Podcast Highlights: How a Legal CRM Saves Time & Increases Business | Everything Except the Law
The legal industry is in the midst of a rapidly changing technology landscape. Until relatively recently, lawyers have lacked software solutions built specifically for the unique needs of their industry, including nuanced timekeeping, billing, document security, and data collection. Lawmatics CEO Matt Spiegel recently joined the podcast Everything Except the Law to share how legal-specific software like Lawmatics can address two critical issues for legal businesses: saving time and acquiring more business.
Save time
The most direct way to save time is to have a legal software that can do your work for you. Automations save so much time that they’ve essentially become mandatory for a modern law firm. An average firm that uses Lawmatics saves 15 to 20 hours a week because they automate tedious tasks like appointment confirmations.
Increase business
In addition to saving time, automations increase your capacity beyond what you could ever do with human power alone. Take this example from Matt’s experience as a criminal defense attorney in California: you represent a client who is charged with a DUI. That client has potential to become repeat business because they want the DUI expunged from their record after California’s three year waiting period. It wouldn’t be practical for you to manually track such a timeline, stay in contact, and maintain necessary records for all of your clients with that kind of repeat potential. An automation system like Lawmatics does all that work for you. It can even automatically email that client to let them know they’ve become eligible for expungement.
A CRM system like Lawmatics provides all kinds of data, like insights into how maximizing your capacity to handle repeat business increases the ratio of revenue to your client acquisition cost. You can define key progress indicators (KPI) that are relevant to your firm’s business model, and make sure you’re spending your money in the most effective way possible: what types of cases provide the most revenue, what types of cases cost the most to acquire, what marketing efforts provide the most bang for your buck. Those KPIs are essential in making strategic decisions for optimizing your firm’s business.
Key takeaway
Legal tech platforms like Lawmatics are a necessity for managing the back-end, administrative functions of your firm. They’re also necessary for creating a great experience for your clients. An automated follow-up system won’t increase repeat business if your clients have a bad experience the first time around.
A CRM as powerful as Lawmatics can make each client feel like they’re your only client. Instantly confirm appointments with personalized automated emails and SMS messages. Stay top of mind with newsletters. Provide comprehensive and easily digestible billing statements. Analyze your marketing performance with detailed analytics and KPIs.
If you don’t use a system like Lawmatics yet, a new era of success for your firm is still waiting. Get started by booking a free Lawmatics demo today.
Podcast transcript
Matt Spiegel
What Lawmatics does and what I think any law firm needs to have this day and age is an automation platform, right? Is automating things that are mundane, the processes that happen all the time. I got to be honest, Nick, it's crazy to me the amount of time that our customers are saving. I had no idea. Our average law firm, which has like three to five lawyers in it, right? They're saving a total of 15 to 20 hours per week.
Nick Werker
That's insane.
Matt Spiegel
Over 50% of the firms were saving that kind of a time. So automation is mandatory now.
Nick Werker
Hey everyone, welcome back to Answering Legal's Everything Except the Law Podcast. As always, I am your host, Nick Werker. If this is your first time tuning in, this is the podcast where we share expert advice on all the parts of running a law firm that attorneys weren't exactly trained for back in law school. Now in this episode, we're going to be taking a closer look at Lawmatics, one of the most popular CRM platforms for lawyers for good reason. If your practice is looking to boost its efficiency, client engagement, and number of new prospects overall, you're definitely going to want to stick around and learn more about Lawmatics. Luckily for us providing us all the details on Lawmatics today will be the platform's founder and CEO, Matt Spiegel. Matt, thank you so much for joining us today.
Matt Spiegel
Yeah, likewise Nick. Very excited to chat with you.
Nick Werker
Yeah, been looking forward to this. So can you tell our audience a little bit about Lawmatics, how the platform originally came to be? Where'd you come from?
Matt Spiegel
Yeah, good question. I guess, and the background is relevant to the discussion, but I'm a lawyer, so I cut my teeth at a big law firm and then started my own law firm. And ultimately the idea for Lawmatics or the concept of Lawmatics really came from research that we were doing at my previous company. So my previous company, which I founded out of my own law firm is My Case. So one of the biggest practice management companies out there still. I started that company in 2010 and I left the company in 2015. And so it was really, at My Case, we were dealing with thousands and thousands of law firms and doing a lot of research and trying to understand not necessarily what lawyers needed or what problems they needed to solve now, but how were they thinking, right? What was top of mind for them when it comes to their business?
