Chris Dreyer:
A tiny tweak in your intake can mean tens of millions of dollars.
Angie Flury:
I think people mistake intake as a reception desk or just like a necessary evil. When in reality, it's the highest leveraged function that you have in your firm. Depending on the size of your firm, when you change your conversion rate from a 90% to a 91, or a 95 to a 96, this can be like tens of millions of dollars.
Chris Dreyer:
Angie Flury runs the biggest intake operation in the industry. In just the last five years, she's grown Morgan & Morgan's intake from 240 agents to over 1,100. For Angie, every single intake agent is important.
Angie Flury:
As soon as you put them on the phone, I don't know if that's a $10,000 case or a $10 million case. You can't do a pre-screen. Okay, you're a $10,000 case. I could put you with a new agent.
Chris Dreyer:
Today we're talking about intake at a massive scale. If you think you're maximizing your leads, wait until you hear how the biggest firm in the world does it.
This is Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the elite performance marketing agency for personal injury law firms. I'm so excited to announce that Angie Flury will be speaking at PIMCON this October. She's going to be talking about what it takes to implement change, how to spot intake problems, and how to build an intentional culture. If you want to hear from one of the best in the business, you need to be here in Scottsdale, Arizona from October 4th through 6th. All right, let's get into it.
I'm so pumped to talk to you. As the chief call center officer at Morgan & Morgan, you're one of the best in the business at intake and you've grown the intake center from 240 agents to over 1,100 in five years and that's just insane. I'm so excited that you're going to speak at PIMCON.
Angie Flury:
I am.
Chris Dreyer:
So we're going to have you talk at October and that's going to be amazing.
Angie Flury:
Yeah, I'm excited about that actually. I love to talk about intake. I always joke around that I'm probably the only person in the room as excited about intake as I am, but it is definitely a passion topic, so I'm stoked to be there.
Chris Dreyer:
Amazing. Well, you got another on this call and many of the listeners I'm sure will be banging down your door, maybe some questions after this. So you got a lot of things happening, but what's fresh? What's a recent win? It could be tech, team, process, just something that comes to mind in terms of development for the intake department.
Angie Flury:
Yeah, we've been dabbling in the AI space a lot, as most people probably are. Our approach to AI is not really to replace agents that much because when people are hurt, they don't want to talk to a robot in my opinion anyway. They want to talk to someone who can give natural empathy and understand. But I think there is a space for AI to come in to help us be more efficient, screen our intakes, look for other cases, cross-sell. And we've been implementing things like that for a little bit now.
Most recently, we put an AI in that transcribes the call and it creates a description of incident for the attorneys. So now they're getting a uniform description of incident that tells them exactly what happened and it cuts about five minutes off of our call time, which with 1,100 agents, you can imagine if I'm saving five minutes per call, two million calls, that adds up. So that's been really exciting as we've been kind of dabbling in finding ways to be more efficient.
Chris Dreyer:
That's incredible. Thanks for sharing.
Angie Flury:
Yeah.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. So I want to kind of just dig in and just throwing it up here and I've got a ton of questions for you. Let's just start with one that's a little different. What do you think the number one thing that people consistently get wrong about intake?
Angie Flury:
I think people mistake intake is a reception desk or just like a necessary evil, when in reality it's the highest leverage function that you have in your firm. And when you think about that, what other part of your firm can you make a small change in that can impact your bottom line so strongly? When you look at like conversion rate, for example, when you change your conversion rate from a 90% to a 91, or a 95 to a 96, this can be like tens of millions of dollars depending on the size of your firm, of course. But this is just a little change that you can make that can have such an impact on your bottom line and people don't recognize it as that.
It almost seems like it's a bother to some people like, "Oh, it's just intake. Just get them in the door and attorneys will figure it all out." But in reality, it's your sales floor. And I think I see, and when I talk to a lot of people, they're like, "Wow, I never thought of it that way." And really you need to be thinking about intake. In some ways, in my opinion, it's one of the, if not the most important part of your firm.
Chris Dreyer:
I couldn't agree more. It's you can drive all these leads. The business has got a big hole in the boat, your CAC and all the costs are never going to work properly. Then you're going to judge and say the channel's poor. Whereas you got a lot of pushback there. I guess for me, it drives me nuts. The smaller firms, it's like, "Well, who does your ..." "Well, I answer. And then it goes to my other attorneys if I'm not available. So we answer." I'm like, "Yeah, but speed to lead and all these things, you're missing out on conversions."
