What Makes A Good Legal Lead Generator?

If you’re a lawyer, you probably get several sales inquiries per week (maybe per day!) about buying legal leads or a related marketing service. Everyone claims they can deliver tons of new leads, all super high quality with a high case conversion rate. Unfortunately, after testing many of these so called “best practice” lead providers , many lawyers discover that finding high quality lead suppliers is often very difficult and time consuming, and they just don’t have the time to weed through all the bad ones to discover the gems! And it’s the gems that will catapult your firm to higher revenues with lucrative conversion rates.  I find it ironic that the bad players pull a quasi-false advertising scam in the legal industry, on lawyers, none the less! I guess that takes some balls!

The biggest problem with data quality is lead sourcing.

Aggregator versus Direct Marketer:  An aggregator collects leads from various 3^rd party affiliates then markets them to your law firm like a broker or middle-man. The problem with this method is the uncertainty of lead origination and inability to control quality. Which sites were the leads sourced from? When did the customer actually complete the lead form? How did the lead aggregator get the lead information? Often times old leads are recirculated with new data which leads to low contact rates. Many times when you contact these leads they have no memory of completing a form. This creates poor conversion rates, wasted time and a lot of frustration.  In contrary, a direct marketer has their own lead generation websites and drives traffic via various online and offline marketing channels to their sites. If they use affiliates, they require the affiliates to send traffic to these sites and do not allow affiliates to post data into their forms. Direct marketers will have higher quality traffic and might even have lower prices since they cut out the broker.

Ask these questions to your prospective lead provider:   Are you an aggregator or direct marketer? Do you generate your own leads or do you use 3^rd party affiliates? What percentage of your leads comes from 3^rd party affiliates? What are the URLs of the websites where your leads come from?

Then there’s data validation.

When you contact new leads via phone, text or email, how many are you unable to contact? We’ve heard that most in-take centers have a 30-40% first time contact rate. That’s terrible. These are supposed to be live leads with an urgent issue and want to speak to a lawyer. The problem is that when the leads are sourced, most lead providers do no validation of the customer’s contact information to ensure you get correct information. To solve this issue, insist that your lead providers validate every email address and phone #. This is a paid service which is why many refuse to add this functionality. But for the lead providers who invest some money to ensure quality, you’ll be the beneficiary of higher contact rates and conversion rates.

To pre-pay or not to pre-pay, that is the question.

For many years the lead generation industry has sold lawyers a model that says you have to prepay $20K, $50K or even more to get leads. Then you wait for the lead delivery. If they have other clients, you’ll likely be in some form of round-robin, which means you have to wait even longer for quality leads. The bigger they get, the more clients they have in your area, and the cycle of waiting continues. If they are a new lead provider, can you trust them to deliver your pre-paid investment in a reasonable amount of time?

Outside of the legal industry, most lead generation companies invoice their customers after you accept the leads. Some require an initial deposit, while others simply manage new clients using test campaigns. Slow ramp up, establish lead quality, weekly invoices, then upon a successful test, volume is increased. You pay for the leads delivered! It puts the client in the driver seat, not the other way around.  Next time you work with a lead generator, insist that you do not want to pre-pay for leads.

CaseClients is a direct marketer who generates 100% of their leads from sites we own and operate. We have a long list of sites we can provide so you can see exactly what your customer sees and the process or form they must complete before you get the lead. CaseClients completes an extensive amount of data validation on phone and email address to ensure high contact rates. CaseClients does not require you to pre-pay for leads. These things are what makes CaseClients a great partner for your legal lead generation needs.