An Inside Look At Our Biggest Mistakes And What Law Firms Can Learn From Them

Nick Werker (Co-Host)

We are back once again on the Legal Intake Experts podcast presented by Answering Legal. I am one of your two hosts Nick Werker joined as always by my co-host Tony Prieto and there is an invisible man. His name is producer Joe. He is here producing, watching over all of us. But I have done something terrible to producer Joe. Uh I will get to that shortly, but I’m going to ask you my favorite question for the third time today. We are recording our third episode today. Uh, how are you, Tony?

Tony Prieto (Co-Host)

Scared.

Nick Werker

That’s a good answer. Uh, well, I don’t even know how to uh broach the subject, but I have usurped this episode like Robert Baratheon uh and the Iron Throne. I have duct taped producer Joe metaphorically to his chair. And now I suppose you are my second hostage.

Tony Prieto

Yeah, I’m I’m here under duress. When Nick slides his chair back and then moves it forward, it’s it’s like someone cocking a shotgun. That’s what that was. 

Nick Werker

That’s amazing. Okay. Well, what I mean by that is I wrote the segment for today’s intro and for the the idea for this episode and I sprung it on Joe and Tony. Um, and so if this stinks, I have no one to blame but myself. And so I wrote a segment. This segment is called Mistakes. I am a mistake making machine. And so Tony, I charge you to tell me about a mistake that you’ve made and what you learned from it. Um, but I really want it to be something good. Not too good, but good.

Tony Prieto

Uh, yeah. I’m perfect. I’ve never made a mistake in my life.

Nick Werker

Uh, I agree with that. 

Tony Prieto

No, I uh I was I went to visit my brother uh last weekend with my family. We went up to Mackinac Island in Michigan. It was a beautiful vacation. And um at the end of that, we went to one of my favorite restaurants in in Ypsilanti when I’m up there um which is called the Bellflower. It’s awesome. They have a different menu every day. It’s farm fresh ingredients, stuff like that. They had a delicious cake and then better than the cake was the ice cream on top. And um my brother ate all the ice cream. Uh there was one last bite of the cake. I said, “Hey, Pete, you want to split it?” He ate all the ice cream. He gave me the cake. I thought, “Wow, that wasn’t the way I wanted to split it, but okay.” And then everyone said, “Hey, that’s not fair.” I said, “No, I could never be mad at my brother.” And one of the mistakes I made when I was younger was I had a friend who was an a****** to my little brother. And we’d been friends for a long time. And uh my parents would be like, “Bring your brother along, go hang out with this guy.” And I would say no. And it really hurt my brother’s feelings. And it took me years. I had at this point, I think I’ve been friends with this kid like almost 10 years. um when I realized, oh, I just you’re just you’re an a****** to my little brother. I’m just I’m just not going to be friends with you anymore. You know what I mean? And the mistake that I made was being scared of losing one relationship that I’d had for a long time. Uh and in in that damaging another one, although, you know, my brother and I are great. He you know, I hurt his feelings when I was 16. People make mistakes when they’re 16. Uh but that one haunts me forever.

Nick Werker

It’s a very sweet but also kind of sad story.

Tony Prieto

Yeah.

Nick Werker

I… What kind of mistake have I made? I am going to say that the lesson that I learned recently is that I for better or for worse do too much for people and I will go out of my way. Um, which is really like a people pleasing dishonesty thing because I want you to like me and when I do that I inevitably raise some expectation of your response in order to me like trying to help you or go out of my way or whatever and that breeds a resentment. And also um I have found that I often get disappointed because people don’t go the same distance out of their way for me or for anyone else. And so I I just like had to wrestle with that. Um and so I have tried to rein that in. I have a newish rule. It’s that I won’t meet you more than halfway. If you meet me halfway, I will go as far as you want to go. Right? But you also have to be putting in the effort. That’s uh that is an amalgamation of mistakes that I’ve made.