Angie Flury:
Absolutely. And how many times don't you answer is the next question. If you really put a number on it, how many times do you miss a call? And every time you miss that call, it's kind of what I tell my team. I don't know if that call is a $10,000 case or a $10 million case. So you can't miss a single call. You try to avoid missing anything. And if you've got it rolling or you got, "Oh, if I get time, I'll answer it. And if I can't, the next guy will." Well, what if he's busy and the next guy's busy? So it's got to be something that's got a lot of focus and singular attention on.
Chris Dreyer:
Let me ask you something about, so Dan was on the show and he was kind of jokingly said something about the turndowns, right? How your turndowns, you're a little resistant and just, "Hey, why would somebody want this?" And then boom, you get a check in the mail. Talk to me about that process, that change of sending your turndowns to other firms to take a second, third, or fourth look at some of the cases that you don't take.
Angie Flury:
Right. I mean, at our scale, obviously we have a system of how we evaluate cases. We hope we catch every good case, but there's a potential, there could be something there that we miss. And so the thought really was becoming, is there an opportunity here for someone else to take a look at it? And it might be something they want or it could be someone who is starting out. We have a partner we work with who is, we jokingly, he's like a junkyard dog. He's going to go out there and fight for every scrap he can get, where at our volume it may not make sense for us to do that.
So we started sending these cases, "Hey, it's not something that we're going to take on, but maybe you will, or maybe you want to take a look at it." And we're finding attorneys out there who absolutely want to take a look. They want to take that case. And as you said, we're getting checks for them, and that's kind of bittersweet because sometimes you get a real big check. You're like, "Oops, what did we do wrong here?"
But it's great because we still have that partnership, that back and forth between the two of us where we're giving them cases and they're giving us cases and it works out really well. The winner in the end is the client no matter what. So if we can help them, whether it's with us or someone else, that's our ultimate goal. And that's kind of the way we tell our clients is we might not be the right firm for you, but we're going to try to help you find somebody that is either they're in our network or not.
Chris Dreyer:
Treating your intake like a sales floor means leaving absolutely zero money on the table. Even the cases that don't fit your firm's ideal criteria can generate serious referral revenue when you build the right partnerships, but identifying and routing these opportunities takes serious operational discipline. When you're managing volume at Morgan & Morgan's level, data becomes your north star. Let's look at the exact numbers Angie uses to maintain quality control across the board.
At your size, you have to have good data to make good decisions, right? It's like you can't listen every single call. You've got to trust your team. We talk a lot about KPIs on here, but at your scale, what are some of the benchmark metrics that you're looking at? You mentioned wanted case conversion rate, but speed to lead, utilization, things like that.
Angie Flury:
Conversion rate, we kind of live and die by it. I mean, that's our number. Obviously it's the most important number that we have as far as how many qualified leads are we actually converting and getting in the door and we're very successful. This year, I think we're going to approach 96%, which I'm very proud of. We worked very hard. I even have a tattoo because of it. It's kind of hard to see, but the team on the floor that if they hit 95, all the leadership would get a tattoo on the call center floor, which we did. It's constantly driving towards that number, increasing that, trying to get that number as high and as tight as we can. But through that, we also have to make sure we're answering the phone every time. So the abandoned rate on the call line is very important. Our goal is to keep that under 2%.
Speed to lead. We want to call within two minutes of submitting a lead on our website because we know if we don't call, they're going to call somebody else who may pick up that phone. And then our coverage, obviously 24/7/365, I want to make sure I have somebody available all the time. So we're constantly watching the adherence of our agents. Are they available when we want them to be available so that we can get those calls answered every single time somebody calls and keeping people on queue, on tap, ready to go. Those are the really ones like in the call center, those are the ones we live by.
Chris Dreyer:
Thank you for sharing those. And you kind of mentioned this, you kind of led me to the workforce management side of things and productivity. It's like what goes into, I know you've got, whether it's Amazon Connect or RingCentral, whatever, they have kind of their own data on that, but what goes into staffing appropriately during the hours and then forecasting if John and the team, they have some big initiative, they're going to open a new market forecasting how much staff you need.
