Understanding the Legal Intake Process Through Music

Pop’stache’s theme for June is Music Month. They focus on new music releases and analyze them in a way that most music magazines wouldn’t dare. I love their irreverent yet analytical approach to this subject. I’m pretty sure most of their contributors are music nerds (like me), and they’re probably not dissimilar from us lawyers. We’re all music nerds (most of us are music nerds), but we also have a rational side that we can’t shut off. So, I always read with interest their analysis of the albums they discuss as much as I listen to their music. And so, I decided that my blog post this month would be the same. I would take their popular “Stashed!” feature article style where they feature a band’s or album’s continuation of style or themes, and use it for law.

I’ll be taking a Stashed! approach to this concept of intake, using music analogies along with the cold, hard science of the legal intake process to help your chills (or thrills) flow. The first thing I want to say is that the structured intake process is not unlike a well-arranged music album. An album has multiple songs, or single notes strung together to form a melody. Likewise, the steps in the structured process of intake, those notes, should have a definitive answer that goes along with them. Each note, or song, should feed into the next to form a beat, or hello to the law firm. If a note fades, allowing a skip between it and the next note, well then it’s going to sound like garbage. If a note persists and goes on too long, it sounds too repetitive, and is just noise.

So, the arrangement and structure of each step, each note, is of extreme importance in the legal intake process, the process of taking in new clients. And much like a music album, the structure shouldn’t sound unnatural or forced. Each note should come naturally. Don’t just put a step in your process because it sounds cool or edgy. It should serve a purpose. It’s all about the beat of the process, a law firm’s ongoing comprehensive approach to legal intake. Everything is tied together and connected, from the front desk strategy to the funneling into staff members who will ultimately accept or deny new calls, a cadence of clients flowing through one step into another. A very nice pop beat, one Tsunami-sized wave of clients into the appropriate chambers of your particular law firm.

It’s a simple intake process, just like a pop song. Hear what works in the background, the beats and rhythms of the songs you love. Play with the synergies between each step in the process. Refine things to an extreme degree to achieve that perfect musical stream, or law firm intake process. Experiment and take a chance, make refinements to the existing process, until you have a good feeling or sound that you can build upon. This is how you should treat a legal intake call. This is how you should treat every single step in your legal intake process. The right call process, the perfect process for your particular law firm and its composition.

I’d like to get a little more in-depth here with what I can only describe as layer upon layer of musical complexity. The structured legal intake process is about rhythm, about maintaining tones and tempos, like a classic pop album. Think of the entire pending live transfer process, for example, as a percussion-laden song. If the tempo is too fast, as in, if you’re talking too much and talking over the potential client (classic mistake), as happens far too often, you’re going to fly by the potential client’s needs. If it’s too slow, as in, if the initial conversation goes on for far too long and really only comes across as needing to be long because you have no idea what else to do with the situation, getting too verbose (classic mistake), then the client might get bored and hang up. Your tempo should be just right. Too hot, the client leaves; too cold, the potential client leaves. When it’s just right, well, you’re going to land that client every time.

Rhythm in an album is also about dynamics. These are those moments where the music is loud, and then soft, and then loud again. The syncopation between soft and loud sections of a song is there to maintain a steady, controlled pace and keep the listener engaged. Without these moments, you know what you end up with? Noise. So, what do you think the structured legal intake process has in common with beats and loudness? Exactly. In the wrong hands, the intake process is nothing but noise. That’s why much like how pop music is structured around hooks, the legal intake process focuses on the client. Everything is done for the client, around the client. Most importantly, it’s easy for the client to grab onto, much like a catchy pop hook.

Much akin to the most popular pop songs on the airwaves today, the legal intake process revolves around an effective call back strategy. It’s one of the easiest ways to bring a new client into your firm’s office. Hook them with the first impression, even if it’s only a phone call. Give them an easy way to grab onto the next note, or step, in the process, so that from beginning to end, they can maintain the beat of working with your firm and not someone else. Yes, you can take the passive approach and hope that the potential client will be patient, and will click around on your website, after which, who knows if they’ll get in touch with you. But chances are they won’t. Behaving like a passive band that doesn’t bother to promote themselves means that sooner than later your band will lose all access to the music scene. Just like your potential clients won’t ever get back to you, you’ll be no next big thing.

So, there you have it, structured legal intake that uses this music metaphor of a structured pop album to explain the anatomy of the legal intake process in a way that makes sense, that’s relevant to most of us. It’s a structured legal intake process in many respects similar to the successful path a hit song takes from beginning to end, from its first note to its last harmony.