#88 – Referral Networks, Intake Failures & the Future of AI Search with Chris Rose

0:00Chris Rose: That's why I'm authentic. That's why everything is Chris fucking Rose, because you know, like, this is me behind it. There's no AI slot here. Your AI isn't going to cuss at you as much as I, and that's what it looks for. It looks for that authenticity. AI knows AI. And so you have to understand what it's looking for and then make your own impression. Otherwise, it's all just regression to the meme.

0:30Tifiny Swedensky: Sharp Strategies, Sweet Success.

0:34Tifiny Swedensky: Hello, everyone, and welcome. You're listening to Sharp Strategies, Sweet Success. I'm your host, Tifiny Swedensky. And today we are speaking to Chris fucking Rose, which I think I'm safe to say in the intro. Chris is the owner and founder of LegalFlare, and we're going to talk a little bit about what his company does, because I feel like if I try to describe it, I'm going to butcher it a little bit in this introduction. But I just wanted to welcome Chris onto the show and turn it over to him to finish out the introduction.

1:02Chris Rose: Hey, thanks. I'm super glad to be here. It's been a long time coming. I feel I've just been silently waiting for this day. And yeah, thanks for having me. Owner, attorney of LegalFlare. Technically, we are a law firm, but we only focus on referrals. We help other law firms refer in, refer out. So it's really more referral management, relationship management than anything else. So many law firms just, they operate on vibes. They send out cases, referrals without having any metrics to measure how their partners are performing. So that hurts my soul. And that's why I created LegalFlare.

1:36Tifiny Swedensky: So give me an example of the profile of the law firm you guys are helping right now. Who is coming to LegalFlare and working with you guys?

1:46Chris Rose: We don't quite have a strict persona yet. So I will just go over a few of them. We have firms that perform a lot of marketing, so they're getting a lot of leads, but they may only take personal injury or they may only take cases in certain states. If they get those leads in other states, they refer them to us and then we utilize our network of partners to move those leads to firms that could handle those types of cases and potentially sign those cases. So when they do, we create a fee split agreement so that all attorneys share in those attorney's fees. Simple as that. So of course, we have some clients that are social media personalities. So they create videos and people call them all of the time and say, hey, I've got X issue. So they just refer those over to me and I get those cases signed.

2:33Tifiny Swedensky: You guys are basically a network of attorneys. Everyone's doing lead generation, but they're getting leads from out of state, out of practice area. They kind of share in the lead pool. Is that about right?

2:47Chris Rose: That's pretty close. You can think of it in a number of ways, maybe like lead brokerage or lead arbitrage. We also help pre-lit firms who aren't able to settle the cases move those over to litigation firms. And a large component of what we do is just firms when they turn down leads, when they decide that they can't sign this lead, it's not for them, even if it's in their case type practice area. We still take those and we have them reviewed by our firms. And so it's a layer of redundancy.

3:14Chris Rose: When I ask law firms, owners, what are your conversion rates? The response I often get is, we sign 90% of the cases we want. That doesn't mean shit. A biased sample. And so what I do is I say, just take all of those, everything that you decline, you get a consent to contact for me so that I'm not violating the TCPA rules. And we'll take those and we'll just run them through our system. If we sign anything, for one, you're saving money because we create a fee split and there's something that you would have just thrown away. And two, it's an audit on your intake. We can actually see how well is your intake performing? Because if we're signing, I mean, right now, our average across the board is 11% of cases that are declined, which says something about these intake departments.

4:01Tifiny Swedensky: Just for my clarity, you guys are signing 11% of the cases being declined by some of the other law firms. So that's like your conversion rate on the rejected leads?

4:13Chris Rose: Across the board, of course. So some firms are great. We rarely turn anything from them in their case type practice areas. And others, they could stand to do a little better. I'm going to call it out, of course, you're my firm, so.

4:26Tifiny Swedensky: Well, that's a, intake is always a hidden issue. And I feel a lot of law firms are at the position like it's as good as it could be. But it's hard for me as a marketer to quantify that because I'm not an attorney. I'm not signing cases. And it's hard for me to say if it's good or if it's not good. But there are a lot of times I'm looking at a lead and I'm like, I feel we should assign that. And the attorney is saying, no, the insurance wasn't good or we couldn't get a hold of them. They wouldn't call us back or something. And I can't prove it. But I have the suspicion that law firms are losing a lot of leads primarily because of ego.

