Maximum Lawyer

Tyson Mutrux 00:00:02 This is maximum lawyer with your host, Tyson Matrix.

Tyson Mutrux 00:00:12 So, Ted, you've got a JD and an MBA, and now you're running a company that serves over a thousand law firms. But before we get into all that kind of stuff, because I think there's a lot of interesting stuff that you can talk about because you're because of your experience. What I want to know is, like, who who were you before you leads? And and what sets you on the path that you're on now?

Ted DeBettencourt 00:00:34 Who was I before? It's a great question. And, Tyson, thanks for having me on the show. Just a kid from Martha's Vineyard, third generation. Grew up on a little island. Went to college, went to law school. When I was in law school, I didn't really like it. My one writing teacher kind of sat me down after her first assignment. She said, Ted, are you sure you want to do this? I said, what do you mean? She's like, well, this isn't really looking pretty good.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:00:55 I'm like, all right. And I kind of saw the writing on the wall, saw what the professors were telling me. And I was like, all right. Wasn't really excelling in law school, but I really liked the business stuff, and I hated writing briefs and doing constitutional law. I just kind of found it, found it boring. So my school also had an accelerated MBA program so I could stay in law school, but while doing it, also get my MBA as well. So instead of, you know, switching courses, I'm like, why don't I just do both? So when I got out of law school, I also had an MBA as well. I really liked the law school stuff because it really helped. Didn't train you how to be a lawyer. It taught you how to think like a lawyer and using that analytical ability to kind of look at both sides of a situation really helps in business. So I don't regret law school. I loved it for kind of how it trained my brain to be better at business, and it truly did.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:01:44 But the business side is what I really always had a passion for.

Tyson Mutrux 00:01:47 You know what I want to talk about is Martha's Vineyard. So tell me about Martha's Vineyard. What was it like growing up there? I don't know anything about it otherwise, I, I know that it's a place that sounds like it's really fancy and it's a great place to visit. But other than that, I don't know anything about it. So tell me. I'm very curious about Martha's Vineyard.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:02:03 So fun place to grow up. Very sheltered. So like, you know, you're reading about stuff in the news and people going to like McDonald's and like having malls, and we'd have to go on a trip off island so that you live on island. Everything is off island. Oh, where is that? It's off islands. So the whole concept of off island was this foreign, mystical place until you go to college, basically. But it was fun, but it was very secluded. And everyone thinks Martha's Vineyard like, oh, you know, stick their nose up.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:02:29 Like, if you're from there, you don't have a house on the water, you have a house in the middle, and you are in the economy serving the people that come down in the summer. So like, you know, my family had a small hotel growing up, 15 rooms. My mother was a eighth grade math teacher, small businesses and a teacher. But it was fun, like for sports in high school. We would have to take the boat and it would take like, you know, eight hours to get there, to have a football game, a baseball game, whatever it was. But then the summer, like a whole new slew of people came in. So you'd have your your year round friends and then the summer friends that would come. So it was kind of fun to have that dichotomy. And there's always good jobs out there because the housing is so expensive. So, you know, I was making 20, 25 bucks an hour at like 17 years old thinking that was normal.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:03:12 So it was a good economy for for young kids.

Tyson Mutrux 00:03:15 So that's interesting about the summer kids and all that. Did that make you become better at like befriending people and establishing relationships because of that?

Ted DeBettencourt 00:03:26 I think so, but there was kind of a I want to say yes, but the reality is it kind of created a townie vibe. So when the kids would come down from off island and they'd say in their summer homes, like my summer home was also my winter home, my fall home and my spring home. So we didn't have summer homes. So there was somewhat of a a little bit of a dichotomy between the people that would summer there and live there, and it kind of just kind of made me understand that there's a difference. And if you work really hard, you can have a summer home, I guess, and that people do have that lifestyle. So there was that. But you kind of just got good at talking to the girls a lot, because it was a whole different group of girls that would come down and it kind of got you out of your shell and learned that, hey, if you get good at making friends, you know, you can get more dates.

Tyson Mutrux 00:04:11 Yeah. And that's very important. Very much so. Last. This is the last Martha's Vineyard question. Maybe, maybe I'm gonna say maybe to give myself an opening for later. But what do the what are the townies think of jaws, the movie jaws?

