Episode 287 Enhancing Law Firm Lead Generation with Ted DeBettencourt
Welcome to the wealthy woman lawyer podcast. What if you could hang out with successful women lawyers? Ask them about growing their firms, managing resources like time, team, and systems, mastering money issues, and more. Then take an insight or two to help you build a wealth generating law firm. Each week, your host, Davina Frederick, takes an in-depth look at how to think like a CEO, attract clients who you love to serve and will pay you on time, and create a profitable, sustainable firm you love.
Intro:Davina is founder and CEO of Wealthy Woman Lawyer, and her goal is to give you the information you need to scale your law firm business from 6 to 7 figures in gross annual revenue so you can fully fund and still have time to enjoy the lifestyle of your dreams. Now, here's Davina.
Davina:Hi, everyone, and welcome back to
Ted:the Wealthy Woman Lawyer podcast. I'm your host, Davina Frederick. And my guest today is Ted De Betancourt. Ted is a third generation Martha Vineyards native who has been in legal marketing for twelve years after earning a JD and an MBA from Case Western Reserve Law School. Before starting Juvo Leads in 02/2015, he ran a legal marketing agency in Boston, helping law firms grow through online efforts like SEO and PPC.
Ted:Ted was using the existing chat companies on the market, but didn't like how they were answering his clients' chats, so he fired them and started answering chats himself. What started out as one person answering chats for a few small firms in Boston has turned into a team of a little under a hundred chat agents answering chats for about 1,100 firms around the country. So please help join me in welcoming Ted Bettencourt the Bettencourt to the
Davina:Wealth and Woman Lawyer podcast. So hi, Ted. Welcome.
Ted:Thanks for having me on the show. A pleasure to be here today.
Davina:I'm so glad you're here because this is kind of a topic that we haven't talked about a whole lot, and that is, using chat to help you generate leads. So I'm really eager to pick your brain about it. I want to hear a little bit about your background first though, and how you sort of got into this business. Because, you know, we, we don't grow up when we're little kids and say, one day I want to be a lead generator for lawyers and law firms. So tell me tell me about how what led you here.
Ted:I guess we'll go back way far. I grew up on Little Isle Of Massachusetts called Martha's Vineyard. I grew up out there. Went to school in Providence, Rhode Island. Went to law got a JD MBA out in Cleveland, Ohio at Case Western Reserve University School of Law and Weatherhead School of Business.
Ted:Really liked my business school classes a lot more than my law classes. Got out, wanted to focus my career first. I always intended to go back to legal actually, but I really liked what I was doing, on the business side. So I quickly started doing just kinda trying to combine the two degrees at first, got into legal marketing. I was working for a few different companies doing the legal marketing side.
Ted:It was on the content side on that, for that apparatus. Then I realized, hey. Everything these companies are doing for law firms, I can do myself. So in about 02/2012, I started a legal marketing agency. It was called Online Business Creators, and got pretty good.
Ted:Had about at my peak, probably had about 30 different law firms I was working with, doing the SEO, the PPC, all kind of that fun stuff that tons of agencies are out there doing now. But what happened was in February, a lot of chat companies came to the market and started using and started pitching my firms. So I tried them all. So there was the ones where the law firms would answer. They were the ones where other people would answer.
Ted:They were the robot chats. There was a we call it faux chat. So you click chat, but it was really just a contact form. And what I saw for my firms was when I use the ones that other people would answer, that would get my firms more leads. So they're like, alright, at the end of the day, my law law firms would, you know, sometimes politely say, Ted, just make the phone ring.
Ted:So that was my goal. And and when I use human powered chatting, you make the phone ring a lot more. But the chat companies I was using at the time were good, but they weren't great. So I kept saying, hey hey, team. Can you can you do a few things differently?
Ted:Can you qualify the lead using these questions? And sometimes they were frankly just bad. So I got pretty frustrated at some of the companies I was using. So I told them, hey, guys. If if you guys don't make these changes, I'm gonna fire you and answer chats myself.
Ted:They kinda laughed at me and said, yeah. Yeah. Sure you will. But that's exactly what happened. So I fired him, started answering chats myself, realized when I did chats for my firms themselves, the leads went up about 50%.
Ted:So I was like, wow. This is I'm on to something here. I get you know, 50 is a big deal for a law firm, and, you know, the corresponding cases went up as well. So I realized, hey. Pretty good at this.
