Choosing the best lawyer intake software for your firm can be daunting; however, if you get it right, better software can have a greater impact on long-term firm profitability than any single employee or case.
But how do you figure out which software solution is right for you? After all, every firm is different. Below, you’ll find suggestions along with questions and answers for buying the right legal intake solution for your firm.
What Is Attorney Intake Software?
Attorney intake software, or legal intake software, allows you to find, engage, and sign new clients in order to drive your law firm’s success. Legal intake management software also provides long term insight into new kinds of valuable cases that will drive your firm’s future. In short, client intake software for lawyers can help you dramatically increase your conversion rate and sign the types of clients and cases you want, enabling an increase in revenue.
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What Are the Benefits of Legal Intake Software?
There are two main benefits to legal intake software: it helps you identify more cases, and it helps you prioritize those cases, ensuring your firm is running at optimal efficiency.
Getting More Cases
While a strong marketing strategy is essential to drawing new clients to your firm, without world-class legal client intake software, you will miss out on some of your best cases. Why? Because of human errors, missed communication cues, and other small delays that add up to a mediocre intake process.
Prioritizing Your Cases
Legal intake software allows you to easily identify and prioritize the clients you want in real time. Prioritizing your most valuable cases in a way that’s meaningful to your firm right at intake helps ensure higher value throughout the entire case workflow. Knowing which cases are likely to be good ones allows you to focus on those instead of wasting energy chasing cases you don’t want.
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Legal Intake Management Software Features Every Firm Needs
You probably already know the benefits of legal intake software. But how do you choose from all of the options on the market? Here are some key features your intake software should have if you want to get significant benefit from it.
Case Monitoring
Your intake team needs to clearly see what needs to be done on each potential case, when it needs to be done by, and who is accountable for completion. As a manager, you need to be able to recognize if follow-up action is overlooked or delayed, and how to get on top of it and make sure it gets done right and on time. Your software should bring this information to your attention, front and center.
Powerful Case Mining
Great intake software should give you a way to go back and search your databases to find cases that develop over time. For instance, when medical products like knee implants get recalled, mass torts can appear that could earn significant payouts for your clients. This can certainly happen after you’ve already spoken with them or taken their case.
If you find that a mass tort exists for, say, a type of knee implant, you can instantly search your records to find clients with knee injuries, knee surgeries, and/or knee replacements, and market to them. This allows you to efficiently find new cases that your clients didn’t even know they had – without spending another dollar on ads.
Smart Alerts for Prospective Cases
Similarly, you need smart legal software that can recognize keywords in case records and alert you to follow up. Sometimes callers call about one legal problem, but they also have another claim they would never find without your help. The challenge with these hidden cases is they aren’t always easy to recognize, even by veteran staff. Your software can be the differentiator.
Seamless Oversight
Above all else, your software should give you peace of mind. By knowing that nothing gets overlooked, your staff is empowered with the tools they need, and you have readily-available data to prove your intakes are running smoothly, you can be sure you chose the right legal case software.
Average Cost of Legal Intake and Management Software
All those benefits sound pretty good, but what will it cost you? The only way to know specific cost for sure is to schedule some demos with platforms you’re considering.
Why is there no “average” for what this kind of software costs? Some companies integrate their intake software together with their or other case management software, while others offer the two as separate components.
If you are looking at software that doesn’t have its own intake, or encourages you to buy third-party intake integration, consider the additional costs of having to keep and maintain that as a separate add-on, as well as the cost of duplicate data entries when it’s not all in a unified platform.
Note: If you have to integrate intake software separately, extra cost is not the only concern. When you integrate new software, there are potential pitfalls like data not transferring accurately or a need to always upgrade the software and components so that they work hand-in-hand.
Characteristics of Best-in-Class Legal Software for Managing Intakes
Here’s what to look in legal software that manages intakes.
Patented, Customizable Lead Scoring System
One of the most important parts of intake is identifying high value cases. GrowPath allows you to score your own case leads so you can prioritize the ones that are most important. Using criteria you assign, GrowPath automatically generates a numerical score for new intakes. This means you can immediately measure the quality of your intakes so you know where to focus. This also has the added advantage of giving you an objective idea on what the quality level is of the cases you are signing.
In order to extract the right information from callers for proper lead scoring, GrowPath’s client intake form software is dynamic. One answer can negate whole sections of non-pertinent questions. Instead of making the caller feel unvalued by having them answer repeated and irrelevant questions, GrowPath allows you to home in on the most important questions to give you an accurate lead score as quickly as possible.
Patented, Revenue-Generating Buzzwords Technology
One thing that really sets winning law firms apart is looking closely at intake and finding cases inside existing cases. A “hidden case” might be a potential mass tort from a medical device recall, even though the caller is calling for a medical malpractice case.
To help your firm find these hidden cases, GrowPath offers a feature called Buzzwords. You set Buzzwords so that as your team takes notes on a case, when a key term appears (like mesothelioma), a Buzzword pops up and prompts staff to ask follow up questions, rather than missing the opportunity.
Easy Integration With Your Firm’s Systems
When you add new intake software, you want to know it will work well with your firm’s other technology, like case management. GrowPath is an all-in-one platform, which means it seamlessly connects with all of your other systems.
This integration has many advantages. GrowPath transfers client profiles to the legal case management portion of the system at the click of a button, without requiring your staff to endlessly copy and paste data.
Relatedly, a great intake process depends on reliable document access and storage. With GrowPath, all documents associated with intakes (like police reports or photos) are stored in the intake record. This means you never need to navigate outside of intake to view key documents.
Instant Communication Tools
Great intake depends on great communication. That’s why GrowPath lets you send texts and emails to potential clients from inside the software, and then stores these messages and client responses in the intake record. This process is both safer and less annoying. You won’t have to copy and paste between multiple programs and risk losing a key message.
Deep Analysis of Marketing ROI
Marketing drives your intakes, but you need to know if you’re spending your budget in the right place. GrowPath’s marketing analytics show you how your ad buys across all channels compare to the number of intakes they create. This lets you quickly generate marketing reports showing cost per lead and cost per case by channel in each hour of the day, giving you a clear picture of marketing performance.
Seamless Reporting and Intake Monitoring
To know how effective your intake department is, you need to measure performance and review the results instantly. GrowPath’s analytics keep track of every new case in your system, and self-generate reports on any process or case you want. You set the parameters, and GrowPath will email you reports on any intakes you designate. This lets you watch selected intakes closely to make sure they don’t fall through the cracks and ensure that the right follow up action is taken.
How Do I Know Which Legal Intake Solution Is Right for My Firm?
If you are looking to grow your law firm or take it to a new level, not having a seamless intake platform in this day and age is a non-starter. Your case management software is only as effective as your intake management.
GrowPath is cutting-edge legal intake software developed by lawyers for lawyers. With 26 patents and more on the way, GrowPath has best-in-class intake tools that other software can’t match.
When you invest in software, you want to know the company behind it will continue to make that software better. This is why it matters that GrowPath owns its own code and doesn’t build on any other third party software. That means that GrowPath can innovate faster to better firms like yours.
