The Law Firm Xcelerator Case Manager and Intake Boot Camps took place earlier this month in New Orleans and were a huge success. These departments can often be overlooked in the PI world, especially when it comes to investing in team training. This event brought together the best of case managers, intake specialists, operations staff, and partners from top PI firms around the country, and fostered lively discussions about what’s working, techniques that are becoming outdated, and ways to make these two departments as efficient as possible.
If you are a firm owner, managing partner, or COO, we highly encourage you to consider sending your team to these events next year. Attendees left this year’s boot camps with specific action items and ideas to take home to their firms.
Take Client Contact to the Next Level
Our first top takeaway from the Case Manager Boot Camp was the importance of consistent and meaningful client contact. Scarlett Lester, the Xcelerator Case Manager Consultant, explained to the audience why creating a relationship with your clients is so valuable at a personal injury firm. Often, a case manager is the person that a client interacts with the most about their cases. This offers case managers a unique opportunity when it comes to gathering information about injuries, the impact of an incident, and recovery progress. If case managers are speaking with clients often and create a relationship where the client feels comfortable opening up, being honest, and sharing more information, the case manager can catch major pieces of information about a case that could have otherwise gone unnoticed.
Additionally, consistent and meaningful client communication makes it clear to clients just how much your firm cares about them as an individual and cares about their case. Oftentimes, bad reviews and unhappy clients occur as a result of the lack of communication. If a client feels that you are not prioritizing their case or doing everything that you can do to help them, it leads to feelings of resentment. Cases move more slowly than many clients anticipate when first signing up with an attorney, so checking in with them consistently and explaining where things are with their case ensures that the client knows they are being kept in the loop. Overall, having happier clients makes life much easier for both case managers and attorneys! Additionally, clients that received good communication from the firm are much more likely to refer your firm to a friend or loved one.
Case Rankings: Identifying & Working Top Cases
Our second top takeaway from the Case Manager Boot Camp was the importance of ranking cases. As soon as a case comes into your PI firm, you should be working to rank that case based on the anticipated case value. This ranking can be adjusted as you learn more about the case, but making sure that all cases are ranked in a timely manner is critical. This ensures that cases are properly assigned to case management and attorney teams that are capable of handling them and are able to get the absolute most out of the case for the client. Additionally, rankings serve as a valuable reminder for time management when it comes to handling cases, as you need to be putting more time and resources towards top cases.
Case rankings are one of the biggest steps to increasing average fee that we will discuss at our April conference, Xcelerate Your Average Fee. If you haven’t already instituted a case ranking system or other measures to maximize case value at your firm, we recommend that you sign up for Xcelerate Your Average Fee ASAP. You can do so here.
The Valuable Data that Often Goes Unused: Call Recordings
At the Intake Boot Camp, listening to and evaluating call recordings was definitely a hot topic. These call recordings are incredibly valuable to your firm, and should not be ignored. Many firms shy away from listening to and evaluating calls, both because it takes a lot of time and effort to do well and because it can make intake specialists uncomfortable knowing that their conversations are being recorded. However, we argue that this time and effort is more than worth it and that if you communicate openly with their team, they will grow to be comfortable with the idea of you listening to their call recordings. Call recordings can be used to focus on the great things that a specialist does just as much as they can be used to point out areas that could be improved.
The quality of your intake department sets the standard for the rest of your firm. If things are going wrong in intake, they are certainly impacting everything else at the firm. Listening to call recordings offers you the chance to catch problems before they arise and to help your intake specialists constantly improve and hone their abilities.
Having an unbiased party listen to and evaluate your intake can be extremely valuable. Xcelerator has a new offering that will be launching later this year: Ghost Listening. For a monthly fee, their intake analysts will listen to and evaluate a select number of call recordings from your firm. They are only accepting five clients at a time for this service and anticipate that these spots will fill quickly. If you are interested in taking part in this offering when it goes live, reach out to info@lawfirmxcelerator.com.
We’d Love to See You at Our Next Event!
The agendas for both days of boot camp were jam-packed, so choosing just a handful of top takeaways was incredibly difficult. These are just a few of the things that really stood out to us! If you were with us in New Orleans, we’d love to hear about what your top takeaways were and how the implementation is going at your firm.
The next Xcelerator event is Xcelerate Your Average Fee, April 20-21 at the Joseph Hotel in Nashville. This event will focus on the specific steps that attorneys can take to make the most of their cases and to increase average fee by 30% or more. Click here to sign up or reach out to info@lawfirmxcelerator.com if you have any questions about opportunities to work with cj Advertising or with our consulting team, Xcelerator.