And really at that moment we saw the kernel of an idea and that idea was that lawyers were starting to think about their law firms as businesses and not just law firms. But this was not a mainstream idea yet. This was just sort of, like I said, it was a kernel. And this was in 2014. So then we fast forward to 2017 when I was looking to come back into the legal tech world and I just thought that the market was now ready. I thought that this idea that started as, in its infancy in 2014 was now picking up steam. And lawyers were really starting to think about their business and not just the law firm. And so we started Lawmatics really as a tool to help you focus on the business of your law firm and not on the practice of law or the management of the cases.
Nick Werker
So I'm personally curious, what was it like to... What made you... I know you said that you saw the evolution, because I agree with you, I remember that timeline in 2017 kind of being, I would say the turning point that I remember that lawyers were ready to take on technology and really build up their firms as a business. But what made you come back and what was it like leaving My Case?
Matt Spiegel
Well, so I left My Case in 2015 and then I went and just messed around for a while. I did things that were very unrelated to tech, and I guess I thought that that's what I wanted to do. I actually just took on as CEO, running a consumer electronics company, I guess is the best way to describe it. It was kind of like Nest, right? The camera product, it was like that. So it was a hardware and a software company and I thought that was what I wanted and it was just really hard and not for me. So what drove me back to legal was really just, it was time for me to start my own business again, my own startup. And I just realized that this was a space that I knew very, very well and it just kind of drew me back.
And so I think that was one of the problems I had with being in the consumer tech space. I'm a consumer, but I don't know, that doesn't make me an expert. It doesn't put me in that space necessarily. And I wasn't necessarily as passionate about it. And I think the passion is really important. And so coming back into legal tech was kind of an easy transition for me, but I think I felt very strongly that, and you probably can sympathize with this, as entrepreneurs or I guess business owners in the tech world, we use tools to help us run.... We live die by tools to help us run our business. We live and die by CRM tools or business analytics tools, business intelligence tools, things like Salesforce or HubSpot or whatever dashboarding software we use. And that's been the way that we've run our businesses for 20 years.
But legal wasn't quite there, but now you saw that legal was wanting to go that route and we're like, "Wait a second, they don't have these tools that we've used forever." And so it seemed just very natural to just take the best of the tools that we use and try to put it into a platform that an industry that has been technologically slow could actually use.
Nick Werker
So I couldn't agree with you more and that's why, so I want to talk about specifically Lawmatics. So you leave in 2015, you come back in 2017. I'm sure that at the reentry point in 2017, because I remember trying to get integrated with a bunch of the platforms that were around and they didn't... I could have used them. And that doesn't say much for running a law firm because I don't run a law firm. I run a pretty big corporation. So I want to ask why do lawyers need a platform like Lawmatics and why is it so important for them to invest in a quality CRM? Because it's not one of those things that is so prevalent that everybody knows which one to get and how to customize it for themselves. What is it specifically that lawyers need that Lawmatics can address?
Matt Spiegel
Well, so this is a really good, I think this is just a good holistic discussion, right? Because one, the tools to do this, you and I just talked about how we've been using tools like this for 20 years. Well, there's no reason why a lawyer couldn't use the same tool. So these tools have been around forever. It kind of highlights the fact that lawyers need software that is built for them. It's a professional service industry like legal, I think just needs products that are tailored to their way of being, right? To their processes to... They have nuanced time being, tracking your time billing. Those are important things.
Signing documents, maintaining the security of documents, gathering large pieces of information, collecting data from a particular client. There's unique things that a professional service industry like legal needs. And so you look at, well, why haven't lawyers just adopted other software out there? Well, the reason is because those softwares haven't been tailored to their needs. And this is the same for any software. Forget, just forget CRM, forget Lawmatics. It's anything, right? There's a reason why lawyers use My Case or Cleo and not Fresh Books or some general platform that is designed to do invoicing, right? It's because they need things, they need trust accounting, they need certain things that are more specific to the legal world. And so every lawyer should want a software that helps them measure their business and engage their contacts, their leads and their contacts more.
