Bilingual intake for South Florida law firms

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Bilingual intake for South Florida law firms

Guide

How long does an inquiry wait at your firm? Here is how to find out.

We do not publish a South Florida response-time benchmark, because we have not measured one, and a number without a source is not something a law firm should build a decision on. What we can give you is the method: how to pull one month of your own inquiries, what counts as a reply, which four numbers to compute, and what usually turns out to be slowing them down.

It takes an afternoon. The result is a number your managing partner has never seen, split by language and by hour of day, and it is usually the most useful page in the firm that month.

THE METHOD

Six steps, one month of data

  1. 1

    Decide what counts as an inquiry

    A web form, a call to the main line, a text to the main line, a chat on the site, and a message to an attorney's cell all count. A referral email from another lawyer counts. A call that went to voicemail and was never returned counts, and it is the one most firms leave out, which is why their number looks better than it is.

  2. 2

    Decide what counts as a reply

    A reply is the first message a person could act on: a text or email that offers a time, or a human on the phone. An automated "we received your message" is not a reply unless it offers a time. A voicemail greeting is not a reply. Write the definition down, because the number changes a lot depending on it.

  3. 3

    Pull one month

    Take the last full month. From the phone system, export every inbound call with its time and whether it was answered. From the web form, export submissions with timestamps. From email, search for the form notifications. Put them in one sheet with four columns: channel, time received, time of first reply, language.

  4. 4

    Fill in the reply time by hand

    For each row, find the first reply in your email, your texting app, or the call log, and record the time. If you cannot find one, the reply time is blank, and blank is a result. Expect this to take a few hours. That effort is itself a finding: a number that takes three hours to produce is a number nobody at the firm has been looking at.

  5. 5

    Compute four numbers, not one

    The median reply time. The worst reply time. The share of inquiries with no reply at all. And each of those split by language and by whether the inquiry arrived between 6 PM and 8 AM. The average is the least useful of all of these; one 40-hour voicemail moves it more than twenty fast replies.

  6. 6

    Read it against the rules, not against a benchmark

    The useful question is not whether your median beats some other firm's. It is whether the after-hours Spanish inquiries have a reply time at all, whether the no-reply share is zero, and whether the reply that did go out would survive a reading against Rule 4-7.13. A fast reply that predicts an outcome is worse than a slow one that offers a time.

WHAT THE NUMBER USUALLY REVEALS

Five things that slow a reply down

These are the patterns that show up in the sheet. None of them is a marketing problem, and none of them needs a benchmark to be worth fixing.

The inquiry arrives when the office is closed

In this market that is most evenings. A form submitted at 9:41 PM that is read at 9:15 AM has an eleven-and-a-half-hour reply time, and the person spent the evening talking to other firms.

The inquiry arrives in Spanish

It waits for the one person who can answer it. If she is off, it waits until she is back. This shows up in the split as a language gap that has nothing to do with the firm's marketing.

The form goes to a shared inbox

info@ is checked by whoever remembers. The reply time is the gap between remembering and replying, and no one is measuring it.

The attorney wants to make the first call

Understandable, and it means the reply waits for a hearing to end. A staff member, or an approved automated reply that offers a time, can go first without evaluating the case.

The conflict check happens before anyone replies

A firm that will not reply until it has cleared conflicts is being careful, and it is also silent for a day. A reply that offers a time does not create a relationship; the conflict check can run in parallel with the booking, using the opposing party captured on the form.

A note on the word benchmark

You will find response-time benchmarks for law firms online. Read where they come from before you use one. Most are produced by a vendor from that vendor’s own customers, which is a sample of firms that already bought a response-time product. A few are secret-shopper studies with a small number of calls. We have not seen one for South Florida firms specifically, and we are not going to invent one to make this page rank.

Your own number, split by language and by hour, is a better benchmark than any of them, because the only firm you are competing against for a given inquiry is the one that replied faster to that person. The longer piece on why there is no honest average goes into this further.

FAQ

Questions about measuring it

Because we have not measured one. A benchmark built from our own customers would describe firms that already bought a response-time product, and a number without a primary source is not something a law firm should build a decision on. The site rule is that unsourced figures come down, not get softened.

Have the sheet? Bring it.

If you have pulled a month, we will read it with you on the demo call and show you what the reporting would have said about it. If you have not, the missed-inquiry calculator gives you a rough dollar figure from three numbers.

Book a demo Run the calculator