Podcast Highlights: Why Your Law Firm Needs a CRM | New Solo

Lawmatics CEO Matt Spiegel joined Adriana Linares on the podcast New Solo. They discussed the purpose of a CRM (client relationship management) software and why client relationships matter, even after a matter has concluded. Here are some highlights:

Why do I need a CRM for my law firm?

In any kind of consumer-driven law, from family law to personal injury, your client’s matter is likely the single most important thing going on in their life. With a client relationship management software, your firm can make each client feel like they have your full attention.

Whether you’re a large or solo firm, relationships matter. A previous client might return with new business or refer a new client, so continue communication after their matter has concluded. Consider sending a newsletter or even personalized birthday cards to keep in touch. A CRM brings clients within reach and keeps them there.

With a CRM like Lawmatics, you can create an intake process customized to your firm and practice area. Automations enable you to engage new leads immediately after they reach out — whether you’re in court, bed, or the Bahamas. Track and bill your time, send documents, analyze your marketing results, and free up valuable time. No matter your firm size, a CRM is critical to increasing bandwidth.

What’s the difference between a CRM and case management software?

A CRM and case management software are not necessarily the same thing. The difference lies in the specific features a software offers.

Practice management primarily focuses on features like time & billing and document management. These tools are cornerstones of the work that goes into managing an active case. A CRM has tools needed to manage a client regardless of the status of their matter or how many matters they have. It focuses on features like client communication, emails, forms, and marketing.

To put it simply, practice management tools help you practice law; a CRM helps you run the business. If no one software has every feature you want, research what softwares or platforms integrate to create a seamless solution for your firm.

What should my law firm’s intake process look like?

Any law firm’s client intake process should be easily repeatable and consistent. It should also plan for contingencies.

What if a new lead contacts your firm but doesn’t follow through with scheduling a consultation? What if they ghost your firm after their consultation? Not every new client will have a perfectly linear intake path, so your firm’s intake process should anticipate different branches of a client’s journey. Identify the spots where a lead might fall through the cracks, and make a plan to re-engage them.

Takeaways

Running a law firm is a lot of work. Between working active cases, consulting potential new clients, organizing marketing efforts, and taking care of administrative business, a modern law firm isn’t built to run manually. As much as possible, get your CRM or case management software to do your work for you. Automations can not only make your intake process more efficient and consistent, they give your firm the bandwidth it needs to anticipate and respond to any contingency.

If you’re evaluating your firm’s processes around client relationship management, ask yourself three questions: is my intake process consistent? Have I planned for contingencies? Is this as efficient as possible? If you answer ‘no’ to any of these questions, then it’s probably time to look for a CRM.

Podcast transcript

Adriana Linares

Hi everyone, it's time for another episode of New Solo on the Legal Talk Network. My name is Adriana Linares, I'm your hostess, I hope with the mostest, thanks for joining me today. We are going to have another round of wine questions with my guests today.

If you have listened to our last episode, I was having a little bit of fun because I've been taking a professional wine course in New Orleans. I want everybody to know I graduated top of my class. I'm going to quiz my guest today. Matt Spiegel. Hi Matt.

Matt Spiegel

Hi Adriana. How are you?

Adriana Linares

I'm great. What do you do. Where do you work? I'm kidding.

Matt Spiegel

What do I do? I don't know anymore.

Adriana Linares

No, I think you do. Let me help. So everyone, Matt Spiegel is a name that might be familiar to you. If it's not, you are certainly familiar with products of the past and products of the current that Matt has developed.

He's a legal technology expert. He's a lawyer as well. You were the original founder of MyCase. You grew up that baby, you let it leave the house and you created a new baby called Lawmatics, and I want to thank you so much for becoming a new sponsor of New Solo.

Matt Spiegel

Yes, thank you. So we're very happy about that. I feel like that was a long time coming for us and we're very fortunate enough to be in a position to be able to do that, which I like. And yes, I did. I am the original founder of MyCase. I did grow it up and then let it leave the house and then go from house to house, to house to house.

Adriana Linares

It's still couch surfing. We don't know if it's found a permanent home yet, but it's still couch surfing.

Matt Spiegel

Exactly right. It really took after me in college, just like trying to find places to live.

Adriana Linares

Well you must be very proud of that baby because it has certainly gone off grown up and become a very successful product out there. And I know we have lots of listeners that use MyCase and they have you to thank for it. I like MyCase a lot. So Lawmatics though is not necessarily new anymore, but I think you should definitely tell everybody what Lawmatics does and the things they can use it with.

