The problem isn’t your intake process. It’s the process leading to the intake process.

Let’s define “intake process.” Generally, that’s the process that starts with the client first contacting the firm and ends when the client hires the firm. It involves taking care of that person from beginning to end and being sure that circumstances are optimized to encourage the client to hire the firm.

Things That Go Wrong With the Intake Process

The intake process gets lots of focus from lawyers. They get upset when the following things happen:

• Clients leave voicemails and then won’t respond to the return call.
• Clients accept a return call and decline to schedule a consultation because they’ve scheduled with another firm.
• Clients refuse to schedule a consultation because of the consultation fee.
• Clients come to a consultation and refuse to pay the consultation fee.
• Clients come to a consultation and don’t hire the firm.

Plus a range of other things that go wrong with moving the client from prospect to customer.

Lawyers look at the intake process in isolation and make efforts to correct the deficiencies. For instance, when clients fail to show up for consultations, they implement systems for collecting payments in advance, thinking that will solve the problem. When clients fail to retain the firm, they develop follow-up systems for pestering prospects until they act.

Get to the Root of the Problem: Marketing

Unfortunately, the problem with intake is rarely found in the intake system. The problem is usually found in the systems that precede the intake system. The marketing is usually to blame.

Let me illustrate for you:

You’ve got a good friend. You went to law school together after going to the same college and living in the same dorm. You have lots in common and have even been on vacation together with your families. She’s someone you’ve known forever and trust with your life. She trusts you just as much.

Your friend refers her friend to you. Her friend is someone she has known for years, but the two of you have never met. Her friend needs help in your area of specialty. Your old roommate passes along your name and number along with a solid recommendation.

Is that friend going to retain you? Is that friend going to retain you even if your intake process has some deficiencies? Probably so. The friend trusted you before you ever met. The friend is ready to go and simply wants to meet to get things started. Your intake process is a non-factor unless you do something horribly self-destructive.

In this illustration, you see how the intake process becomes less important than it might otherwise have been. When there’s high trust, you don’t need the intake process to go nearly as well as when that trust doesn’t exist.

The key is to build trust before the intake process becomes a factor. Trust is essential to moving potential clients along in the process toward retaining your firm.

So when a lawyer comes to me and asks questions about how to perfect the intake process, I’m happy to talk about intake and how to make it go smoothly. I’m happy to explain the systematic approach I’ve taken to converting prospects into clients. However, I can’t be certain that replicating that intake process will work for the lawyer when I don’t know much about his or her marketing. The marketing sometimes builds trust and sometimes doesn’t.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll talk about trust and how it’s established even before a client calls your firm.