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It’s a challenging time for legal firms to gain new clients — new research shows acquisition costs have increased more than 60% in the past five years. On average, legal firms spend between $50 to $350 per lead generated, and $500 to $2,000 per new client.
According to experts, three key factors have compounded to drive up cost per lead in the legal industry:
Combined, these developments make it more difficult for legal marketing teams to precisely target audiences and optimize their ad bidding strategy.
Thankfully, there is a solution that can help law firms spend their ad dollars more efficiently in this privacy-first landscape. Invoca conversation intelligence AI tracks your marketing-driven phone leads and captures insights from the conversations, helping you reduce your cost per lead.
By law, clients must reach out to a legal firm first to initiate a relationship. Therefore, inbound phone calls are one of the most important touchpoints for prospective clients to engage with your firm. It’s where they go to ask questions, set up consultations, and make genuine human connections with your business. However, many legal firms aren’t taking a data-driven approach to phone conversations.
With AI-powered conversation intelligence tools like Invoca, legal marketers can unlock valuable insights from phone conversations, such as how many phone leads their marketing campaigns drive, the quality of those leads, which services their clients are interested in, and any pain points they’re experiencing. This empowers legal marketers to make data-driven decisions, optimize their ad bidding strategy, and drive client acquisition for their firms.
Legal marketers face a unique challenge because, by law, clients have to reach out to them directly to initiate a relationship — this initial point of contact often occurs over the phone. To grow your client base, you need to drive phone leads from your campaigns. But a recent study found that 26% of law firms do not track their leads at all.
If you’re not tracking which marketing channels, campaigns, and ads are driving phone leads, you’re probably underreporting your ROI. This can make it harder for you to prove the value of your work to your leadership team. It can also make it a challenge to defend your marketing budget from getting cut or build a case to increase it.
Invoca solves this all-too-common issue by tracking the calls your marketing campaigns drive. But, unlike some tools, Invoca doesn’t just track that phone calls occurred — it uses AI to analyze the quality of each call and determine which were leads. This allows you to get credit for all the conversions you drive.
With costs per lead skyrocketing, it’s critical to make every dollar in your marketing budget count. When you use Invoca to get credit for your phone leads, you can see a complete picture of your cost per lead. This allows you to make more informed decisions to lower it.
For example, with Invoca, you may discover that what you thought was an underperforming campaign was actually driving a large quantity of phone leads. Or that one of your campaigns was driving the wrong kinds of calls, such as inquiries from existing clients about their cases or billing. You could then reallocate your budget accordingly, doubling down on the best-performing campaigns and cutting spend from the duds.
In addition, Invoca integrates with the marketing tools you use every day. For instance, Invoca’s no-code Google Ads integration automatically feeds call attribution data into Google Ads, so you can see the phone call conversions your campaigns, search keywords, and ads drive alongside your online conversions. You can also use Invoca’s data to inform Google’s Smart Bidding algorithm. This lets Google’s AI do the work for you, automatically making the right bids to drive more phone call conversions at a lower cost. It’s an easy way to scale campaigns and squeeze more returns from your ad dollars.
A strong retargeting strategy is critical for maximizing the impact of your marketing dollars. It’s far cheaper to convert a prospect who is already “warm” than trying to start from scratch with someone who has never heard of your firm. In addition, if you blast your audience with irrelevant ads that aren’t targeted to their needs, you’ll waste your ad dollars. But your retargeting strategy is only as good as the data you use to inform it — and with privacy restrictions tightening, finding the right insights can be more challenging than ever.
Invoca fills data gap caused by third-party cookie depreciation by capturing first-party data from phone conversations. These conversations are full of rich insights, such as if they’re a new client, which services they’re interested in, and if they expressed urgency. You can then use those insights to retarget prospective clients who didn’t convert. For example, you can serve prospects ads for the specific services they mentioned over the phone, such as corporate law, personal injury, or intellectual property. You can also increase your bidding threshold for callers who expressed urgency, as they’re more likely to convert.
In addition, you can use Invoca to detect which callers signed a contract to retain one of your lawyers over the phone. You can then suppress those callers from seeing future ads for your firm. This reduces wasted budget and creates a better experience for the customer, as you’re no longer serving them irrelevant ads.
Your intake team also plays a critical role in acquiring new clients. They’re your prospects’ first point of human contact with you — for all intents and purposes, they’re the voice of your firm. They’re tasked with the important responsibility of gathering the right information to determine if the caller’s case is a fit for the firm, and if they should move forward with signing a contract to retain a lawyer. Because some clients are going through tough situations, such as those dealing with personal injuries, the intake team needs to take extra care to express empathy and understanding throughout their interactions.
Despite the importance of the intake team’s work, it can be a challenge for law firms to accurately measure their performance and provide the right coaching. The traditional model of scoring performance involves manually listening to your call recordings to identify each agent’s strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. However, this approach isn’t scalable, since most managers only have the bandwidth to listen to a small sample of their calls. This can lead to sampling bias, as you may catch some of your best intake agents on their worst days or vice versa. In addition, this manual process is prone to subjectivity and human error.
Conversation intelligence solves this problem by automatically scoring all of your calls with an AI model trained to your firm. You can set the criteria that make up a successful call — for example, you may require each intake agent to start the call with the approved greeting script, gather the caller’s information, ask a set of questions about the caller’s legal case, and end with a proper close. Agents will then receive a score based on these criteria, helping managers understand what they need to work on and how to coach them.
In addition, in the highly regulated legal industry, it’s imperative that your agents follow compliance guidelines on every call. With Invoca, you can monitor 100% of agent conversations for non-compliant language. Since conversation analytics are delivered directly after the call ends, you can also address compliance issues immediately instead of days or weeks later when the agent could have potentially handled hundreds of calls in a non-compliant manner.
Did you know 90% of clients say that online reviews influence their decision when hiring a lawyer? Bad reviews can be a stain on your reputation that can hamper your ability to grow your business.
While it’s impossible to eliminate negative brand mentions entirely, your company can still use technology to help prevent them. Conversation intelligence platforms like Invoca analyze phone conversations with AI and gather valuable insights at scale. This allows you to quickly identify calls where client experience issues take place. For example, you may discover that there was a problem with your website, one of your intake agents didn’t express enough empathy, there was a billing issue, or your team forgot to follow up with a client.
You can then drill into the call recordings and transcriptions to understand what the issue was and if your team correctly resolved it. If the issue was not resolved, you can quickly call back the client and make amends. This can prevent negative reviews and other blowback that could harm your firm’s reputation. It can also help you rebuild trust with clients and reduce churn.
Weitz & Luxenberg, a law firm specializing in personal injury cases, was running ads on a broad range of marketing channels, from paid search to Facebook to TV to billboards. However, they didn’t have accurate attribution about which of those ads were ultimately driving client acquisition. This made it difficult to allocate their marketing budget to the right campaigns.
With the help of Invoca's AI technology, they attributed every phone lead to the ad that drove it. This allowed them to spend their marketing dollars smarter and drive more new clients at a lower cost. As a result, they achieved these eye-popping metrics:
“No matter where our ad is, with Invoca we get the attribution. It’s no longer a gut-check—now I have the proof, I know whether or not the ad buy is working and if it’s making the right people call,” said Bill Denninger, director of business operations at Weitz & Luxenberg.
Want to learn more about how Invoca’s AI can help you improve client acquisition for your law firm? Check out these resources:
