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Automated Intake for Law Firms

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Marketing, Messaging, Technology

What Everybody’s Chatting About – How Chatbots Are Revolutionizing Law Firm Intake | Part 6: Chatbots and Legal Ethics

This is the last part of our 6-part series, in which we’ve addressed how chatbots are changing the game for law firm intake.  This is part 6, where we’ll discuss legal ethics concerns related to chatbots. In part 1, we defined what a chatbot is. In part 2, we covered common chatbot features. In part 3, we addressed why chatbots are so essential for modern law firm intake. In part 4, we taught you how to build the perfect law firm chatbot. In part 5, we offered some suggestions on how chatbots can help you make better decisions about client intake.

Any new legal technology comes replete with questions about legal ethics.  That’s totally fair.  Lawyers are uniquely situated professionals, whose entire businesses can be wiped away due to an ethical snafu, and each state has its own specific jurisdictional rules, which makes it especially difficult for multistate practices to derive an effective formula for staying out of trouble.  Even longstanding law office technology concepts,  like use of the cloud and epayments (which have largely received stamps of approval from ethics boards), still cause many attorneys to break out in hives.

The law firm chatbot implies questions about legal ethics (as do most marketing tools, especially those focused on engagement), because the technology is meant to engage non-clients.  In that construct, lawyers are concerned over ethics rules banning improper solicitation and the inadvertent creation of an attorney-client relationship.  Each of these concerns, however, can be dispensed with.

Chatbots don’t prompt the impermissible solicitation of clients any more than traditionally-accepted website contact forms do.  Chatbots merely invite a user (law firm lead) to input information.  And, in any event, once a user lands on a law firm website (another traditionally-accepted form of law firm marketing engagement), the question of improper solicitation largely goes away, because the website visitor has affirmatively sought out information about a law firm, and landed on an informational page.  This is not like the virtual equivalent of handing a business card to an injured party at the scene of a motor vehicle accident.  A chatbot is just another information-gathering tool seated at a law firm website.

The difference between chatbots and most law website applications is that a chatbot is an engagement tool that allows for a conversational interface, such that the more relevant concern is: will the law firm lead believe that an attorney-client relationship is formed, even if the law firm does not intend for one to be formed.  This is an old problem, with a modern twist, because a chatbot allows for a conversation, rather than just being a one-way information collection medium.  However, the solution is not dissimilar from what lawyers do in other contexts that implicate the gulf between clients and non-clients, because it’s still all about transparency and providing concrete status updates to non-clients.  And, in the context of a chatbot, that still looks very much like it does everywhere else.  The addition of a disclaimer into the chatbot dialog and/or mention of the use of a chatbot in the general website disclaimer puts the user on notice that mere use of the tool, including to book an initial consultation, does not create an attorney-client relationship.  Then, this is about finalizing the nature of the relationship.  Just as a lawyer would normally do, in this context: if a lead becomes a client, she signs a fee agreement; if a lead does not become a client, she receives a non-engagement letter or email from the law firm, in order to finally confirm the point.  Via chatbot technology, that can all be delivered through the software itself.

Chatbots may also have the ability to notify law firms of potential conflicts of interest, via integration with contact or client management software or reference to internal datasets, which potential conflicts lawyers can then clear or not.  The technology is not currently sufficiently advanced as to ‘automate’ conflict checks.  Currently, at least, the only safe route to clear conflicts via a chatbot is through the creation of an alert or flag that a law firm can process in the course of business.

Now you know how to implement a chatbot in an ethically-compliant fashion.  Thanks for following along with our 6-part series on how chatbots are revolutionizing modern law firm intake.  For more on law marketing in the modern age, keep reading our weekly blog posts here.

Analytics, Marketing, Messaging, Technology

What Everybody’s Chatting About — How Chatbots Are Revolutionizing Law Firm Intake | Part 2: Chatbot Features

In this 6-part series, we’ll address how chatbots are changing the game for law firm intake.  This is part 2, where we’ll discuss chatbot features to look for.  In part 1, we defined what a chatbot is.

First off, a warning: chatbots are only just now starting to be developed in the legal vertical.  This is very much a new segment of the industry.  That means that you won’t find the equivalent of a Westlaw in the legal research field, or a Clio in the law firm management space.  These are growing companies, that are adding features; and so, you may not be able to find, at present, a company that offers all of these tools we’re about to discuss in one package.  This is aspirational, then, for the time being; but, it is likely be actual, in the near term.  So, when you explore your chatbot options, ask about existing features, but also inquire about the product development timeline, when new features will be added.

Now, then: What should you be looking for in a chatbot?

You should be able to access a ‘no code’ botbuilding environment.  There should be an interface through which you can build, manage and edit your bots.  It should be simple, straightforward and easy to use.  You don’t want to have to hire a development shop to build bots for you, and then continue to pay to get them updated.  Neither do you want to code bots yourself.  The chatbot tool you select should represent the happy medium between those two options.

