Tax Season is the Superbowl for Law Firm Owners

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Introduction: Leveraging Tax Season for Law Firms

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Richard James: Tax season is the Super Bowl for law firm owners, especially if you're a flat fee or hourly based firm, not so much contingency.

Richard James: You know, when I built the firm in Phoenix, I leveraged the tax season to bring in more than 50 percent of our incomes in just 4 months.

And I did it in 5 easy steps. And by the end of this video, you're going to be able to do it too.

Step 1: Identifying Your Target Audience

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Richard James: Let's get to step 1 of the first thing that you need to do to get this ball rolling. We have to segment

the who. What does that mean exactly, the who? Well, when you're thinking about making this type of an offer, we'll get to that in a minute, to bring in money to the firm, we have to understand who it is that we're going to talk to. Where are we going to get the money from? It's from people. It's from your clients.

And so there are two very [: 00:01:00

If you own a law firm and you're a flat fee or hourly base, you definitely are owed money by your clients. In fact, most of you are owed somewhere between 5 percent and 30 percent That means that the really, really good ones collect 95 percent of every dollar they bill. And the mediocre firms or really struggling firms collect 70 percent of every dollar that they bill.

the reason why that's so important is because that money that you don't collect, you will forever chase. If you're a 500, 000 firm and you only collect 70%, there's 150, 000 on the table. If you're a 3 million firm and you only collect 70%, there's 900, 000 on the table. Trust me, I see this. Every single day.

%. [: 00:02:00

Understanding Debt Collection Strategies

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Richard James: But let's get into a little deeper on this particular subject of money.

Because we have to break it down into two important categories. It's how much do they owe you? And is that a high number or is that a low number? And then we have to talk about the age of the debt. And is that young or old? So let's focus on the young and the old for a second. If you were to talk to a company that had a debt collection service, they bought a debt and they went to collect it.

h again, we're going to talk [: 00:03:00

Okay. Let's talk about the dollars in this conversation. So, the dollars in this conversation really comes down to the amount that they owe you. And that kind of depends on your firm. If you're a firm that has an average case value of 3, 000, well, 1, 000 is a big deal for you. And an offer to them of, let's say, 100 or 200 would be a big deal to them.

ing to when it comes to what [: 00:04:00

Now there's a second very important category that we have to pay attention to and that is new prospects. And the reason why you have to pay attention to new prospects is because when you're meeting with new prospects, one of the ways to increase the average amount of money that you get as a down payment is to make sure you're making it an offer to leverage the taxes.

And now again, I'll get into the offers in just a second, but when we're making our offer, we have to understand who we're talking to because when you're sitting down with a new prospect, We want to convince that prospect to retain the firm so that we can start working their case and giving them advice.

that person on some sort of [: 00:05:00

This is one of the reasons why we're able to accelerate the rate of collections during this four month period of time, which leads us to this conversation I've been having about the second step you have to do. You guessed it.

Step 2: Crafting the Perfect Offer

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Richard James: We have to pay attention to the offer. Now, what does this mean exactly? Buy an offer. Well, here's what I mean. When you're marketing for leads, if you pay an agency to market for leads or you do your own marketing, it doesn't matter. You're fundamentally saying to them, I'm going to give you something in return for something else.

and email address and maybe [: 00:06:00

And you can get that information by giving them something. Well, when we're doing work to collect, we're doing the exact same thing. Here's the big difference. This is why tax season is the Superbowl for law firms. Because when you're crafting an offer, it's so important for you to leverage the conversation that's already happening in their mind.

And what conversation is happening in the mind of every single American inside the United States that works? Tax season. Why is it on top of their mind? Well, it's kind of a law and they have to pay their taxes. Two, many of them are depending on that refund. And three, the advertising world has been hammering them since slightly before January, all the way up until tax season about using their services.

e ads and so have all of our [: 00:07:00

And when we do that, we can get a higher response rate.

Hey, if you want to figure out how to maximize tax season for your law firm, go to the lawfirmsecret. com.

Now, We get a higher response rate, not from leads, but rather from collections, because that's where we're focusing our attention. That's the list that we can start to draft most of our money from right away. And so the first thing that you want to do, as I said, was identify your who.

have a different offer for a [: 00:08:00

You're going to have a little different offer for different groups of people. So let's take the people that owe you money, the people that owe you money and have old debt. We're going to give them a little bit more incentive to be able to pledge their tax refund, to be able to get their money paid back to you in return for some sort of discount. So we'll want to make sure we are careful as who we send these offers to. For somebody who has younger debt, we can make a lower offer, so it can be a much lower offer. Just the fact that we're making the offer and we're having the communication with them is something more than you're probably normally doing as a law firm.