Angie Flury:
I mean, our marketing team is my best friend. So we stay very, very close because anything they do is going to impact the call center. I mean, we've learned that through trial and error through the years. And normally we kind of know going into the year what we expect our growth to be. But like this year we expected a number, ended up being almost double that. So I feel like I've been kind of chasing behind them all year, keeping my staff where it needs to go. I have a dedicated workforce management team. They are one of the most important teams that I have because they are making sure every hour is covered and we have to, some might call it micromanagement, but we are doing real time adherence. We are watching our agents. Are they available? Are they on break when they shouldn't be? If they're sitting at their desk, is their phone ready to take the next call?
It takes that level of oversight with our volume and the amount of agents we have. We can't have everyone on break at the same time or everyone on lunch. So it takes literally a team of people just watching the queues. Not every call is the same and we all know that. So obviously we've also structured the contact center where an auto call, which is the heart of our business, that's the number one call. So if millions of calls are hitting one time, an auto call's going to get answered first and then right behind that general liability and then it kind of goes down from there. But if we're running a hot and heavy mass tort, that call might get prioritized right behind auto.
So it just kind of depends on what the market looks like at that time, but we can pull those levers, which is very important. If we're getting killed in auto that day, we can send calls for somewhere else or we can turn the dialer off for a minute, allow us to get caught back up, and then we could turn the dialer back on. So we're constantly just managing it. It literally takes a team to sit in front of a screen or multiple screens and watch what's happening so that everybody's available, everybody's getting answered, everybody's dialing. I mean, it's pretty awesome to watch actually. It's kind of like conducting an orchestra.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, absolutely. And I'm definitely going to drill into the in-house side of things and do you sit up front and get your tattoo where everybody sees it and they're cheering, ringing the bell. This is awesome. One of the things you mentioned, the dialer, and that was going to be kind of the question about the team. You got the different practice areas like do you segment practice area intake specialists, do you segment the phase like maybe you got an outbound team versus an inbound team or a referral team? What have you seen as being the most efficient to structure the team and then it goes in the dialer and then, hey, you're on the phone? Talk to me about that setup.
Angie Flury:
For sure. We have found the most success for us. We have what we call our frontline care team and for lack of a better term, it's a live IVR. It is people who are just directing your call appropriately. So they're going to ask you, "What are you calling about today? Have you called us before?" Reassure you've called the right place and then they're going to route you into the appropriate skill. So if it's an auto call, they're making sure they get them to the auto queue. If it's a slip and fall, it's going there, mass tour, a labor. We play in a lot of litigations, I think 25. So we have to make sure that we're not putting a labor case in front of an auto agent because I do have my agents trained.
So I have PI agents, I have non-injury agents, I have social security agents, I have frontline care team, I have outbound. They are skilled out differently. On the outbound side, the dialer's running, those agents are dedicated. They're not screening. So they're getting ahold of the client. "Hi, Chris. Hi, I see that you contacted our firm. Do you have a moment now to talk about your auto accident?" "You do? Great. One moment. I'm going to get you over to one of our auto accident experts."
And then they transfer them into the auto accident queue. That way I'm not tying up my outbound team with doing full consultations. They're just dialing. They get ahold of somebody, they get them into the queue. If they don't, they schedule a time to call back or they leave a message. That we have found is very efficient versus I used to have a full team of outbound sitting there trying to screen through cases and then they weren't clearing our dial lists because they were getting tied up on consultations.
Now we're getting our list cleared because they're transferring them into the people who do the consultations. Again, this kind of gives me the opportunity. We do use a vendor to help us out with our non-injury. All of our injury cases are screened in the states. We screen our non-injury nearshore and so we can send those calls off to the vendor and we can keep everything else kind of in house. So it is divided very carefully, but we want to make sure we keep everybody kind of in teamed out so that we can make sure we're protecting the personal injury space and then we can get the non-injury calls down.
Chris Dreyer:
That makes a ton of sense, and thank you for sharing that. And I think I talked to Reyes Law. They do a lot of volume, a couple thousand cases a month, and they did like the pre-qual/closer kind of similar setup, get somebody because just bandwidth, you don't have the time to do those long calls to dig in.
Angie Flury:
Right. I mean, we have almost a hundred people on our outbound team, but should 60 of them be on a consultation, that's 60 people I have not dialing now and I need them to keep dialing because the lists are long. We're calling on follow-ups, we're calling on leads and I want to dial that lead as fast as humanly possible. So I want to keep them available and that kind of allows outbound to just focus on outbound and I don't have to worry about, "Oh, now they're busy taking inbound." We don't ever cross that line. Outbound stays outbound and then we make sure we stay fully staffed on inbound.