Ted DeBettencourt 00:04:27 Oh, they love it. We all love that movie. So the kid who got bit by the shark was one of my assistant football coaches.

Tyson Mutrux 00:04:36 No way.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:04:37 And they hired a bunch of locals because they didn't think the movie was going to be what it was. So they gave all the locals and they gave them all a piece of the action. So he got points on that, and he always said that it paid for his roof. He had like two lines in the movie, but he had like substantial revenue streams from that movie his whole life, so they don't love it. They actually just celebrated it was this a few weeks ago. They just did the 50th anniversary of the movie. So like they had a bunch of the actors come down, they did like big showings all around, and they even have like an Amity Island, the name of the vineyard in the, in the movie, weekend where like, they have all this set ups and like, tour buses come through and film it.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:05:14 So the island loves it. And it's a fun movie, like my parents are actually extras in jaws two, so you can see him running on the beach, but they use a lot of local talent for talent, a lot of local people in the movie.

Tyson Mutrux 00:05:25 That's cool. That's really awesome. All right, so I want to shift gears. You had said because we were talking beforehand, you mentioned something about Elsas and how how beneficial they've been. So tell me about that. What what's, what's going on with Elsa? It's working so well for you.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:05:38 Sure. Well, what we discovered probably about almost two years ago now, is that message response time is a ranking factor in Elsa's. So a lot of firms will, you know, try to get as many Elsa's as they can, but they can't just get up in the rankings. And then, you know, we looked and said, all right, well, yeah, your messages are off. So what happens is Google, when you turn on messages and you answer them fast, Google really rewards that behavior.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:06:03 So what they do is they rank your ad higher. So not only do you get more LSA messages and you get a heck of a lot more LSA phone calls, but Google even goes so far as to putting a little badge on your LSA ad that says typically replies in. It'll say a day, a few hours, a few minutes, and you always want that few minutes because the faster you reply, the higher they rank you and the more leads you get. So what we've discovered is that when we answer messages for our firms is that they rank higher, so they get a lot more traction in LSA. The other thing that LSA does that is a little bit sneaky is when a user submits an LSA message, Google takes that same message and they try to get it to three other firms. So now Google is charging four firms for one lead.

Tyson Mutrux 00:06:48 Wow.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:06:49 Very sneaky. But so you know, I always tell firms don't be mad at me for that one. Get mad at Google. But what we discovered is that how we do it is we manually log in to the LSA accounts and by doing it manually, because we have a team of real people doing that for our firms, by doing it manually, we're able to get the phone numbers of the LSA lead before all the other companies are using Autoresponders.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:07:12 So when firms use us, we get them on the phone with leads before anybody else, since four firms get those leads. That's a huge advantage because now we're beating all the three of the leads to those, the three of the firms to those leads. So like in the past two years, like, you know, we've we've had at least 100% growth in the past three years. We've attributed our growth pretty much a lot to LSA because like firms really want to rank high in LSA.

Tyson Mutrux 00:07:34 Well, that's that's incredible advice. I hear a lot of say people say LSA is great, which I agree with them. You also hear people say, oh, LSA have never worked for work for me. I wonder how much of it has to do with the fact that they're not being proactive about responding to those leads.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:07:46 If you don't respond quickly, Google won't rank you. So like it's a feast or famine world. You're either crushing it or else, or you're yelling at your marketing company because they're not doing what you should really be doing, which is answering the phone calls fast and turning on messages and either answering every message in a few minutes, you know, one, or hiring a company to do that.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:08:06 So if you're not doing it, you're going to be losing out to those that are.

Tyson Mutrux 00:08:09 Yeah. I do think it's interesting that that's the way you as someone that owns a chat company, I don't know if you'd call it that, but you put it that way. But it is kind of interesting because you all manually do respond to those so quickly. I think that's pretty cool. But I wonder how much that has to comes from how you kind of started things because you were you you became frustrated with the chat services that were out there. So you basically just started firing them and you're like, I'm just going to start answering these chats myself. So do you think that it comes from that?

