Speaker 1: Hey, everyone. I'm Melanie from Streamlined Legal, where we help law firms get the most out of their practice management software. One of the questions I get asked a lot is whether or not your firm should be purchasing Clio Grow or Lawmatics or some type of intake software. There's a lot of great products out there. Those are two of the intake software that we work with the most. But the question is, is it worth it? Should we be spending our money on this type of software? Now, just to review for those of you that haven't used a Lawmatics or Clio Grow, this is software that helps you track potential clients. So it helps remind you to follow up with them. It helps you send out those engagement letters with a click of a button so that they can be returned by your client with a digital signature in a matter of minutes. And it really, really speeds up that process of getting clients in the door and helping us track those that we may have lost track of. And so this is something that, of course, can be very helpful to firms, but there's always other considerations involved. And so one of the things that we're going to take a look at tonight is we're doing intake math. We're going to start looking at whether or not we should be purchasing a Clio Grow or a Lawmatics. So let's start with some easy numbers. I'm going to use for this example a firm that does estate planning. And we're going to say that we're getting five new clients a month. Okay. And if you don't know your numbers, it's very easy to find some of these. For example, we can go back to look at our engagement letters. How many did we prepare and have signed last month? Look at the last couple of months if you want some data. We can also look at the retainer's amounts that we got in last month. There's a couple of ways that we can track how many new clients we got last month. And again, if you want some nice data, go back and look at the last couple of months and see what's been happening. So our firm is bringing in about five new clients a month. And our average case value is $3,500. Now for those of you that haven't calculated your average case value, I'd encourage you to do that. If you're doing a flat fee, it's pretty easy. We take the amount of money that came in, divide it by the number of cases that we had. That's our average case value. If we're doing hourly, then it may be a little more complex. But for purposes of our demonstration, take your gross income from last month or last year, divide it by how many cases you had. Hopefully you have a list in your practice management software or maybe you have an Excel spreadsheet somewhere you're tracking that. But go ahead and find out that average case value. Again, it's just an average. We know that we're going to have a lot of different numbers in there. So our average case value for this example is $3,500. And so then we take a look at this software. How much does it cost, right? So we've got Clio Grow. I put an average on here of $100 a month. Now, of course, depending on how many licenses you have and if you have Clio Manage, they charge differently. Lawmatics is a little more expensive. But let's go ahead for this example and assume we're going to spend $100 a month on this software, which for Clio Grow will get you about two licenses. So I'm going to go ahead and use that as my example. And the next thing we need to take a look at is the whole reason that we're using this software or one of the main reasons is so that we can get more clients. And so if we are getting five new clients a month, the real number we need to look at is how many clients are we not getting? How many people are contacting our firm via phone, via email and not hiring us? And so we need to take a look at how many first contacts are we getting? And so if we don't know that number, I'd first of all go talk to the person that answers the phone. Go talk to the person that gets those emails and they can probably give you a better idea as to how many people are actually contacting the firm and not hiring us. And so for whatever reason, there's multiple reasons obviously. So if you don't have that number or they're not sure, go ahead and have them start tracking for the next couple of weeks or month and let's see. Put a tally mark down every time someone contacts the firm about the services that we offer of course. So we do want to start tracking that number if you're not already. But if you don't have that number, let's use a guesstimate or an estimate based on the person that's answering the phone and the best information that they have. So in this case, we're going to say we've actually had 10 potential clients contact us each month for the last 3 months. And for whatever reason, you know, they found somebody else, we got busy, we didn't get back to them, you know, there's all kinds of reasons why these people didn't end up hiring us. But if we look at that number, we have the potential for 5 additional people to be hiring us each month. If we have better follow through, a lot of things can happen. And so we go ahead and look at that number of 10 and we say, okay, well we have some room where we could try and capture some more people without even doing additional marketing. So this is just what we're getting now. Of course, if we add an additional marketing and all kinds of other things, then we could raise that number as well. So we're looking at 10 potential clients a month. So then it's a simple math equation, right? What we look at is if we can capture one new case each month from those 10 people that called in or contacted us because we're using Clio Grow and we have better follow through, faster engagement letters, that whole process is just going that much more smoothly and we're able to convert one new case a month, right? And our average case value is $3,500. That means that we've brought in $3,500. That is significantly more than the $100 a month that we spent on Clio Grow. And so to be quite specific, that's a 35 time return on your investment. So we spent $100 a month on Clio Grow. We got one new client a month, which I think is very, very reasonable given the numbers that we just looked at. And now we've got 35 times ROI. Now, of course, we need to go ahead and service that client and so on and so forth. But the idea is that if a software that costs $100 a month can help you bring in one extra client with an average case value of $3,500, the answer is an overwhelming yes. Yes, the spoiler alert is yes, you should get the intake software, whether it's Clio Grow, whether it's Lawmatics, you know, there's other software out there. Pick the one that works best for your firm. But the answer to the story is yes, you should have some type of intake software to help you track those leads and make sure that you're not leaving money lying on the table. Thanks for joining me tonight and have a great evening.