Your chatbot should engage leads.  Modern consumers prefer messaging, and you’re going to utilize a chatbot to give your leads that option.  So, their user experience should be your primary consideration.  Is the chatbot visually appealing when it launches at your website?  Is it easy to navigate?  Does the conversation flow?  Can users upload documents?  Remember, the idea is to provide a seamless engagement for legal consumers, not to make them wish for the old days of website contact forms.

You’ll also want to be able to brand your chatbot, so consumers can immediately orient themselves to the fact that they’re engaged with a platform that you operate.  There is limited utility for you in making the chat service’s branding primary.

Your chatbot should qualify clients.  Aside from providing a better consumer experience, one of the reasons you get a chatbot is so that you can save time triaging potential clients.  A chatbot is a great way to avoid the excesses of ‘tire kickers’.  Your chatbot should have classification tools available that can determine whether a potential client is worth your time.  If you can use a chatbot to ferret out low value cases, that means you’ll only deliver yourself opportunities to engage the high value ones.

On a related note, you should be able to route those potential clients to the right attorney or staff person, via notification and scheduling tools.  A functioning chatbot will notify lawyers and/or law firm staff when a lead has hit a qualification.  At the next legal, your chatbot should be able to automatically schedule appointments for leads with the right contact at the law firm, setting calendar appointments for both parties.  Your chatbot software, to that end, should include an internal calendaring system.

A modern law firm chatbot tool should include a lead inbox, with basic information about each intake.  But, that’s where the data analytics should start, not end.  Your chatbot software should track conversations, conversions and scheduled appointments.  Beyond those metrics, your chatbot software should track the effectiveness of the bots you create: Are leads dropping out of conversations before completing them?  Are leads dropping off at a particular question?  Is it taking your leads too long to get through one particular question you’re asking them?  Modern software should track data and analyze trends before delivering consumable metrics to law firms — and so should your chatbot.

Chatbots represent scripted conversations, guidance for law firm leads.  But, what about when a lead asks the bot a question that isn’t in the script?  Your chatbot should react, not implode.  So, can leads skip questions?  Can leads ‘go back’, or otherwise navigate the chatbot without having to answer every question in order?  Does your chatbot provider use natural language processing to credit answers that don’t appear in the exact format expected?

Of course, no software exists in a vacuum any longer.  Every law firm wants each new software tool it acquires to integrate with the other software tools it employs.  While that’s always possible, it makes sense for a chatbot software to integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) software software – for additional lead management capabilities – and with law practice management (LPM) software – to convert leads to clients.  Beyond that, opportunities exist for chatbot software to integrate with signature, epayment and document automation tools.  As with any modern law firm software, there’s almost no limit on how extensible a chatbot platform can be.

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Now that you know what features to look for in a chatbot for your law firm.  We’ll focus next time on why chatbots are essential for modern law firm intake.  Stay tuned, right here.

Marketing, Messaging, Technology

What Everybody’s Chatting About — How Chatbots Are Revolutionizing Law Firm Intake | Part 1: What’s a Chatbot?

In this 6-part series, we’ll address how chatbots are changing the game for law firm intake.  This is part 1, where we’ll answer the most basic question of all.

So, what is a chatbot?  The best way to answer that question is to deconstruct it.  You probably know what a chat is; basically, it’s an online conversation via text-based messaging (NOT text or SMS messaging, in this context).  Remember AOL Instant Messenger, which was so popular at the advent of the internet age?  That was a chat service.  Google Hangouts — that started out as a chat service.  Chat is nothing more than an online conversation, most often engaged via a widget (small box) that differentiates the remainder of your screen real estate from the chat.  Now, the majority of chat is ‘live’ chat, or in-person conversations — whether that’s you talking to a friend, or you talking to a representative of a business, employee or contractor.  A chatbot (bot = robot) automates the conversation.  This is a human interacting with a set series of questions, or a machine (software) that can provide real-time answers via natural language processing and/or machine learning.

Obviously, chatbots are of limited or negligible usefulness in the context of personal conversations: If you need to, or want to, use a chatbot when talking with a friend — that’s just weird, honestly.  However, in a business context, there is a significant advantage to offloading the duty of conversation to a bot.  If you’re an attorney, it saves you from answering the phone or messaging directly with leads or existing clients.  That means you can spend more time working and making more money.  You only need to intervene for off-book, unplanned conversations; as long as chats conform to a predetermined workflow or process, or can answer some unexpected questions using NLP and/or machine learning, there are likely to be relatively few instances in which a human needs to inject herself into generic conversations.  Now, if you’re an attorney who is currently using staff or a contractor (even a contract service, like a virtual receptionist or live chat) to engage leads, a chatbot could replace all or part of the traditional intake role for a fraction of the cost, and is available 24/7.  But, this doesn’t mean that you’re obligated to go about firing staff; technologies like chatbots can also augment or assist the work of law firm staffpersons.  If you free up your office manager from answering phones, he may be able to focus on additional duties, or refocus on duties he had been neglecting whenever the phone rang or a website contact form was submitted.  Because you can integrate a chatbot product into your existing technology stack, like case management software and CRM, the chatbot service can be seamlessly added to your existing, or improved, workflows.

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Now that you know what a chatbot is, and how it works, we’ll focus next time on discrete chatbot features.  Stay tuned, right here.