Ted DeBettencourt 00:08:39 Partially so, for the most part because we always said, like, you can use automation and AI to do things, but if you can do it better with person, these leads are worth so much. And the speed to which your firm needs to get on top of it matters such a great deal.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:08:53 So if you can help a firm get to a lead three minutes faster, five minutes faster. Or show an empathetic conversation and you can show through data that that results in more cases. If it takes a little bit more effort by using real people, it's worth it. So these are all pain points I had when I was running an agency. And, you know, the go between the chat companies and the firms. And I just realized that it's nothing beats a person. So let's use people at it and just throw people at it to solve the problems.

Tyson Mutrux 00:09:20 Do you think that I will get good enough at some point? Right. It's not there now. But like in ten years, do you think you'll get to the point where it is good enough? Just as like where people feel like they're talking to another human?

Ted DeBettencourt 00:09:32 Absolutely. And, you know, three years ago we've had people telling me when, you know, when I started coming out, Ted, you're not going to have a business in six months.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:09:40 I said, yeah, maybe we'll see what happens. So, you know, I've been hearing that every few months for the past three, maybe four years now. And it's getting closer as it gets. Keep getting closer. We keep iterating. We don't use anything with AI on the front end consumer facing. We use a ton of AI and data analysis. So like if we want to figure out what script works better in this situation, we can run a million iterations through AI and help us look at our existing data to help figure it out. And they can do it across multiple clients. It can do data analysis that we can't conceivably do in a in a short period of time. But in terms of human powered chat, take it over. It absolutely will. And then it's going to be a race to who has better data to feed it. So whoever has a ton of data to feed it, to say, hey, we ran a million iterations using this, million iterations using this, it's just going to become a training algorithm.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:10:25 We have a ton of data because, you know, we've answered a few million shots at this point, so we're hoping we'll be at the forefront. But right now, every time we're do experiments to say, hey, let's try AI, let's try that. We just see AI isn't as good as a human right now.

Tyson Mutrux 00:10:37 What do you think about the idea that it's actually going to make human connection stronger, because it's going to take care of all the unnecessary stuff. The AI can take care of that, and it's going to force more human will, human connection, because people are going to want to talk to each other more. They're going to have the opportunity to talk to each other more, have the opportunity to see each other more in person. What do you think about that thought?

Ted DeBettencourt 00:10:57 I like the idea and the one, the iteration we've always thought about, well, if if everyone's going, I well, what if the next iteration of chat isn't just a communication, but up pops a little window and it's like a zoom with a person.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:11:09 So we got so far as to a B testing some of that, and it didn't work out now. But we think that when everyone's bought and bought chatting, there might be a better opportunity for a market for just proving that it's human. We haven't seen it yet because it's not quite there yet, but we think it's just a matter of time.

Tyson Mutrux 00:11:26 That's I think that that's it's funny because we just don't know where it's headed. I think that that's definitely something that is a possibility. I don't know if you saw this recently about Google, how they're not banning AI voices, but they're only monetizing human voices on their platform starting in mid-July, which I think is a really interesting thing.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:11:44 You mean like YouTube videos?

Tyson Mutrux 00:11:46 Yeah, YouTube. So YouTube videos. Yeah. So it sounds like it's going to completely collapse the faceless YouTube channel marketing that a lot of people have been doing lately. At least they claim that they've been making millions of dollars on. I'm sure some maybe have, but I think a lot of it's overblown.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:12:02 There's a few making a few bucks and then everyone's selling courses.

Tyson Mutrux 00:12:04 He's exactly right. That's what it is. But it makes me wonder how many, how many companies are gonna start writing policies to make things human only as opposed to to using AI?

Ted DeBettencourt 00:12:13 We're seeing some stuff in California about that. So we have to be very careful in certain states about how we do it. And I know, what's the bike company peloton? They got in trouble on the chat for in California for how they handled it, because they part of it was they were using AI chat. And when you use AI chat, you have to be more upfront about how you disclose it. So we had our lawyer look into it, make sure it doesn't apply to us. And it's very specific about AI chat, but different states, California in particular, they do have different regulations about how you interact with bots on a website when you're representing a company.