One thing that's really critical to remember I think, is that it's about 75% of all law firms business comes from referrals. And that's not just other lawyers, it's your own clients. So what I see, I'm sure you see the same thing, but what I see in working with so many law firms, the lowest hanging fruit, the part that lawyers are screwing up the most, is they're sitting on this gold mine of business. They've got thousands of clients that they've helped in the past and then they're not doing [inaudible 00:10:10] to engage them once their matter's over. That matters over and they're like, "All right, see ya." Right? Five years later when that person knows somebody who needs a lawyer for the same practice area, it's been five years, maybe they remember you, maybe they don't. You haven't been nurturing them, you haven't been making sure that you stay top of mind. There's so much missed opportunity. And you can't do that without software. You can't do a good job of that nurturing without software.
Nick Werker
It's not like you and me, where we get one customer and the customer stays for whatever. I think my average customer stays for two years, right? I don't really have to live and die by referrals because my customers aren't just one off things. I build a relationship with each individual customer. So it is funny to hear that you're sitting... It's funny to hear how law firms have to run differently as a business, but how it's all the same principles. If you could automate this process, you'd make so much more money just by simply nurturing the clients that you already have and telling them, Hey, when you run into a friend or a colleague or a coworker or so on and so forth in the future who needs my help don't hesitate to send them to me. And you can automate that. You can automate that by emailing them, by keeping in contact, by engaging them, by educating them. The possibilities are endless.
I do want to talk about... I hate to say that the past few years have been chaotic, but I don't want to say chaotic. I want to say the past few years we've seen a great amount of change and really a shift in the mindset of law firms in their willingness to adopt software and technology for their firms. But from the source, I want to hear what type of feedback have you gotten from users of your software during this time? What are users and what are lawyers saying about Lawmatics? What have they been able to accomplish over the last few years?
Matt Spiegel
Well, first of all, I think that at least now in the legal industry, because look, I've been in the legal tech industry since late 2009. So I've been with it through thick and thin. And we started with My Case in the days when it was me, it was Jack at Cleo, it was Larry at Rocket Matter. And we were just sort of getting this whole cloud thing going. They even started it before we came along. And now at least the idea of the cloud and even practice management in the cloud is table stakes. People are okay with that. By being okay with that it's like they've accepted all other types of platforms. And so it's nice we're not having to educate people on this is why you need to use web based software anymore. We've kind of crossed that chasm. So that's very helpful because when I was starting My Case, it was not that we had to educate the whole community on, "Hey, it's okay, it's safe to use the cloud. In fact, it's safer to use the cloud than whatever it is that you're using currently."
So we don't have that problem anymore. But what we've heard, really what we've heard through the last, for the few years, during the pandemic obviously, I think that's also been a good push for law firms. They almost had to use technology. If they didn't use technology before, they almost were forced to just by nature of the circumstances and by nature of what their clients now wanted of them. And what I mean is maybe they didn't want to use Zoom because they were afraid of it, right? Now they're forced to. So we've seen that forcing of technology on top of the idea that it's okay to use technology now being very commonplace. So that part of it I think has been great and wonderful for the industry as a whole.
For us, what we're really seeing and what people tell us about using a software like Lawmatics, which is actually pretty incredible, it's two things. There are two value props. And actually, I'll take a step back here because it's important and I think, curious if you'll agree with me on this one. I think there are two value props as a service provider that you can deliver to a law firm. And it's really only two. You're either going to save that law firm time, which is going to... Time is money, or you're going to get them more business some way. But at the end of the day, that's really kind of it, those are only really kind of the two value props that you can provide. It's the very rare company that provides both. You guys actually interestingly, you guys probably provide both, right?
Nick Werker
Yeah. I don't want to be that guy and say that, but...
Matt Spiegel
No. But you do because you're obviously saving them a ton of time by taking phone calls off the table, letting someone else handle that. But you're also then answering the call and you're situated in a way that you're going to help them convert and get that lead, that potential new client connected quicker and hopefully a higher percentage close. Right?
Nick Werker
Yeah. And we don't generate new business. We don't help them make more money, but we do help them capitalize on the opportunities that their marketing...
Matt Spiegel
That's exactly...
