Intake is your missing link between calls and cases – here’s how your law firm can get it right

Intro: You are listening to the Lawyer Stories podcast with host Benny Gold Lawyer. Stories was founded in July, 2017 on Instagram and is an expanding global network of lawyers and law students sharing their personal journeys to the noble profession of the practice of law. Join us on this podcast as we dig deeper into these stories and hear from lawyers and law students from around the world.

Intro: In all areas of the legal profession. Here at Lawyer Stories, we believe that every lawyer has a story. What's yours?

Benny Gold: Welcome to the Lawyer Stories podcast with Benny Gold. This episode is sponsored by CallRail and I'm excited to introduce our guest, Gyi Tsakalakis, who is president and co-founder of Attorneys Sync. And one of CallRail's agency partners now just to set the stage attorney saying grows law firms and it's founded by lawyers.

Benny Gold: There's no long-term contracts. They have been doing what they've been doing for a while. And Gyi is a law graduate too, so that, I think that's pretty cool too. Same as I'm a law graduate for and I work with lawyer stories and also with CallRail. You're never gonna miss a call, so make sure you check them out.

Benny Gold: They do call tracking. It's very important to not miss a call from a client who really needs you. Gyi, I wanna welcome you in today. Thanks for coming on.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Ready. Thanks for having me. Great to be here. Can't wait to chat.

Benny Gold: Yeah, no, for sure. And I have to say that I've seen your brand, so attorneys think is one of the brands that I've seen out there since I started lawyer stories.

Benny Gold: Like I've seen it everywhere out there. I know you do a lot of good works and it was cool to find out that you work alongside CallRail who is actually. Our new partner too. Shout out to CallRail. Like we're super psyched to be working with them. Really nice people over there. Highly recommend.

Benny Gold: So tell us a bit like where you're from in your early background. I want to hear the law school story, like why you went to law school. And then of course we're gonna kind of transition to what you're doing now.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Sure. As a really young person, I actually thought I was gonna be a judge.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Okay. My my mom still teases me about that 'cause I didn't take that path. I reflect on it. We'll get to there, but I went to Michigan for undergrad. I started out as a computer science major. This is, I'll date myself. This is like 19 97, 98. That's amazing. Those were good

Benny Gold: years though.

Benny Gold: Like I was, I'm not too far off. Those were good years. All right. Go ahead.

Gyi Tsakalakis: They were great years. If you were a freshman at the University of Michigan and you were co national champs rushing the field and bumping chest and players, amazing. Love it. Go blue. Go Vallejo. Anyway, I but back then, like computer science, it was gosh, when you think about it, it's how much has changed?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Back then it was coding in a dark room. Java, not Java script, but Java, the programming language had just come out, I think my sophomore year. And I quickly realized that it really wasn't for me. Like I had I had a technical mind, like I liked some of the things I was building computers and stuff.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Wow. But I, but the, when I started to get a sense of what coding was, at least back then, this is early internet days. Not as, there's no social media. I think someone from Google actually came and talked to us did a lecture. But this is, it's right around the birth of Google.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And anyway it wasn't for me. And so I pivoted to philosophy major, which I wouldn't trade in the world. I love philosophy, but I didn't, but I wasn't really gonna be, and I'm not an academic. For me, after I graduated, I took a year off reflected. Yep. And my my, actually, my, I was a, I played high school football and my office.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Oh, that's awesome. What position? You're never gonna believe this 'cause I'm, five, nine and a buck 75. But I played guard linebacker at my high school. Okay. Okay. And I'm proud to say I was captain of the team in all area again. That's amazing. Believe this, you wouldn't believe it looking at me, but Are you a Lions

Benny Gold: fan?

Gyi Tsakalakis: I am, yeah. Shout out to the Lions. Yeah. I'm a big Patriot fan,

Benny Gold: That's,

Gyi Tsakalakis: I'm a Tom Brady fan, so I'm a That's right. Facto Patriots fan. That's

Benny Gold: awesome. Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis: But yeah, li hey, go lions. And, we've definitely had our days of woe, so we're happy that they're doing so great. Unbelievable.

Benny Gold: By the way just a note on that. Nobody's gonna be happy to say this, but like the coach now is, was on the o and 16 lions, so I really hope that they. Get one. You know what I mean? That was, he's been through it. All right. Back to the show. Yes.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Awesome. Yeah. Anyway, so I, philosophy degree took a year off my, anyway, the point of me telling about my offensive career is he was also a trial lawyer.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And so I went Wow. And he was a mentor to me. And so I went, worked for him. And then I went to law school. I graduated Wayne's. States didn't have the grades to get into Michigan Law School. Okay. And worked there for about two years. And in the early days, as a new lawyer, people are asking me like, Hey, what should we be doing for marketing stuff?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Do we should could get a website and this kind of stuff. And so I'm interesting researching, researching, talking to a lot of other lawyers. And it's funny, this is, so this is like 2006, 2007, and a lot of the lawyers I talked to not just lawyers at my firm, but a lot of the lawyers I talked to, they're like, we're not really sure the Internet's gonna be this thing for lawyers. Now the funny thing is this, 2006, 2007, the internet already was a thing for lawyers, back then it was like total attorneys and legal fish and legal match. And these are lead generation companies and we actually started out doing lead generation.

Gyi Tsakalakis: The short version of the lead gen thing was there was a whole thing about whether or not lawyers could pay per lead, whether that was fee sharing with non-lawyers. There was a big fight about it. Interesting. Yep. Long story short, they just, the courts came down all the most. I think actually have her jurisdiction said it was fine.