Tyson Mutrux 00:12:47 We had a conversation internally in the leadership team meeting last week, I think is what it was, and it was about how how less effective AI chat has been from whenever we were doing human only chat.

Tyson Mutrux 00:13:04 And it's not even close. And so I think that that's kind of an interesting thing where, I do think you're going to start to see in situations like that, people are going to start to shift back to human chat, because AI is just not as effective in some things.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:13:19 Yeah, I think I has a million use cases. I use it all the time. And by that I mean not as much of my, my executive team. I probably use it the least I have. My team members are on it 24 over seven. I can take a lot of great data and do a ton of things with it. But right now, if everyone's digging going, I let them go. That way. All our data and every time we do testing against other modules and other chat companies. And even if we set it up ourselves to try to ab test against ourselves, against AI, we're just not seeing the same results. So we're very data driven and we just know we get paid on a per lead basis.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:13:55 So if we do less effective, not only do our clients do less, but we like make less money. So we always want to maximize leads for our clients. So we know with humans we can maximize the leads.

Tyson Mutrux 00:14:06 It makes me think about a few years ago, we got this pretty good case through our chat, and it was the person kept using the phrase traffic attorney. They need a traffic attorney, they need a traffic attorney. And they thought that an injury attorney was a traffic attorney because it was a car crash. And but through asking some some more questions about it, they were able to determine, oh, this is this is about a car crash. They don't need a traffic attorney. They just thought that's what they were called, what we were called. And so the human was able to ask an additional few questions to get to the bottom of it. Right. Okay. well, well, it's not just. Do you need a traffic attorney? Like, what are you actually calling about? What's what's the situation? Whereas I don't I think the I might get oh, I need a traffic attorney because the I here's what the I is really good at is filtering out cases that we don't want.

Tyson Mutrux 00:14:56 It's really good at that. But in a situation like that there might be a really good case. They just are using the wrong terminology. So the eye is then filtering it out. And so that I think that that is a that is a concern of mine when it comes to using AI chat.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:15:11 I completely agree. You can use AI to filter out what we find is the biggest boon for using humans is so you know, we're on a lot of pi sites, so 62% of our chats start with a question. Here's something bad that happened. You know, I was in a car accident, got injured. What do I do? Most people are looking for a P.I. attorney. They haven't hired a Pi attorney before. Or if they have, maybe it was one time, a long time ago. So we start all our chats with, oh my goodness. We try to show as much empathy as we can upfront. Oh my goodness. I can't believe what you're going through. That's horrible. Just so you know, you're in the right place.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:15:43 We can definitely help you. So by having that empathetic way to build trust with clients, what we're seeing is that we can still filter out the bad ones, but we're having a better conversation with the really good leads. And not all of them are really good. But when we have that conversation with all of them, by the time they get to the point where they're ready to get to give us their contact information, we've already had a built some rapport with them. So then we hand it off to the law firm. The chances of them showing up for the consultation becoming a case has increased versus a lot of the AI and faux AI, which is really just like filling out an online form. So we're able to have better, longer conversations that turn into more cases and leads for our clients.

Tyson Mutrux 00:16:22 Yeah. This is an example of, you know, why you like a B testing so much. You're a huge believer in a B testing. And so can you explain to to people what that means for like and so I bet a lot of people don't even know what a b testing is when it comes to the law firm owners.

Tyson Mutrux 00:16:37 Some of you do, I'm sure, but I bet the big chunk doesn't know what a B testing is. So can you explain what it is and then what? What kinds of maybe some simple tests that law firm owners can run to improve their the performance in their firm?