Matt Spiegel

So we just technically celebrated our five year birthday.

Adriana Linares

I was guessing five years, mentally.

Matt Spiegel

And it's weird, right? Because I think it doesn't feel like five years and obviously the whole pandemic thing just fast forwarded time, and has definitely created this wonky sense of the past.

So it doesn't feel like five years, but I go back and I think about it and it's just been a lot, and we've built this massive product and what it's become, it's definitely exciting to me.

I had no idea what we were going to really build when we started to build it. And so to see what it's become now is pretty exciting and I'm pretty happy with where we're at. Although, and again, while it does feel it's been a long time and five years feels like a long time, it also feels like we're just getting started. So I think that's why there's definitely a bit of a dichotomy there.

Adriana Linares

Are we still calling it a CRM or have you grown it to a point where it's beyond a CRM, it's like a platform?

Matt Spiegel

We refer to it as a platform, but like-

Adriana Linares

Okay.

Matt Spiegel

... I mean Salesforce is a platform and Salesforce is a CRM. I think we still have this problem where people don't know what a CRM is or-

Adriana Linares

Yes, and that's where I was going. Please tell us.

Matt Spiegel

If you look at the definition of what a CRM stands for, is like customer relationship manager, right? Management.

Adriana Linares

Client.

Matt Spiegel

Client, customer, whatever you want to call it, right? It's a relationship management tool. Well to me, everything that you do for your business, when it comes to your clients, is part of managing that relationship. So obviously, nurturing that relationship through intake process, that is part of the relationship management. Nurturing them after their case is over with newsletters and trip campaigns, that's obviously-

Adriana Linares

Staying connected, top of mind.

Matt Spiegel

Same thing. That is very much relationship management. But there are a lot of other things that are relationship management too. You could argue that helping them manage their case, whether maybe even billing them, to getting paid, managing their documents, that's part relationship management as well. So to me, I view CRM as all encompassing, is pretty much everything. Anything that you really need to manage your business. If your business deals with customers or clients.

Adriana Linares

And I should say, just to give you more credibility than you already have, you practiced law for a long time. Well, not that long because you're not that old.

Matt Spiegel

Five years. Five years.

Adriana Linares

You practiced law. So you came from the background of understanding what it's like to run a law firm from the backend, not necessarily just the practical side. So you've got experience running a law firm, you started a practice management system and now we've got Lawmatics that's a CRM.

I think a year or two ago, someone asked me for a newsletter or magazine something, "What do you think is going to be the biggest trend of..." It was either 2020 or 2021? May have even been 2022 when they asked me and I said, "Well, it's probably CRM." Because I talked to so many lawyers that what I get asked about repeatedly today, isn't the cloud anymore? Woo, we're over that. We're on the cloud, we believe in the cloud, we got there.

The two hottest things that I hear about right now, are attorneys asking me about, client relationship managers and document assembly, which back to your point is if you can start the relationship with a client where you're gathering data, gathering information digitally in something like an intake system, a CRM, and then you're able to push that data digitally from the intake form all the way to the final bill that you're sending out, then you're managing your client relationship and using technology to make it smooth and seamless.

So as far as Lawmatics goes, because I do always like to talk about pricing and people are going to wonder, and you're a sponsor, so we're going to say, "Go to Lawmatics and check them out." Tell us about pricing a little bit when it comes to Lawmatics.

Matt Spiegel

So pricing is pretty straightforward. We're kind of like anything else in the market where it's generally going to be based off of the number of users that you have in the platform.

I'm a big believer in playing around with pricing, but I'm also a big believer in value pricing. And what that means is really you want to price your product off of the things that deliver, the perceived value that your customer looks at. And what I mean by that is, a law firm tends to think about how successful they are by the number of people they have.

And that's not necessarily the best measure, but tends to be the way it is. It's not necessarily how many cases they have, it's really more how many people do they have. So because they look at people as a big measure of how well they're doing and how big their law firm is, then we base our pricing off of that.

That's what I mean by value based pricing. And so we continue that trend. We've experimented in the past with doing pricing based off of the number of cases that you have. And again, we just, lawyers didn't necessarily attribute the same value to that and it was difficult.

Adriana Linares

Oh that's interesting.

Matt Spiegel

So we charge like 250 bucks basically per month. And that comes with three users and a bunch of other great stuff. And then if you need to add users on beyond that, it's just as user pricing.