Gyi Tsakalakis: But we pivoted to agency model and so we, we founded Attorneys Inc. In 2008. We founded another agency outside of Legal in 2013. Oh wait Gyi,

Benny Gold: hold on. So were, did you find that as you were like a practicing attorney, did you find attorney sink?

Gyi Tsakalakis: I, we the last 2007, I was like, it was in like. Brainstorm land, and then I officially left my law firm in 2008 to go full steam at attorneys sink.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And so attorneys sink, it really was just an idea in 2007. And but I went to the lawyer and my, the lawyers at my firm I think were shocked. They were like, what are you doing? And I was like, yeah, I've got this entrepreneurial itch, so I'm gonna try something new.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And my business partner had been working at a lead generation company for at-home services that another friend of ours. Had founded. And so we, I was kinda like, look, I was like, I think we can, there's a, there's an opportunity to do something here. A lot of the stuff that I was looking at wasn't, I just didn't think it was that great and lawyers with my people.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And so I was like, you know what? I think we can help some of these lawyers out with this stuff. And so that's how we started. Did you like,

Benny Gold: reach back in your pocket from, your early days at Michigan to be like, Hey I'm doing like computer coding and all this stuff this is like techy and I it's like reigniting this interest.

Benny Gold: I want to add.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Totally. I think the, early on we were doing a lot of like web design and development work and those and for me it's it's still, there's some coding. It's not the same thing as like the coding I was doing in college, but I definitely got a personal and professional satisfaction out of getting back into the tech space and really the thing that I still think is amazing after doing this almost 20 years, like the fact that we can put stuff online.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And tweak. The websites and build links and do the digital pr and do all the nerdy things that we do from an SEO standpoint and get a law firm to show up in a Google search and it's generating business for this firm. Like you, you feel like you like cracked some code. And this is why all the, this is why the SEO people, talk like that is because it's amazing.

Gyi Tsakalakis: You're getting all this free quote unquote free traffic from Google and it was like solving a puzzle. So I think I definitely. Enjoyed that aspect of it. Thank you. No,

Benny Gold: That's that's amazing. So what drew you to helping like other law firms grow? Like you saw some sort of an opportunity within a lot of law firms?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah. Like I said, I, lawyers were my people. Yep. And I just was like. I had a lot of relationships with lawyers and I, even today, like a lot I was looking at CallRail actually puts out some good research on legal specific, and so I'm prepping for this conversation. I was looking at some of it, but, you don't have to be an internet marketing person to know that even today a lot of law firm websites are pretty bad.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And yeah. So I was just like, we can improve this. And, I wasn't alone because there, there was a proliferation of. Digital legal marketing companies over the last 20 years. It's every day there's a new legal marketing company. So I think people are onto this idea that lawyers people use the internet and social media and various communication technologies to find and hire lawyers and what lawyers present to them impacts their decision about whether they wanna hire 'em or not.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And so I think that. That, that was really for me why there's just such a huge opportunity in legal to be able to help lawyers improve their marketing.

Benny Gold: Did you miss being a trial lawyer, like when you came out and started to do it or?

Gyi Tsakalakis: I, people ask me that all the time and there are some parts I still miss.

Gyi Tsakalakis: I was I was big trial advocacy guy. I loved being in court. I was probably a little bit too enamored with it. Maybe I watched a little too much law and order. That part I loved. Obviously I loved helping clients, but going through. Medical record. We did civil litigation and and we did a lot of plaintiff personal injury and there were a lot of aspects I don't miss at all.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And so it's funny though, 'cause I, when I think back, it's if you, if I was just litigating maybe I still would be doing that, but I think when I reflect on it too as much as I loved it, like man, I, it's total, I'm totally empathetic to why so many lawyers burn out because it is hard. It is emotional.

Gyi Tsakalakis: It is draining. Totally. And so for the, and I have tons of respect for, some of my close friends and clients are trial lawyers and super grateful for the work that they do. I think lawyers in general, we could, and I'm gonna get philosophical on you, but yeah, please.

Gyi Tsakalakis: They, lawyers serve such an important function in our society. They are the front lines of defense. I was talking to, I always say criminal lawyers, like the only real lawyers because they're the only, they'll protect us from the government. But, all lawyers they're helping people navigate sometimes the worst thing that's ever happened to a person in their life.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And got a lot of love for lawyers and but anyway, to answer your question, like I miss some parts of it. I don't miss other parts of it. And, I get to scratch a little bit of that legal itch because, I quote unquote him general counsel for my. Businesses. Now I'm not in court, thank goodness.

Gyi Tsakalakis: But yeah I miss some aspects of it, but I'll tell you, I. I, I'm super grateful, like one of my close friends is my business partner, my brother is my business partner. Wow, okay. The relationships that I've built from these businesses it's hard to go back and think what could I should have would've, but I enjoyed my brief time doing it.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And, it was great. I got to work with my mentor at his firm. So it was pretty cool. And I, and it was a small firm, so I was baptism by fire. I was in. I think three trials. My first year I, it was motion call depositions, like I was hitting it hard and that those, that aspect of it I loved.

Gyi Tsakalakis: So

Benny Gold: do you think it helps, obviously, that like you're a lawyer going into legal market? And the only reason I say that is because. There's so many marketers. There's marketers that aren't lawyers, and for me, like I help, I think it helps me like when I'm on a podcast with like with a lawyer talking about certain items, even though I'm not practicing right now, like I think if a lawyer came to you and was like, Hey, like this is my issue.