Ted DeBettencourt 00:16:52 Sure. A B test is just when you take you know, I do it in my garden as much as I do it in my on my our websites. We're probably running about 30 AB tests right now at any given time. So what that means is you send traffic to your website and there's a few ways to do it. Let's say you send everyone to your website and you want to see what call now button works better. Does it work better if you put it in the top in red or no, the top in red or the top in blue? So you want to see if red or blue does better. So basically you run 100% of the traffic to your website, but 50% of the traffic see the red button 50% see the blue button.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:17:28 And then you let it run for 30 days or until you get a statistically significant amount of data. And then you see what button generated more calls. And if you can say, hey, I got 50 calls when it was red and 25 it was blue. Shoot. You make sure your buttons red. So in the same way, you can test red versus blue. You can also test other things. So like we have a lot of firms that we're testing. Do I get better results when I drive PPC traffic to my homepage, or do I get it when I drive it to my landing page? The first test we ever did was do I get more leads when I have chat on or when I have chat off? So we ran the bunch of those for our firms, but nowadays pretty much all law firms no chat is on 98% of the top 500 law firms in the country. So now it's less about chat or no chat. It's more about does this chat company does better or does that chat company does better.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:18:18 So oftentimes when we go live in a firm gets a lot of traffic and they're not convinced that human can be a bot, we'll say, all right let's do a split test. We'll give it to you for free for 30 days. Try it. And then after 30 days, you tell us who got you more leads. So we do those all the time. Running them right now, probably about 30 or so. And basically we just give it to him for free and say, don't make a decision based on your gut. Make a decision based on your data, based on the data, and you pick the winner after the 30 day free trial.

Tyson Mutrux 00:18:44 That's pretty cool. Have you have you seen any testing where it shows that a chat that pops up is more effective, or one that stays down? It gives them the option of clicking on like the size of it, the colors or anything like that.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:18:56 Yes. So there's a million different iterations. So we've tried all of them. And we started with one thing and then we iterated, iterated and iterated.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:19:04 Long story short, you can get the more aggressive you are with the chat bot, the better you'll do. But it comes at a caveat. So what we do is if you be too aggressive, Google won't like it. So one of our competitors, I won't say who on mobile when you pop up, it takes up about 50 to 60% of the screen and it's like, well, okay, yeah, it's good for chat, but that's horrible user experience and it decreases the amount of phone calls you get. So if you run an AB split to an AB test against anyone, never just track. If you're doing it against chat, never just track the amount of chat leads you get. Look at the overall leads because like, yeah, I can put chat out. Block your phone bar, block your contact bar and then hey, look how many chat leads you get. But yeah, your phone number is tanked, so don't look at the chat alone. If you're looking at leads, look at total leads.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:19:50 So you want you know and that's true for anything. So make sure you take the holistic approach when you do an AB test. So you're looking if you're looking at leads you're looking at how many total leads you got. So it should never just be about just chat or just red first blue. But look at the whole picture when you're doing AB split test.

Tyson Mutrux 00:20:05 Yeah I wouldn't I wouldn't have thought about that. That's interesting. I never thought about maybe you getting penalized for something that's really more effective, but then in the long run, it's not because it's going to take away from your traffic. So that's that's a really interesting thing.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:20:19 It's sneaky. So the companies I when I had when I wasn't having a chat company, I was using their chat companies and I was tracking calls because I had a small agency and I was tracking calls, and I'd put these chats on my websites and I'd like the leads, the firms like the leads, but my my call rail volumes were bottoming and I was like, what happened on my phone calls? And I couldn't see it on desktop.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:20:37 But then I, you know, this was seven, eight years, eight years ago, so phone wasn't as big. But now it's, you know, 80% of traffic. I'd go on the phone and be like, wait a minute. I'd have to like click all these buttons before I get to the call Now button. I'm like, okay, that's where my phone leads went. I was getting chats, but they were stealing my phone calls. So if you're doing that, don't do that. If if you have that on, tell your chat company to stop doing it.

Tyson Mutrux 00:20:58 Well that's good advice. Really good advice. So I'm going to shift gears a little bit and talk about just like legal marketing in general. So because you've been in legal marketing for over a decade, and I, I wonder what some of the biggest myths or misunderstandings that you see in the legal space.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:21:14 Sure. Probably the biggest one is in from an agency. Well, a lot of firms listening. If you don't think you're not getting enough leads, that might be the case.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:21:24 But check your intake, listen to your phone calls when your agencies and your leads are coming in. What is your follow up process? If you have listened to 100 phone calls, are you happy with what percent of them? 90% of firm owners never listen to the phone calls. Don't understand the process. Before you start yelling at your agency to get you more leads, make sure you're maximizing the value you can be getting with the leads you have in. We see the biggest gains that firms make aren't so much when they double their lead volume, but when they really get a handle of what's happening to leads that do come in. So the scariest thing a firm can ever do is listen in to a random assortment of 2025 phone calls and seeing if they were handled properly. Next, what happens is, well, okay, well, what happens when you get a lead form, submit a chat, a phone call, and they'll tell you they'll call you back. What is your lead chase down process. So the biggest opportunity is and the quickest wins I've seen for firms are the ones that really get a grasp of those, so they can make sure they're following up with the leads and answering the phone when they call, and not having it go to voicemail.