And then we have another tier when you get to 10 users, that changes the pricing a little bit as we do serve everywhere from the solo law firm all the way up to firms with, we have a firm with 500 lawyers, so we really run the gamut there, which is also something that's pretty unique about what we do, is that we serve segment to the market that not a lot of other products can span across. And so yeah, that's kind of how our pricing is structured. We have little add-ons here and there, but generally speaking it's the user based pricing.

Adriana Linares

That's the starting point. And so at $250 a month, is that whether you're one or three people?

Matt Spiegel

Yeah. If you're one, you're paying $247, if you're three, you're paying $247, after that, you pay more. And what we find is there are very few true solos out there. Even if you are true solo, I can promise you, you spend 240... In fact, the true solos probably save more money using Lawmatics than the people who have three or four lawyers.

Adriana Linares

I cannot have conversations today where somebody says to me, "$67 a month, that's really expensive," or $250 because I want to say, "We should have had this conversation 15 years ago," because my number would not have been in the double or even the low triple digits.

We would've been having a conversation in the thousands of dollars about the server and the software and the maintenance and the upkeep that you would need.

So when something sounds expensive to you attorneys, I want you to think about one billable hour a month that you would pay equivalent to a product like this and what it would save you in time and energy and duplication and reducing risk in making mistakes, because the more tech savvy and digital you are, the less mistakes you can possibly make. I won't say you won't make.

So I think that's very reasonable, especially what CRMs can do. Before we break off, move on to our next segment where I want to ask you to teach us a little bit more about CRMs and what to look for and a little more open... Not necessarily about Lawmatics, but if you're shopping for a CRM, here's what you're looking for. That's what I want to ask you about next. But before I do that, I have a quiz question for you, Matt. You told me you were a wine guy.

Matt Spiegel

I love wine, but I did something very strategic, which is I became a wine guy and then found friends who were really rich and really like wine. And that's the best place to be.

Adriana Linares

You're a baller man. I just want to grow up and be Matt Spiegel and get to go golfing-

Matt Spiegel

No, you just want to go. Yeah, I'm telling you the key is to just make friends with people who spend a lot of money on wine.

Adriana Linares

Yeah. Because I don't ever see myself paying $300. I'd rather buy myself a little Hermes bracelet than a bottle of wine. So you're right, I need those friends. And listeners, if you are that friend, let me know. I'll come-

Matt Spiegel

Hit you up.

Adriana Linares

... Hit me up. Okay. Matt, a Roaja, R-O-A-J-A is, multiple choice: a method of making sherry, a wine from Spain, a rust colored wine or a grape type?

Matt Spiegel

So I do actually notice, I know it's a wine from Spain because when I was 16, I spent a summer in Spain and you can drink at 16. Insane.

Adriana Linares

So civilized.

Matt Spiegel

Yeah,

Adriana Linares

We'll be right back. We're going to listen to some messages from some sponsors.

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Adriana Linares

All right, we're back. In our first segment, I wanted to ask you about Lawmatics. I want people to... If they haven't thought about getting a CRM, I want to help them understand what a CRM will help them with insofar as managing their practice.

And look, I could talk about this all day, but I've got the actual expert in front of me. So when somebody says, "What do I need a CRM for? I'm just a solo practitioner, or we're a small firm, five people, we don't need to spend money on a CRM. I got a person that does that." What is your answer and your response to that? Encourage people to look into CRMs.

Matt Spiegel

Well, I usually have some questions for them and it's pretty simple, right? Well first of all, it's asking, "Do you know what is the average percentage of business for law firms that come from referral?" Or I'll just straight up ask them, I'll say, "Okay, that's great. Where does most of your business come from?"And they're going to say, referrals.

Adriana Linares

Of course.

Matt Spiegel

It's 75% of law firm business comes from referrals, generally across the board. And so then I say, "Okay, awesome. This means that all your former clients are important to the success of your law firm."

So then I say, "Great, do you have 500 former clients?" Most of them say, "Oh, I've got a lot more than that." I say, "Awesome, what are you doing every year on their birthday?" And they say, "What do you mean?"

Adriana Linares

Nothing?

Matt Spiegel

Well, are you sending them a card? Are you sending them an email? They're like, "No, how would we-"

Adriana Linares

Text message?