And just the act of having the conversation with them that's already going in on their head about tax season and tying the pledge of their tax return to pay for your tax bill, something they already owe you, or sorry, your legal bill, something they already owe you for. It allows them to say a natural yes, especially if the debt is young.

hy we start to get a rush of [: 00:09:00

Or we had any reason why we couldn't help you with X today? and their answer is, well, I can't afford it. I don't have the money. Those people are the ones you're going to leverage. Tax season with right the ones who say yeah, sure. Here's my amex or here's my visa or here's my mastercard no, we're not going to worry about leveraging it with them.

Those who say, yeah, I can put half down today, we're probably not going to leverage it with them. but those who don't have any money, and do have a tax refund coming, we can actually leverage with them some sort of paid in full discount or other type of offer that we give them if they just pledge their tax refund.

erstand when that tax refund [: 00:10:00

Fundamentally, you're offering them terms, but you're offering them terms from the concept of their tax refund is coming in. For those of you lawyers who just went to the outlier in this conversation and said, well, I can't control if they give me their tax refund or not, what should I do about that? The answer is, how about we worry about that when it happens?

et it so that you only leave [: 00:11:00

That is a huge move in the right direction. So I know lawyers love to pay attention to the outliers in this particular case. Let's not do that. So let's take an example. so let's go back to the list conversation I had earlier. We had people who owe money. And of that, we had segmented it by whether they have money, or whether it is time, right? Or what we called age. and We had people who were old, and we had people who were young, right?

ve to be a larger offer. Now [: 00:12:00

So it's not just large or small, it's in percentage to what they owe you. Like a 100 offer on a 1, 000 debt is actually pretty good, So the third thing we have to talk about is

Step 3: Effective Marketing Techniques

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Richard James: marketing.

At the end of the day, if we don't take our offer and our list and put them together, right, you have to take the list that you segmented and you have to take your offer

out doing that? Well, let me [: 00:13:00

Now, if you're from Iowa, I mean, no disrespect, but oftentimes those cornfields don't have a lot of traffic going by them. And so if you're not putting your message out to your list about your offer, you're going to get Crickets. That's not what we want. What we want is we want to increase the income to the firm and we're looking for that magical 50 percent number in four months.

e open rate and a reasonable [: 00:14:00

But it's probably not enough. You might want to send something via direct mail. And yeah, that's great. But if you go with that, that's where I want to start, but you've never done direct mail before, arguably the slowest process for you to use, sometimes most effective, but oftentimes the slowest. I'm not telling you not to do it.

I'm just telling you if you've never done it before, it's not where I want you to start. The next that you can do is you can just pick up the phone and you can make a phone call. That's right. You can just have a live person pick up the phone and make the offer over the phone to the person who owes you money.

ne, text your list. A lot of [: 00:15:00

Somebody in your office could send a hundred text messages from the iPhone. Why is this important? Well, because they get the right color message on their phone. If you're an iPhone user, you know what I'm talking about. And finally, not finally, but another option for you, is you can use Facebook, Instagram, even Google to some extent.

We'll let the technical gurus deal with which one you should be using. But we're basically talking about some form of Retargeting, right? So you're basically going to take the list and you're going to put a very specific message in front of the list. There are limitations to this. There are things you have to do to manage this that is for the professionals or for somebody in your office who does this for you to make sure you know how to do it.

offer, now you can start to [: 00:16:00

The reason why this is so important is because deadlines make things happen faster. And what we're doing right now is actually referred to direct response marketing. It's okay if you don't know what that is, but just understand that direct response marketing basically says we're going to put out an ad and we're going to get a response back.

and we measure the response. [: 00:17:00

Let me illustrate that with a story. So the reason why you want to make sure you add a deadline is because when you do, your response will go up. So I'm going to tell you a story that's going to bridge into my bonus section a little bit later. But know this, when I first started building the firm in Phoenix, I used a copy of a book.

Not this book, this wouldn't be relevant. It was a book specific about the practice area. And when I did, I started giving it away for free. And when we use television to drive that ad, we would generally get somewhere around eight new leads every time I did one of these ads. That was pretty good. Cost per lead was actually pretty low.

o add a deadline. All I said [: 00:18:00

That's a 10 times full. So when you create your offer and you send it to your list, make sure. You add a deadline, and you're going to see your results skyrocket. Now, we would be remiss if I didn't get into the next following step.

So the next step is very important and it's oftentimes overlooked. And the reason it's overlooked is because a lot of law firm owners don't think about sales. And they don't think about conversion. They usually think about getting a good job done for their client, which is awesome. You have to do that.

They [: 00:19:00

And that's step number four,

Step 4: The Importance of Scripts

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list, they should be saying [: 00:20:00

It's highly important that that happens. The second place is probably pretty obvious. It's where you should have a script right now, and that's during your initial consultations, during your ICs. Why is this so important? Well, because if you have a script right now, you need to augment it a little bit when it comes to making the offer for the investment.

when they run up against people that don't have money or don't have a lot of money to be able to know how to exactly word the offer when we're allowing them to pledge their tax return. So we have to write out the script. Now, the final one, we're going to call that a mystery and I'm going to save it until last.

u. So, if you're going to be [: 00:21:00

So that you can maximize the number of people that take you up on this offer like, pledging their tax return. If you do that, we're going to increase the number of people who pledge their tax return, fundamentally increasing the amount of money we earn to the firm between January and April. And again, there's a mystery component I'm going to get to in just a minute.