Chris Dreyer:
Fantastic. Managing an inbound queue of millions of calls is an incredible logistical puzzle. By separating outbound dialers from consultation agents and creating a specialized frontline care team for routing, Morgan & Morgan keeps their sales floor moving efficiently. But systems are only as good as the people running them. You can't just put a brand new agent on the line with a potentially catastrophic claim. Let's look at the rigorous six-week training program they built and the specialized roles that act as force multipliers for the entire operation.
What goes into training, right? Intake seems like a little bit more turnover than other roles, that's just sales in general. For sure. What goes into the training to ramp them up to where they're ready to hit the phone and how do you approach the product knowledge side of things?
Angie Flury:
So we actually have a six-week training program for our intake agents and it's grown over the years. It started as two weeks. When I first started here, they had a two-week training program. We've continued to expand it as we've gone along and I think it's incredibly important because really as soon as you put them on the phone, again, I don't know if that's a $10,000 case or a $10 million case. You can't do a pre-screen, "Okay, you're a $10,000 case. I could put you with a new agent." I have to make sure that that agent from the minute they hit the floor can take that call. So we do a blend of classroom training and we created something we call the Morgan Academy. It's kind of like a nesting pod. So what they do is they spend the first week and a half in classroom training.
The first day is just Morgan & Morgan. It's all about culture, who we are, what we do as a firm. We want to make sure they really understand the firm that they've joined. Then we start going into systems and kind of starting to teach a little bit about what the law is and then we teach them one case type. So like for example, we may start with general liability and we take them into the academy. They sit side by side with an existing agent that we call an advisor and they take only general liability calls for a day or two. Just get the hang of talking to a client, taking the information. They have an advisor right next to them who can take over the call if they need to. The advisor's there to guide them. Then they go back in the classroom and now maybe they learn work comp and then they come back into the academy and they do the same thing.
Now they can take general liability and work comp, and they do that for a couple days, and then they go back and they learn auto. And we just keep doing that until they learn all of the case types that they may be screening. Then they stay in the academy for an additional two weeks and while they get very comfortable, their advisor starts to back away. They're always around and they're there if they raise their hand or they have any questions. But this way we have QA listening to all their calls. We have an AI tool that is called Ready. It's a simulation where they can actually do a whole consultation with an AI agent who pretends to be a client. And so it allows them to work through the system and actually do a full consultation. So we do all of these things before we ever turn them loose on the floor.
They get used to the knowledge base. They learn how to ask questions. They know how to dial into our tier two system, everything they need. So they are fully ready. The minute they hit the floor, they are a full agent that can do everything that anybody else can do.
Chris Dreyer:
That's fantastic. I don't know how many of our listeners know this, but I actually worked at West Telecommunications and so I was that guy trying to sell AT&T on the dialer and a lot better than my previous job out in the heat with no AC, but kind of similar. I came in, did the classroom for a few weeks, then I started side by side. I had the QA team listening and then they threw me to the fire, but then they had the different tiers of here's the least qualified all the way to the very qualified, like the S tier cases or situations. But yeah, so it reminds me very similar to that.
Angie Flury:
Yeah. What we have found by expanding this and doing this type of training model, our attrition within the academy is very low, almost zero. They feel very well-supported. And then our attrition when they first hit the floor has dropped dramatically because what we were seeing in the past is we put them on the floor, they're not ready, they get overwhelmed and they resign. Now they are ready and they feel a lot more comfortable. They just have to deal with being on their own a little bit more than they were in the past or having a new team lead. And so that's a little different for them. But one thing I had not spoken to is we do have teams that handle our catastrophic and ultra catastrophic cases when they come in and as soon as the agent picks that type of injury within their flow, it triggers these teams to actually take over the call.
So they dial into the call and they say, "Hi. Due to the severity of your case. I'm going to take your call on." So we don't throw the most hurt or the most injured expensive cases to a new hire. They do get those taken from them, but they should be able to handle it in theory if they couldn't.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. You want your most experienced closers to take over those.
Angie Flury:
Absolutely.
Chris Dreyer:
That barge in feature. I think RingCentral has that. I know Amazon Connect does.
Angie Flury:
Most telephonies should have that.
Chris Dreyer:
Another question I've started asking recently, I think this is kind of intriguing. In the military, you have these force multipliers, right? It's like you got a whole battalion, then you got a tank. You got a whole battalion, then you got a guy with an Uzi or something. I don't know. I don't know the different guns. But in intake, what are, of course, the trainers, huge force multipliers, but what are some of the other force multiplying roles that at scale it's like, now that I have a hundred reps, I can think about this one person that's going to really provide a lot of impact for these others.
