Issue No.8

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Christopher Sands

It's 9 p.m. on a Friday night, and there's a woman sitting at her kitchen table, filling out contact forms on three different divorce lawyers’ websites. She's feeling desperate and wants help as soon as possible.

Nobody's at their desk at Hannon De Palma, the divorce and family law firm I run. But within seconds, the woman who filled out our contact form gets a text: “Hi, this is Christopher from the divorce attorney's office.” A few seconds later: “Our office is going to call you tomorrow to schedule a free case evaluation.” Then: “Please pick up when they call so we can get this taken care of for you.”

The woman at the kitchen table doesn't know any of this is automated. She just knows someone answered. During business hours, a potential client hears that Delilah is going to reach out in a few minutes. After hours — like that Friday night — they're told to expect a call the next morning, and who'll be calling.

When a lead comes in, speed is everything. The firm that responds first more often than not wins. Before we set this up with Quo’s Make integration, the woman who contacted us on a Friday night might not hear from an intake person until Monday morning. Our response time was somewhere between 24 and 72 hours. Using Quo and Make took our response time to two minutes.

Where the handoffs used to break down

Speed to lead isn’t just about that first text. A lot of the breakdowns in our workflow used to come when we needed to hand off between two people: intake to salesperson, salesperson to attorney. Now we’re all on the same interface. Attorney, paralegal, CEO — one conversation thread, one inbox.

People send court documents through texts. When someone’s out, another person clicks in using our shared inboxes and picks up where they left off.

The transcripts changed things dramatically, too. Before, our salespeople had to listen, sell, and empathize, while simultaneously taking notes about the case. We even bought them all quiet keyboards! But we quickly realized they were so busy taking notes, they couldn’t really make a deep connection with the person on the other end. Now, like magic, the transcript does that work. Our salespeople can be present in the conversation. And the handoff to the attorney is seamless, because every detail is already in the file and captured automatically.

Increase Revenue with No Extra Work

Our attorneys bill by the hour. Quo tracks exactly how long each call lasts and who was on it. That combination solved a problem I didn’t even set out to fix.

We’re a legal practice, so the stakes on time tracking are high. An attorney might round down, or forget to submit their time for a call. In our industry, it’s common that attorneys massively underbill for their time, because they rely on memory and manual timekeeping.

Now the data is automatic. Every call in Quo has a timestamp, a duration, and a record of who was on it. We export the call analytics, calculate each client’s billable hours, and the invoice practically writes itself. If a client questions a charge, the conversation is short: here’s the call, here’s the duration, here’s who was on it.

This isn’t just a law firm problem. Consultants, accountants, freelancers, and tradespeople who quote by the hour all miss lots of billable time that costs their businesses money. In some cases, up to 50% of billable hours can go unaccounted for. The difference is whether you have a record, or merely a recollection. (Pro tip: your memory is very unreliable.)

If you’re already using Quo, this data is sitting in your account right now. Go to Analytics in your workspace, filter for your client-facing numbers, choose a date range, and hit Export CSV. A copy of your call data gets sent to your email. You can filter by team member and see every call duration. For teams that bill for time, it’s worth checking what’s already there before building anything new.

I didn’t set out to fix our billing process. I set out to fix our phone system. The billing part was a side effect of having good data.

Three things to try this week

These are three things that made a real difference for us. None took more than an afternoon to set up.

1. Text back faster than your competitor. Set up an automated text that fires the moment someone fills out your website form, even at 9 p.m. We use Quo + Make. Introduce yourself by name in the text and tell the lead when to expect a call. When they're expecting you, they pick up. Our conversion rate jumped because people got an instant reply and stopped shopping around. Here's a Make scenario template to get started.

2. Use your call data to capture lost revenue. If you bill clients for time on calls, go to Analytics in your Quo workspace, export your call data for the last month, and compare it to what you've been invoicing. Every call has a duration and a timestamp. We use this to back up every line item, and it's eliminated almost every billing disagreement we used to have — and increased our captured revenue by up to 30%.

3. Pull up your call transcripts and review your last five sales calls. Copy a transcript into ChatGPT or Claude and ask: “What did the caller need? Did we address it? What could we have done differently?” I use this for sales coaching at our firm. Zero setup required — the transcripts are already in your Quo account. You'd be surprised what you catch when you're reading a conversation instead of remembering it.

I’ll be sharing even more workflows in Claude that'll save our teams hundreds of hours over the next year during a live event on May 14th with Daryna. RSVP here.