Guest post by Jared Jaskot, founder of Jaskot.law, an immigrant-focused community law firm and YoTengo, an AI-powered legal chatbot dedicated to helping the immigrant community.

You have an awesome legal app - but you are looking for more users.  Addressing this problem requires two things:

1. Traffic
2. Conversion of the Traffic

Conversion depends primarily on your initialinteraction with your customers.  Thisarticle offers you the best way to script that interaction.

Even though we are building the future ofvirtual lawyering, lessons from the world of lawyering IRL should not beignored.  Atthis point in my career as a lawyer, I have done over 20,000 of these briefinitial meetings.  I am obsessed withconsults.

A great consult follows a pattern, no matterthe type of law.  This is the pattern.

1. Brief Niceties
2. The Client Relates their Legal Problem
3. The Attorney Asks some Clarification Questions
4. The Attorney Proposes a Menu of Solutions
5. The Attorney Explains their Reasoning.  The Attorney Explains the Advantages and Disadvantages of each Option.
6. The Client Asks Questions about their Options
7. The Attorney and Client Agree on a Solution
8. Legal Work Commences 

Following this pattern leads to the bestpossible outcomes for the firm;  happyclients and high conversion rates ensue.

When I started designing apps, I threw all my hard earned lessons on this out of the window. I was interested in the automation of step 8, the legal work itself. Accordingly, my apps interactions with my clients were based on getting the answers needed to do the legal work. I completely ignored the basic pattern. I am not alone.

The average legal app starts an interaction with something like:

App: Are you in California?

Client: No.

App: I only help people in California, bye.

At best, you could call this a mashup ofnumbers 3 and 4.

Or, in a “successful” interaction:

App: Are you in California?

Client: Yes

App: Great, what’s your spouse’s name and date of birth?

Here we have numbers 3 and 8.

Both interactions are awful.

Aslegal app designers we are interested in the question of “Can my app help you.”Clients are much more interested in telling us their legal problem and feelingheard.

To those of you that practice law IRL, this isno surprise.  Clients rarely come to lawyersto ask, can I get divorced or can I sue _____? They want to tell us their problem first and they want to know theiroptions and the pluses and minuses of these choices before we get to the nutsand bolts of how we will execute the legal options themselves.

One of the reasons that app designers tend toignore the critical beginning of the client interaction is that it is hard toimplement.  The binary logic of an expertsystem interviews or fillable forms do not lend themselves to listening.  These systems excel in informationextraction. Expert systems are all about asking the information you need tofill out the legal document.  Still, theproblem persists because the best kinds of conversations involve listening. 

The difference between listening to clientconcerns and extracting client data to fill out a document can be understoodthrough the lens of giving vs taking.  A giving interaction asks the legal consumerabout their concerns and addresses them. A taking interaction extracts consumer data for the purposes ofexecuting a legal document.  Consumers prefer to do business withgenerous companies.  The fact that weare offering these consumers an app rather than a human lawyer does not changetheir basic intuitions about their interactions with companies.

Listening to customers is technologicallychallenging, but it is not impossible. The best technological solution for the listening problem is achatbot.  Chatbots can make customersfeel heard, and they can talk with them about options.  Chatbots can talk about why your app is thebest option in this particular situation and then they can make your pitch: you should use my app to solve your legalproblem, I know I can do it for you.  Ihave authority.  Others in your situationhave had success using my app and are happy they made the decision. 

Once your chatbot has taken the customerthrough steps 1-7, you can make the sale and your automation can do the legalwork with your Documate app.   

In our experiments, chatbots outperform static web pages 10x! If you are using an advertising campaign to drive users to your app, your most important variable is conversion rate. Investing in conversion efficiency is the best use of your money.

Chatbots are the ideal way to convert usersfrom social media.  You can drive a userfrom a Facebook/Instagram ad into a conversation in Facebook Messenger and thenconvert them and push them into your app after you have qualified and closedthem.  You can also remarket to them muchmore easily on facebook.

Basic chatbots are easy to build yourself onwidely available platforms.  Adding theability to understand natural language, multiple languages, multiple platforms,and integration with your app is much harder.

If your app can make the docs, but lacks theability to have a conversation, we would be happy to help you build a bot thatcan supercharge your app’s usage. YoTengo builds chatbots exclusively for law firms and legal apps.  Our company is owned by lawyers andunderstands the sensitivity needed for a legal conversation.  Our bots are on pace to have over 1 millionconversations in 2020 and we understand what the conversation before theinterview should be.  The network of lawyersthat are currently using our bots would be happy to buy and sell leads inconcert with your app giving you the ability to both capture more revenue fromyour current interactions and enjoy higher traffic.

As a Documate customer, I know the joy and excitement that building legal apps create and would love to help you spread your solutions throughout the world.