Ted:Why don't I try to grow this side of the business? So at first, it was simply an offering for my small little agency. And by agency, I mean, you know, I was a one man show doing content, doing a little this, little that, trying to make it all work, pulling in some independent contractors where I needed. But I closely found out, hey. If I can add 50% more leads to Affirm overnight, well, shoot.
Ted:That's valuable. So it started as me answering chats for my 10 clients, 30 clients in Boston, New England area. I had some all over, but mostly to Boston. Quickly turned into a company where we're now on about 1,100 law firms around the country.
Davina:Oh, wow. That's huge. Yeah.
Ted:Thank you. Thank you. Yeah.
Davina:And We
Ted:work with a lot a lot of good firms.
Davina:And so you you formed this new company.
Ted:You're right. I have a partner. So the partner and I sat down. We were working at a a WeWork WorkBar. Those are, like, the co op office spaces.
Ted:We were just, frankly, just try to go find they have a lot of free beer events, so we would go to those and kinda just pick our brain, talking about what we're working on. I was telling him what I was working on, and we said, hey. Let's try to team up. So I am not a I can do WordPress development, but I'm not, like, a coder coder. He's a developer and has great ideas.
Ted:So we sat down and said, hey. He builds the code. I do the chat stuff and, you know, eight years, what are we? Nine years nine years later, you know, here we are.
Davina:Wow. That's wonderful. Almost a decade of that. So I have questions. Tell me what your so if you've got 1,100 people, 1,100 clients, how many people do you have on your team for that to manage this?
Ted:A little under a hundred. So we're twenty four seven, three 60 five. And our motto is butts, not bots. Butts in the seat, not bots in the cloud. One difference we have is we use real people to answer chat.
Ted:A lot of their competition is starting to use AI. And what we find is that in marketing for lawyers, especially on the female side, you wanna be your authentic self. You don't wanna try to be someone you're not. You don't wanna represent yourself in ways that aren't true to your core values. So when you use AI chat, what we find is that people can tell it's AI.
Ted:They kinda get frustrated when they're talking to AI. The chats don't go as well. It's not as authentic. So we always, when we work with a firm, try to learn the firm's voice, how they speak with clients, what phraseology they use when talking with clients, how they try to show empathy and sympathy with statements. So we really try to mirror the voice of the client so they can be their authentic self.
Ted:So it's from the first interaction they have with a client all the way through handing them that pay handing them that check for the, for the recovery. Why by using real people, we can really mirror their authentic brand and drive a lot more leads for for our clients that way.
Davina:Right. Right. So give me an idea of what your chat is like. I mean, I know that for a lot of people listening to this, they may go, well, how does that work? Because what if they're asking legal questions?
Davina:These people can't be answering legal questions. It's the number one thing that lawyers are gonna think about. So can you answer that for me?
Ted:Absolutely. So may I ask the second one first and the first second? How we answer legal question is, and we got a lot of questions that are legal. A lot of times people start to chat. Hey, I just have a quick question.
Ted:Can you help me? Sure. Our trick is we get the name and the phone number upfront. So then when they have that legal question, well, we can at least get that if they won't agree to a consultation so the firm can follow-up with them. But usually, it's, hey.
Ted:You know, here's the situation. Do you think I have a case? Our response by default because we can't answer legal questions. We'll get fired and by, you know, all 1,100 clients, and we'll lose the business overnight. So our default answers to that is, that's a great question.
Ted:I'd love to set you up with attorney Beth Smith. Can I have some time for attorney Smith to give you a callback so she can answer that question and tell you how, let you know if she have a case with you? So we don't wanna answer any legal questions ever for, you know, legal reasons, obviously. So we always defer to the law firm's answer. And when they're chatting with, when they're chatting with us, they're expecting that.
Ted:They know they're not gonna get the down into the nitty gritty of the legal world with them. So usually, once we get a little bit more information, we'll then qualify them. You know, if you're a PI attorney, where did it happen? When did it happen? Tell me about your injuries.
Ted:If you're a family law attorney, you know, different questions we ask. How many kids are involved? Are there kids involved? Tell me a little bit more about the situation. So we really try to assess it out based on exactly what practice areas the firm has.
Davina:Yeah. And so when you're working with the client, they're helping you in the beginning formulate questions, things like that. Right? You I'm sure you have like a process that you take them through to help them give you the best questions and answers and that kind of thing. Most typical things.
Ted:Yeah. That's exactly. We start with our template by practice area. So let's say you're, criminal law attorney. We'd sit down and say, here's typically what we ask for crim law.