Benny Gold: This is what I need to solve. I need like the website, I need to figure out SEO. Like you might be able to get into the mind of an attorney a little bit more.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah, for sure. It definitely helps in terms of I speak lawyers language, a lot of marketing people speak in marketing gobbledygook, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis: An easy example is leads versus potential clients. Pros, prospective clients, stuff like that. But also like rules, professional conduct, like most market. They have no clue about rules of professional conduct. And in fact, they get lawyers in trouble with that kind of stuff. That's interesting.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah. Unethical marketing tactics all the time. But I'll tell you this, because people always, the other, it's funny because my team is always we should be leaning into, the four lawyers by lawyers. Like you, founder, you're a lawyer, you're founder, a marketing agency, and I've always been like.

Gyi Tsakalakis: My being a lawyer doesn't make me a good marketer. You, it's funny 'cause then I tell lawyers all the time they're great marketers. Just think of what you do at trial. Like at trial, you're marketing your client, you're marketing your case to the jury. It's the same thing, communicating the value of your case.

Gyi Tsakalakis: But I don't love the, just because I'm a lawyer, I'm gonna be good at marketing a law firm. I do think there are some, I think there's some language things. I think there's some understanding about the ways the business works, especially 'cause we serve a lot of plaintiff's law firms, and so talking about like target cost per case and that kind of stuff.

Gyi Tsakalakis: It's second nature to me, whereas a lot of other marketing people talk about like vanity metrics, like impressions and clicks and I'm like, who cares? Like gimme qualified consultations and clients.

Benny Gold: Interesting. So tell us exactly like what ITER Attorneys Inc is and what you do, like how you serve attorneys.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Sure. Lawyers come to us with all sorts of different needs. I, when I really boil it down, like we're like business consultants in the marketing context because, having done this for so long, we know that. Lawyers are gonna pay us a fee. They're gonna pay, maybe they have an ad spend, maybe they're gonna make investments in some other digital assets and they're gonna spend X and we gotta give them X plus Y back.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Or they're gonna be like, what the heck's going on? And really, in my view, you've gotta be somewhere in the three. Three to 10 x return because otherwise it's go invest your money in an index fund if you're only getting, five to 10% return. Yeah. But so that's like a very broad way that I describe what we do.

Gyi Tsakalakis: We kinda do soup to nuts. We'll, we do website builds, we do media management. We'll run Google ads campaigns. We run paid social campaigns. We do SEO we work out, we help law firms on intake. That was another thing too, that I think early on, and this is where the CallRail stuff comes in too.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Early on and a lot of marketers still are like this, they're like, look, we're responsible for making the phone ring. But we're not helping you connect the dots back to actually signed retainers or, cases. And the thing that I've learned is it doesn't really matter eventually, if you're not connecting it all the way back to money for the lawyers, they're gonna find somebody who can.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And that's one of the reasons why we get involved in intake and when we talk to lawyers, when we do our exploratory call, we're like, how are you handling intake be? And lawyers, some lawyers still even today will tell me. I answer my phone and if people can't get ahold of me, they'll leave me a voice message.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And I'm like, don't waste your time in digital marketing because that is your, they're gonna be onto the next one every six months. There's a whole new crop of lawyers and with some exceptions, like there. For sure. There are exceptions out there where you're the only person in town who does the thing.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Good for you. That's great marketing in and of itself, but. That represents a very small sliver. Whether it's referrals or whether it's paid ads, like people want to have a great experience when they contact you and voicemail is not that experience.

Benny Gold: How does CallRail help with that?

Benny Gold: I know they track the calls and give us an example and then we're gonna go back to talking about attorney sink.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Sure. So the big the initial reason and CallRail has really come a long way to, over the years that we've worked with them as well. But the initial impetus for us signing up with CallRail way back in the day was call tracking.

Gyi Tsakalakis: What they, and there's two big contexts that really helped us in. We're an agency. And so we want to be able to demonstrate like, Hey, we, let's use one specific channel. So we're gonna do some work in local SEO, we're gonna get your firm to show up in the little map pack and organic results.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And so having a dedicated call tracking number from CallRail in there allows us to say that. People that called this number, they came from that Google business profile. They also have this thing called dynamic number insertion, which basically allows you to, when someone lands on your website, it connects the call data to the source information.

Gyi Tsakalakis: So it'll be like this call the per the person who landed on your website, they came from Google, they came from Facebook, they came from whatever the campaign that you've got going on. So you can be like. Oh, we can actually do return on ad spend analysis from your website via calls. And so that, that was, that's a really powerful tool.

Gyi Tsakalakis: But I would say today, they do, they've got, this voice assist product, which is basically ai call answering. And I really think the world's going that way. It, there are contexts where you need a human being to talk to people, but it's, gosh, it's getting good. And it's, and so again, you no missed calls.

Gyi Tsakalakis: It's amazing qualifying calls. It can, and also their thing too, that it does, it will score it. You can, based on sentiment analysis from the call transcript, it can say. Hey, this is, just these, the PI context, like this is a wrongful death case. Like you need to immediately get on the phone with these people right now.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Wow. Yeah. So that, so it's extremely valuable from a marketing perspective.