5:03Chris Rose: Yeah. Oh, God. Hold on. I've got my soapbox around here somewhere. I'll pull it out and then we can go on a rant. And so as a marketer, you should know firms are often saying, you're not getting us enough leads. We're not. These aren't good leads. And sometimes in this relationship, it's not me, it's you. But it's so hard for us to look at ourselves. And the other part is most attorneys, especially if it's a law firm that's being run by an attorney who's also practicing, they usually have no idea what they're talking about. It's tickle lane. Are you running a business? Are you running a practice? And so I see it all the time when they're trying to do both. And they'll push back on marketers who are doing a great job because they're not getting the results they want. And they don't think, oh, maybe Marcy in the intake department is just kind of not the nicest person in the world, doesn't want to do her job or whatever. Maybe they're just having a bad day or maybe it takes them three days to get back to a lead. There are so many reasons why they wouldn't be able to sell it, but it's always easy to blame you.

6:02Tifiny Swedensky: I've had attorneys say to me before if they want to sign with us or if they really want us, come back to us. They operate as a, we'll talk to you, we'll consult with you, but you come back to us when you finish treatment or this milestone passes or you get this information. But I have such a tough time telling you, convincing these attorneys that they don't come back. They go on their way. And speed to lead is so important and it's so, I don't know, ignored, I guess, at the business level. It's so frustrating.

6:34Chris Rose: Okay, yeah. You're hurting my soul. First, come back to me after treatment. Punch me in the face. What are you doing? Sign them right now. Good Lord. Whoever said that to you or whoever's said that to you, they're bad. They're bad at their jobs. And in 10 years, as we are, we're standing on the precipice, market compaction, consolidation, margin compression. They're going to be out of the job. It doesn't work that way anymore. Sign them now. Good Lord. And then you said something else that I was going to rant on about. But yeah, that's terrible. Do you yell at them? Do you cuss at them? You should swear at them. I find it works very well. What is your response when you do that? What do you say to them?

7:16Tifiny Swedensky: I mean, well, and it's kind of rare I get asked a question on the podcast, but I try to show them the data. Like, I try to prove to them with numbers that what they're saying is factually incorrect. Because, I mean, I worked with lawyers for the last 10 years. I've been in the business of trying to convince lawyers to do marketing, do this type of marketing, do this kind of marketing. And the most effective way to convince them is to show them, here are the numbers, here's the data, here's what you could see. And it's unfortunate because there's so much out there that's hard to prove or unproven or difficult to quantify. And what I try to say to them like an absence of data is, don't you want an ACE intake system? Wouldn't you want that system to be as good as it could be anyway? I don't feel like on something like that there's really room to tolerate okay conversion systems or intake systems.

8:13Chris Rose: Yeah, no, you're exactly right. Vibes. That's what we're talking about. Hey, what does your intake department look like? Oh, it's good. They're happy. That's vibes. What is the saying? What gets measured gets improved. So you need to set quantifiable metrics by which to establish a baseline and then control variables to improve your system. And this is what we're talking about. Like, are you running a practice or are you running a business? Because a business requires metrics and KPIs and an OKR. Whereas, you know, it's good enough or they don't want to see it or they don't want to invest in some way to measure these. And what are you doing? You're going to be out of business.

8:57Chris Rose: And I'm going to push back on something that you just said. You said you show them, you prove to them with numbers. I myself subscribe to behavioral economics. Are you familiar?

9:06Tifiny Swedensky: Oh, yeah.

9:06Chris Rose: So you know. So you know that people, they don't make logical decisions and then sit with the emotions. They make emotional decisions and then justify them with logic. But they don't realize they do that. So if you show people numbers, it's been my experience that if they are open to numbers in the first place, then you can persuade them. If they are not, if they make a gut reaction, then you, you know, have to scare them.

9:33Tifiny Swedensky: Well, and that is a good point. I've seen that a lot in business where people do tend to make the emotional decision, even when, you know, the obvious solution is right in front of them. Tighten the intake systems, invest more in marketing, you know, something else.