Ted:What do you think? And maybe they say, no. Let's change this all around, and I don't do this type of law. And I I I don't take to these cases. And, you know, I don't serve the whole state, just these five counties or just these 10 ZIP codes.
Ted:Whatever the rules are, we do with that. But we try to come to the table prepared as much as as much as possible so they don't have to sit down and write them from scratch. I'd rather say, we went to your website. We saw this is the language you use. We saw these are the types of cases you work with.
Ted:So when we sit down, it's not a long lengthy process. We already have a good idea for what they're doing based on the information on the website and the expertise we have.
Davina:Right. Right. So is this 247?
Ted:20 4 7, 3 60 5, every chat responded to an an average of twelve seconds with real people.
Davina:Oh, wow. That that's incredible. And tell me what do you guys also work to drive traffic to the site or do you is that where your partner comes in or how does that work?
Ted:We are fully dependent on that law firm driving the traffic. Why the business exist is because if you put us on a site, let's just, you know, I I let's say a website gets a little bit of traffic and they get 50 leads a month. So a little bit of traffic, but a fair amount of leads. And by lead, I mean, a phone call coming in or a form. As soon as you add chat to that site, that number goes from 50 to 75.
Ted:We get you at least 50% more qualified total leads. So we give every client that works with us a free thirty day trial. So we can sit down with them at the end of that trial and say, alright. You told me last month you got 50 leads, you know, 35 phone calls, 15 forms. This month, I see we got you 30 chats.
Ted:How did your phone calls do? How did your forms do? They generally said, Ted, I've had about the same amount of phone calls, but you got me these 25 extra leads. Yeah. I see our leads are up 50% here.
Ted:This has been a great fit. Let's continue.
Davina:Yeah. Yeah. So they already have to have traffic coming to the site and some sort of proven way of of get that. You know, we're getting leads of some kind they're filling out forms or they're calling. We're just not happy with the amount we want to get more.
Davina:We think there's a lot of traffic, but we're not capturing the leads. Exactly. So, so
Ted:I answered that sort of poorly there. The firms need to bring the traffic. We will just convert more of it into leads. But Yeah. They still need to have the pay per click budget, the marketing agency, the SEO.
Ted:Whatever they're using to drive traffic, we just convert more of it to make it more effective.
Davina:How do you handle it if, law firms charge for consultations?
Ted:A lot of our firms do. It really depends on the practice area. If you're doing PI, I probably wouldn't advise it. For family you know, we work with a lot of family law attorneys. They always not always.
Ted:I'd say 80% of the time of our of our family law attorneys are charging consultations. We just let the chatter know. This sounds like something we'd be able to help you with. What I'm gonna do is set you up with, the intake specialist or the, you know, client coordinator. She can tell you more about the next steps in this process and schedule some time for a consultation with, you know, attorney Smith.
Ted:There will be, 304 hundred dollar fee involved in that. Would you like me to connect you with the intake coordinator so he or she can, tell you about the next step of the process? We don't try to push that out, upfront. But usually, once we've built some rapport through the conversation, they've told us more about the case, or their situation, the higher the likelihood we're able to turn that into a a paid consultation.
Davina:Interesting. And I want have you got any sort of data or feedback on the success of people charging consultation fees and sort of booking those leads through chat?
Ted:We don't we can't collect credit cards through chat. So, you know, we like firms a lot more when they don't charge consultation fees because, you know, we say Makes it
Davina:easier for you.
Ted:Makes it easier for us. But we can do it. We can't collect credit card information. We've tried some situations where we say, hey. The next step is to sign up on this link here, and they capture that information.
Ted:We don't have a good success record with that. So
Davina:Interesting. Interesting. So really connecting them with the intake specialists is the way it goes. So it's human to human. Yeah.
Davina:What is it you think that you guys do? Cause you said you've had this experience when you had your agency and you were working with all the law firms, you were hiring companies to handle chat, and there were some that had human chat, you know, people. So what is it that you found disappointing and, and how is it that you do it better?
Ted:Sure. What I found disappointing in my greatest source 70% of my business is built on people getting frustrated with their previous chat company and coming to us. So how we do it differently is every chat that comes in to one of our clients is graded on a 10 scale. Our agents are hired, fired, promoted, demoted, and bonused based on how fast and how well they answer chats according to the rules that that particular firm gives us. So we spun spend a lot of time and effort on quality control because we know one bad chat can cost the firm millions of dollars.
