What the best High Street law firms do...

Picture the scene: a partners’ meeting.

“We could do with more fees?”

“Yes, totally, every penny counts.”

“The key is new business. How many enquiries do we get a month?”

If the answer is “No idea”, then read on.

Handling enquiries

You’ve done the hard work. Whether it’s from your website, your reputation, your location, or returning clients, enquiries are coming in. But what happens next? You basically have three options:

Option 1: No plan. You don’t know the number of enquiries, the source, or if they ever become real business.

Option 2: Manual. You try to create a process, but it’s work in itself, and it relies on people to make it work.

Option 3: Leads management. You have one system that can manage enquiries with automated responses and reports.

Why bother? Let’s put some figures against this, using 100 enquiries of the work you really want.

Option 1: no one monitoring or knowing. Let’s say 5% of enquiries become a file. At £500 a file that’s £2.5k in fees.

Option 2: you are trying to keep track and that brings some success. 10% success = £5k.

Option 3: you know what’s going on, tracking enquiries, following up leads. You improve conversion to 33%. That gets you £16,500 of new business.

What these figures show is that understanding and converting your existing opportunities could transform your business. We all want to be option 3, right? So, how do we do it?

Denovo Leads Management software propels you into option 3

Here is a real life example showing how a law firm moved from option 1 to 3 with Denovo software. We asked Ross Yuill, Director at The Glasgow Law Practice, how they did it.

How did GLP used to convert enquiries?

We were doing a poor job at this, which meant we were overlooking one of the most important aspects of running our business successfully. We were taking notes on paper, spreadsheets, post-it notes, you name it. Often the details would get logged in our case management system or the message would get passed on to a fee earner, but on the odd occasion it wouldn’t. Even when it did there was no structure to how we actually handled the enquiry. There was inevitable delay in responding to the client and on many occasions we were simply throwing money away.

When did you realise you had to change?

I remember asking the other partners about our conversion rate in a meeting. In all honesty none of us had a clue. That was the moment. We were doing a lot right to get enquiries – good brand, good website, good reputation, bits of marketing here and there, but we needed a way to turn those enquiries into fees. We contemplated investing in a receptionist, but the spend wasn’t going to be sustainable long term. We needed a smarter, more cost effective solution and that’s what we found with Denovo’s Leads Management software.

Was it easy to switch from manual to online process?

Change is always tricky to implement. We were using Denovo’s CMS anyway, just not in the most effective way. We upgraded to their CaseLoad platform and started managing leads through the system. Their support team trained our staff within a few days. They followed that up with simple video tutorials which we could refer to whenever we needed them. That made the whole process simpler. It was non-disruptive which, for a busy High Street firm, is one of the most important factors when changing anything.

How are you now using Leads Management software?

Denovo gave us a simple tool to manage and follow up with potential new clients before a matter is even created. It allows our team to add a potential client, or lead, to CaseLoad the moment they call or email in, and to add notes and essential details while they’re on the phone. Creating a new lead is less time-intensive than setting up a new pending matter and leaves the more advanced data entry for when the lead converts into a client. Less time is spent creating records for those who may or may not become clients, but all data is preserved and transferred to the matter once a lead does convert. Leads are kept separate from our existing matters to make it easy to differentiate between active and potential clients. We no longer have to retain our leads in a separate system – it’s all in one place. Maintaining all potential and active clients within the same system makes it easy to stay organised, streamline and report all facets of our practice. 

Now, when a lead comes in, we can interact with them through automated document production and email management, before converting them to a client which transfers all information over to the new client and matter.

Email info@denovbi.com or call 0141 331 5290 and see why some of the most successful law firms in Scotland use Denovo to handle their enquiries