Tyson Mutrux 00:22:25 Is there any sort of drop off in the leads where they hear the message, you know, this is going to be a recorded call, yada yada yada. Where they just drop off because they it intimidates them or whatever. Is there any drop off that you've seen?

Ted DeBettencourt 00:22:38 It could be I haven't jumped in a car in 7 or 8 years. I think I'm pretty standard nowadays. Pretty much if you're using it, if you're spending money in marketing, you're probably recording your phone calls if you're not. The payoff of the 1%, if that of leads you to lose, you lose because they hear that recording is more than made up for it by the fact that you can track your marketing. If you can't track your marketing, you can't manage it, you can't measure it, you can't manage it. So any offset of of having people hang up because they hear that's being recorded. I would argue, is more than made up for it by the sense that if you measure it, you can manage it.

Tyson Mutrux 00:23:14 Yeah. So I mean, you've I mean, you have access to a lot of data yourself. You have access to seeing a lot of different firms and how they operate. And I wonder if when you're looking at firms that are crushing it online versus let's say, like those are just kind of like just exist. They just kind of are there. what do you think is usually the difference? Is it, you know, is it driving a bunch of traffic? Is it the messaging on their websites? Is it like their offers something else? Like. Like where? Like what is that difference between the ones that are crushing it and the ones that are not.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:23:44 The ones that know their numbers? So that's kind of the phrase I like to use firms that know their numbers and treat their law firms like a business. As you know, this is what the business does. I just happen to be a lawyer. They're the ones that tend to grow the business slash law firm, the lawyers that want to be lawyers and kind of get annoyed by thinking about business stuff.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:24:05 They're the ones that kind of have don't have as much long term success. So if you if you're the the managing partner of a law firm and you think of yourself as a CEO and you're looking at KPIs, and the KPIs aren't strictly case data, but more on the marketing side as well, those are the ones that tend to have the success.

Tyson Mutrux 00:24:22 What about when it comes to like, the mindset or the behaviors of law firm owners that are that are growing consistently versus those that are just kind of. Getting stuck.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:24:30 Great question. I don't know too much about the mindset of the lawyers. My main contacts with all the big firms are the, you know, the CMOs, the chief marketing officers. At that point, I think what they do is they're trusting their team and they're not trying to do things that they don't like doing. So when you get to the point where you can hire a CMO and let them steer the ship in terms of the marketing side, and you're just hiring the right people around you to do it and not trying to hold on to everything.

Tyson Mutrux 00:24:54 Let's focus in on the marketing like the CMO, the marketing people. So are there are there some that just kind of like get it and like and they're like, okay, we got to do this this then and here's why. And do they have any are there any are there any common ribbons or common themes with those that get it. And then the ones that are just the marketing doesn't work for them because they've got some sort of mental block.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:25:16 I wouldn't say it's a mental block. I'd say when I'm talking to somebody and I'm saying when I'm asking data questions and when I ask data questions because I'm only effective if I can prove to the firm I get them more leads? So when we sit down in a in a meeting, I'm like, all right, well, how many leads you get last month? Oh, I don't know. You know, the phone rang a lot. All right. It's gonna be hard for me to prove. Prove a percent increase. When? When you tell me.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:25:38 I got a lot. Like. Well, what does that mean? So the firms that. No, they're not even the CMOs that know their numbers and have some data to share. Those are the ones that you see grow because you measure it. You can manage it. If you don't measure it and you're going off your gut, you're going to have a hard time, you know, managing a big enterprise.