Ted:So we wanna do everything we can to make sure chats are answered fast and by the rules and using the correct language we should. You can't I can't tell you how many chats when I was on the firm side, I'd see come in, like, they'd say, yeah. I was in a car accident, and they'd say, I'm sorry. No. A lot of times, no empathy was used or they'd have something that showed they weren't even listening to the conversation.
Ted:It was just the quality control was very low. So So when we got into it at first, we said, alright, well, this is the most frustrating thing in the world when they're telling a car accident victim, tell me about the name of your spouse and how many kids you had involved. Like, no. No. This is a car accident, not a family law matter.
Ted:Like, you should be able to understand that. So from the outset, we realized that has to be the number one priority of our company is quality control to make sure these chats represent the firm as the first touch point for these leads in the best way possible. So I think that's a real differentiator for us.
Davina:Yeah. So how do you I imagine, and then you have pretty good training program. So can you give me kind of an idea of what that's like? How you how you hire and that because I think, what happens a lot of times is, you know, VAs are really big right now and people are hiring special global, global VAs, you know, people from other countries and some with great success, some with not even people in The US, some with great success, some with not. And so to me, it seems like you would have to have a pretty, rigorous or thorough training sort of program to be able to teach people that.
Davina:Cause I know people get people all the time and then they're like, they didn't work for me. It's often usually a training sort of issue.
Ted:Yeah. Well, I think it comes out and I think that if you're using the term VA, you're probably thinking of the person is not employee. If you train the person, the employee, and you say, okay, well, an employee needs training guidance. They need a program. They need a progression.
Ted:They need a process. We have staff members all over the country and some even in foreign countries. We treat every staff member the exact same way. We don't use the term virtual assistant or anything like that. I work from North Carolina.
Ted:I got team members in California, Colorado, and even in The Philippines. There's all our chat agents, whether they're in Colorado or California or The Philippines, are great on the same scales or taken through the same training program. We don't call California people virtual assistants because they're employees just like everybody else that works for your company. Right. It takes about three months for an agent from they enter the the training program to be able to answer chat with real people.
Ted:It takes a long time. We need to make sure they understand the chats the rules for the for the sector of the of the team they're on, that they understand the grading, they understand the cadence, and there's fast. It's very easy to answer not easy, but it's easier to answer chats. It's really hard to do it when every second counts. So, you know, we can get employees trained and say, alright.
Ted:They're good. It takes them about thirty, thirty five seconds to answer. That's not where the training comes in. Alright. Well, that's the bare minimum.
Ted:It we have to answer chats in twelve seconds or less. So once they hit the thirty second mark, now it takes another month or two to get that speed to come. You know, it's like hitting the softball, you know, you can swing a bat, but actually hitting the ball, that's another story entirely.
Davina:That's so interesting. It's such a, it's such a nuanced detail that you wouldn't normally think about unless you're in the business, you know? Tell me about mobile versus laptop. I know that like, you know, what 90% of what people are doing now is on their phones. Is that a different experience?
Davina:And is something else required when people are using their phones versus when they're using sitting at a computer and using a laptop or anything like that?
Ted:Yeah. We're just seeing, every year, a larger percentage of our clients' leads come from mobile devices. One of the biggest changes we've seen in in our company is we have a few ways we communicate with people through the website chat, meaning someone's on the website, either on their phone or on their mobile. But we also, on mobile devices, put a sticky bar, meaning when you scroll up or down, there's two little buttons. One says call us, goes to the firm.
Ted:The other one says text us. The amount of people texting a firm for a first time meeting, first time contact goes up each and every year. When we roll it out seven years ago, it was probably about two to 3%. Now for most firms, people are texting, about all their overall total leads for all our firms are probably somewhere between 15 to 18%. So it's just a higher percentage every year of people are texting with law firms.
Ted:So being able to offer to your consumers the ability to SMS your firm is a win for a lot of our clients.
Davina:Oh, wow. Yeah. I can see where that would be huge. I know, you know, most of my communication is through text when I'm looking for things, and I get a ton of text reminders if I sign up for anything or do anything. And and, so I can, I could see where that would be a huge advantage because people don't want to talk on the phone anymore and they want a simple, quick answer and a solution and they want to move forward?
Davina:And, I'm hearing it better. And so is my younger sister. And she just does everything. But if she can't do it by chat, forget about it. She's not calling anybody.
Davina:So chat really is a huge, it's a huge differentiator, I think, for, for companies that are using that. For sure. Tell me something I haven't asked you that you feel like people need to know.