Angie Flury:
Well, the ultra-cat team is a big deal because not only do they take on that ultra-catastrophic case, but they're doing it live while the agent's listening. So the agent is learning how to upsell and take on these kind of cases, how to speak to someone who has experienced a death or is severely injured or has a loved one in the hospital. So not only are we getting it signed, but the new agents are hearing that. So they're getting training whether they want it or not. They're starting to kind of learn more about that. You have that role. You have people that our tier two folks that we have here are some of my most tenured people. They know everything. I kind of joke around like when I have to phone a friend, I call them because they've been around so long they can answer any question, they can handle any kind of training that we need to do.
And so when an agent reaches out to one of these folks, they're learning all day long. And then my business analyst, this is a newer role for us. Believe it or not, it took us a long time to kind of get to the point that we thought we need a business analyst, but we need people who are sitting and watching what's happening to be able to tell us, "Hey, there's a problem in this state. These cases aren't signing up as much in Nevada as they are in Arizona. Someone should look at that." Or, "We're seeing more turndowns here than we're seeing here or we have an agent who some reason isn't signing up as many cases as everybody else on their team." Having someone just sit there and study that kind of data is changing our business because it's stuff that when we're in the trenches, and I always kind of joke around and call it herding cats, but when we're out herding cats, we don't have time to look at that level of detail every day.
And so having someone whose whole job is just to sit there and study the data, pop it into Claude, Claude spit out and say, "Hey, yeah, we found something here." It's been game changing. I mean, it is literally changing the business.
Chris Dreyer:
That's incredible. That's incredible. Right before you and I joined the call, I was running a big prompt on Claude extracting and looking at a whole bunch of data. I just threw it a whole bunch of data and I said, "Summarize and scrutinize." That was my prompt.
Angie Flury:
I love that. Claude's the best. I mean, Claude is changing the game for us here. It's been fantastic.
Chris Dreyer:
For our audience listening that wants to send a referral or wants to send you those turndowns for a second look, how does that process work? Do they get in touch with you? Do they contact the Morgan connection? How does that process work to get a part of the system?
Angie Flury:
The Morgan Connection is ideally where they can go, but I'm happy to connect them if they want to reach out to me. They can actually just call in to Morgan & Morgan and we can connect them if they get into the call center. That's easy enough. Everyone knows how to make that connection. But the team on the Morgan Connection side is fantastic. They'll work very closely with our partners. What kind of cases are you looking for? Is this something that you would like to see this type of case or where is your sweet spot that you would like us to send and what venue and what area? They are wonderful. I work with them all the time. So yeah, just reach out and we hook you right up.
Chris Dreyer:
That's amazing. And for our audience listening that just wants to connect with you, has any questions for you, what's the best way to get in touch? And then also maybe just a preview of PIMCON, like what you're going to talk on maybe that we didn't touch on.
Angie Flury:
Yeah. I think we're still working on what we're going to talk about at PIMCON, but I think talking a lot about what it takes to implement change, where to start finding problems in your intake space and identifying them early on when you have one or two people because those problems multiply when you have five or six, 10, 20, 20 to 50, starting to look at things like that, talking about culture and how it needs to be intentional because it matters, especially recognition and things like that for the people who are doing your intake. So it's going to be a lot of fun stuff. I'm working really closely with your team there to build out what hopefully will be a fun and very informational session.
But in the meantime, if anybody wants to reach me, it's aflury@forthepeople.com. It's F-L-U-R-Y, like Fury, but with an L. And we do have a very robust filter, so maybe email me twice if you don't hear back from me, but I'm happy to answer any questions.
Chris Dreyer:
Amazing. Angie, thanks for coming on the show.
Angie Flury:
Thank you.
Chris Dreyer:
Excellence is the standard and Angie's team proves it every day. By tracking KPIs rigorously, prioritizing training and leveraging force multipliers like AI and specialized routing, Morgan & Morgan has built the ultimate sales floor. If you want to hear Angie talk about how these lessons can be applied to your firm, then go to PIMCON.org right now and grab your tickets for PIMCON 2026. That's pimcon.org. I'm Chris Dreyer. Thanks for listening and we'll catch you next time on Personal Injury Mastermind.
