave that for another conversation, right?
Grace: [00:46:08] Yep. Got tons.
Liel: [00:46:10] Ok, excellent. We’ll have a great rest of your day.
Grace: [00:46:13] Declare Grace you Tulear play by.
Liel: [00:46:17] If you like our show, make sure you subscribe. Tell your co-workers, leave us a review, and send us your questions to ask@incamerapodcast.com. We’ll see you next week.
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