Matt Spiegel

"Yeah, we have 1500 clients. How are we going to inform our clients? How are we going to send them all a message on their birthday?" And then I say, "Well, first of all, how are you going to generate referral business?" You ushered these clients through the most important thing in their life.

Because most law firms, most consumer law firms, whatever that client is going through, is the most important thing that is happening in their life at that time. So whether you like it or not, you are an integral part of their life, at least for a period of time.

And so you want them to refer business to you, you want them to have a good experience. I think at least acknowledging their birthday, maybe sending them an email would be the right thing to do. You can't do that without a CRM. It's impossible.

The reason why you don't do it, is not because you don't want to do it, it's because you don't have the bandwidth to do it. You don't have the capability to go checking a calendar every single day of the year and then filling out a card and putting it in the mail.

So you need a system to help you do that. So that's, I think a very top level example of how I would respond to that question. But I think it's really just holistically, it's helping lawyers understand and get them to think a little differently in the sense that, forget about this as a law firm and think about this as a business.

You're a business that provides a product. Your product is legal services. But as a business that provides a product, customer service is the most important thing. I don't care about the outcome. I really don't.

I think that you could be the best lawyer in the world and have an unsuccessful practice because you provide terrible customer service. So people are going to like, "Yeah, I got a good outcome." But all they're going to think about is how you are just a total ass hole. And the flip side is true too. You could be a mediocre lawyer, maybe even a bad lawyer, but you could provide an amazing customer experience and you're going to be very successful.

Adriana Linares

And let me put a positive spin on this, which is you could actually lose the case, but if you established a good relationship with your client, and they saw how hard you worked and every effort you made and they were part of that process with you, they're probably going to... Of course we might be disappointed in the outcome, but you still may have done a good job and they would recognize that and still refer you business.

I mean, I can't think of a bigger compliment that attorney could get, which is, "we lost my case, but he's still a great attorney and I would still hire her." And I think that CRM, that client relationship managing part is critical, especially when that happens. Not if or when, but if you happen to lose a case, which happens every case, somebody's got to win and somebody's got to lose, if you're nurturing and managing that relationship in a way where they understand how hard you worked, how hard your team worked, you're going to win.

Joshua Linen

Yeah, I agree with you completely. And I think lawyers lose sight of that. They think that, "Oh, I'm just a lawyer, I'm just going to represent them and they're going to be happy." They don't think about the customer service side of it. To me having a CRM, it doesn't necessarily solve all the problems. It doesn't necessarily mean that now you're just going to provide good service. I don't want anybody to think that. But what it does say is that it's a priority to you.

Adriana Linares

A lot of attorneys lose sleep at night wondering where a case is in the process or did I remember to, where are we in the workflow? A lot of the management of, and a lot of that can be done through a case management system. So help us understand the difference or if there isn't one or the integrations with, if you've got a case management system, do you automatically have a CRM? If you have a CRM, do you automatically have a case management system?

Matt Spiegel

So I would say, if you have a practice management system, you do not automatically have a CRM.

Adriana Linares

I agree.

Matt Spiegel

And I would say that if you have a CRM, you don't necessarily also have a practice management system, I think that that depends on the product. But I think if we look at the traditional definition of what these platforms are, I would look at practice management... And I know that practice management tends to focus on a couple things; it's time and billing and it's document management. Those are the two big things that kind of go into managing a case. Managing inactive case.

And I look at it as practice management are tin theory are the things that maybe should help you practice law better or do your job of lawyering better. And some of those things that we traditionally think as being practice management actually falls more in line with being a CRM.

So it's just that I think the terminology in the legal space is a little out of whack. We're not going to change that necessarily, it's been kind of the case for a long time. When people think practice management, they think of something very specific. But I think that what practice management should be are tools that help you practice law and CRM are tools that help you run the business.

Adriana Linares

So let me see if I can help because this is the way I look at it. If you don't mind my injecting the way I think about it, which is, there's the beginning kind of how a case starts, how you gather the information, how you engage, and then once you've got past a conflict check and now they've signed the engagement letter and you've got a client, you have to have a way to manage dates, deadlines, details, parties, tasks, notes and documents.

To me, you are now managing the case, managing the matter and you might have one client with six matters. And that's what your case management system helps you do. Your CRM helps you manage that client regardless of where they are in the process and no matter how many matters they have.

