The Lifecycle of a Personal Injury Claim: Intake

Originally published May 24, 2021. Updated August 11, 2023.

This is the second installment of our series about the lifecycle of personal injury claims, in which we focus on what you can do to get more clients while providing the best service possible. To read the first installment, click here.

A well-executed intake process is invaluable for a personal injury law firm. Your intake should have a clear mission: sending quality leads to your attorneys.

When your intake team gets it right, your potential clients feel assured they’ve contacted the right law firm and your team members have a solid base of information to work from. When done poorly, intake creates more work for your team and frustration for your potential client.

Let’s examine a few things you can do to ensure your intake team carries out its mission successfully.

Make Sure Your Intake Team Is Properly Staffed and Trained

If you’re a small firm, you can designate the person who typically answers your phone as your intake specialist. If you can expand your intake team, you can hire team members who focus solely on receiving calls from leads or work with third parties to facilitate your firm’s intake.

To quickly form connections with callers, your intake team members should be:

• Patient
• Empathetic
• Good listeners
• Skilled at getting relevant information to accurately assess lead quality

Intake team members should understand that the person on the other end of the line has experienced trauma, and they’re now reaching out for help. Though your intake team will be reading through a script to get the info needed for your lawyers, they should first express empathy with the potential client before launching straight into their script.

Pro tip: If you record your intake calls, review them regularly to determine how well your intake team members deal with leads. If you have specific feedback based on those calls, review them with each team member to improve how well they relate to leads.

Giving Your Intake Team the Right Script to Follow

Before you create a script, determine what factors make a lead valuable for your firm. Though many factors are universal for personal injury firms (i.e., an injury diagnosed by a doctor, an injury that falls within the statute of limitations, etc.), others might be specific for your firm depending on the unique types of cases you want.

Once you have a list of criteria that makes a lead qualified, create a script that your intake specialist can follow to gather the information you need from incoming leads. Keep each question on your script concise and make sure your intake specialist knows the information they’re trying to get by asking it.

Review your script periodically to determine if it’s helping your intake team get the information you need or if it needs to be refined.

Intake Forms Can Also Be Helpful for Your Intake

Online intake forms can be a great supplement to your call intake system. You can make these forms available to those who fill out a contact form on your website. This is a particularly useful method of qualifying leads because it can be automated, which saves your firm time.

When creating an intake form, you can use the same process listed above that you used to build a script for your call team.

Use Intake to Identify Which Marketing Channels Are Most Successful

Whether on your intake form or script, make sure you’re asking the lead how they heard about your law firm. This will help you identify which of your marketing channels is the most successful and make smarter decisions about how you allocate your marketing funds.

Want to Refine Your Intake Even More? We Have a FREE Guide to Help.

Hopefully, you’ve found these tips useful, but if you’d like to dive deeper into building the best intake system possible for your firm, we’ve created a free guide to help you elevate your process to even greater heights.

In our guide, we outline the importance of consistency, prioritizing high-quality leads, and offer a list of sample questions that can help your intake team with the screening process.

Get the free intake guide now!

Improve Your Intake with backdocket!

Backdocket helps firms create a database of prospects, track their leads, and follow up in person or through automated processes. If you want to get the most out of your intake process, let us show you how backdocket can help through a free demonstration.

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