Nick Werker
And goodwill have already generated.
Matt Spiegel
Yeah, that's exactly right. Lawmatics delivers on the same two value props in the same way. The amount of time... So what Lawmatics does, and what I think any law firm needs to have this day and age is an automation platform, is automating things that are mundane, the processes that happen all the time. I got to be honest, Nick, it's crazy to me the amount of time that our customers are saving. I had no idea. I actually thought that it would be the other way around, that our bigger value prop would be all the new business that we're getting because of our conversion, the intake process. We're going to help you convert more leads and we're going to nurture your past clients and that's going to bring in heaps of business. And that's true, that happens. But what's astounding is the amount of time we are looking at, we surveyed our users and our average law firm, which has three to five lawyers in it, they're saving a total of 15 to 20 hours per week.
Nick Werker
That's insane.
Matt Spiegel
And I was completely floored. And so we double checked all the data because I thought that there was, people were just clicking the wrong thing. But it was over 50% of the firms were saving that kind of a time. So automation is mandatory now. And the best example I give to tie some of the stuff we were talking about earlier together, and I ask this question all the time is, "Okay," so I have a room of lawyers and I say, "All right, who has more than 500 past clients?" Everybody raises their hand. I say, "Awesome. How many of you are communicating with all of them on their birthday?"
And then all of the hands go down, right? Because how the hell are you going to do that? How are you going to send an email to every one of... You have 2000 past clients. How are you going to send an email to them on their birthday? Well, you can do it with an automation platform. It just does it for you, right? It's such an easy concept to kind of understand. And if you don't understand how sending an email to your past clients on their birthday can help you get business, then I'm not sure that we can really help you. It should be pretty easy to understand how valuable that could be.
Nick Werker
I like the idea that, because I don't do that. I don't email clients on their birthday, but I do have other automations that happen when clients reach certain milestones or.
Matt Spiegel
Yeah, exactly.
Nick Werker
It's just automated. So...
Matt Spiegel
I used to do criminal defense, and in California, when you get a misdemeanor, you can get it expunged from your record in three years. So if I get a DUI, I can't wait for that three year mark because I really want to get that thing expunged, right? That's huge. You need a lawyer's help to get it expunged. And as a criminal offense lawyer, I would charge 1,500 bucks to do an expungement, right? Here's the problem. How am I going to remember when everyone needs their expungement? I'm going to set a little calendar date three years out, and I'm going to look at my... "Oh, it's time to contact this." No, but how awesome would it have been when I was practicing criminal defense if I already have their conviction date, I'm keeping track of it in my software. So how awesome would it be if just two years and nine months after their conviction date, it just automatically sent the person an email saying, "Hey, guess what, come back. It's time to do your expungement." It would've been a printing press. I would've just been printing money.
Nick Werker
And how much money do you save on lead generation? Because you've already converted that person as a customer. They're already comfortable working with you. You don't have to go out and find new expungements. You already have pending expungements. That's your...
Matt Spiegel
That's exactly right. And it's value. So this brings us to a discussion, which I'd love to have with you, and you'll probably like it too, I guess. But the other big thing about a software Lawmatics and we haven't talked about yet is metrics, KPIs. I believe truly that if you cannot measure a marketing source that you are spending money on, then you shouldn't do it. And it might be working really well for you and taking it off the table might kill your business, but if you can't measure what's working, you shouldn't do it at all. Right? And so to come back to one of the most important metrics, I think is acquisition cost. These are things, you and me, Nick, we know that like the back of our hand, we live and die by CAC, customer acquisition cost. But lawyers don't even know what that is, but they should.
If your average revenue from a customer, from a client at a law firm is 2,500 bucks, but you're spending $5,000 to get that client in marketing, well that doesn't work. So to come back to this example where it's like, all right, let's say you spent $500 to get that DUI client and you made $5,000 from them for the case. Well now if you go get another $1,500 from them, that just increases the ratio of your cost of acquisition to the revenue side, which is really, really good, big metric to pay attention to. But these metrics, these KPIs are so critical. We're trying to introduce these business defining metrics to law firms that they typically don't measure.
Nick Werker
We will be right back after this short ad.
