An intake script bought from a national vendor asks the wrong first question
Intake scripts get syndicated just like content, and one written for a common law state opens on the wrong footing in Louisiana.
The opening questions should establish matter type, where each party lives by parish, whether any court has already been involved, and how it is safe to reply. Everything else can wait for the meeting.
Louisiana differs from other states at the level of the system, not just local practice, so a borrowed script can walk a caller down a path that does not apply here. Nothing in an intake process is legal guidance, and the script belongs in front of your own counsel before anybody uses it.
Draft it with an attorney, then hand it to the people who answer the phone and let them mark every question that keeps confusing callers. They will find more than the attorney will.
Read the finished version aloud. Anything that sounds like a form being filled in gets rewritten until it sounds like a conversation.
Whoever answers the phone should name parish courthouses without hesitating
Callers judge competence in the first minute, and vocabulary carries most of that judgment.
Anybody who says county in New Orleans has told the caller they are not local. The same goes for an answering service in another state reading a generic greeting written for forty firms.
Train whoever picks up on the actual names. Orleans, Jefferson and St. Tammany, and the places inside them: Metairie and Kenner, Mandeville, Covington and Slidell, Algiers and the West Bank.
Give that person enough authority to book a meeting. A message taker adds a delay, and delay is most of the problem you are trying to solve.
Score a handful of calls each month against a short rubric. Did they capture parish, matter type and a safe contact method, and did the call end with a specific next step.
Half the loss happens in the forty eight hours after the first call
Most firms record the inquiry and the engagement and see nothing in between, which is precisely where the inquiries go.
Log the moments individually: inquiry received, first human contact, conflict check cleared, meeting booked, meeting attended, engagement signed. The drop will not be where anyone guessed.
Conflict checks that take days hand the matter to whichever firm cleared theirs first. Give the check an internal deadline and a named owner.
Somebody has to own follow-up for people who did not book and people who booked and did not appear. Two attempts is diligence, not pestering, and it recovers matters nobody counted as lost.
Family decisions run long. Somebody who called in the spring may be ready in the fall, and only if the file did not go cold in between.
Referrals arrive through the same broken door as web inquiries
The best inquiries a family law firm receives come from people who already trust you, and they are routinely handled worse than a paid click.
A referral from a Metairie accountant or a therapist Uptown lands as a voicemail like everything else and waits its turn behind a form fill.
Flag referrals at first touch and route them to a person rather than a queue. The referrer put their own reputation on the introduction and will notice how it went.
Close the loop. A short note back saying the person was contacted keeps the source alive and costs a minute.
Count them properly. If referrals produce a meaningful share of your matters and none of your measurement covers them, your reporting is describing the smaller half of the practice.
Put one number on the wall: matters opened per hundred inquiries
A single ratio, tracked honestly by parish and matter type, tells you more than a dashboard of averages ever will.
Define an inquiry once, in writing, so nobody is counting spam, wrong numbers or a vendor call as demand.
Break the ratio by parish and by matter. An Orleans Parish custody inquiry and a St. Tammany divorce inquiry do not convert alike, and the blended figure conceals both.
Break it by source too, while expecting sources to be partly wrong. Ask the caller how they found you as well as reading the analytics, then reconcile the two.
Review it monthly with the people who answer the phone in the room. They usually know where it breaks weeks before a report shows it.
Keep a change log beside the monthly numbers, because one metro will not fill a split test
A single market rarely produces enough inquiries to detect a small lift, so change deliberately and read the record instead.
Change one thing at a time and record the date, the change, and the reason you expected it to help. Memory is not a measurement system.
Choose levers with real size to them. The structure of the first meeting, how quickly a meeting can be offered, the first question the script asks, what gets sent before the meeting.
Give each change a full cycle before judging it. Family matters do not resolve inside a week, and a fortnight of data will mislead you in both directions.
Keep the log for a year. Reading it back alongside the monthly numbers is generally the most useful hour anybody at the firm spends on marketing.
Questions we actually get
- Where do most family law inquiries actually get lost?
- Almost always between first contact and a booked meeting rather than on the website. Common causes are calls answered by a message taker with no authority to schedule, conflict checks that take days, and no owner for following up with people who did not book. Logging each step separately usually finds the gap within a month.
- Can we A/B test our way to a better conversion rate?
- Rarely at this volume. One metro and one practice area seldom produce the traffic needed to detect a small improvement, and tests that never reach significance waste months. Sequential changes to large levers, with a written log of what changed and when, produce more usable answers for a firm this size.
- Should our first consultation be free or paid?
- It is the single biggest lever on both the number and the quality of meetings, and there is no universal right answer. Free generally increases volume and no-shows. Paid generally reduces both and raises the seriousness of the people who show up. Change it deliberately, hold everything else steady, and give it a full cycle before judging.
- How should we handle inquiries from a parish we do not serve?
- Log them, then refer them somewhere sensible. An inquiry you cannot take still tells you where demand is forming, and a clean referral to a firm on the Northshore or the West Bank often comes back to you later. It costs a few minutes and builds the referral network that produces your best future inquiries.
- What should we measure if we only track one thing?
- Matters opened per hundred inquiries, broken out by parish and matter type. It captures intake quality, follow-up and fit in one number, and it moves when you fix something real. Website conversion rate on its own tends to reward whatever produces the most form fills, which is not the same as producing clients.
