Five years ago, your law firm was brand new. You had just left the comfort of a steady paycheck at a big law firm to go out and concur the world on your own terms. Having just finished reading your fifth business book, your confidence was soaring, and you were feeling as comfortable as you were ever going to about starting your own business.
You purchased a domain for your website. Perhaps you signed up for Squarespace, Wix, or had heard about the benefits of going with a CMS like HubSpot or WordPress.
Your accountant pushed you into using QuickBooks Online. You bought your email with your domain through GoDaddy. You picked Office 365 because you were familiar with outlook and didn't want to learn something new at that moment.
You filed the proper paperwork for you P/LLC. You were probably doing your own bookkeeping (if you could call it that) by filing receipts in a special folder you made in Outlook.
Finally, you got your first potential new client from a previous colleague of yours. They sent it over via email and you promptly responded back. A couple days later you hadn't heard anything back from the PNC, so you followed up with a phone call that went straight to their voicemail. A few days later they happened to call you back.
It wasn't the best case, but it was the case you were given. You took it on. You realized you might need to look into some case management software if you were going to grow this firm. Having used Clio Manage at your previous firm, you decided to book a sales call with them. Again, learning a new piece of technology wasn't high on your list. Drumming up new business and actually litigating the matters you had took the front seat.
Eventually, you built your referral network. You signed up for Clio. You were juggling the referrals you were getting out your email inbox. You had read about CRMs, but you couldn't tell anyone what it stood for. Was CRM a noun? A verb? Perhaps an adjective. Regardless, you needed a better way to keep track of the leads coming in, so you whipped up an excel spreadsheet and aptly name it "Leads".
The spreadsheet grew overtime with columns like "contacted y/n", "Marketing Source", "Who Sent", etc. You finally hired some help upfront in the form of a paralegal. Not only did you expect them to help you with the admin of your matters, you needed them to answer the phones, get back to potential new clients, and (without their knowledge) you wanted them to help build your machine.
You also started investing some of your hard-earned revenue into marketing. To the law firm marketing agency you hired, you were small potatoes. To you, your budget was another mortgage payment. More leads started coming in, mostly from the paid ads. At least that's what your customer success rep was telling you.
The new leads were being sent to you, and your paralegal via email. At first, these leads landed in your SPAM folder. Once that was fixed, your process was "whoever got to the email first must respond." That worked well until you noticed your leads seemed to spike after hours and on weekends. You took on the responsibility of responding to those. No rest for the wicked...
You then realized that you were the only one manually updating your Excel Leads sheet. Admittedly, that was the only thing you were doing with it. It became a place where leads went to die.
When a new client signed up with your law firm, you manually entered their information into Clio Manage and dumped everything from your notepad and emails into the default fields.
Your process was fragmented and relied mostly on you. Your tech worked in individual silos and most of it was collecting dust, or being used for things it wasn't engineered to do.
Here's what you have today:
IT'S ALIVE!!!
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