Tony Prieto

How do you measure halfway? Metric imperial?

Nick Werker

I don’t think you have to. I think it’s I think no matter how you measure the distance, halfway is halfway.

Tony Prieto

I think I Yeah, I mean, wow, you outsmarted my smart ass joke. I think one of the one of the things I’ve always maybe I’m too literalminded with meet me halfway is just like where is that? And you you feel it in the moment. You know what I mean? But I like that Nick’s mistake is being too good of a person. He’s too humble.

Nick Werker

It’s not what I meant.

Tony Prieto

You’re holding me hostage. I got I got to get back at you somehow.

Nick Werker

Ah, you son of… Um, anyway, the purpose of that segment is that recently I had learned about uh some mistakes that were made here at Answering Legal. So, I’m going to tell you, Tony, about some uh communications that I’ve intercepted and a review that we received and some stories about uh some conversations that I’ve had internally here with our uh account setup team and our support team um with Jake who leads our technology team. There’s big there’s teams. There’s lots of teams. Uh and the first one is something that I think is our fault. Me and you. Us. Is a  lack of education to our customers in recent times about call forwarding and how you use call forwarding for an answering service.

Tony Prieto

Okay. I mean that seems really basic like sort of bottom level. In order for an answering service to work you do have to forward your calls to them. So how does, how does the mistake happen?

Nick Werker

Good question. So, let’s assume that again like being super humble that you and I and the rest of our team are good at our jobs and that Answering Legal is known, liked, and trusted by law firm owners and attorneys and lawyers across America. And someone reaches out to us, what ends up happening is they go to the website and they either call someone and they speak to uh an account executive here or they submit a web form and someone from our team reaches out to them and and tells them about what we do, who we are and uh how we build all that sort of good stuff and encourages you to try a free trial with us. What we tell our customers in that communication is that what we’re going to be doing is forwarding their calls, which just relies on like the infrastructure of of the phone company. When we get the call, when it is uh received by us, our our technology obviously like does a bunch of things in order to populate messages and call flows and and right, it just basically takes a bunch of like buttons and puts them in one place and then instructions and we train the receptionist, right? That’s the complicated part for us. But really, what ends up happening when you hire an answering service is you’re really relying on the telephone company to forward your calls every single time that it gets missed to us. You can explain that as many times as you want. What our job is is to educate lawyers that you have so many phone numbers and you have to forward them all to us. And what you can do is you can have separate lines where when we answer the call, say you have uh and you should uh a Google LSA number, right? And every time somebody calls your… The number that gets displayed by Google, it forwards to your LSA number. Every time that phone number rings, you know you just got an LSA caller and we can send you the message on that line that says LSAs. Or you have one for Google Ads. It’s a Google Ads number or you have a billboard one in Spanish and that one goes directly to our Spanish speaking receptionist and it says Spanish speaking, I don’t know, Spanish billboard, whatever. Right? You label it whatever you want and you have to forward those numbers to us. And what happened was we uh had a communication with this lawyer and he’s like, “Great. I forwarded my whole phone system to you guys,” not realizing that he had a separate number for his LSAs and his LSA phone calls weren’t being answered. And he was just like, “You guys aren’t answering my LSA calls.” And it took this email being intercepted by me to realize he definitely didn’t forward the LSA number. And nobody told him that he had to go in there and forward the LSA number.

Tony Prieto

And the thing is that there’s advantages you could do to that, right? Like you could have different call forwarding protocols by number. For example, uh if you wanted to have the opportunity to answer phone calls, but you just don’t speak Spanish, you can have a one call forwarding protocol that lets it ring in your office first for your normal line and then for your Spanish speaking line, whatever you put on, you know, “se habla Español”, your billboards, that goes straight to us and our our Spanish speaking receptionist handle it. Um there are ways that you could uh weaponize this, but uh you’re right. I mean, call forwarding is both complicated and old. Um, which makes it really hard for people to understand. 