Now, we have to talk about the fifth step, because again, it's yet something that's most often overlooked by law firms. So, step number five.

Step 5: Training Your Team for Success

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m. And I said we had to have [: 00:22:00

The first, and most important, is we need to make sure they memorize. We need to make sure they memorize the script. Yes. Memorize. I know we don't want our team to sound like a used car salesman. I get it. I don't want them to sound like a used car salesman either. But I do want them to get results. And the way that they get results is they memorize what it is they're going to say, when they're going to say it, and how it is they're going to deliver the message.

we just need to make sure we [: 00:23:00

So we have to convince them that it's in their best interest to retain your firm by pledging their tax refund. Okay. So, First thing we want to make sure we do is memorize. The second thing we want to make sure we do is practice. Now, practice comes into two primary categories. The first category that practice comes into is that they have to role play.

The second category that they have to come into is we need to play live game table.

we know that they've got it. [: 00:24:00

And finally, it brings me down to my third step. We really should be scoring. Their calls or a sample of their calls to know whether they're doing what we want them to be doing. Remember, my grandfather said we should inspect what we expect by report. There's what we think is happening in a law firm, there's what we want to be happening in a law firm, and then there's what is actually happening in a law firm.

And the way you figure out what's actually happening in a law firm, especially when it comes to this particular category, is we go ahead and we score their calls and let them know how they're doing. And again, this is in every single department. The AR team, the sales team, and the Mr. team we're going to talk about in just a minute.

as five steps. Right now you [: 00:25:00

Bonus Tips for Maximizing Tax Season

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Richard James: But I'd like to give you a bonus. Are you okay with that? I hope so. I like bonuses. Let's give you one right now.

you to absolutely positively [: 00:26:00

ersation that you allow them [: 00:27:00

You're going to talk to them about how tax season relates to what it is they're going through. You're going to leverage the conversation that's already happening by the massive behemoths out there that are bringing their attention up. And you're going to enter into that conversation with your lead generation techniques.

If you have your own marketing team, this is fairly straightforward to do. Your creative team can start to come up with ads. What does that look like? Well, if you're in a YouTube ad or a Facebook ad, couldn't you put a red, white, and blue striped hat on like uncle Sam and wear it? And maybe even go as far as dressing like Uncle Sam, maybe even put a white beard on and that can be a start of your commercial.

w, you could do other things [: 00:28:00

You can just use words to accomplish your goal. Now if you've got an agency that you're working with, sometimes it takes a little bit more effort to get the agency to do this. Why? Well, because agencies can only give you so many hours. When it is, they're working with you, and so they can't do a lot of the creative.

leverage their tax return to [: 00:29:00

I'm not going to write it for you right now, but I hope you get my point. Now, earlier I talked about that mystery team and that mystery script. Well, guess who that is? That is your ASA. What is an ASA? That is an appointment setting agent. The people who are on the phone answering the phones or making outbound dials to your unconverted leads Those are the folks that are going to need their own script Those are the folks that are going to need their own training Because they're going to need to know exactly what to say to either your unconverted lead list Let's say you didn't even want to do this with advertising and you wanted to generate more leads and more appointments But you didn't want to spend money on advertising.

to the appointment when they [: 00:30:00

And just let them pick up the phone and call them with this new offer around the idea of tax season. We're going to be entering into their conversation. Oh, by the way, We can also use the same tools we used earlier. We can send them an email, we can send them direct mail, we can pick up the phone and call them, we can text them, or we can retarget them.

And so when we start to generate leads and we look at this from a lead generation perspective, the unconverted lead list is a low hanging fruit, easy way for you to start to generate more appointments using this conversation of tax season.

Conclusion: Achieving Your Best Tax Season Ever

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Richard James: So, how did we go from generating no money during tax season to almost 50 percent of the revenues of the firm in just four months?

y, those that are in the new [: 00:31:00

After that, we just made sure we wrote our scripts. So everybody knew exactly what was going on. And we started marketing these things to put them together. And then finally we trained everybody on the entire pool of information. And once we did that, we just made sure we did it over and over. and over again.

This is not about reinventing the wheel. Once we know this works, we just want to do more of it. That's the key. Don't try something new. This isn't actually new. It might be new to you. But this has been around for a while. So just use something that somebody else is doing and do more of it for your firm.

d, you want to pay attention [: 00:32:00

It's a simplified way of doing it. And then from there, we're going to make sure we have scripts. Right? And the reason we want to have scripts is because our teams that are fielding the phone calls or making outbound calls, we want to make sure they know exactly what to say, when to say it, and how we want them to say it.

nd then five, we're going to [: 00:33:00

Hey, if you want to figure out how to maximize tax season for your law firm, go to the lawfirmsecret. com.