- We already answer every call. Where else would inquiries be leaking?
- Usually in three places. Between the booked consultation and the attended one, where distance and time of day do quiet damage across a metro this size. Between a form submission at seven in the evening and a callback at eleven the next morning. And between a good consultation and a signed agreement, where paperwork and a few days of silence undo the persuasion. Measuring those three stages separately is the first job.
- Should the first consultation be free or paid?
- Both work and they produce different practices. A paid consultation filters hard and protects attorney time. A free one increases volume and shifts the qualification burden onto intake. What does not work is being unclear about it on the site, because the ambiguity costs you the inquiry to whichever competitor published a straight answer. Decide, publish it, and measure the change over a defined period.
- How fast do we actually need to respond?
- Faster than feels comfortable. In a market where most callers have no existing relationship with a firm and are contacting more than one, the first firm to reach a live conversation is heavily advantaged. We would not put a specific number on it without seeing your own data, but the pattern in your call log will make the case more convincingly than any benchmark we could quote.
- Can you run A/B tests on our site?
- Sometimes, and honestly, often not. A single-metro family practice rarely produces the inquiry volume needed to detect a small improvement reliably, and running an underpowered test produces a confident answer that is simply noise. We prefer sequential changes to substantial things, call recording review, and stage-by-stage measurement. Where volume does accumulate, such as pre-consultation reminder emails, testing becomes viable.
- What should we track that we probably are not tracking now?
- County and matter type on every inquiry at first touch, consultation attendance separately from consultation bookings, and retained matters pushed back into the advertising platforms. Most firms track inquiries and revenue and nothing in between, which means they can see that something is wrong without being able to see where. The middle stages are where the fixable problems live.