Nick Werker

It’s just not something you think about at all. And so, the other thing that I want to point out and then we’ll go on to mistake number two because I want to get through this because I have I don’t want Joe to have to be duct taped to his chair for too long. I want to

Tony Prieto

He can breathe through his nose though.

Nick Werker

I didn’t duct tape his mouth. He can shout for help. Just know that no one is helping him.

Tony Prieto

In space no one can hear him scream.

Nick Werker

No, he’s just I I like your metaphor. I do, but he he’s just taped to his chair. He just can’t interfere with my usurping of the podcast. But I can hear him oftentimes, especially um with uh smaller law firm owners and especially like a few years ago, a lot of the lawyers that we worked with were what I would call like one lawyer, one receptionist, right? Or like a shared receptionist at the front of the office building. And at the end of the day, the receptionist leaves and your your business calls are still getting forward to forwarded to Answering Legal, right? Like say the receptionist in there doesn’t whatever it goes to Answering Legal overnight. What ends up happening though is because you only have the front office reception and you want to communicate with your clients, you’ll give out your phone number. You’re fine if existing clients hit your phone number, whatever, and they leave you a voicemail or they text you or so on and so forth. But those clients when they give your name out as a referral, give out your cell phone number. And the law firm owners will be inundated with these phone calls to their cell phone and not have it forwarded to the answering service on a conditional basis. And so that is my other hot tip, take for lawyers using an answering service is if you have that set up and people are calling you on your cell phone, just put the service on your cell phone, too. Save yourself a little headache.

Tony Prieto

I mean, honestly, I I talked about this with Nick. Uh before voicemails, people had answering services. And if you weren’t at home, I read uh I read the novel Rosemary’s Baby. It was was published in 1967, takes place in Manhattan. All… Everyone has an answering service and they know their friends answering service receptionists by voice and they’re like, “Oh, I got this one. She’s not very nice.” And it’s just a completely different world. Obviously, it was 60 years ago, but um their personal phone calls were being forwarded to an answering service if they missed it. I’m not saying that everyone should go out there and get a personal answering service. That’s kind of a lot. But if you have people, as the as the children say, blowing up your phone, uh conditional call forwarding, it’s totally it’s exactly the same as having voicemail in that if you don’t answer the phone, it’s just going to go to someone who’s going to take a message. uh accept your clients will love it. You might think, “Oh, it’s impersonal to forward my personal phone number.” Like, “What if my wife calls me and gets the answering service?” First of all, I think she’s going to think that’s hilarious. I would. And two, it’s going to just sort of close the loop on anything that could come in that was business related to your personal phone number. And you just won’t have to deal with any spam calls anymore.

Nick Werker

I used to have the service on my phone and I would do catering still on the weekends and I forget who it was, but I was dealing with some like event coordinator or whatever and they called me and they got the answering service and when I spoke to them later, they were like, “Who was the person answering your phone when they answered it so professionally and they said like Nick Werker’s office? How can I help you?” I stood up and I started reciting the pledge of allegiance. I was in tears. I’ll never forget that. It was so funny.

Tony Prieto

I mean, think about how impressed your friends will be when they speak to your receptionist on your personal phone number, ya know?

Nick Werker

All my friends know what I do. They’re not impressed by me.

Tony Prieto

Yeah sure, your friends. 

