Does Your Law Firm Need a Chatbot?
To start, I am not going to be talking about chat services like Apex chat or predetermined path chatbots where it's essentially a choose your own adventure bot.
The bots we'll be explaining today are those powered by a large language models, such as OpenAI's GPT-4.
Chatbots can help with everything from lead generation to internal training. The trick is training on the right data like you would train an employee before setting it free in the world.
Why Your Law Firm Needs Help From a Chatbot
You need a chatbot to help scale your team. If trained correctly, they can answer everything that a person on your team could answer (and more).
The idea isn't to replace someone on your team, rather it's to convert your team members from answering general information to having them focus on closing a client.
How Chatbots Can Improve Client Interaction
Let's start with a few examples of how you can deploy a chatbot to your website to support lead generation and support with other client interaction.
Lead Generation
Different people may engage with your firm in varying ways. Some want to call someone and talk, while others may want to start the conversation online.
Maybe someone wants to get help, but isn't in the environment where they could pick up a phone and call. Now that's a great opportunity to get a chatbot involved!
If you use a call-focused chatbot service, that company's goal is always to collect a phone number so they get paid. They don't know your company well enough to answer any specific question, so they may not create as good of an experience for a prospect.
If you use a predetermined path bot where it's essentially a contact form masquerading as a bot, then you still aren't always providing answers to unique questions.
Gain people's trust by assisting them with their personalized questions, providing custom answers using a tool like GPT-4, and now you may have overcome some objections without ever actually talking with that person.
Train your chatbot to answer questions and then sell the experience your firm has in the area of law. At the end of the answer the bot can push to a lead gen page to help close that conversion.
24/7 Availability
This benefit is more straightforward.
The bot never sleeps, so they are available to help whenever your prospects are ready. Simple as that.
You don't need to think about managing schedules for someone managing the chat window because the bot is always on duty.
Automated Reminders
Are you manually sending reminders or case updates? With a chatbot, you probably won't need to. Now, this isn't totally a "chatbot" like you would typically see on a website.
You need to connect your case management system to an automation tool and create a way to send updates when the status of the case changes.
We use Salesforce, which allows us to connect to numerous tools that can help solve this. If your firm is on a platform that allows developers to work and customize, then it should be possible to create similar systems.
Alternatively if you don't want to build something unique to your firm, you can try a tool like Milestones. This is not an affiliate link and we do not get compensation for sharing their tool. We just thought it was a good idea.
How Can a Chatbot Help with Your Internal Staff?
The same way you want to train the model for an external chatbot, you want to do the same thing with the internal one.
Train the chatbot on internal processes or lingo that your team typically uses.
Now, when someone has a question around handling a common issue or procedure they can ask the bot first for the answer.
This frees up the supervisor's time to focus on higher impact tasks and focus on the fringe cases that need more attention.
This is also a great way to get new hires up to speed quicker.
You can train the model to train your team.
How We Use Chatbots
We're currently using chatbots that have been trained on website blog posts to act as a front line helper for a disability law firm website.
What we've noticed, and it's been extremely interesting to see, is that people engage with the chatbot like they're talking with an actual person.
The bot is trained on our website sitemap and is using GPT-4 as the language model. It has a good understanding of the general law, but cites specific examples from blog posts the team has written.
It's phenomenal to see how great the answers are. Honestly as good or better than someone on the intake team could give, because it's also citing the sources which helps people read more if they want to.
This also helps in the content creation process as we see unique questions that we may not have fully addressed in the content.
This system benefits everyone: website visitors get value because they have their questions addressed, our intake team can spend more time helping close cases, and our content team understands what topics we need to write about.
Need Help Getting Started?
There may be challenges to getting started:
- Understanding what the firm needs
- How do you choose the right chatbot?
- How do you train your chatbot?
- How is privacy ensured?
We get it. New technology testing and implementation can be stressful. If you want help with getting a bot started on your site, let us know.
Email to me with your questions. Happy to help!