9:50Tifiny Swedensky: Kind of tangent to intake, but definitely something I'm curious about. So, I mean, I imagine you guys do a bunch of just communication. You're communicating with the attorneys in your network, but you're also, and you're also communicating with the leads, particularly with the lead side of it. How much do you guys use stuff like email and SMS? Or is it totally human? Are you guys using AI agents? What's the mix of communication and how you're reaching out to people?

10:18Chris Rose: This is a huge topic, and so I'll try to touch on it as much as I can. I'll just explain my system. Okay, so I built this entire system of AI agents, and so what they do is if I receive a lead either into my system through a CRM or lead management software or email, my agent's parses information, case type, practice date, contact information. Then we send out an automated email to the potential clients, and then each one is customized for the originating firm, whoever sent it over, and it says, hi, you know, we're from LegalFlare, your case was referred to us, along, you know, from whomever, I just want to let you know we're reviewing your case with our network of attorneys, you know, and that's the introductory email. And then every two days they receive another update that just says, hey, we're still looking at this. Don't worry, like, we're still here. We're trying to actively, you know, move this case. And if a firm accepts their case, you know, they say, so we have it accepted whether they actually want to try and sign it, then we let them know, hey, this firm is going to be reaching out to you just so you know, be aware, look out for them, and we send this all through an email. And then once the case is signed, it's actually placed with a firm, we don't send any more emails because we kind of step back at that point.

11:34Chris Rose: But if it goes through, if it exhausts our system, which is usually three reviews, then we send them an email that says, hey, sorry, we couldn't find anyone who's capable of taking on your case, but here's some resources that you can reach out to or reference, and, you know, we wish you the best of luck. We are not in a position to help you right now. And so it's most important to say, like, to not say, like, hey, you don't have a case, you know, even though a lot of people are, like, they're just paranoid about something, especially employment law. Everybody wants to sue their boss because they ain't getting their perfect dog, but, you know, and so it's communication.

12:06Chris Rose: And I heard about this study from the London Underground, the subway system, where they were trying to increase commuter satisfaction, and so they spent a lot of money to decrease the duration between trains, like, from eight minutes to six minutes or something like that, and they re-polled and they found out that satisfaction didn't move at all. Yeah, I mean, like, less time waiting, you'd think it would be better. I believe they went to a marketing company, and the marketing company said, well, why don't you just put, like, a sign above that says, this many minutes until the next train arrives. Everybody was, like, so much happier because if you don't know when that next train is coming, it might not even exist. You could be here for an eternity, but it's that unknown, that doubt that gives rise to anxiety and fear and trepidation. So just sending out emails saying, hey, we know you still exist, and we're trying to work with you, and I think that's the best that we can do. And so those are all automated, and sometimes they respond, and we have AI agents that, like, when we get a response that surfaces it to us, like, hey, you should respond to this, or hey, this is just them saying thank you or whatever. And we try to, you know, not just treat them like a lot of other referral platforms kind of treat these cases, like you would sell, you would put up a pair of old shoes on eBay and let people bid on them. It's kind of fucked up because these are actual people, you know, with actual problems, and so just try to take a more humanistic approach to this. But yeah, that's what we do. I was monologuing. Sorry.

13:23Tifiny Swedensky: No, I mean, that's great. I was thinking it's not unlike something that I try to do with my clients, and I mean, obviously we're talking about a smaller scale, but whenever, the difference between, let's say you receive a lead through your website chat at Friday, 7 p.m. any given week, for a lot of law firms, that lead wouldn't hear back from your law firm until Monday, 9 a.m., whenever the intake team gets in and starts their day and starts going through the list of people they need to call back. And the difference between that system and then a system where once we receive the lead in whatever system that we have, we send out a text or an email or both that says, hey, we're reviewing your message. When is a good time to call you back? Because if they respond to that and tell us like, oh, I'd like you to call me back at 3 p.m. on Monday, that's when I get off work, we're creating like a little micro commitment with them, and they're just less likely to call the next law firm or, well, that, call the next law firm and sign with them instead of signing with the law firm they called originally.