Benny Gold: That's super cool. So what makes you attorneys inc different from other agencies out there?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah, so I the we run the entrepreneur operating system. So they have their, this thing called the three uniques, which is basically your key three key differentiators.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And so I would say this, the first one is we do only month to month. Like we don't do any long-term contracts. That makes us accountable for showing what we're doing, why we're doing it, what the value is to the firm every single month. If you're not happy, we're not trying to lock you in and you'd be surprised, but like a lot of our worthy rivals.

Gyi Tsakalakis: One year, two year, three year contracts and no real accountability. I think the second thing for us is like we're very focused on business metrics. As I was alluding to before, a lot of legal marketing agencies will talk in marketing language. They'll say things like impressions and clicks and even calls themselves like raw calls.

Gyi Tsakalakis: It doesn't tell you anything like you need to know things like what's your target cost per case. Total number of actually signed retainers, qualified consultations and you need to feed that information, that business data back into the machine so that you can actually manage your media to.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Those types of customers. So if you know it's a qualified consultation or if you know this as a client, you can go tell Google and these other platforms you're buying media from Hey, this was qualified. Go find more of these types of interesting signals. Interesting to buy media.

Gyi Tsakalakis: So that's the second thing. And then. We offer market exclusivity. Some of our clients will waive it, but a lot of our competitors will work with 30 law firms in the same area. And I've just always, maybe it's like my lawyer mindset, like you can't, it's a conflict of interest.

Gyi Tsakalakis: You can't represent the plaintiff and the defendant. Interesting. Yeah, that's, yeah. And I would say those are the big three, but and that's geographical.

Benny Gold: If you have a PI firm, like in. Some small town and outskirts of Detroit, you won't take on another one, or is that out work?

Benny Gold: Yeah

Gyi Tsakalakis: We navigate it on a case by case. Some firms will want, some firms want they will say look, this is your hq. And maybe they'll want a city. Maybe they'll want a county. Some firms want states, but I'm like, if you're gonna lock us out of a state, like there's obviously gonna be a price point to that.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Sure, yeah. But it varies from place to place and, and. Some firms will say, like I said, many firms will also just be like, we don't really care. And I, and that, I'll be honest with you, that's been a surprise to me because it's so intuitive to me. But like I said, a lot of our competitors don't do it.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And a lot of lawyers that we've talked to said they really don't care.

Benny Gold: Yeah. Wow. That's great.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Maybe I'm on the wrong differentiator. No,

Benny Gold: I think that's a, I think that's a good offering though. It's a kind of a confidence type thing. Do you think it's like stressful to be like, okay, like I have to give this person like a pinpoint of every.

Benny Gold: Detail every case. Like we have to, we actually have to point this back to a dollar, like that type of thing. I know, I know firms do that. Like I know law firms wanna know, and like you said, they'll move on to the next one. But like, how does, I mean that, that shows you obviously have a lot of faith in your product.

Benny Gold: But isn't that like super stressful to be able to. Show all that stuff, all those stuff.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah. It's funny, I was having a conversation I'll zoom out for a second. So there's this idea called, what you're alluding to is called attribution. So what gets credit for the case?

Gyi Tsakalakis: What gets credit for the qualified lead? And for a long time marketers convince businesses of all types, but lawyers in particular of this idea of last touch or last click attribution. So what that means is that. When a client comes in, whatever the last channel that client touches gets credit for it.

Gyi Tsakalakis: So lemme give you an example and it'll be obvious to you why this is a problem. So I get referred a lawyer's name, I go search online, the lawyer's running an was running a Google ad. I click on the ad and I call, and I hired a lawyer. The marketing agency that was running that Google ad campaign.

Gyi Tsakalakis: They're gonna say, Hey, look, we generated this call for you, but wait, no you didn't. It was referred by somebody else, a former client or a colleague, or whatever. And I call that attribution myopia. And the, and so anyway, they, we having a conversation with a lawyer about this today online, the pendulums swung back the other way.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Now lawyers are like, we can't make heads or tails outta this attribution stuff. It's not a hundred percent accurate and. And there are limitations to it, but my point is like it, I don't have to be a hundred percent right. I need to directionally be able to show you. That your marketing investments are paying off for you.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And so we do what's called dual source attribution. It's a combination of the quantitative, a analytics data, so people actually, it, the clicks that are going on behind through analytics and Google Search Console. We marry that data with the self-reported lead data. So when someone, ask somebody how they heard about it and they say a referral, so that would go in the referral bucket.

Gyi Tsakalakis: But we would show the picture of look, ultimately you can decide businesswise, how you wanna bucket your leads and your cases, but we're gonna show you the different channels that contributed to those. And by the way, legal service, some legal services consumers, they don't have, they, if they don't know a lawyer and they don't and they're not comfortable getting a referral, you can think of plenty of situations where people are like, don't wanna ask their friends for a divorce lawyer, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis: DUI, lawyer or something. If it's search, click, call hire, we can show you that journey. It's very quantifiable. You can do return on ad spend and when you do that enough over time, you get a pretty good sense of where the, the lines are like, you can, there's things you can do to tweak it and optimize campaigns and improve landing page experience and all that kind of stuff.

Gyi Tsakalakis: But ultimately you get a good sense of Hey, this is where you are today. Based on our experience, we believe we can improve it to look like this. And I tell people all the time, I'm like, when we create a forecast and we hit the forecast, everything's everybody's you're the best thing since sliced bread.

