Client Experience Starts with the First Call (Key Takeaways from Filevine's LEXSummit)

Sophie: Welcome to another episode of the final notes podcast. We have another bonus episode this time with Tom and account executive at VXT and Luke, who you may or may not have seen in our previous episodes and who is the co founder and CEO of VXT.

Sophie: So welcome to this episode.

Tom: Hey Sophie ,happy to be here. Finally made it.

Sophie: Yes, we've got two new appearances from the VXT team, which we love. To kick us off, Luke, I would love if you want to share with me what Lex Summit is, and a little bit of an intro to the conference that you were both just at.

Luke: Yeah, Tom and I were in Utah and Salt Lake city and the United States for Filevine's Lex summit. So Filevine is a case management system primarily in North America, but they have customers all over the world and they run an annual conference for their users and potential customers where everyone comes together to discuss everything going on and law firms to look at what's coming from Filevine in terms of new products and features, exciting changes to the company, to the software, and also to take a look at FileVine's partners like VXT. So yeah, Tom and I were in Salt Lake City and had a great time hanging out at FileVine's conference.

Luke: It's really interesting because, most of Filevine's customers today are in personal injury law in the U. S. So these are law firms that are working with clients in really stressful situations where something might have gone wrong. Perhaps they were in a car accident or, they were injured in some other area of life and these personal injury attorneys come in and help them move forward and get through those challenging times.

Sophie: So it's a super interesting conference and that there is such a niche group of attendees and something else that is really niche about LEXSummit was the stellar lineup they had for the guest speakers and the performers. Tom, did you have a favorite?

Tom: I really wanted to see Jake Gyllenhaal, so I think it was a last minute replacement for Gabriel Macht, who was playing Harvey Specter from Suits. Yeah, seeing him speak was probably like the highlight for me. The other two star cast was Nellie and Camille Vasquez. So I'm not sure between those who you had preference for Luke. Our exhibit was right next to the like presentation room and I heard everyone like cackling when Camille was presenting or speaking. Bit of FOMO

Luke: the speaker lineup was absolutely incredible. I don't think I've seen one as exciting from like any conference I've been to before. So yeah, Camille Vasquez, who was famously Johnny Depp's attorney and a really highly publicized case in the U S and yeah, Jake Gyllenhaal. He's like probably one of my favorite actors.

Luke: So I was super excited to hear him speak. He was recently in this awesome TV show. On Apple TV called presumed innocence and yeah I was like watching that like just before we went to lick summit and so it was just like, yeah, really cool to go in here from the speakers when we had the opportunity to like peek in and listen in.

Sophie: Yeah, I definitely had FOMO sitting on the sidelines. In terms of the conference or the other booths that were going on, the other sponsors. Were there any standout kind of gimmick things? I asked this in our last episode as well because we're starting to see things like hair salons and masseuses and crazy things like that at conferences, which you don't usually expect.

Sophie: Was there anything like that that stood out at LEXSummit?

Tom: There was definitely one that stood out way above the rest. Probably the best gimmick I've seen at a conference. There was a guy from was it Hona? Who was walking around with a fishbowl. And he was submerged in it and he had a little snorkel above the top. And the catch phrase as to why he was wearing fishbowl was like, stop drowning in paperwork.

Tom: That stood out to me.

Tom: Felt bad for him because he had that for seemed like two days so wondering how he goes to the toilet or, if he can hear anything in there.

Luke: Yeah,literally. It was really funny. Hona is as a company started by some friends of VXT and provide law firms with a client communication portal where it makes it easy for law firms to keep their clients up to date on how legal cases are like progressing. which is a really cool product.

Luke: So people should definitely go and take a look at that. It was it's actually funny. The catchphrase was actually stop drowning in phone calls, which was, it's relevant to us, right? VXT is a software based phone system and Filevine's customers are largely personal injury firms and personal injury firms deal with a crazy volume of inquiries.

So yeah, it was really funny to see that guy like walking around with a fishbowl in his head.