14:29Tifiny Swedensky: Understanding how behavioral economics, like you said, and how people make decisions and commit themselves to decisions is really important when you're setting up like marketing funnels and systems like that. And I really like your point that it's not necessarily a frequency of communication. Nobody's going to feel safer getting 20 emails, automated emails, that say, here's my book, here's my video, here's my blog, you know. I see people really go overboard with this stuff, but something targeted that like understands that they're a real person, they got other stuff going on in their lives, they really just want somebody to take over their case for them, and they don't need all that, but they do need reassurance that you're there and you're paying attention and you're listening. And little tweaks to your communication, like timelines or your progress, can make a world of a difference. I just monologue there, I'm sorry about that.

15:24Chris Rose: No, no, no, we're balancing it out. But yeah, you're exactly right. And so what it comes from, that anxiety, is really, it's that living in your head. And so if there is something that you can't take off your plate, like it's just gonna like keep you up at night, I know it's what I think about all of the time. And so if someone just says, hey, I'm working on this for you, you can stop thinking about it, like I will think about it for you, suddenly there's that, really what we're providing to some extent is relief, just letting go of this burden so they don't have to think about it for a little while. The number one complaint that bar associations receive from clients about their attorneys, right? Go ahead and say it for me.

16:05Tifiny Swedensky: Oh, I don't know. They didn't communicate enough.

16:07Chris Rose: There you go, lack of communication, exactly, lack of communication. And that's because the clients are just like, do you even exist? Like I haven't heard from you in three months, you know, I was in a car accident, my back is killing me, I'm racking up all these doctor's bills, and like I call your office and you don't even call me back. Do you even exist? And so just by communicating with your clients, hey, we're still working on this, you know, this is where it is, set expectations and follow through. That's how you establish trust, and it's also just called being human, but it actually escapes a lot of attorneys, you know, for one reason or another.

16:44Tifiny Swedensky: Something I don't feel like we people in the whole legal marketing space talk enough about is how parallel, how many parallels there are between a potential client hiring a law firm and a law firm hiring like an SEO company or a PPC agency or a new accountant or a bookkeeper, because it's the same kind of thing. The client needs somebody to, like you said, ease their mental burden, to take over something that's big and important and has this like world-shattering impact, I mean, depending on the nature of the case for the potential client. And then like for the law firm owner, you know, they hire an SEO company to take over their website to help them compete in this highly competitive industry of personal injury marketing or law firm marketing. And there's a lot of parallels between the client interpreting the law firm as being good and helpful and law firm interpreting their SEO company as being good and helpful. And sometimes, like you said, it comes down to the frequency of communication, the type of communication, and just making sure like the owner feels reassured that the SEO company knows what they're doing and got it, has it handled. And the other parallel just to toss it in there that I find interesting, and in both cases, you know, you have the client using ChatGPT to explain to the lawyer what they're doing wrong with their case, and then you have the lawyer using ChatGPT to explain the SEO company what they're doing wrong with their website. I find it ironic that nobody is like kind of realizing the parallels there. But...

18:17Chris Rose: No, you're exactly right. We're going to have a conversation about this. So what you are highlighting is subject matter expertise. Clients do not have subject matter expertise around the law. That's why they need a lawyer. And when someone is handling something that they don't understand, they try to gain understanding. That is the parallel you're talking about between lawyers trying to understand how marketing works. I have my own ideas as to how we can do this. But you tell me, if you're working with a new firm who is just coming in and saying, hey, Tifiny, I'm going to pay you this money, but like I only want cases where it's commercial and the client was medevaced out of there. And so like, how are you going to do that for me? Oh, and also, I want to make sure that you send me three emails a day so they let me know that you're actually doing this. And I expect all this by the end of the month. They often have high expectations. So how do you talk to them? How do you establish expectations?

19:09Tifiny Swedensky: I'll be honest. If somebody came to me and said, these are my expectations, I'd be like, I cannot meet them. So a lot of times it's just establishing, like for me, it's mode of communication is usually the most helpful. When I'm working with clients, you know, my assistant watches my email. So I have some help there. My email is connected to my project management board. So it's my calendar. And so these days, I only really have to go to my AI agent to ask questions about projects and stuff I'm working on. So as long as I tell my clients, like if you're communicating to me through email or the project management board, that is ideal because that's easy for me to manage. And I encourage them to communicate as much as they can or they want, but I let them know I'm only going to be responding to emails at the end of the day. If I see something or my assistant sees something and it's urgent, she will slack me and let me know. But otherwise, you know, don't expect emails until, or don't expect me to check emails that frequently. So I'm usually laying it out and just being brutally honest about how I work and how best to work in my system.

