In this day and age of digital marketing and digital relationships where the people that you know and their contact information, particularly their emails are currency, it’s essential for all law firms to have a CRM or a customer relationship management database. I once heard some lawyers refer to the CRM as sort of like the before unit. It’s like the software for the before unit. If the doing the law part of your job is done through practice management software, the CRM database is where you’re going to track all of your leads, track all of your contacts. I have gone through a couple over the years. They have scaled up in terms of their complexity and their capabilities. But from the very first day that I started my law firm, if somebody went to my website and they filled out the contact us form on the website, I got the information over into my CRM and I had a bunch of template emails set up where I could say to them, “Here’s a link in this email that you can use to book a Zoom with me or let me send you a form so I can do a conflict check.” And so it’s very useful to have a CRM to interface with new leads that come in through your website.

It’s very useful to have a CRM if you have a phone answering service, because in this day and age, any legal CRM that you’re going to use is going to have a back door that you can give access to your phone answering service to. And so when people call Baker Law Group and it’s a potential new client, and really frankly, if anybody calls Baker Law Group, the people who answer my phones are taking down name, phone number, email, what’s it about? And it’s getting over into my customer relationship management system. And so over the course of the last six years, I have had digital records created for me. I haven’t touched it myself of thousands and thousands of people who have contacted me through my website, people who have called my firm. I wind up with the emails and the phone numbers of opposing counsels and referral partners and all kinds of other people out there.

And I use this to market. I use my CRM as a way to send out email newsletters. I use it for mass emailing. For example, involved in various American Bar Association committees. And sometimes I will help them advertise. There is an event that’s happening over here and it’s like, I’m going to go ahead and send a thousand emails to a thousand lawyers encouraging them to go to this event. And lo and behold, these construction lawyers are like, “Oh, I forgot about Jeremy over there in Chicago. Oh, I just heard he was licensed in Arizona. Well, I need some help with a matter in Arizona.” And so staying top of mind with people, doing the email marketing, sending out the newsletters, not only is this a function of the CRM, it is a way that you can keep track of everyone that you know. You can keep track of your contracts, keep track of your leads, you keep track of who you took on as a client, who you did and who you’re going to follow up with, who you’re not.

I do not send a lot of emails out of my system to potential clients better be spoke. I have hundreds of email templates. Some of them say, “Oh, that matter is not quite right for me, but you should talk to this other lawyer.” And other times it says, “I don’t do that kind of work. So you should go to avo.com and you should look up a lawyer and other email templates serve other purposes.” And so the CRM allows you to send mass emails, do newsletter marketing. It allows you to set up templates for interfacing with new potential clients. Also, my engagement agreements are generated through my CRM. And so all of the conflict check data that people fill out into the system, it gets fed into my engagement agreement. So I don’t just have the client name and the scope of the work. I have an advanced conflict waiver which identifies who are the other parties involved in the construction project.

And there are form fills where the data literally goes from the form that I send them into my system and then into documents where I’ve got templates where the data gets fed into different fields. And so it’s great to have a CRM for all of these reasons. But one of the things that I think is most powerful about a CRM is being able to keep an eye on the behavior of people who are receiving your emails. I, for example, over the last three months, because I just rolled out a new website three months ago, I have sent thousands and thousands of emails to people. They’re not all the same emails. I’m sending different emails to real estate developers as opposed to architects, as opposed to contractors, as opposed to lawyers, as opposed to various other contacts where I’m saying essentially, “Hey, remember me, check out this new website that I’ve got.” And what’s really cool about my CRM is I could see what their behavior is.

I can see some people had the email bounce and it didn’t get through to them because they changed jobs. Okay, I’ve got to update my database. Other people, it’s like I can see they opened the email and I can see that they clicked on the link and then I can see how many webpages did they go to. And so I’ve sent out thousands of emails and I am able to see based on the data that I’m getting back of thousands of people I sent emails to, who are the ones that spent the most time on my website and where did they go? These are people who are probably interested in hearing from me more. And so whereas maybe I would do email marketing once a quarter to some of these people, maybe I would bump them up and I would put them on a drip marketing campaign where they would get an email out of my CRM every two weeks or something like that because say this is a real estate developer that hit 15 pages up on my website, that is a signal to me that this is somebody that might want to hire me in the short term.

And so it’s a great way to keep track of your contacts. It’s a great way to deal with new leads. It’s a great way to stay in touch with your list. It’s a great way to see who is interfacing with your content, who’s jumping around your website. And when you are able to send out templates at people, rather than having to do a unique email to everybody that contacts you, you could save the kind of money that is, I’m sorry, the kind of time that you need as a lawyer who suddenly has a bunch of administrative responsibilities, intake operations, hiring, billing, accounting. If you’re going to be moving out of the position of just being a lawyer in another firm to having to deal with this stuff, you got to find ways to save yourself time. And so having these templates, having these forms, having a way to generate engagement agreements, having a way to take retainer money, payments electronically through the system, having it be so that people could sign your engagement agreement with their finger on their iPhone digitally, then all I have to do is pull a lever and my CRM ports the data over to my practice management software, which is, we’ve got sort of the CRM is like the before unit and the practice management software is like the during unit.

People don’t move out of the CRM over into the practice management software until they become a client of my firm, but the practice management software has all the data ported over into it. And so I have all these fields filled out about for this particular construction project, who’s the lender, who’s the owner, who’s the joint venture partner, who’s the developer, who’s the general contractor, complete list of subcontractors. And in the work that I do, because I’ve got to be concerned about conflicts of interest, I’m able to track all this stuff seamlessly and I’m not the one doing the data entry. New client comes in, they get the email, they get the form, they get moved along, they sign the engagement agreement, ports over into my database. And now I’m able to use that for conflict checking purposes. And so a CRM along with practice management software is absolutely something that you need to invest in out of the gate.

There’s a bunch of different ones out there. They’ve got pros, they’ve got cons. I think you got to find the sweet spot of finding something that is not too complicated. The system that I’m using right now is so incredibly powerful that I would’ve been absolutely lost trying to use it in the first few years of my law firm. I had something that was much simpler that did its job for me just fine until I wanted to step up into a new level of ability. And there’s a lot out there. I think the choice about CRMs is a little bit less clear than practice management software. I think there’s really a market leader in practice management software, but you should explore the CRM options. You absolutely need to have one connected to the contact us forms on your website. You got to have the people who are answering your phones, have the ability to enter data into it.

It will save you hundreds of hours over the course of a few years by helping you automate tasks that you have to get done that you simply do not have the time to do manually, and it will give you a level of insight into your list and their behavior when you email them that is an essential advantage for marketing.