David Haskins:
Intake is the department that doesn't get enough attention unless it's back.
Chris Dreyer:
This is PIM. I'm back with a special toolkit episode where we highlight the systems and partners that help personal injury firms scale. I'm Chris Dryer, founder of Rankings.io. We're tackling one of the most expensive blind spots in your business, lead leaks. These are the hidden gaps in your intake processes that cause good cases to slip away before you even know they exist.
David Haskins:
We have over a hundred lead leaks we've identified now, and one of the ones that I see firms coming to is-
Chris Dreyer:
That's David Haskins, and he can sniff out any leaked leads. Today, we dig into where they start, how to spot them, and the tools you can use to plug them. What you learn in this episode can boost your want rate and see better marketing ROI. Let's go.
You work with over a hundred firms. High level, what's some of the most common assumptions that get law firms into trouble when they're thinking about intake?
The unseen reasons lead leaks in PI firms cost qualified clients before they ever reach the CRM
David Haskins:
The most common assumption is rooted in cognitive bias. You're assuming that this is your level of performance, your level of conversion. A lot of times, firms can leak leads before they even hit the CRM. It comes down to what Harlan Schillinger said, his trademark phrase, "What you don't know, you don't know." This issue, this problem, it's incredibly costly if it's not controlled.
Chris Dreyer:
It's a huge problem. Putting my marketing agency hat on, it's like we can drive a ton of leads and if they don't get converted, we're out of business or we're in trouble. Then it goes a step further for helping with intake, then it's like, hey, what about case values and all those problems. And it's massive.
David Haskins:
We work with, mostly, a lot of smaller firms, one to five attorneys in mid and smaller markets. They are more reliant on their SEO than major market players and volume firms. They could live or die by how their intake operates. And so many times, I could have two campaigns in similar markets, similar population sizes, similar reputation review scores and similar rankings like say in the maps or organic; the one firm is like, "You are the best thing that's happened in my life, in my business," and then the other firm will go, "It's not really working for us. We're not really seeing the conversion." And then diving into how their processes are set up, how they're staffed, how they're measuring bandwidth to staff up. There's so many of those unknown unknowns that they're not uncovering and that all contributes to lead leak.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, so what's this process look like? Walk me through this audit process and some of the things that you're looking for and then we can address some of the issues.
David Haskins:
As we've dug into the issues, we've noticed that it's not just giving people scripting, teaching them on call control, teaching them empathy, concise and thorough information gathering, but there's an element of cognitive bias that happens on the phone that you just wouldn't know if you're not sitting there listening to phone calls and secret shopping or auditing random calls. I saw a workers' comp lead come in and the agent mistakenly thought it was an employment case, and so they said, "You need an employment attorney. Just go on Google and look for an employment lawyer." There's a couple problems with that. One, you lost a valid workers' comp case that you could have signed up. And two, even if it was an employment lead, if you do workers' comp, you need to have an employment referral arrangement with an employment firm because that kind of bleed over happens a lot in the workers' comp field.
If you're the intake manager or you're the managing partner and you're reviewing that lead in the CRM, what do you see? John Smith called. Employment law issue. Rejected. You would look at that lead and be like, "Oh yeah. Well, you did what you're supposed to do." It's not until you actually listen to the call and start to uncover these little cognitive missteps that I think happen because if you're on intake, you're taking three to five to six calls for every one qualified lead sometimes. In more catastrophic or complex practice areas like med mal, it could be 30 to 50 calls to one lead.
So if you think about it, that agent, when that phone rings, it's sort of like a Pavlov response. When that phone rings, they're used to getting on the phone and most of the time disqualifying the case. So you sort of end up in a natural process, not by anything you're doing wrong, but in a natural way, you sort of end up arriving at this instinct to disqualify, sometimes, more than to qualify. And I think... Yeah, I always tell attorneys the best intake person that your firm will ever have is the founding attorney.