Tyson Mutrux 00:25:54 Like, what are the key numbers you think the firm should focus on? So when leads are coming in? And I mean, I'm not talking about all numbers. They should focus specifically when it talks to like marketing comes to marketing. Like what are those what are those key numbers if they're let's pick three. What are the top three things they should be looking at.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:26:10 Likes, retweets and thumbs up in YouTube.

Tyson Mutrux 00:26:13 Yeah, I was like that. No way, no way I was looking at your face.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:26:17 Those are the vanity numbers. Those don't matter. The ones we like. leads wanted lead.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:26:24 Wanted lead to case. Signed rate and then average case value. So if you know how many leads you get. So let's say you get 100 leads. Well how many of those are wanted. So a lot of firms know how many leads they got. But then they get into oh that wasn't wasn't a lead. Well it's either a wanted lead or it's not. All right. So then of the one it leads you have how many did you sign into cases. What percent of those. And then from there you can back into a lot. So total leads wanted leads sign cases average case value. So those are the ones that I'd focus on if I were running a firm. And the ones that the big firms focus on and tell us about.

Tyson Mutrux 00:26:58 Okay. So if you had to kill one of those and you had to keep the other three, which one would you have to kill?

Ted DeBettencourt 00:27:02 I'd kill total leads. I think wanted leads is more important.

Tyson Mutrux 00:27:05 Oh, interesting. Okay, that's I would I would not have guessed that.

Tyson Mutrux 00:27:08 So it very interesting. All right. So let's shift gears again. We're going to stay in when it comes to marketing and online marketing. But marketing intake client communications things like that. If you were to project over the next 3 to 5 years, where do you see online marketing intake and client communications headed?

Ted DeBettencourt 00:27:28 Well, marketing first is going to be going. How are people figuring out how to leverage AI more. And when consumers use AI more? How are you going to get in the top of the ChatGPT rankings hanging on top of the Gemini, the grok, whatever. You know, the is the new cool one on the block. So I think that will come with a shift. We're already seeing a pretty downward trend in SEO traffic for a lot of long tail searches, informational queries that now just is showing up in Google with the answer. And from AI we haven't seen the leads drop off, but the information, the long tail queries are changing. So with that change means less traffic. With that, traffic change means have to figure out more ways to get your ads in front of those eyeballs.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:28:10 So used to just drive them to the page and then run retargeting ads to them and hopefully get them in the long tail. But that's changing quickly because of the AI stuff. So that's going to continue to shift more to OT, of course, more to AI figuring out how to get in the top of those algorithms, and those will be a continual change. What was the next one after marketing.

Tyson Mutrux 00:28:27 Communications, client communications, client communications, marketing, and then intake.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:28:33 Client communication? We're seeing a lot of cool platforms on the market come around in terms of helping clients better communicate with their firms in terms of where they are in the current status of their case, you know, case status. They're one of the ones. We're seeing a lot of success. Our clients see a lot of success with and just being able to communicate with that. But I think I makes their platform a whole lot better. I like those guys. I've seen those guys have great success with our clients. So more and more platforms like that, or just case status taking up a a bigger of the market share.

Tyson Mutrux 00:29:01 Yeah. Jonah, Jonah's been doing a really good job with that, too. Jonah's I was at at disrupt a couple of months ago, and they're some pretty good guys, too. I like I like those guys when it comes to. What about intake, though? Do you think intake is going to change at all? I know that I is going to be, you know, become a bigger and bigger, but do you think it's going to come down to still the same thing at follow up, making sure you're staying on top of those leads, making sure that you've got some way of reaching out to them. Is there anything that you think is going to change when it comes to intake?

Ted DeBettencourt 00:29:30 Sure. There's a whole bunch of intake AI platforms out there and they can send text messages. They can send emails. I've heard of phone intake. I have not been impressed with any phone answering services that are using. You can filter out some stuff by the end of the day. For most phone you still need a person.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:29:48 As that gets better, there'll be more automations around there. I don't think there will be a way to take out a human touch from intake. And I think still the firms that manage that the best and train their team properly and get people up to speed so they can track that lead to wanted lead to case, sign rate. Those will be the firms that win. I think there'll be a lot of ways instead of maybe you don't need it, you won't need a team of ten anymore. You can get by with a team of seven and using a lot more automation there, but I still think there'll always be a need for person.