20:15Chris Rose: Totally get that. Okay. So let me ask you this. When a firm comes to you, what are their, do they often have like initial expectations about results? Like, do they have some conception of what you are going to provide them even before they talk with you?

20:29Tifiny Swedensky: They do. It's so difficult because like everybody's a little bit different. I think for all the ones that come to me, they summarize and say they just want clarity. Like they want somebody who can kind of answer their questions about this or that. I don't know. I don't promise results. And what I tell them, what I try to explain to them, is like my services are to help you build the marketing systems that'll continue to run and grow your firm that aren't dependent on all this stuff. I'm not sure if I'm answering your question the way you wanted me to, but I mean, just being honest, like that's how I kind of know.

21:02Chris Rose: Yeah, yeah. I think you're exactly right. Oftentimes firms, attorneys, they don't quite have a clear conception of what you do provide. And I think what you said is, I'm not promising you results. I'm promising you systems. And if you follow the systems, then we can at least measure the results. I mean, that's what I do. Everything I do is systems, systems, systems, systems. So, okay. Yeah, exactly. But, you know, marketing is tough because it just feels so nebulous. We put shit and money out there and then we hope to get clients back. Like that feels like magic. Like you are a magician. And so how do you like assuage attorneys, you know, law firms that, hey, actually there is a system. There is a way to measure this. And this is how we do it. Are they interested in understanding how you do it? Or do most of them just say, just take care of it and get back to me?

21:51Tifiny Swedensky: Most of them just say, take care of it. I try to teach them and with mixed results, I'll just, I'll leave it there. Yeah.

21:59Chris Rose: I mean, it's hard to teach the smartest people in the room is what I found, whether it's true or not.

22:04Tifiny Swedensky: That's interesting. Okay. When I think about legal marketing and what I'm trying to do, because in many ways, I'm looking at like what a fractional CMO does as being almost like the new form of SEO company. I don't want to get too grand in my expectations because for like the last like 10 years or so, right? Law firms have looked to Google and SEO and websites and digital marketing as a whole. For me, like it looks like they kind of group all these things together when sometimes they're very different. And then they treat that as like, this is what marketing is. You know, this is what you have to be good at to get cases. But I think as time goes on, one, AI and all these marketing in general is becoming more sophisticated, more nuanced, and a lot of law firms are still in the mindset that Google is marketing king. Like if you're the best at Google, you're the best at marketing. But that's not really it. You know, marketing is so much bigger than that. And a lot of law firms treated their SEO companies very much like a fractional CMO, like the source of information about marketing and how to be market. But SEO companies only know SEO, right?

23:20Tifiny Swedensky: But if you understand the broader scope of like law firm marketing and how marketing teams operate and how they produce content and what really gets noticed versus like, what service do I provide and can I sell you? Instead of selling my approach to marketing, really, I'm just selling like, let's try to make good marketing by setting up systems that make sense and work in the real world. And I rarely use the podcast to sell myself, that work that are systems that like big companies use to make ads and make marketing. Let's track it with the tools that are available to us that allow us to track ROI very closely. A lot of law firms just don't have that. And let's start building something that we can grow and measure. For me, that's how I see like fractional CMOs kind of fulfilling that niche that a lot of law firms tried to put SEO companies into as being the wise, you know, all-knowing marketing wizard.

24:19Chris Rose: So let me ask you this. I know we're running short on time. Where do you see marketing going? Like real quick, Tifiny's take, hot take, let's go, 90 seconds. Where do you see it going? Especially, I mean, I'll just let you take the reins. Go.

