Why static intake forms cause 97% of potential law firm clients to drop before contact
Chris Dreyer:
You don’t have a marketing problem, you have a conversion problem. Let me explain. You can pour thousands into ads, SEO and TV spots, but if your intake experience still looks like a 2015 contact form, you’re losing clients before the conversion even starts. Think about the way people buy everything else today. It’s instant, guided and personalized. You don’t have to explain how Amazon works, packages show up on your doorstep. You also don’t have to explain how to book a ride on Uber or tell it what city you’re in. But when someone’s been in a wreck and they land on your website, they’re not sure what to do. They don’t know what kind of lawyer they need, whether their case qualifies, why they would even matter or what happens next, and the confusion kills momentum.
Daniel Steinberg:
So if you look at the average conversion rate of static contact forms, we’re talking about web traffic conversions, specifically within the legal industry, it’s typically sitting between somewhere in and around 1% to 3%.
Chris Dreyer:
That means 97% of people who come looking for help leave without ever talking to you. What if you could sign more cases without boosting traffic? What if you could sign more cases simply by capturing the traffic you already have?
Daniel Steinberg:
It’s about incremental gains.
Chris Dreyer:
This is PIM, powered by Rankings.io. I’m Chris Dreyer, and I sat down with Daniel Steinberg of Lawbrokr to understand how to make a law firm intake as simple as booking an Uber. Let’s get into it.
Daniel Steinberg:
My name’s Daniel Steinberg. I’m the CEO and founder of Lawbrokr. We’re a pre-qualification web traffic conversion platform, so working in conjunction with marketing agencies and other top-of-funnel platforms to really help optimize the digital experiences for your potential new clients, and make sure you’re getting the granular data that you need to operationalize your intake processes.
Chris Dreyer:
Let me see if I heard that correctly. Basically, you help law firms convert the leads to have them make more money?
Daniel Steinberg:
Absolutely, that’s exactly it.
Chris Dreyer:
Most clients don’t wake up knowing they need a plaintiff’s attorney. They just know something bad happened, and they’re scared, confused, in pain or angry. The mistake most firms make is assuming the client understands their system. They don’t.
Daniel Steinberg:
There’s a time and place for contact forms and publicly-facing intake forms, don’t get me wrong.
Chris Dreyer:
They don’t know the difference between liability and damages or what a statute of limitations or jurisdiction even means.
Daniel Steinberg:
But that first interaction that clients have with you, especially in the legal space, it’s very uneducated. It’s not often that a consumer has ever engaged with a law firm. They don’t necessarily know what their problem space is or how you can help them.
Chris Dreyer:
And when they hit the form asking them to type out their whole injury story, they freeze, they drop off.
Daniel Steinberg:
And those standard message boxes don’t provide your law firm with standardization. It impacts the intake teams, it’s hard to prioritize the right quality leads, and as you know more than anyone, Chris, from a rankings perspective, it’s pick up the phone as fast as you can and convert that lead as quick as possible. And if you’re not focusing on the right lead out of all the volume that’s coming through, that client or potential client is going to another law firm.
Chris Dreyer:
Firms can solve this through guided education.
Daniel Steinberg:
So to be able to guide consumers down these paths that ultimately educate them, but also pre-qualify themselves in and/or out of your funnel, is so integral.
Design principles from consumer apps that increase engagement and client trust
Chris Dreyer:
Lawbrokr found when you guide potential clients with simple conversational questions like, “When did the injury happen? When did it occur?” People engage longer and trust faster. When we talk about guiding clients, we’re talking about building a pathway, one question at a time, that helps them figure out what they actually need. Lawbrokr does this through conversational workflows. Instead of dumping clients into a blank contact form, they’re met with smart prompts that feel like guided conversations more than a questionnaire.
Daniel Steinberg:
What we want to try and support is the standardization and to make sure that you’re capturing the right type of data, so that you can, again, take that lead to conversion as quick as possible.
Chris Dreyer:
Each answer shapes the next step, asking when the injury happened, where it occurred, or what kind of harm they experienced. Behind the scenes, the flow educates the clients, while pre-qualifying the lead, teaching them about deadlines, jurisdiction, and what makes a valid claim. They’re learning about their case while qualifying themselves. This kind of education can lead to conversion.
How gamified, mobile-style intake experiences make client onboarding feel natural and personal
Daniel Steinberg:
It’s about incremental gains. So let’s say hypothetically you spend $0 on marketing, but you care about creating a better client experience from the front-end and modernizing your business, that’s where we slot in. If you’re getting five inquiries a month and Lawbrokr can expedite that 3x to 5x, then that’s considered success for your law firm. We typically see success in web traffic conversion from an increased perspective. So a lot of people will look at Lawbrokr and be like, “Oh, it seems like there’s a lot of questions here,” but the proof is in the pudding when it comes to our technology when it comes to gamifying those experiences.