Tyson Mutrux 00:30:18 Awesome. So before I get to my last couple questions. You are a sponsor of Max, Lorcan and I. I really appreciate you joining us in October and we're super excited about it. We're super, super excited to bring it back, but also super excited to have you. So if people want to reach out to you and ask you questions about marketing or about leads or chat or whatever, or if they're interested in leads, what's the best way that they can get Ahold of you?

Ted DeBettencourt 00:30:43 Sure.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:30:43 Shoot me an email, Ted at leads, or just go to leads.com and start our chat on our website.

Tyson Mutrux 00:30:48 Well, that's that's simple enough. Very good. You can I mean, I think that's kind of cool. Is like you can test out the product with the product, you know, and then see kind of how the company does it. I think that that's that's pretty cool because it's cool because you can show off your own skills to like, you can. It's almost like a something where you can sort of brag as to how good you are with your own chat.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:31:08 I'll be honest, it's a double edged sword. So people come on in the last like these very detailed questions. And we don't train the chat agents to be sales agents. So they'll ask super detailed questions and the responses. That's a great question for Ted. I'd like to set up some time for you to chat with them, and they're like, well, no, I need to know what's your average blah, blah, blah SEO numbers? And we're like, all right, well, you know, that's a question for Ted.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:31:29 Let's chat with him. So it's a double edged sword. But yeah, test us out. See the videos on our website, see how your video would look on your website and start a conversation. We'd love to show you how a 30 day free trial works.

Tyson Mutrux 00:31:40 That's really, really cool. Here's what I want to know. I want to know what excites you most right now about the work that you're doing.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:31:49 We have a lot of firms that we can add a lot of value to. So but when we first got into this and I was on the marketing side doing pitch SEO, I didn't really understand what the clients were going through. The more Pi firms and the more firms I'm working with, I'm realizing how bad these insurance companies a lot of times are really screwing people over. So like to a lot of these people, like lawyers are really being heroes. Like they're saving people's skin. They're getting them money to get back to work or giving them money when the insurance companies are absolutely screwing people over.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:32:20 So the fact that we can contribute to lawyers being heroes to more people kind of makes me excited. Like, I read a lot of the chat scripts and like there's some horrible situations and the lawyers were helping are the ones that are helping these people get better outcomes for their lives, for their family. So just to be able to contribute to that kind of makes me excited. Like we can help people make their lives better by helping the law firms serve them better and more of them. So it really makes me excited every day when I know that at the end of the day, we're helping more people get justice for their results.

Tyson Mutrux 00:32:49 Got you. Are there any new features, new tools, anything? Anything you're experimenting with that you can talk about? I'm very curious.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:32:56 Nothing I can talk about. I can give some hints. We're toying with some different ways to communicate with leads that have not been followed up with. So we're toying with those. We have a few different AB tests rolling out, a few different product features that we will be launching into into Alpha in the next month or so, but stay tuned.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:33:15 But the next feature for us is now that we get firms leads, how do we help firms chase down leads that they haven't been able to get Ahold of? So we have those features that are being rolled out in the coming months here.

Tyson Mutrux 00:33:25 I thought I might be able to squeeze one little secret out of you, but I won't push you too hard. So. Well, Ted, I appreciate you coming on and doing this. I, I just kind of enjoyed having the conversation about talking about the stuff you're doing with, like, and talking about marketing and everything else. I just think it's a lot of fun.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:33:39 So likewise.

Tyson Mutrux 00:33:41 Yeah. Thanks for coming on. I can't wait to see you in October. And so, if anybody has any interest in online chat lead, they do an amazing job there. I mean, it's humans. They're humans that are actually doing it. It's not AI, and it's Ted's got the data to back it up. So reach out to him if you if you need if you're interested in doing volutes.

Tyson Mutrux 00:34:00 But thanks, Ted. Really appreciate it.

Ted DeBettencourt 00:34:02 Awesome. Thanks for having me on. Look forward to seeing you on October.