Nick Werker

They know what I am. I sort of and accidentally muddied two of the mistakes together um because producer Joe was not here to rein me in. Uh so I do want to talk specifically about call forwarding because here is I told you about the LSA problem and I talked about forwarding the number. Now I have a separate call forwarding problem. Separate. Okay. This person, the LSA thing, we resolved that. Uh, and I intercepted the message because whatever, right? Like I’m involved in a lot of conversations here. I am, as Jamie Ding, the Jeopardy contestant, who I love and admire. I am, as what he refers to himself as a bureaucrat. And so I’m involved in a lot of things that go on here and making sure that things are uh improved all the time for our clients. The other thing that happened is we recently got a bad review. We got this bad review and I read this review and it instantly made sense to me. And it it instantly made sense to me because I’ve been in this business for so long and I know where uh misunderstandings happen usually. So what the core of this review was is again the sentiment of the person was uh we weren’t answering their phone calls and when he tested his own line he got an IVR and so he immediately he heard the IVR and he sent us an email to cancel because he was like you guys aren’t even answering and I got I hit this IVR and it said like press one to to speak to this and it said press two to speak to that And I read this review and I knew ex instantly what it was. And I I checked in it and it was it was the case. This law firm owner changed phone providers. And when he changed phone providers, it dropped the call forwarding. And he must have gone to like one of those voice-over IPs, which is a good idea, right? They’re really they’re cost effective and they have a lot of features and there’s specialized ones for uh lawyers, which is is great. But I think the like out of the box setup when you install it is that it has an IVR. And so the call forwarding got dropped. The calls weren’t making it to us. And we don’t use an IVR. We have all humans here.

Tony Prieto

Yeah. Why would we use that? Defeats the purpose of an answering service.

Nick Werker

So there will be people who call in and they’re like, I have the automated system and if they press one, it’ll send them to the answering service. And we’re like, turn that off. And they’re like, I don’t know how. And so we we turned it off for them. And so I read that and I was like, oh no, we didn’t. And and this is how uh I know that I am a paranoid person is I didn’t blame this person at all. I immediately took ownership and I was like it’s not being communicated to this person in a process that like if there’s any major changes made to your phone system that it could cause the the call forwarding to sever. And it’s not like we forward your calls. We don’t own your phone numbers. We don’t want to do that. We want you to own your phone numbers and be able to do whatever you want with them. So if the call forwarding stops working, we will never know, right? And and oftentimes, like if people want to cancel, they unforward the calls themselves because they’re educated. But we didn’t have this um and and especially in recent in in recent times, we should update our our welcome packet, Tony, to make that that uh disclaimer that like any major changes you make to your phone, you have to check with us.

Tony Prieto

And you could take I mean, not just an answering service uh lesson from this. You can take an intake lesson from this which is like that is an intake mistake we made, right? We should be letting these people know when they become customers the rules uh the expectations. And the takeaway from that is to do the same thing for your law firm, right? Like when you see a hole as Nick identified in this review, it’s easy to push the blame away from yourself to blame the person like in this case, right, this guy didn’t know that he had to make this change when he changed phone providers. That’s not actually his fault because it was our job to educate them. In that same way, when you get a bad review, you lose a client, whatever’s a negative outcome. We I mean, we had a recent episode about, you know, taking accountability, look at what happened and see if there’s, you know, just we talked about intake here. There’s plenty of other things that could have gone wrong, but if there’s something that they didn’t know that they should have known, that mistake is in your intake.

Nick Werker

Yeah.

Tony Prieto

As it was here with ours. 

Nick Werker

And so when I intercepted this, I obviously investigated a little bit and I read through like the communications on um because he sent an email to cancel and we were like, “Why are you canceling?” And and we soon figured out why he was canceling all that. I read all the notes. I spoke to the person who handled it and I was like, “Should I call?” And they’re like, “I called him. He he wasn’t hearing it.” You know, it is what it is, right? Like the relationship is over. And uh I made a response. I did reach out and I said something to the effect of like, “Thanks for helping us learn this lesson and that like I really do believe in what we do here and if you’re open to it, I’d love to have a conversation about how we can uh how we’re implementing this feedback and if you ever need our help in the future, I hope you don’t feel like you can’t come back. Like there’s no hard feelings. We we own that this was a miscommunication and a misunderstanding and and our part in it.” And uh ultimately that’s that’s like the most that I can do, right? I’m not going to harass this guy into coming back and I hope he has a good experience elsewhere, too. It is what it is.

