Getting Traffic and Conversions to Your Legal App

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.  This article offers you the best way to script that interaction.

Even though we are building the future of virtual lawyering, lessons from the world of lawyering IRL should not be ignored.  At this point in my career as a lawyer, I have done over 20,000 of these brief initial meetings.  I am obsessed with consults.

A great consult follows a pattern, no matter the 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 best possible outcomes for the firm; happy clients 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.

As legal 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 feeling heard.

To those of you that practice law IRL, this is no surprise.  Clients rarely come to lawyers to ask, can I get divorced or can I sue _____? They want to tell us their problem first and they want to know their options and the pluses and minuses of these choices before we get to the nuts and bolts of how we will execute the legal options themselves.

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

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

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

Once your chatbot has taken the customer through steps 1-7, you can make the sale, and your automation can do the legal work with your Gavel 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 users from social media.  You can drive a user from a Facebook/Instagram ad into a conversation in Facebook Messenger and then convert them and push them into your app after you have qualified and closed them.  You can also remarket to them much more easily on Facebook.

Basic chatbots are easy to build yourself on widely available platforms.  Adding the ability 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 the ability to have a conversation, we would be happy to help you build a bot that can supercharge your app’s usage. YoTengo builds chatbots exclusively for law firms and legal apps.  Our company is owned by lawyers and understands the sensitivity needed for a legal conversation.  Our bots are on pace to have over 1 million conversations in 2020, and we understand what the conversation before the interview should be.  The network of lawyers that are currently using our bots would be happy to buy and sell leads in concert with your app, giving you the ability to both capture more revenue from your current interactions and enjoy higher traffic.

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