How and Why to Establish AUTHORITY at Intake

When I first started working with lawyers about twenty years ago, there was a widespread public perception about them.

Lawyers will take my case and throw it on a pile. I won’t be able to get them on the phone. I will get screwed somehow because lawyers are arrogant.

And in fact trying to get a call back was frustrating to a lot of clients. They would call, leave a message, and…nothing...for weeks.

One of my first clients innovated the simple practice of calling clients before they ever thought to call the firm. To provide a touch of astonishment at how engaged and service oriented they were. And at the time clients were astonished.

All across America in recent times, law firms have gotten better at being responsive, at being in touch at least once a month. And they strive to be kind and empathetic.

It’s all so nice, but something’s missing.

In small cases, prospective clients are not totally clear what they are looking for. They have not thought it through. With a fender bender requiring a few months care from a chiropractor, the criterion is, “Be nice. Listen to me. Show me you care”.

That’s it. They see your website or your signage and lobby and they sense that you are enough of a law firm to more than handle this small matter.

With a catastrophic case the number one criterion is: will they get me the biggest settlement or verdict? Should I talk to three or four and go with the best? It may be the only million dollar decision they ever get to make and they are determined to get it right.

If you do not establish Authority at intake, the client only knows you can handle a small case. It’s all they are focused on. Again, their criteria are unconscious. If you are nice enough you get the case.

And we all know that small cases can easily be caught over the phone by a well trained rep with no legal background.

If they came to you with a catastrophic death case you’d know you have to show them you can take down Goliath. You must exude toughness, because being nice alone is not going to cut it.

The way you catch a soft tissue case might be creating a problem for yourself in the future. Clients you won a great settlement for may go to a different firm a year or two later when something truly catastrophic occurs.

Happens all the time and it hurts. Subconsciously, they might consider you to be the nice guys suitable for the smaller cases.

Let’s talk empathy for a minute and consider it within the ‘Law of Contrast’. If a little child heard about your injury and said…."I'm sorry you are hurt”, that would lovely, cute, precocious, and certainly empathetic.

If a gruff and thorny person—who happens to be a killer litigator—heard about your injury, and demonstrated empathy, it would count for a thousand times more.

If a person who could not take down Goliath in a million years showed empathy it would be nice. When a killer litigator is kind and empathetic, it’s powerful.

How can your “niceness” convince them how lethal you can be in a bare knuckle brawl like a trial or a fractious negotiation with a defiant insurer?

The reason you have to get them to “feel your steel” is so they know you can handle this case or something really big if it should come up in the future.

I have innovated a frame that is in fairly wide use that subtly puts you in control and gives off all the right messages. It’s called ‘The Authority Frame’, or ’The Selector Frame’.

First let’s consider the state of mind of the suddenly injured person coming to you for help.

Jay Abraham my marketing mentor would always say, “People are silently begging to be led”.

Reflect deeply on this phrase because it’s a useful mental template for understanding the mindset of injured people coming to you for legal care. Your prospective clients want you to take them by the hand and take them from where they are to where they want to be.

And they don’t really know where they are. They are hurt, vulnerable and confused. You are the expert. It is you who will establish for them where they are. And when you do that, to them it means you are the expert who can take them to where they want to be.

Because they are looking for leadership, The Authority Frame is a powerful and effective but subtle means of establishing your leadership.

I’ll give you two examples. The first is for when the lawyer handles the intake, which is the norm in smaller firms.

A call comes in. An injured person wants to speak to a lawyer. The well trained intake person, knowing this fits the criteria of a desirable case, gets the lawyer on the line.

The lawyer says: “Hi Susan, I’m Steve Schmidlaper, I’m an attorney with the firm. My purpose for this call is to see if this is a case we’d want to take on. I look at two things: the case proper—the injury and damages. I also look at YOU. Are you the kind of person a judge and jury would believe and that our whole team would want to go to working for...”

It’s meant to be conversational. You say it, pause, and keep going. If they say nothing they have accepted the frame, the ballpark they will be playing in with you. Let’s look at what it establishes in a few seconds.

I’m in charge. I will decide. If you play your cards right you will get what you came for.

They wanted an expert to take them by the hand. Here is a confident commanding expert, taking them by the hand. Hallelujah!

I have never seen a single objection to this raised by a client during intake. Now they sense you are strong and can masterfully navigate an adversarial environment like a trial or a fight with an insurance company.

If you try to nice them to death they will never "feel your steel" and they will not have the sense you can take down Goliath if it’s ever needed. You’ll catch the small case, but as we know, a good phone agent can do that without a law degree.

There are many law firms where there is no contact with the lawyer until later in the case. The phone rep can establish authority with a simple four word phrase:

“Here’s how it works”.

This phrase—which is impossible to improve upon—operates like a hypnotic command. So many messages are implied and they all land behind the critical faculties of the prospect and are accepted without question.

That too is pleasurable to the person seeking expertise and confidence. Someone from the firm they sought is taking them by the hand and letting them know how it is and what to expect. It’s assuming the sale at its best.

Okay, so now let’s talk empathy some more. Machiavelli is frequently quoted as saying it’s better to be feared than loved. That’s not how I remember it from reading 'The Prince'. Italy in the 1500s was a mess. Twelve principalities on Friday. Two more on Monday. And by the end of next week it was back down to ten.

Wars, intrigues, assassinations, conspiracies, back stabbings. Along comes this genius who proudly proclaims to Lorenzo de Medici that he knows how to help him navigate through all the conflicts.

If you want to be loved, said Machiavelli, maybe chop off a head or two in the first week. Then everyone will know you are serious. After that you are free to be kind, generous and beneficent. Maybe it will last for a year or two until the terror wears off.?

Then you’ll have to get the axe back out.

Applied to today, you want to be kind, but the client has to feel your steel to know that you can handle this case and anything truly calamitous that might occur in the future.

Here’s a very simple technique to induce your new client to take an action at your behest. This drives the 'surrender to authority' nail the rest of the way in.

“Have you got a pen and paper there, Joe? You’re going to need it in a minute. Okay, go ahead and get them. I’ll wait. (Pause). You got 'em?”

Then you go into the intake and share or extract information and a few minutes later, say, “Okay, I need you to write down these three things”.

Maybe it’s the documents they need to have handy when the investigator shows up to handle the paperwork. They were silently begging to be led; now you are leading and they are following.?

You are the expert. You are in charge. They have surrendered to your expertise totally.

Now when the case manager gets with them to make sure they have all their travel time logged or medical documents in order, they are far more likely to be organized and to cooperate fully.