Tony Prieto

One of the advantages of working in a business that isn’t doesn’t have a bunch of let me put it this way, no one’s going to make an ethics complaint to Answering Legal for a mistake that we made where if you’re a law firm, someone absolutely could make an ethics complaint to your bar association. And most of those are about miscommunication or lack of communication. So, something to keep an eye out for.

Nick Werker

That’s a scary thought. That’s a very scary thought. Anyway, here is my mistake number three is one of the thing that I actually do want to embark on is there is such a crossover and we see this all the time. We have Gyi and Conrad on, we have Christopher Earley on, we have Delisi Friday on and there’s such a crossover between law firm marketing and relationships and all of that with intake, right? Marketing wants you to do a better job at intake so that they can just say that they did a better a good job marketing and getting you these wanted cases.

Tony Prieto

Make the numbers look better. Yeah.

Nick Werker

Yeah. And people are invested in your success, right? Really good people.

Tony Prieto

 I don’t I don’t mean that in a a negative way.

Nick Werker

I wasn’t correcting you. I was I was saying… I really wasn’t correcting you. I was trying to be additive. I’m sorry.

Tony Prieto

Sure. Sure.

Nick Werker

So, I get very very interested even though we don’t do any local search for like very obvious reasons, but I get very interested in how smaller law firms do local search. And so, I follow people like Darren Shaw, from Whitespark. I follow the Near Media guys now from Gyi and Conrad and all that. And I’ve learned a lot about local SEO and how many listings and premium listings that lawyers have to buy and and where all of their information is. And it’s very important for all that to be congruent. However, lawyers and especially marketing companies out there love tracking numbers. I know we’ve already covered that you want to make sure all of your tracking numbers are forwarded to the service because we can help you delineate those messages and where they came from. Even though uh I encourage you also to be using call tracking, like CallRail or WhatConverts. I do love WhatConverts. Shout out Michael Cooney. I encourage you to look through all of your listings and look at your phone numbers and see what’s out there because I have seen recently that switching between marketing service providers or switching between listing providers or anything like that will leave outdated addresses or phone numbers and people will call those and they’ll be out of service and they’ll be like, “Well, this person doesn’t practice law anymore and I can’t get in touch with them.” And so that’s my final thing is go out and review your local presence and make sure that all of your phone numbers actually ring to your office.

Tony Prieto

One of the scariest things every time I try to find a business and it says like permanently closed or something like that, one of the scariest things I can imagine is someone makes a mistake, right? Like phone numbers off, people start leaving reviews on Google saying, “Hey, this place is closed.” And then Google marks your business as permanently closed and you’re just not you’re open but you’re just like why is no one calling my phone number. I imagine that’s that’s a nightmare that some uh business owners have.

Nick Werker

I have a worst nightmare for you. First of all Google business profiles have a button on it called suggest and edit and so your competitors can go onto your Google business profile and suggest and edit now whether or not Google approves proves that edit is up to the Google lords and I’m sure that you can figure out a scheme in order to change that information. And so you do have to be monitoring that again why you should be monitoring your local presence all of the time to make sure that all of these things are on and and working toward your business. But I do have a story uh this is years ago now. The company here was getting a little bit bigger and I work very closely with the owner. It’s still a family-owned business. and he was having a conversation with this uh lawyer who her firm I want to say was in Brooklyn and she was like, “I have this website. I just want somebody to look at it. Like, I’m getting a new website. I want this. I want that.” And the owner was like, “I I have no idea what I’m talking about.” And literally takes the phone and gives it to me and is like, “Hey, can you talk to this lawyer in Brooklyn and help her like go over things?” And I was like, “Sure. Listen, send me your website. Send me like x, y, and z”. Whatever I asked for and I just looked at it and the first thing that I found, first of all, she had a website that was made for her that she had never seen before. There were two websites of this woman. I sent her the second one. I was like, “Why do you have two websites?” She’s like, “I’ve never seen that before in my life.” It had her address on it, phone. It was the most bizarre thing I’ve ever heard. The second thing that I discovered is that Google Maps had mistakenly put her address because she had typed it in. Uh, I guess it was like a rented space as Chipotle. It was at Chipotle. And I was like I was like, “This is this is Chipotle.” And so we went in and we corrected it and like she’s like, “The Chipotle is across the street. That’s crazy.” And I was like, “Yeah, it is crazy.” And and like people look at that and they’re like, “Why is it in a Chipotle?” And then maybe they don’t call you cuz it doesn’t look so legit or it’s just confusing.