Gyi Tsakalakis: But predicting the future's hard and sometimes like we create a forecast and we can't hit that exact forecast. But ultimately, if we're showing a return on investment, if we're showing leading signals that we're moving in the right, leading indicators, we're moving in the right direction. The lawyers will get it, but to your point yeah, it's not a exact one for one, especially when you start thinking about things like brand, so if you're doing offline, like billboard buys or radio buys or brand social media buys.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Those pe the only way you're gonna find hear that show up in your attribution data is if someone's yeah, I see all your billboards. I watch your radio creative. It's not a direct response performance play. And I'm always like, look, we can, let's look at the individual channel performance, but also let's look at a blended mix and say, hey.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Based on all the money and time you're spending on marketing, are you generating a larger return? Are you growing your firm? Okay. And so you gotta look at the data a couple different ways.

Benny Gold: Interesting. Wow. That's a lucky. That's awesome though, man. Wow,

Gyi Tsakalakis: you asked.

Benny Gold: I did. No, that, that was great explanation.

Benny Gold: What do you think most lawyers are doing wrong right now when it comes to digital marketing and tracking their leads?

Gyi Tsakalakis: I think there's two big things. The first is, and look, I'm empathetic because it is a jungle out there. I, every day I see an ad for double your law firm's revenue.

Gyi Tsakalakis: But the first one I'll say is lawyers are chasing these shiny objects. Look, many practice areas in many, locations. It is super competitive. We got more lawyers per capita than any country in the world, right? There's a lot of consolidation going on because of alternative business structures.

Gyi Tsakalakis: You're gonna start to see venture capital and private equity money coming in to fund, especially in the plaintiff space. But law firms are consolidating and so you're seeing national players emerge across. And so it's competitive. And so lawyers get desperate and they wanna try this stuff. They're chasing these shiny objects and they're chasing these tactics that, maybe they'll work for a second, but they're not really sustainable. They're not long term. And then the second thing is that. And again, I'm empathetic because I think that marketing people have trained people to think like this, but like everybody is on direct response.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Like everybody is thinking about performance marketing. Everybody is fishing in the same watering hole and very few firms are actually doing what marketing people would call demand creation or brand building. And i'd say you gotta have a mix. And you can't silo your activities.

Gyi Tsakalakis: That's another thing too, like lawyers will get so hyper-focused on one channel, but marketing investments should be like portfolio strategy, just like you would do in you real life investing. Like you gotta diversify Yeah. Your marketing activities. And so those are the big mistakes that we see over and over again.

Benny Gold: That's, yeah. That's interesting. I like that analogy. Let's talk about CallRail a little bit. Yeah. How did attorneys Inc begin working with CallRail? And like, why did you feel their attorney CallRail was the right fit for your clients?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah like I mentioned earlier, my brother came from he was a big agency world some Publicis agencies, like big holding company agencies.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And so call tracking. In marketing writ large is like table stakes and there's some big players like Invoca. There's a couple other call tracking metrics but they're like enterprise solutions. Super expensive, very powerful, but super expensive. And CallRail was really trying to bring, at least my view of it, they were trying to bring call tracking to the SMB small business category.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And so the pricing was much more accessible. And they were do, and they had this key feature, which is this idea of dynamic number insertion that a lot, basically what it does is it it's, it cycles different phone numbers based on the sessions that are coming in. So back to that idea that you can actually track oh, you came from Facebook and you called or we use a call tracking number in Google business profile.

Gyi Tsakalakis: But it was really because they were, at the time, they were one of the few players that was servicing call tracking for the small business community.

Benny Gold: Yeah. So what's the importance of intake? I have had podcasts with a lot of people talk attorneys talking about intake. It's so important people coming up with designs about how to preserve the calls and what they should do.

Benny Gold: And we know CallRail is a player in there. So what, how important it is it for you? And tell me a little bit about that.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Intake is everything. I tell firms when we do exploratory calls for new clients, that's like the first thing we talk about is like, what's your intake process?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Because, and we learned this early on. We'd be making the phone ring and the lawyers would be like, we're not getting any cases. And then we'd start listening to call transcripts and be like you missed 20% of your, you didn't even answer the phone 20% of the time. Wow. And when you did, and sometimes when you did answer it, you sucked.

Gyi Tsakalakis: You were like law firm, like no empathy. Again, people are calling you with some of the worst things that's ever happened to them and you're just like law firm, like deadpan. And every industry report. CallRail's. Got a report on this. Most of the major practice management tools that study this stuff, like every law firm, we're still horrible at this.

Gyi Tsakalakis: We're horrible at intake, we're horrible at follow up. We're, lawyers don't want to, it, it's like sales 1 0 1 that you have to chase. And lawyers hate it. They're like, I don't, people wanna get ahold of me. They'll get ahold, they'll leave me a voice message. And it, and so anyway the classic story is lawyers will say.

Gyi Tsakalakis: To marketing agencies or even their internal marketing people. They'll say, we're not generating enough leads. And it's like you got plenty of leads, man. You're not working them right. Like you're not actually answering the phone. You're not nurturing the lead, you're not showing empathy like you're not.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And the other thing too, the internet has totally democratized access to lawyers. So if someone calls you and you're a jerk, guess what? They got 10 other lawyers to call that in five minutes.

Benny Gold: That's right. That's right. They all populate on Google. You're not the only game in town.

Benny Gold: So they're gonna be, they're gonna be dialing, it's just like anything, any service you're looking for, they're just gonna keep dialing. How does CallRail help you show clients exactly which marketing channels are producing results?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah, the they, they will give you, so you can actually, so I'm a so let's take a slight different thing.