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Nick Werker
I want to pose a question to you because I have a feeling that the answer is yes, and it seems like from what I know about Lawmatics, that the KPIs are really strong, but the insights that you can glean from the KPIs are really strong. I want to do this with a story because this is a true story. So about a week ago, a very, very, very close friend of mine called me up and he's like, "Hey, you do marketing, right?" And I said, "Yes, I do marketing." And he said, "Well, I'm trying to find another income stream..." In so many words, this guy used to be a high end waiter, he has a day job, but he just wants to make more money for his family, he needs more money. He's like, "I've been writing freelancing online, but that's not really sustainable. And I'm looking to do... I do SAT tutoring and I can do tutoring virtually, and I'm really good at it."
And so I'm talking to him about, I was like, "Yeah, I could. I'll do it for you, man. I'll set up your website, I'll set up a calendar, they can book, I'll host it. Don't even worry about it. I'll do the whole thing." And he's like, "Oh, but what about Google? Can I spend money on Google? I have a friend who spends money on Google." And I was like "Off the top of my head, I don't know if each of those clicks that we would generate for you is going to be more or less or profitable for you based on what you try. I know nothing about your business. I can't tell you if you're going to make more money than it's going to cost me to bring you a client. On the flip side is I can't even tell you what it would cost in any space on what it would would cost you, nor the amount of time that it would take either you or me to generate an ad or..."
So I want to know, because I think that this is kind of true, is lawyers have different types of cases that might take a certain amount of time. So the return on spend or the revenue that you might make versus the amount of time that it takes you to complete that case could be different. And each different medium has a different cost. So is there a way to cross reference all of that and see where I should be spending more money here to get this type of criminal defense case, and I should be spending more money over here to get this type of criminal defense case, because this one might take me a little bit more time, but the spend on this platform is way lower. So can you optimize where you should spend-
Matt Spiegel
Absolutely.
Nick Werker
... Your money on?
Matt Spiegel
Absolutely. Again, this is where... And we can geek out over metrics and stuff, but my view is you need to be able to slice and dice. You need to be able to slice and dice your data however you want. I view it as you need to be able to ask whatever question you want of your data. So if I want to ask that question, which is like, "Okay, which type of criminal defense case is more valuable to my business?" You should be able to ask that question of your data and get an answer. And I think that's pretty fundamental. I mean, well, most fundamental would be just general source tracking. I'm spending this much money on an AdWords campaign and this is the ROI that I'm getting. But being able to slice and dice that ROI and analyze the revenue that you're generating from a particular matter, a particular type of case, and how much time you're spending on it, these are all things that you should be able to look at in many different ways.
Nick Werker
Yeah, you're right. I just geeked out and tried to ask you a complicated question because I get excited about... Because I have that... I can do that. I can find a certain type of law firm that I get from this certain type of ad and they only use... Obviously I want people to use more minutes, but I find a certain... I can only find, say I charge by the minute, I can find bigger customers in one place, but I find a lot more smaller customers in another place. And what's more valuable to me and how much does it cost to obtain each one? And where should I be doing that? So I just get nerdy.
Matt Spiegel
I mean I'll be like... I mean, you should see our data. I'll be like, "Hey listen, I want to know what... Is a lead more valuable if it comes from Google after 4:00 PM on a full moon."
Nick Werker
Yep.
Matt Spiegel
Right? I mean, we'll get crazy with our data.
Nick Werker
I run into that problem a lot too, where I'm like, "Am I overthinking this? Am I putting too much? Is it just random?" There's no trend for the full moon, but I want to know.
Matt Spiegel
It's really, to me it's all about, you do have to be a little careful, I think is good advice to share with law firms. It's like you want to make sure that you have some statistical relevancy. So if you're looking at a particular data set and you're trying to drill down into numbers and your sample set is two cases or something, it might not be statistically relevant. So you want to make sure you have enough sample set that you're getting data to make a decision off of, right?
Nick Werker
Totally. Don't change your entire strategy because you've got one big whale or... You know what I'm saying? And don't quit before the miracle happens too.
Matt Spiegel
That's exactly right.