24:30Tifiny Swedensky: More fragmented, totally more in social media, and not social media as in like Facebook's a social media platform, but like every website's becoming social media in some degree. Where this podcast is hosted, Substack, it's part social media, part old school internet. And it's becoming like far more fragmented, but you can unify all the fragments by building, to hate sound cliche, but building a brand and building a brand footprint that links all of these fragments together. And that's not as ambiguous as it sounds in my view. But yeah, that's where I see the future going. It's very fragmented. Everything is becoming social media. People are getting business recommend. They're going to ChatGPT, which is basically based on Reddit comments. They're going to, you know, these other sites, getting recommendations and so many infinite ways that it just kind of defies like this one source, like Google or local service ads. So I don't know if that had a long-winded answer, but that's basically it.

25:30Chris Rose: No, no, no. And I absolutely agree. There's just so much more intimacy and you have to go to where people are. And if you say Facebook, well, you've got what, like 10 years left on Facebook before everyone that's still there dies, like of just, you know, incredibly old age. I'm not on Facebook anymore. All of my grandparents are dead. Like that's just what it is. But I mean, maybe it's great for like wills, trust and estates, but you have to go there. You have to be authentic because a brand is the emotion that people feel when they see who you are. It's the emotion that they relate to your brand. That's what it is. And you're exactly right with ChatGPT, other basically AI answer engine optimizations is really what it is. Like how do we position ourselves to be the option that these AI are proposing, you know, and so it's a new frontier. And I think the old SEO ways are, if not dead, die.

26:25Tifiny Swedensky: Oh my God, yeah. SEO isn't dead, but...

26:28Chris Rose: It's all in life support. I definitely think it's terminal. And so we'll definitely disagree here. And I don't want to, you know, go down two in the weeds. We'll do a part two sometime. But more and more people are using Gemini, or if they type it into Google, what is the first response? It's Gemini's response. It's not those ads. It's not the top 10. Here's the AI response. And it's more personalized. And it's not just a, I've aggregated all of this information. Here's what I think you need. That's what it is. Instead of, here's a list of websites, go do your own research. And that's what people are relying upon.

26:58Tifiny Swedensky: I think if we're being extremely literal, no, SEO is not dead. It's still going to exist for some sort of industry or in some sort of niche, the same way the yellow page ads do, right? But, you know, you're right. Like it's, people aren't going to Google to find answers to questions anymore. They're going to AI, you know, and they're, it's also nuanced and it's so much bigger than just Google. And where I struggle to articulate is like having a good website is important. Part of what SEO companies provide is just a really good website that runs well, that's well optimized and all this stuff. But the old model of content and blogs, unless you're writing totally actually unique content that somebody else can't just like fart out with ChatGPT, I'm basically like, why even bother? It has to be good and unique and that's a high bar. That's a high bar for a lot of law firms who are used to writing, you know, 10 things to do after a car accident or something like that.

27:53Chris Rose: Punch me in the face. I mean, that's why I'm authentic. That's why everything is Chris fucking Rose, because you know, like this is me behind it. There's no AI slot here. You know, your AI isn't going to cuss at you as much as I, but yeah, and that's what it looks for. It looks for that authenticity. AI knows AI. And so you have to understand what it's looking for and then make your own impression. Otherwise, it's all just regression to the meme.

28:17Tifiny Swedensky: Yeah, that's why I don't get a, that's why I don't get a nose job, because it's like, AI is not going to make a nose this crooked. That's how you know it's meant.

28:24Chris Rose: I didn't even notice. Well, I noticed.

28:26Tifiny Swedensky: And of course, my husband says the same thing. But anyway, I digress. Everyone's like, where is she going with this podcast? Well, we have to close up, but Chris will definitely have you back on for another episode. I'm a little short on time today, so I only can ask one closing question, but how do you want people to look you up and learn more about you?

28:42Chris Rose: Yeah, well, everybody's probably heard this, but I say there are always two ways to find me. One is, you know, just go to my website, legalflare.com, or chris.rose at legalflare.com. Or the other way is to go into your bathroom, turn off the lights and say Chris fucking Rose sometimes into the mirror and I appear just like that.

29:01Tifiny Swedensky: So that's pretty funny. I don't have a magic spell where I appear like that. I'll have to work on that. I'll connect you with my guy. I feel like I'm the, like, light a candle after 3 a.m. type appearance. All right, well, thank you so, so much and thanks everyone for listening. We will see you next time. Bye.

29:19Chris Rose: Bye.