“The faster your law firm follows up on leads, the greater the chances of converting them into clients. And those leads could be worth millions,” said Ted DeBettencourt, co-founder of Juvo Leads, a North Carolina-based chat and message answering company that serves the legal industry.
“We found a way to increase the number of qualified leads by 50% using people powered services such as website chats, SMS message answering, Google Business Profile messages answering and most recently Local Service Ads (LSA) Message answering,” explains DeBettencourt.
Juvo focuses primarily on personal injury and other consumer facing practice areas that get over 500 website visitors per month. While most firms drive traffic to their website, DeBettencourt said they may not be great at answering website chat, text message or LSA Messages. “Not answering anything in over 30 seconds will kill your firm’s ability to convert leads into cases.”
“All the top law firms use Google LSA but it’s hard to get your firm to consistently rank well and get a ton of leads,” said DeBettencourt “When Juvo Leads starts answering your firm’s LSA Messages, we do it in under one minute which drastically increases your firm’s LSA score. Your ad will consistently rank at the top which will result in 2x-5x times more LSA leads, while your LSA cost per lead goes down.”
DeBettencourt developed the idea for Juvo Leads after he earned his Juris Doctor from Case Western Reserve University School of Law and realized he didn’t want to practice law. While in law school he earned an MBA and started a legal marketing agency. DeBettencourt found that his law firm clients were missing out on leads by not responding quickly enough. Juvo Leads was launched in 2016 with his 10 law firm clients but now boasts over 1,100 across the United States.
You Bring the Traffic…
“A law firm brings the traffic, and we convert it to a lead,” said DeBettencourt. “If someone comes to your firm’s website, we pop up and proactively start a conversation to turn that into a lead. Next, real people answer chats in person on the firm’s website 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
“Next, we answer text messages by putting buttons on the website so people can text the firm,” he added. “We answer those text messages for them. We answer every message via text or anything else in 12 seconds or less with real people.”
Qualifying Leads
When a potential client first contacts a law firm, Juvo qualifies the lead based on a series of questions selected by the firm. For a PI firm, for example, in addition to a name, phone number and email address, the potential client might be asked when the accident occurred and if there were personal injuries.
“Once we qualify the lead, we email the law firm the contact information, upload it to their CRM or schedule a consultation,” said DeBettencourt. “If it’s a particularly hot lead, we even sign the retainer right then and there.”
Juvo is paid based on the number of qualified leads it sends to a law firm.
Human Chat is Better … for Now
“As of today, human chat is much better than purely AI,” said DeBettencourt. “Someday, probably soon, that math will change, and when it does, we’ll have more data to program our AI than virtually everyone else in the market. In the meantime, we say, ‘It’s butts in seats, not bots in clouds.’