Ted:What do people need to know? Everyone likes to think about AI and have it be in the future. AI is a great tool. And when you use it effectively, it can make your work life a lot easier. What we haven't seen yet is widespread adoption of people switching out talking with people with talking AI.
Ted:Someday that day will come. But what we see in our tests when we try it is that as soon as someone realizes they're talking with a robot or they have the uncomfortable feeling of saying, oh, it it usually doesn't happen at first, but once that level clicks, the person abandons the chat. So for as much as what people wanna say, AI is the future, and it certainly is, and we're adopting it in other elements of our business. Right now, person to person communication is still superior than robot to person communication. And that the fact that we use humans is how we take advantage of that for our clients.
Ted:So we make the conversations more authentic, which means more leads in cases for our firms.
Davina:Now I I imagine, you know, from my own experience, when you're talking to somebody and you're getting, canned answers, you're not really getting the answer to your question. You're getting canned answers because, you know, AI has limits at this point. Maybe you won't one day, but right now it still does. You you are you using the visual chat too? I noticed on your you know, so when you're chatting with somebody, are they seeing a person?
Ted:How we started to chat, we have two different ways to do it. We either pop up and say, hi, welcome to the name of this law firm. How can I help you today? Or do you have a legal problem I can help you with? The other way we do it is we play a short video of the law firm owner.
Ted:What we find is that that builds a little bit more rapport. So when you build a little bit more rapport with the law firm, then you have that consultation. Then when they sit down with a lawyer, they're like, Oh yeah, you're the one from the video. It's kind of funny in the video effects. They almost feel like I'm not going to say celebrity, but when they sit down, the attorney's like, oh, yep.
Ted:I remember you from the website. And you know, the attorney doesn't know they saw the video, but they're like, oh yeah, yeah, that was me. And they kind of give a little chuckle. So it's just a way to build rapport, and it's a way for a lawyer to help on the branding of their website. So, you know, if you have a law firm that a certain person is the big focus of the brand and having that person be familiar, a video can really help bolster that.
Davina:Okay. Interesting. So you're having the lawyer then the owner or leave partner or whatever, creating a video that's, you know, hi, welcome to the law firm. How can we help you today? Or we're looking forward to helping you or something like that.
Davina:Right?
Ted:Exactly right. That's right. Yep.
Davina:Okay. Good. Alright. So before we wrap it up, any other little gold nuggets or anything you wanna leave us with before we end this conversation?
Ted:Sure. I got three. Okay. Good. Whether you use us or somebody else, use chat on your website.
Ted:You're gonna get more leads. Most places give you some trial of some sort. Two, GBP messages got turned back on by Google last week. If you don't have those on, turn those on. You can set your own text message or have a company do it for you.
Ted:And three, here's something that most firms don't know about local service ad. When you turn on messages and you answer them fast, Google rewards you by giving you higher LSA rankings. You can either answer those messages to sell or have a company like us do it for you, but you will get more LSA phone calls and cheaper LSA leads when you turn messages on and answer them fast. Sorry. Those are my three tips of the day, I guess.
Davina:Good. Alright. So we I'm gonna go back to tip number two. I want you to tell me what the acronym is, what it stands for. But you're saying g what?
Ted:Google Business Profile. Used to be Google My Business. It's had a few Right.
Davina:It's very confusing. They're always changing the name of
Ted:it.
Davina:Yeah. I'm sorry. Google business profile, when you turn messaging on for that. Right? So they probably
Ted:They just rolled it out. So it's it's still brand new. But if you wanna get a little head start of the competition, that's a quick win for you.
Davina:Good. Excellent. Thank you so much. Ted, thanks so much for being here. We wanna connect with you and learn more about your company and how you can help us.
Davina:Where do we go?
Ted:Juvo, j u v o, leads, l e a d s, dot com. Juvo leads. And we have a chat there. You'll see my video. Feel free to start a conversation on our website.
Davina:So they'll give an actual experience of what it's like.
Ted:That's exactly right. Yeah. I'll put my friendly face, saying who we are, how we help, and then chat with our agents.
Davina:Wonderful. Alright. Thanks, Ted, for being here. I really enjoyed our conversation.
Ted:Likewise. It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me on today.
Intro:If you're ready to create more of what you truly desire in your business and your life, then you'll want to visit us at wealthywomanlawyer.com to learn more about how we help our clients create wealth generating law firms with ease.