Nick Werker
You have to give yourself, I would say, ample opportunity in order to and sample size, what's statistically relevant for my stats people out there in order to make decisions. But I want to talk about clients because I think we sort of give lawyers in the past six to 12 months, a lot of people are like, "Oh, lawyers are doing so good. They've caught up, they took on the technology, they did this." But I give more credit to the law firms that have become what I'll call client centric. And what I think is becoming a term now. How have the expectations of legal clients evolved in the recent years and why might law firms need a platform like Lawmatics in order to meet those expectations?
Matt Spiegel
So look, this is my bread and butter. This is what, when I go around and talk to bar associations, this is what I talk about. It's about thinking about customer service. I think customer service can outweigh performance in the courtroom or results in matters. It's just as simple as that. And so you need to take a look at the customer experience, the service that you provide. I call it the path to delightenment, which is looking at this client journey and trying to figure out every step of the journey, what opportunities do I have to delight my client or my potential client? And that's starts from the very get go. When they call, do you answer right away?
It's as simple as that. And it goes all the way through how you communicate with them, how you make them feel. You got to remember something. And almost everybody who's listening to this, and almost every one of our customers and probably every one of your customers, Nick, they do a certain type of law. It's going to be personal injury, it's going to be bankruptcy, it's going to be criminal defense, it's going to be estate planning, it's going to be family law, it's going to be immigration. That's like majority of it. The case that you are representing them on, this is the most important thing happening in their life.
Nick Werker
That's right.
Matt Spiegel
Categorically. To you, it's just another matter. Put yourself in their shoes. This is the most important thing happening in their life. How do you think they want to be treated? Put yourself in their shoes and think about it that way. And it will change the way you think about customer experience, customer service and what you do at your firm I think.
Nick Werker
I love that synopsis. And at the risk of being chastised by my friends and colleagues and my family members, I'm a very anecdotal person. I like to tell stories. I play a lot of slow pitch softball. Because that's what I'm capable of, not no shame to my slow pitch guys out there.
Matt Spiegel
I love it.
Nick Werker
But I've always worked under the assumption that it's really easy to market a good product. And over the years people will compliment me, "Oh, you're doing a great job marketing this, that." And I'm like, "Nah, dude. It's so easy to market a good product." It's because we have a good product and it's not necessarily the truth. In essence, all that I offer is a call center. And yes, my people really, I do believe in my people. And that's my point is that the people who run this organization top to bottom are superior. And that's what customer service is it's a person to person connection. So when I play softball, they have these bats are made out of this crazy material. You hit the ball and it makes the ball go farther. And if you can get an extra 20, 30 feet out of a hit that turns a ball, that somebody catches into a home run. So you want to maximize the amount of feet that you can hit a ball. And there are bat companies out there that make the best bats on the market.
Matt Spiegel
And there are people that will pop a top off that bat and shave it so that you get even more...
Nick Werker
Oh, they'll shave it. Oh, that's dangerous. But these companies, there's one specific, I'm not going to name them because I don't want to be sued because I don't know if they'll come after me. This is a small podcast, but I'm not going to do that. They make the best bat on the market and they have the worst customer service of anybody I've... Like, it's almost as bad as airplane like airlines, right? Well, you're calling them up and be like, "Hey, my bat it cracked, it did this, it did that." So on and so forth. And they tell you, "Sell it." Right? "We're not going to replace it, try to get the money." They're insane. So yeah, they might have a great product, but if their customer service is terrible, I'm not going to buy, even if I get the extra... I don't care how good of a lawyer you are, if somebody calls you up and you say, "I'm the best, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." No, you're a jerk, right?
Matt Spiegel
Totally.
Nick Werker
Your customer service sucks. I can't get ahold of you. I don't know what to expect. I'm not going to hire you, right? Because I have a level of expectation that I need you to meet. So you summarize that beautifully. I want to ask you, because I think most lawyers have a general idea of the benefits that they get from a CRM like yours. Not totally the automation and the analytics, but I think we've covered that. I do want to ask you, are there any under the radar features that Lawmatics provides that attorneys should be aware of?