Gyi Tsakalakis: So in a, in an ideal state. You're using CallRail on top of a client relationship management system, and I will disclose that I am a investor and advisor to a tool called Matics. That's a CRM basically for lawyers. And so an ideal situation, you got CallRail, CallRail will say, okay, this call came from this Facebook ad.

Gyi Tsakalakis: It goes into matics. You work the prospective client in Matics. You qualify that it's a lead, and eventually you've got it matriculates into a fee for you. And now because of that combination between CallRail and your CRM data, I can run a report that says, show me how much money we spent on Facebook to generate phone calls and what did that turn into in fees for us?

Gyi Tsakalakis: And so now you can do return on ad spend or return on investment analysis. And CallRail plays a big role in that in the the phone, text, and message context.

Benny Gold: And you were saying earlier you could just tell like the system to go find you like leads like that. Sorry if I'm simplifying it.

Benny Gold: Really, I'm No,

Gyi Tsakalakis: that's it. That's right. I'm learning a

Benny Gold: lot. I'm learning a lot, Keith. So sorry. Got it. If I'm simplifying that sort of thing.

Gyi Tsakalakis: No, you got it. So what happens is that the and you can do this with CallRail or you can do it I like the CRM 'cause the CRM takes it a step further, but you can do it just with CallRail too.

Gyi Tsakalakis: If you mark a lead qualified in CallRail, callRail has an API. So basically it connects with Google as an integration with Google Ads. Okay. And CallRail can tell the Google Ads platform, Hey, this phone call that came in, we, the CallRail will do the sentiment analysis and you can tag it and be like, look for certain words that will trigger, like lead qualification, score it.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And you can tell Google, Hey this lead that came in this phone call that came in. This is what we're looking for. Go and now it's all because it's largely AI based. Now the AI will be like, alright, now we're going to change con the configuration of the campaign to go find more prospects that match that.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Pattern. All AI is really doing is just big pattern recognition tool. And so what it's doing is it's okay, you told us this was a good signal, we're gonna go find the other patterns that match that. And when you start doing that over and over again, it starts getting better in training on your data.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And it starts to say, oh, it's becoming very obvious, like where we should be showing our ads, what messaging is working the best. Wow. What landing pages are working. Yeah. It's amazing. That's

Benny Gold: awesome. So what other key insights do you get? I know you just explained some of them, but I. I love that like you're able to track through CallRail, like where those ads are coming, like where your potential clients are coming from in the leads.

Benny Gold: And are there any other key insights that Attorneys Inc has gained by leveraging the CallRail data?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah, the other thing is you find where your problem areas are on intake because it'll it runs a sentiment analysis and it can be like. The, it'll be like these calls, the callers are all pissed off.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Here's why. And you can go and identify so it helps you manage intake specialists, especially if you like, if you have an intake team, whether it's internal or you're outsourcing to virtual receptionists, you can like basically score your intake team and be like, these are the, your A players, these are your B players.

Gyi Tsakalakis: You can coach 'em and manage 'em. Figure out why intake's going poorly. You can see if they're not following up. You can do it, it can also, you can adjust your workflow on the sales process. So like I was saying earlier, based on that initial phone call, you might be like this call needs to be live transferred to an attorney immediately because we want to get this case signed up.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Or it might trigger a workflow that says, Hey, we still need to gather more information. And so we're gonna put them in a nurture workflow, we're gonna collect and do more research and get some medical records or something. But all that stuff can be done automatically.

Benny Gold: Okay. Okay. So for a smaller.

Benny Gold: Law firm. Law firm. Like how do like somebody just starting out, how does CallRail help them streamline their intake process? And avoid like missing new clients, potentially new clients?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah. The fir the first thing, if you're gonna, if you use their I, sorry, CallRail, I'm blanking on the name of the tool that they just released a new tool.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Oh, I think it's called Voice Assist. So voice. Is basically an AI receptionist. So you tell Call, CallRail can scrape your website for all of your data. You can also input your business profile. You can enter frequently asked questions. You can talk about fee agreements, whatever information you want the machine to res, to answer and the machine will field your calls.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Now again, I always say. It, the devil's in the details with how you implement these things because it can also go very badly if you're not setting it up. And also giving people, I always say give people the option to connect with a human or to opt out of the AI technology.

Gyi Tsakalakis: But you think about that you have a very cost effective 24 7 never sleeps answering. Service that's not just leave a voice message. It's like it can answer questions, it can fill out scheduling forms so you can get the meetings on the calendar. It can do a lot of things and, some of them, some of the times, depending on how you configure it, you can actually include.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Scheduling stuff so you can, people asking like, Hey, when's my deposition? Or blah blah, blah. I can help you navigate that. So anyway, it basically serves as a virtual receptionist, as an AI receptionist. And so from a small lawyer just starting out that doesn't have the funds to hire a full-time receptionist and doesn't, isn't sold on the virtual receptionist option can be a great option for answering the phone.

Benny Gold: Wow. And then you could grow with it, 'cause it has all these other things that you can do. How does attorneys syn integrate CallRail into client's existing systems? Yeah, we, we

Gyi Tsakalakis: tell Go ahead. No, go ahead. Yep. I was just gonna say we tell everybody, get on CallRail.

Gyi Tsakalakis: If you don't, if you're not, this is how these conversation go. I'm like, our team's Hey do you, are you using a call tracking system? No, we're not. If you're not using a call tracking system, we're gonna be flying blind. We have no idea where the calls are coming from. We don't know which calls are qualified.