And then to me, I have to say this because it's just me. I don't think you get good document management in every case management system. So a lot of times when I'm helping a law firm start, that's one of the first things we decide, do you need net documents? Because OneDrive isn't going to cut it, Clio Drive isn't going to cut it, Box isn't going to cut it. So to me, document management isn't always part of a case management system. So a lot of times I think law firms need three systems. The thing is they have to talk to each other.

Matt Spiegel

I don't disagree with you at all. I think that document management specifically is one that probably falls a little bit outside the traditional purview of a CRM.

Adriana Linares

Especially with emails now.

Matt Spiegel

But emails to me very much falls within CRM. Because anything that is communicative, is important to be kind of tracked and managed in your CRM. Documents can kind of go either way.

So I think a good CRM will have some level of document management available, but it shouldn't necessarily be what you would be used to seeing in something like NetDocs. You should be able to tie a CRM in.

Like if you look at Salesforce, Salesforce is the epitome of a CRM. It's the biggest. Most law firms are not going to use Salesforce, it would be insane. But as a tech company, we're going to use Salesforce.

I don't think ever managed a document in Salesforce, ever. That's just not what it's designed for. It would have a great plugin to do that or another company that it would tie into, but it's not designed to do that. It's not really part of the relationship with the client himself. Now you may take documents from some other product and share them with the client through your CRM, that's something that the CRM would handle because again, that's communicative. But the document management itself is probably an external tool.

Adriana Linares

Yeah, it can be. Before we take another quick break, let me ask you another question, Matt Spiegel. True or false? A super Tuscan is another name for a magnum.

Matt Spiegel

False.

Adriana Linares

Super false.

Matt Spiegel

Magnum is just a giant amazing bottle of wine.

Adriana Linares

Two in one.

Matt Spiegel

Who doesn't want a giant Magnum?

Adriana Linares

I wish I had my cheat sheet in front of me, but when we were learning about wine sizes in wine school, there's your standard 750 liters bottle that we all can imagine that a magnum is two of those and then they get bigger and they all have these great biblical names. The Nebuchadnezzar, the Methusa. So it's kind of fun and funny. Good job. That's two out of three for you.

Matt Spiegel

I love this question though because you're like, I love the creativity there. You're like super Tuscan. Someone might think that this is a Tuscan wine just supersized and that's how they call them giant, it's just super.

Adriana Linares

That is a good question. And just real quick, a super Tuscan is a wine from Tuscany that breaks their laws and rules and blends in other grapes other than the sangiovese grapes. So the winemakers got aggravated with all the rules and the laws that these governing bodies of Tuscany were saying you can and can't do with wines.

So they're like, "Screw you, we're going to make something new and it's going to be called Super Tuscan."

Matt Spiegel

I love it.

Adriana Linares

I do too. We like rule breakers around here. We'll be right back. We're going to listen to some messages from some sponsors.

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All right, I'm back with Matt Spiegel and I want to talk about intake, Matt, because do you think that Lawmatics starts with intake? Like CRMs start with the intake process. You've got to have someone that you're communicating with in order to push them through the flow. I feel like a lot of attorneys, and I think this is the type of thing you don't learn in law school and you just figure it out later. Well, I've got to have an intake system, what does that mean and how do I create a good one?

Matt Spiegel

So an intake system to me is really, it's something that every client will go through, so it's something repetitive. I guess every law firm probably has a process even if you don't think that you do-

Adriana Linares

mm-hmm . Or if it's bad.

Matt Spiegel

Or if it's bad.

Adriana Linares

You might have one, but it's probably bad.

Matt Spiegel

But basically it's like, "Okay, when a new lead comes in, I do this and then if they do this, I do that. And if they do this, I do something else." And it's understanding all the different ways that people can go with whatever your process is. And everybody could be a little bit different.

I think a good example of an intake process and probably a pretty standard one out there is, somebody calls your law firm or they come to your website and they raise their hand, they're like, "I want to learn more about your firm, or I need a lawyer." And the next step is, "Okay, well let's talk." So you just schedule a consultation. I think that's the typical process is lead comes in, let's get them scheduled for a consultation, and then maybe before they come in for that consultation, you want to capture some information from them so that you can review it before meeting with them.

That's a process, that's an intake process that is Lead comes into my website, fills out a form, they get a link to book a consultation with me, after they book the consultation, I send them a confirmation email, after that, like a day or a couple hours before, I send them another form to fill out so I can learn about their case before they come in and talk to me. That's a process.