Matt Spiegel
I think... Well, it's hard because it depends on the firm. I think that email marketing is under the radar to a lot of firms, even though it shouldn't be, right? And Lawmatics provides all that, email campaigns, newsletters, all that kind of action is handled inside of Lawmatics. So while it's not under the radar to us, it may be under the radar to a lot of law firms out there. Lawmatics now offers some time and billing components. So we've kind of gone down that road a little bit. It's certainly not nearly as robust as My Case or a Cleo is, but to a lot of law firms out there, it's plenty. And it actually just allows you to live in Lawmatics for the entire life cycle, which is a pretty cool thing.
Nick Werker
Well, and the more data that you can collect inside of Lawmatics, the more robust that your insights can be, right?
Matt Spiegel
That's exactly right.
Nick Werker
You need an email, but it's all right there. You can cross reference that with the whole entire life cycle of a lead, to a customer, to a returning customer.
Matt Spiegel
And just the fact that we're an automation platform and we have this beautiful automation engine means that anything we do, we can plug into that engine, which means things like time and billing and a lot of other things, document management, all that stuff can just be automated.
Nick Werker
So I'm going to selfishly ask you for a sneak peek. Is there anything that you can tell us about platform development? Something coming out, maybe?
Matt Spiegel
We are this week, so I'm not sure when this is going to go, but this week or next week we're going to launch a feature that seems small, but it's maybe one of the biggest features we can launch in a while, which is we're giving... So Lawmatics has booking platform built in, so you can send out a link and people can book meetings with you. We're now going to have the ability to tie that to a required payment. So if you want to charge for a consultation, which so many people are doing now, you could limit it so that they can't actually reserve that appointment until they've made a payment. And that all goes through our platform. It's automated and it's really fantastic. So that's one that we're really excited about.
Another one that we're in the process of releasing right now... So email is a really tricky thing. Lawmatics is ESP, it's an email service provider. Getting email delivered, man, it keeps me up at night. It's not... When you have thousands of law firms and they're all sending... I mean we're sending millions and millions of emails every month. Making sure that that gets delivered is really hard. One way that we can solve that though is by sending email through someone's own outbox. Not the mass emails. That's going to get you black...
We don't want to get you blacklisted. So we don't want to all of a sudden have 5,000 emails go from your outbox in Google. But the critical emails in Lawmatics like sending out an invoice or sending out a document that needs to be signed or sending out a form that needs to be filled out or a booking link, very easy to send those directly through your outbox. So now you're not even... You worry not about sending through Lawmatics IP, the IP address and spam issues or anything like that. It's literally you sit down at your computer and hit compose. It goes through your own outbox.
Nick Werker
Interesting.
Matt Spiegel
This is a really big feature and we actually will be releasing the feature for mass campaigns. What we do in that situation is we throttle it. So we only send one email every 30 seconds. So it could take a while, but at least you know that you're going to have no issues with deliverability. So this is, these are the things that we think of sometimes. It's not a super sexy feature that actually makes the most impact.
Nick Werker
Totally understand. I'm excited for that. I like the idea of throttling because I need email throttling, so I don't know how, but I'm going to hit you up for help. So instead of asking like, "Oh, why should lawyers... Where should they go to get, to check out Lawmatics?" For anybody who's listening to this, who's interested in trying Lawmatics, can you sort of explain the process of getting started using the platform?
Matt Spiegel
So this is an area that we care a lot about. So we put a lot of effort into onboarding. So when you come onto Lawmatics, the thing is it's a Ferrari, right? But not everybody knows how to drive a stick shift in a Ferrari. So we will really walk through and we will help you think about your processes and help you develop the automations that you really want. It would be unfair of us to sit a lawyer down and say like, "Hey, just go do email marketing." Not going to know what to do. So we really help and an onboarding process for us can, it takes 30 to 45 days. We really spend time working with you and making sure that you're going to be set up for success on the platform.
Nick Werker
Love it. Matt, I would like to thank you so much for joining me on the show today. Really appreciate you being here.
Matt Spiegel
Yeah, Nick, thank you so much for having me. It's good to talk one on one, but I look forward to being on more panels with you too like we've done in the past.
Nick Werker
Yeah, same here. So for anybody who's listening, we hope you enjoyed this conversation. We will be back with another episode of Everything Except the Law soon. Be sure to check out previous episodes on the show on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Anchor, the Answering Legal YouTube channel. Links to everything covered in today's conversation can be found in the description of this episode, including the link to get started with Lawmatics. We hope to see you next time everyone.