Gyi Tsakalakis: We don't know if you're answering the calls. So that's a pretty easy conversation. So I would, off the top of my head, I would say 90 some percent of our clients are using CallRail, or if they come to us with a call tracking technology like. We'll probably even suggest that they check out CallRail 'cause it's usually more cost effective.

Gyi Tsakalakis: But let's just assume that, they don't have, they usually don't have anything we'll deploy CallRail on their website, in their Google business profile forms. And then we, so for us, what we like to do is. And we try to be platform agnostic. Whether whatever practice management tool you use, CRM tool you use we will work with your existing data.

Gyi Tsakalakis: But an ideal situation, we'll export all the data into BigQuery and then we use Power bi to visualize the reporting dashboard. But basically attorneys uses CallRail to help our clients understand. Where their marketing investments are working, where there's opportunities for improvement in their intake and the lead scoring and all that kind of stuff to better inform their media buys.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And it's more

Benny Gold: than intake too. It's more than just taking the call. It's tracking. I just want to repeat that about ra. Okay. So it's

Gyi Tsakalakis: tracking and it's it's sentiment analysis. When I say that it, it can like, and people might be familiar with this in the context of 'cause Zoom has an AI that does some sentiment analysis on meetings. Some people use ot, ai. We use fireflies for our meetings. But basically the AI can tell you like what's going and what's going poorly in the conversations. And so it really helps you improve your intake, improve your the client experience or the potential client experience on the front end so that you can convert more clients more efficiently from lead to client.

Benny Gold: Yeah. So let's move over to AI for a few minutes. So AI is like a huge topic obviously in the legal industry right now. How do you see AI transforming how law firms are gonna manage leads and client intakes? I know it's starting to happen already. There's a lot of items out there and systems.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah, I think in the marketing context. The obvious place, especially as it relates to CallRail and, intake in general, is that you can, it can score the conversation. So it can basically, AI can say, Hey, you should have asked this question, or this the potential clients are asking this question a lot, so you better have answers for this.

Gyi Tsakalakis: It can obviously do the sentiment analysis. But really is a broader sense, like I was saying earlier, like what it's really good at is pattern recognition and it identifies patterns and data even that human beings aren't good at identifying. We use it all the time and to analyze marketing data and it will find patterns that.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Even our best analysts won't find. And so I think in the marketing context, it's the ability to like essentially have a conversation with your firm's data to be able to, talk about hey you, you can upload call transcripts, whether you're using CallRail or using some other, you can use chat GBT for this, but, again, there's all sorts of privacy and rules, professional conduct and anonymizing and all that kind of stuff that we're not gonna get into right now. But there's ways to configure it so that you can protect that stuff. But let's just assume you've solved those issues. You can put in a hundred calls and say, what are the biggest objections that people have when they call the law firm?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Like, why don't people hire us? And it will tell you, and it's pretty darn good.

Benny Gold: Wow. Wow.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah.

Benny Gold: That's amazing. So what's your take on lawyers' hesitation to adopt AI and how do you think they can, like what's the first step to, for a lawyer to start experimenting with an AI system?

Gyi Tsakalakis: I would just go play with Chad, GPT.

Gyi Tsakalakis: You know what's funny? I've been doing this for a long time and I remember when. There was this, there used to be this big fight in legal about cloud software and on-premises software. Everybody's I would never put my documents up into the cloud. It's not safe, and blah, blah, blah.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And they were super resistant to it. Yeah. And I remember every single legal tech company fought these fights. I, I had the privilege of getting to know the leaders at avo, the leaders at Clio, a lot of the legal tech companies, Matt Spiegel at law, mad. And they fought this fight for years.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Lawyers were like, we will not put our data in the cloud. And of course we think about that now and we laugh. 'cause every system's cloud, you know what, ai, it's been the complete opposite. Lawyers are one of the fastest adopters of ai. And I think a lot of it is that they see they're like, holy moly, we can actually, this automates a lot of our work.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And I think there's, and this has been a big conversation, especially for and for lawyers that are listening. That are on the billable hour, and they're gonna roll their eyes. I know it because they, people have been talking about the death of the billable hour forever. But when you actually see what the AI can do, when you have it configured and deployed on your firm data, and it takes hours of legal research, it takes hours of legal drafting, it takes hours of legal writing and reduces it to minutes and seconds, you're like, wow, this is a true game changer.

Gyi Tsakalakis: The, in the, in the plaintiff space, there's a bunch of players for med chronologies and for all sorts of other aspects to demand generation letters. And so anyway, it's been the opposite. Like lawyers are super adopters of ai and I tell lawyers all the time, I'm like, if you're a billable lawyer and you're like, I don't, I'm not gonna do this AI thing, the market is gonna end around you because the clients are f are, they're like.

Gyi Tsakalakis: They're like, how can it be that you're charging me several thousand dollars to do this thing and this lawyer down the street is doing it for a fraction of the cost? How can it be that you're charging me thousands of dollars to do this thing and I can go to chat GPT? And you know what, like maybe there's some risks with chat GPT, but I feel like I'm getting a pretty good result.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And by the way. We're only two years into this thing. Think about three years out, five years out, 10 years out. Yeah. Like the, like it's, this thing is learning exponentially. Not to mention that the players in legal, like Thomson Reuters and Cleo with VLC, like they're training their ais just on. Cases and firm data.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And so these ais are gonna be really good. So I would say if you plan on practicing law over the next 10 years, if you're not getting ready to retire in the next two to three years, you better hop on the AI train as fast as you possibly can.