Now, what can happen with that process is it can go a number of different ways. What if that lead comes in and they don't book an appointment? Well, now I need a process for that. I need a process to get that person re-engaged, get them to book a consultation with me. So you have different branches that can go in different directions and those branches could then get someone to come back to the main process or they could kind of spin off down some other processes that you have.

But a good intake process will understand the perfect linear journey that a client will go through. And it will account for all of the different spots in that linear journey that somebody can fall through, like all the cracks that somebody can fall through, and it will have processes there designed to catch them.

Adriana Linares

And it will be automated and not require a lot of humans. Can we talk about that too?

Matt Spiegel

Sure.

Adriana Linares

So the thing is, when you have that sort of question and answer tree, "Did the lead come in? Yes. Where did they come from? Website. If website, then this. If they walked in the door, then this. If referred by a client, by a old client or best referral that we've got, then this."

That should be spelled out in through a CRM so that if you hire somebody brand new, they're not sitting there figuring out which branch to take this lead through, the system helps them do it, or it helps you do it when we are busy and you don't want to have to figure it out or remember.

Matt Spiegel

So I think repetition is really important and building a process, being able to repeat it the same way. I read a book when I started my law firm called The E-Myth.

Adriana Linares

The Attorney E-Myth or did you do E-Myth or did you read The Attorney E-Myth ?

Matt Spiegel

I just read E-Myth.

Adriana Linares

Oh, find The Attorney E-Myth, it's really interesting. But go, go. I got it. I love E-Myth.

Matt Spiegel

Yeah, with me. And so the whole idea of that book is like, it's like how to build a franchise, how to build this business that is just repeatable. Every experience is the same. And I took this very literally, and I remember at my firm, I was like, "Okay, you know what? Every lawyer, every person that comes in for a consultation is going to get a folder. They're going to get the same folder, it's going to have my logo on it's going to have my business card in the same place. It's going to have this on the right side, it's going to have this on the left side."

And I would just do it every time. It's this repeatable process, it's a habit. And that's important to building a good process. Now the thing is, if you keep that manual, you're not going to do it. It's not going to be the same every time you're going to skew. The only way to keep it very repeatable and to keep it the same every single time is to have it automated. Not to mention that it saves you an incredible amount of time.

Adriana Linares

And resources.

Matt Spiegel

But if you automate it, everything is the same. And when everything is the same, you can measure and you can experiment. You have relevant data that you can go off of to determine whether something is working or not. If you're doing something a little different every single time, then you have no idea what's working and what's not.

Adriana Linares

I feel like every small business owner, especially me, has gone through that with my website, with newsletters... I never knew what worked. Everything kind of worked and I survived. So I just kept doing random things and never had a process until I had... I actually use a CRM called Vcita that I really like. So yeah, so I think that makes a lot of sense. But someone has to also, you can't take advantage of a tool that you're paying a lot of money, for if you don't sit down and actually create those systems and those processes.

Matt Spiegel

So you got to sit down and write them out.

Adriana Linares

Write them out, and then you put them into the system, which isn't hard these days. All the little robots are so hard.

Matt Spiegel

No, it's super easy. But also my recommendation too, you can take it so far and you can get up to a certain point, but the company, like Lawmatics is a good example and a lot of other software companies are the same way. But we know what we're doing. We work with thousands and thousands of attorneys. We see what works, we see what doesn't, and we will help you. You can take your processes a certain... Get it most of the way there and then we can help you understand some best practices and just push it over the goal line, or maybe think about something in a way that you haven't thought about it before, which could be really helpful.

Adriana Linares

One of the things I want to make sure I say out loud to listeners is if you intake form is in Microsoft Word, or if it's a PDF file, that's really nice and it's fillable form unless you can export that data into a system, you are putting the information that you're initially collecting from a client to what I call, "Data prison."

And a CRM is designed so that let's say someone lands on your website, they fill out a form, they answer a couple of questions, that data gets put into the CRM, the CRM notifies you that a new lead came in, then... I don't know how automated this part gets, but is the next step automatically to create the opportunity for an appointment or is the next step that they have to answer a few more questions?

Or is the next step that you send them another document through the CRM in a format that can capture the data and be used so that if they do become a client? You move them from the potential client file into the existing client file and all that data moves with them.

Your goal in building your law firm, should be that data only gets entered one time ever somewhere. And then from that point forward, it just flows through the process of working the case, closing the case.

When they come back, the information that's relevant to their second matter or their third matter is still in there, you don't have to ask them again, you don't have to repeat that. You're just looking for the new information.