Chris Dreyer:
If your intake looks and feels like a tax form, people will treat it like one, tedious, frustrating and easy to abandon. Lawbrokr studied what happens when you flip that experience. When firms use simple design cues from consumer apps, progress bars, tap-style answers, short question bursts, conversion rates climb dramatically. This is psychology of good contact forms at work.
Daniel Steinberg:
So when you utilize consumer psychology and gamify the way that consumers engage with you, from things that look and feel like your cell phone and Instagram and TikTok quizzes, inherently people are going to engage at a higher rate.
Chris Dreyer:
Every swipe, every next button, gives a small dopamine hit that keeps people moving forward. They feel like they’re making progress, not doing paperwork.
Daniel Steinberg:
So we see an increase in web traffic conversion. At the same time, you capture pre-qualified data that standardize the experience for your customers, but also your intake teams. And anecdotally from there, from any salesperson’s perspective, I come from a sales background, the more data that you have on that potential customer to augment that intake conversation, the more instilled trust that you can build with that potential client to take lead to retainer faster.
Chris Dreyer:
This kind of gamified automation doesn’t replace the human touch, it gives your staff more impact.
Daniel Steinberg:
So if you think about the personal injury space as a whole, or plaintiff space as a whole, they’re not just calling your law firm, we all know that. They’re calling one to three to five different law firms at the exact same time, or they’re making inquiries digitally between one to three different law firms. If your law firm understands their problem set prior to picking up the phone compared to someone else, but you have the same speed to lead, they’re likely going to have that trust instilled in your law firm to retain you compared to someone else, because you can now walk them through your operating processes and how you can support their case as opposed to playing 21 questions that that other law firm already captured on Lawbrokr.
Chris Dreyer:
Lawbrokr found that most leads happen before your intake team ever gets a chance to pick up the phone. Like I said earlier, people start filling out a form, get distracted and never come back. What if your system could follow up automatically?
Automation workflows that re-engage leads instantly and prevent missed opportunities
Daniel Steinberg:
We do have tools in place from an automations perspective, so you can trigger automated emails from Lawbrokr submissions to close that client experience gap, walk them through your processes, ask them to book a call with your team, et cetera, et cetera. But we also slot into the tool sets that you already use.
Chris Dreyer:
The gold standard in PI intake is to pick up the phone as fast as you can, but it’s not the whole picture anymore.
Daniel Steinberg:
Everything’s pushing towards the digital side of business. There’s a big evolution of digital, whether that becomes because of AI tools, like ChatGPT and things like that, the search ability and the ways that people are engaging are inherently shifting from what legal is known for. And as important as law firms’ websites are from a digital asset perspective, it doesn’t mean that people are going to start landing on your website as consistently as they always do. And you’ve already alluded to multiple different ways of engagement, and that linking structure in order to convert off-platform or off-asset of being your website is going to be so crucial for your law practice, and probably for a lot of different professional services, it’s not just inside of the legal space.
So I think it’s trending towards that. I don’t know if it’s going to happen as fast as the adoption of law firms are adopting AI technology, but it’s going to come quickly. And the evolution of digital, we already see it, 78% of legal consumers are already shopping online. The shopability piece has not caught up to the rate of e-commerce and how consumers make those quick decisions because of the lack of education. But I think the more types of platforms that you can use to educate the potential clients on how to engage with law firms is going to be crucial from a conversion perspective.
Chris Dreyer:
To get in touch with Daniel and learn how your firm can convert more leads, hit them up here.
Daniel Steinberg:
Super active on LinkedIn, linkedin.com/in/dsteinberg9. Obviously, you can also visit our website, lawbrokr.com, L-A-W-B-R-O-K-R .com, dropped the E for the fun of it. I’m always open to connecting with folks and just talking all things digital, it doesn’t have to be about Lawbrokr or anything in between. Love consulting with potential clients and current clients on what types of tools they can leverage and ultimately operationalize their law firms, so feel free to touch base and reach out.
Chris Dreyer:
If AI can’t find you, neither will your clients. You just heard how intake is shifting, and the firms that adapt now will lead the pack. I’m Chris Dreyer, CEO of Rankings.io. From AI to SEO, Rankings keeps your firm top of mind and first in search. Visit Rankings.io. I’ll see you there.
