If you are spending law firm money to market your law practice, your law firm must be making a good impression with potential clients who walk in the door. Otherwise, those marketing dollars can literally go down the drain. Interestingly, some attorneys are just more adept at making a solid impression with potential clients than others. For whatever reason, they convert more potential clients into clients than other attorneys. It is important to measure initial consultation conversions at your firm.

One way to figure out what attorneys are more adept in the initial consultation room than others is to simply measure it. Like a batting average in baseball, you can eventually figure out who does better than other attorneys on a percentage basis.

Over time, and many initial consultations, it becomes almost impossible to argue the numbers. There can certainly be some randomness after only a few or a limited number of initial consultations. But the larger the sample size gets, the less random it becomes based on the numbers.

What most law firms discover when doing this over time is that their initial impressions may be wrong in terms of who they think is like to be successful with potential clients.  For example, it isn’t always the more experienced attorneys who do well — as many would think. Sometimes, that might be true.  But, sometimes, it’s the newer attorney who is simpler more personable, and who makes a better first impression.

Regardless, by tracking and measuring the numbers, you can learn a lot. The folks who are successful can often provide insights and observations to others to help them improve. The law firm can also begin making better decisions about who to put into initial consultations with greater frequency.

Of course, who does better with potential clients is not always a better lawyer. Sometimes, excellent and experienced lawyers can just struggle with potential clients. But that doesn’t mean that when they are assigned a case that the client won’t be perfectly happy with that attorney.

Either way, begin measuring how your folks do with initial consultations by tracking how many consultations each attorney does versus how many conversions they get and you will learn a lot. You will also separate yourself from firms that never look at these numbers.

If you have any thoughts on initial consultation conversions, feel free to share them below.