Chris Dreyer:
That makes a ton of sense and that kind of makes me think of Anidjar and how they set up their law firm where they have the attorneys screen the calls because they can identify what's a case and what isn't. But they're kind of outside the norm. I would say most law firms, it would be better if they had this dedicated intake team where that's all they do. They have the processes and scripts.
What's your thought process about the setup? One of the big ones, I just talked to one of our firms in Chicago on the phone and they were doing the classic, Hey, it goes to attorney one. If he doesn't answer, then it goes to the paralegal, then it goes to the next attorney. And it's like, I didn't even have this understanding or didn't even realize this was occurring or I would've made some recommendations. What do you see just from the structure set up?
David Haskins:
That's a perfect example of a mistake people are making. They assume that... So that would be optimism bias and that can lead to the injured man in the subway scenario where if there's one person, they'll jump and try to rescue him, but if there's 50 people, can people look around and go, who's got this? If it's everybody's responsibility, then it ends up being nobody's sole responsibility. One time we saw a lead come through that was a drowning case and new attorney, an associate attorney jumped on the lead. It was a Saturday and it was like 15 miles over the state line. Child drowned in a hotel swimming pool and was in intensive care, had a brain injury, and he handled the lead by telling them, we only practice in this state. That attorney thought that he was doing the right thing. When I brought that to the attention of the managing attorney, it was within a couple of hours.
They called the person immediately, spoke to the parents and drove four hours each way, gave up their Sunday to go sign the case, and then once they got back I said, "Look at the difference in your firm. One attorney is having a five-minute conversation and telling them to call the bar in another state. You gave up your weekend, basically, and drove all day long to make sure that you signed this case up." And without a consistent process to manage intake at that level, that could be happening monthly or weekly in a firm, and you wouldn't even really know.
Chris Dreyer:
For volume, where you're fielding a lot of cases, a lot of times, they're following this logic based statute. Next question. How do you teach intake to discover and pull more details out on a case? What goes into that? Is that a major leak that you've identified?
How a “one call close” intake mindset helps increase signed personal injury cases
David Haskins:
We have over a hundred lead leaks we've identified now. And one of the ones that I see firms succumbing to is what I call giving the client homework, which is investigating the case too much. I need a copy of the police report, send me pictures of the accident, send me pictures of the scene or witnesses that insurance information. I like Gary Falkowitz's approach, which is get to a reject or retain within, Gary's thing is three minutes. Our process is to teach the one call close. We also like firms to adapt sort of like an MVP retainer that doesn't need to go heavily into the medical disclosures and high-tech and HIPAA and all that. You can do that in onboarding, once you sign the case. Giving that person, in that first interaction, giving them the peace of mind and sort of the closure and the reassurance that you're not going to have to deal with the insurance company anymore, you're not going to have to worry about if you say something incorrectly or if you should sign a document. You've got somebody in your corner.
Chris Dreyer:
Here's the problem with over investigation. You're giving clients homework before they've even signed. That's a massive leak because instead of building trust, you're adding stress at the worst possible time. So where do firms go from here? Some run intake through Salesforce. Others lean on tools like Lead Docket, which was built for personal injury. But what David's team is working on goes a step further. It layers AI on top of intake to spot the hidden leaks and uncover revenue that most firms don't even realize they're missing. Let's break that down.
David Haskins:
We put all our clients on Lead Docket. I like the way that the CRM connects to, for instance, like call rail, call tracking metrics. One of the things I love is, in our intake accelerator, we create an unassociated calls filter so that you can go in... If you're in lead docket or a similar CRMs, if you get a call and it matches to your call rail caller ID, it'll attach that call and the call records to the lead so you can audit how the call went. Unassociated calls feature lets you go in and look for leads that didn't hit the CRM or didn't match. We've been developing a software that will actually listen to all your calls, grade all the calls, grade the operator's performance, surface the injuries, grade the case quality based on damages, treatment, liability, A through D and then as soon as the call is over, it gives us full analysis and a score and will alert you of any missed opportunities.