Benny Gold: You just have to ize your AI cases. Right?

Benny Gold: Totally. That's the thing that's crazy. A law review and look. Sites on 'em or the citation?

Gyi Tsakalakis: They're trained, they're using the large corpus of lawyer shepherded cases to train the ai. Yeah. They're using the, if you upload firm data into these tools, they're using it to train the models.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And so it's funny, we joke around, but it's like you're, the firms are training the machines on the technology that's gonna put a lot of these firms outta business. And don't get me wrong, I, in the short term here, like I, I'm still very much in the camp of lawyers Plus AI is better than lawyers alone is better than AI alone.

Gyi Tsakalakis: But when you see what it can do, like the nu the amount of legal work of the current type of legal work, 'cause the Lud eight fallacy, people will say, oh, there's gonna be all this new legal work that we're gonna serve. The, 70% of the latent legal market doesn't get served by lawyers anyway.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And so we're gonna have, there's gonna be more access to justice and we're gonna bring the cost of lowering down that. And that all sounds great to me. But I think about it and I'm like I'm a family law lawyer in my local community and there's only so many people here and there's only so many people getting divorced and divorce is what I do.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And what used to take me hours to do doesn't, like you better come up with flat fee billing or subscription billing. Yeah. Or project billing or value-based pricing because billing by the hour, like you're not gonna be able to, you're not gonna be able to justify. The the hours. I wonder if you used a

Benny Gold: lot more pro se attorneys too.

Benny Gold: Just they could do their own research and get their own cases. Find me a case on this, that sort of thing. And then, I think like for the pi, the plaintiff's lawyers, I think, just. Getting the demands out mean, we've had techs on our show that talk about all that, do all those things, obviously they still get a percentage of the, of what they recover.

Benny Gold: But I think the hourly is where it's gonna be. Get interesting, like spending hours, like putting together a, some sort of like a pleading or complaint or something like that. So I, yeah, I think you're exactly right with the come up with a flat rate type of thing.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah. And in the contingency world, in plaintiff lawyer world, what's gonna happen is lawyers that used to handle a hundred cases are gonna be able to handle 500 cases.

Gyi Tsakalakis: 'cause they're just gonna be largely supported by tech. And so these national players are gonna spend tons of money on radio, billboard and all this other media to scoop up more of the market share. And then, you don't need as many lawyers to work the same number, to work more cases. So you're gonna reduce head count, take on more cases.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And that puts a lot of pressure on lawyers.

Benny Gold: Super interesting. How do you like being a podcast host?

Gyi Tsakalakis: I love it. I, when I started, I thought, I was like, no one's gonna listen to this thing. I did it on a whim, and I'll tell you, it has been, we had a conference, people like.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Wanted to come and, talk about the topics. We talk on the podcast and it's been very positive from a business development standpoint for our companies. And I really enjoy it. I'm very lucky, like my co-host who's a friend and also a competitor, like we have a great time doing it. And I tell people all the time I.

Gyi Tsakalakis: We know we've had some lawyers that we've talked to about doing it as well, and we're like, you do a if you're a local law firm and you do like a local, cover your neighborhood, have other business leaders come in, yeah, do a podcast, maybe cover sports, man, it is a great way to be top of mind with folks.

Benny Gold: Yeah. No, I like that, that I think that's a tremendous idea actually to do that in your in your community. So is there anything we missed that you wanna point out about? CallRail or attorney sink or anything in general, or, and by the way, we thank you for coming to Boston Connect. That was so cool to meet you in person.

Benny Gold: I get very fired up when I have an event and I get to meet somebody that I've just seen for so long in the huge community that we call Instagram. 'cause I believe, Gyi, that it's like. It might be thousands of us, but everybody knows who they are, each other are.

Gyi Tsakalakis: I totally agree. Thanks so much for hosting that in Boston.

Gyi Tsakalakis: I had a great time actually. We had some mutual connections there too, so that was cool. Really good time and really cool space. Yeah. Yeah. It was, that was what's name of that space again? So that was our

Benny Gold: second year there. It's called Cavo. Cavo. It's right downtown. Give it

Gyi Tsakalakis: a shout. Give it a shout.

Gyi Tsakalakis: It's really cool. Yeah. Yeah.

Benny Gold: And hopefully we're gonna do Miami in February. That's what we usually do. We did it in January last year, but Miami's next. So we're looking for Miami's

Gyi Tsakalakis: nicer than Boston and February. It is.

Benny Gold: Yes. It's

Gyi Tsakalakis: No, I, this has been great. I, I tell lawyers all the time, I'm like, look, I'm like, you gotta hold your marketing investments accountable.

Gyi Tsakalakis: That's my main message. Diversify and hold your dollars and time accountable and good luck out there. And if you desire to grow. The other thing that we still hear all the time is I just do good work and new business comes. And if that's true and you're hitting your growth objectives, doing that, like good for you.

Gyi Tsakalakis: But most of the time without a supporting investment, like you're missing out on opportunity because people are fickle. Even your best referral sources, if you're not staying in touch with them, if you're not nurturing those relationships they forget about you. They forget about who you are, they forget about what you do, they forget to refer to you.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Be intentional with your growth.

Benny Gold: Love it. Gyi Tsakalakis knows his stuff. Thank you so much, man, for being here. We'll be in touch. Stay right there, everybody else. Thanks for tuning in wherever you are in the world today. Enjoy yourselves. Cheers.