Tony Prieto

I’d assume that the that when I went to to a consult a consult with that lawyer, uh, I would get free Chipotle. So, I would sign up.

Nick Werker

I’m sure I don’t know the legality of that, but I don’t think it would be a bad thing.

Tony Prieto

If I was running a business out of a Chipotle, all of my clients would be getting a free meal every time we had a meeting.

Nick Werker

You do love for Chipotle. 

Tony Prieto

I’m paying for it. You know what I mean? 

Nick Werker

Yeah. I ate Chipotle last night, so I can’t judge you. Anyway, that’s all I got. Those are all my mistakes for today. And now I will let you not be on camera for the rest of the day.

Tony Prieto

Uh, this again was all Nick’s idea, so if you don’t like it, blame him. But um I think that one of the things that uh lawyers often fail to recognize is how because everything is so specialized for lawyers. I mean we’re an answering service that specializes in answering for attorneys, right? There’s CRM specialized for lawyers, etc. It’s easy to fall into the silo of like if it’s not specialized for lawyers, specialized advice for lawyers, for examples, it it won’t really work. But like you could take a lot from the uh mistakes that Nick is is owning up to here that we’re that we’re discussing that that we’ve made that we’ve made and that people our you know customers make and apply them to your business even if you don’t have an answering service. Um because at the end of the day, intake is just something that everybody’s got to do, you know, regardless what you know, your your mechanic probably doesn’t have a great intake process, but they do have an intake process, you know, and the better their intake process, probably the better you think they are as a mechanic.

Nick Werker

That’s very interesting. I hope I don’t need a mechanic, though. But I guess you also hope you don’t need a lawyer.

Tony Prieto

Yeah.

Nick Werker

Good metaphor. Very good metaphor. Anyway, I am going to go drink more coffee and I am going to cut producer Joe loose from the bonds of his duct tape shackles to his cushy office chair.

Tony Prieto

Yeah, absolutely. If you liked I, like I said, if you didn’t like this episode, go find Nick on LinkedIn and yell at him for uh locking up Joe. But um if you do like this episode uh listen to more of our episodes on uh Apple Podcasts, Spotify, uh YouTube, and Amazon Music.

Nick Werker

And I just want to say because I didn’t write an outro for this episode because producer Joe I I really did usurp this that we referenced Answering Legal and answering services several times today because wow, I wrote a self-promotional episode. Look at me go. I’m learning. our listeners, if you enjoyed anything that we talked about or identify with anything that we talked about, you can head over to answeringlegal.com to learn more about our virtual receptionist service. There’s also a link in the bio of this episode uh to get a 400 minute free trial of the service and in more context, which we should uh elaborate on. Uh that is about 14 days worth of of uh a trial for Answering Legal.

Tony Prieto

Yeah, I mean if if you have any other questions, you know, shoot us an email. We we would love to uh do like a like a mailbag episode at some point. So uh you can probably email joe@answeringlegal.com if you have any questions uh that you’d like us to answer. When we have enough of them, we’ll put together an episode hopefully. Thank you all for listening to the podcast.

Nick Werker

Joe, I do not promise to never duct tape you to your chair again.

Tony Prieto

You see how we lose Joe and this just falls apart at the end. See you next time.

Nick Werker

Yup, it fell apart. Bye.