Chris Dreyer:
I've never heard of any software that has these capabilities, particularly the scoring, the identifying, the notification for the leak, and those types of components. Just to elevate and improve your staff, alone, has a big benefit, not to mention just a tremendous insight. Right? So are you able to sink into any CRM or is it only Lead Docket? Tell me a little bit about this in terms of the tech component.
Why AI intake auditing tools are critical to fixing lead leaks and improving accountability
David Haskins:
The software, it's built to manage intake departments. So it's not doing the lead chase, the follow-up, the signing, the reminders, the emailing, the texting and all that sort of thing. It's built to evaluate and catch any issues that happen at that first point of contact, that first point of reaching out. And what we've done is, we've used our best practices, our training manuals, and we've built an AI who is what I believe is the most thorough intake manager in the industry. Because they don't sleep, they don't get tired, they don't only have two ears and two eyes. It has infinite number of ears, as many as we need. And it's listening to every call so it can identify any of these issues, as minor as they are.
Chris Dreyer:
So it's like the ultimate quality assurance rep. And I'd say many firms don't have that. They'll have their intake specialist and things, and they might have one leader, but they're not listening to every call. Maybe they're cherry-picking some calls-
David Haskins:
Yeah. In our intake accelerator, we... For any attorneys listening or anybody in intake listening, in our intake accelerator, we were auditing five calls per agent per week. And when I've asked this in the industry or in talks, nobody is auditing that many calls. But for me, again, obsessed with efficiency, I looked at that and I said, if somebody takes a hundred phone calls in a week and they make one mistake, they lose one case. And you listen to five of them at the end of the week, which is still a lot, you have a 5% chance of finding that mistake. And if that person that's listening to those five calls is a human also, you could hear the mistake and not catch it, just because you could have the same cognitive disconnect or your little misstep that that person had. So what we realized was if you could just analyze all of them, you could find the one in a hundred that you miss.
Chris Dreyer:
When you zoom out and start to analyze every single call, patterns become impossible to ignore. That's the power of data. It takes bias and blind spots out of the equation. That's where tech really changes the game.
How recognizing top-performing intake calls can drive team growth
David Haskins:
When we're scanning all these calls, a lot of times, what we realize is intake is the department that doesn't get enough attention unless it's bad. You messed something up. You screwed something up. You lost an opportunity. You did something wrong, and so one of the things we've created in the software is what we call the high five view, which is everything that's a green... If the interaction was 80, 85% or higher, you can filter all those interactions and have one dashboard in there that's all your best calls. And you could filter them by agent too, so that you can have... We have firms using them in their Monday morning meetings and their stand-ups to give a attaboy, atta girl, to people that are doing great work. It's a great way to elevate the intake team and give them more recognition when they're doing good job, instead of just criticizing when they had a bad audit.
Chris Dreyer:
I think that's awesome. So instead of just beating them down and telling them how they can improve, here's the call that needs to be kudos and here's who we need to model.
David Haskins:
And a common technique in training and management is the criticism sandwich. Like, Hey, you're doing really good with this-
Chris Dreyer:
The shit sandwich is what I've heard.
David Haskins:
The shit sandwich. Yeah. Yeah. You're doing really good with this. This needs to be worked on, but also this is still doing pretty good too. And it's perfect for that. The shit sandwich. I like that.
Chris Dreyer:
What's the best way to reach out to you and connect with you?
David Haskins:
Find me on LinkedIn, or you could check out the software at speedintake.com and get a little idea for how it works.
Chris Dreyer:
What Dave and his team are building shows, with the right processes and the right tech, you uncover hidden revenue and sign more of the cases you've already earned. That's the edge the best firms are leaning into. If you want to scale, it's an edge you can't afford to ignore. All right, that's it for today. Join us on Thursday for another insightful conversation with some of the best minds in personal injury. I'm out.