So I hope this encourages everyone to look at CRMs if you haven't, to consider getting one. And then Matt, tell us real quick, are they standalone, do they integrate? What am I looking for if I'm looking for a CRM for the first time?

Matt Spiegel

So there are definitely CRMs that you could get away with standalone and maybe not need any other piece of software. But to me, my recommendation is, a good CRM will be very, very good at what it does, which is CRM. And then it will leave some of the other stuff to other platforms, whether it's integrating with Clio, in MyCase, PracticePanther, Filevine, Smokeball, Rocket Matter, whatever.

So a good system will integrate with those. And a lot of other things. You might want an integration with Google AdWords because you're spending a lot of money on marketing. You might want an integration with CallRail, because you're doing call tracking. So firms that are a little bit more sophisticated when it comes to marketing and tracking, which I think all firms should be, but that's a different story-

Adriana Linares

I agree.

Matt Spiegel

... for a different day. But a CRM is going to help you track all of your marketing efforts. That's a big part of what a CRM will do. A good CRM.

Adriana Linares

If listeners have been listening to this for a while, especially toward the end of the year, here's a reason you want a CRM. If there's nothing else that convinces you holiday mailing cards.

Matt Spiegel

Totally.

Adriana Linares

So if I could solve one problem for every law firm on this planet, whether it's one or 1000, whether they are in Greece or in Boise, Idaho, it's figuring out who gets one, not three from every attorney in the firm, a holiday mailing card.

In the old days, we would print out and then pass around and everybody would put their initials next to which client they wanted their card for and stuff. It's so much easier today guys, stop working so hard and so manually find technology that helps, that makes your life easier, that helps you run your practice easier. Matt, I've had you here a long time. I'm going to ask you one more question.

Matt Spiegel

Yeah. Let's see if I can go three for three.

Adriana Linares

What is a Cremant month? This is cremant and the E has a little dash over the top.

Matt Spiegel

Oh, now I know.

Adriana Linares

A type of Sherry, A. B, a type of sparkling wine. C, a method of filtering wine or D, none of the above.

Matt Spiegel

So I really don't know, but it just sounds to me like it's something sparkling, probably because I don't know what it is and I'm not a big sparkling guy. That would be my guess.

Adriana Linares

Well you did a good deductive reasoning because Cremant sounds French, and a type of sherry is Spanish wine. And they said, What is a cremant? Which means it's probably not a method of filtering wine and it's never none of the above. So you got it exactly right, a french sparkling wine that did not come from the champagne region is known as a cremant.

Matt Spiegel

Have you ever had a cremant?

Adriana Linares

I have. Sure.

Matt Spiegel

Is it delicious?

Adriana Linares

They are.

Matt Spiegel

Okay, I'll have to try one.

Adriana Linares

Yeah, and they're obviously all very different, whether you like them dry or sweet and they're great. But yeah, I've been trying a lot of wines. Again, remember I'm trying to become a big girl with my wines.

Matt Spiegel

Yeah, you should. I like that.

Adriana Linares

Matt, I appreciate you coming on so much and thank you for becoming a sponsor of New Solo. I hope everybody goes out, takes a look, signs up for a demo, learns more about Lawmatics. Tell them where they can find, friend, follow you and do those very things.

Matt Spiegel

Yes.

Adriana Linares

How do they get in to your CRM?

Matt Spiegel

I appreciate you Adriana, always. And you can just come check us out lawmatics.com. Also, I'm always available. I love when lawyers, if they just have random questions, business related, customer service related, just anything.

It's really cool sometimes, I'll just hear from random lawyers being like, "Hey, just curious, what are your thoughts on this?" Just email me matt@lawmatics.com. I'm super responsive and I love getting messages.

Adriana Linares

You are very generous with your time. I have sent you people in the past where I've been like, "I have no idea. This is such a great question for Matt Spiegel. Can I introduce you to him?" You say that and you mean it.

So yeah, everyone, if you have some questions, please reach out to Matt. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of New Solo. If you have liked what you've heard today, please think about giving us a five star review. But honestly, you know what I'd rather you do, I'd rather you forward New Solo to another attorney who you think would be able to learn from it.

I get a lot of nice compliments about New Solo. It's not about me, it's about my guests and all the information that they bring. So if you think another attorney could benefit from what we talk about here, share the show with them. Thanks so much, Matt. I will see you soon and everyone else see you in the next episode of New Solo.