Sophie: So just to clarify, what says head submerged in

Luke: Yeah, it was,yeah.

Sophie: I saw those pictures and I thought it was some kind of distorting mask that you could put on. Oh my god, that's

Luke: No, the guy was literally wearing a snorkel.

Sophie: Oh my god. The more you know.

Tom: What his skin was like at the end of that, right?

Sophie: yeah. So look, you just mentioned that Filevine handle a lot of phone calls. What other kind of differences are we seeing with personal injury attorneys and how they interact with their clients?

Luke: Yeah, so Ithink personal injury law firms receive probably the most inbound communications from potential clients as compared to any other specialization of law. And that really has an impact on you. The things they care about and running their law firm. And so one of those things is because they receive such a high volume of phone calls.

Luke: They might have different requirements for their phone system and the other software that they use to run their firm because they are receiving such a large volume of potential clients in general. They need to have really mature systems in place for managing those potential clients and deciding whether or not this is like a valuable client for our law firm.

Luke: And so perhaps more than other areas of law, we see personal injury law firms using CRMs likelead docket, particularly with Filevine. When firms using other case management systems like Clio, they might use Clio grow, which is Clio's CRM product. Other case management systems, practice management systems have CRM functionality built in to their platforms.

Luke: And so it was really interesting seeing those differences and, how, how they flow. And to like, the different processes that are important and valuable in different types of firms. Maybe Tom, do you want to speak to what that means more specifically for firms when they're looking at VXT and using VXT?

Tom: Yeah,definitely. So I definitely found the same where they tend to get a lot more leads and then of those leads compared to maybe other areas of law, a lot of them aren't sure if they have a case when they submit an inquiry. So for example, if I'm inquiring with a family law firm to get a prenup, I know that I have a case.

Tom: But someone trying to open a personal injury case might not know that. They may be a great client, but they may only be willing to ring you, let's say, one time. So they dedicate a lot more effort into making, let's say, like a really good call flow. So for example, if someone tries to ring Sophie and Sophie's not there and it goes to voicemail,they might be the last time they ring.

Tom: Can we do multiple ring groups? Can we do analytics, see how many missed calls we have of those missed calls? Can we see if they're abandoned or if they went to voicemail? So they have a lot of interesting questions, which I haven't normally been asked at other conferences

Luke: Yeah, like how do we make sure that we are always responding to leads really fast, never missing our calls, some, we see this more in the U. S. in general, where U. S. law firms have entire sales and marketing teams, which in other areas of the world, You see more often in other industries, outside of law.

Luke: If you look at New Zealand, Australia, for instance, it's really rare for a law firm in New Zealand, Australia to have sales people, to have marketing people on their team, whereas in the U S it's, Much more common. And one of the interesting differences about personal injury in theU S is that most personal injury law firms bill on a contingency basis. So that means the law firm only gets paid if they win. Their injury case and so because of that it's so much more important for the firm to assess Is this a case that we can win?

Luke: What is the probability that we will win this case? Because you know if a law firm that only earns income when they win a case if they are, you know Winning only 30 of their cases that could be like a really significant cost to the business to the firm that might mean the end of their firm.

Luke: And law firms care a lot about having a high win rate.

Sophie: Yeah,definitely it's interesting seeing those different considerations and one thing I want to bring up is we keep talking about communications and phone systems and calls being such a crucial part of of a personal injury attorney's role,but we are VXT and we haven't really introduced what VXT is for anybody that might be listening who doesn't know what VXT is.

Sophie: Look, did you want to share what VXT is and why we were actually at Lex Summit?

Luke: Yeah,absolutely. So, Attorneys spend a lot of their time at work on paperwork that comes from phone calls. And so, law firms use VXT to make their phone calls. Because we integrate with legal software like Filevine, who organise LEXSummit, so that we can, Provide specific functionality that helps attorneys automate all of that paperwork.

Luke: So another way of describing VXT is that we're a voice over IP phone system or, a software based phone system. So attorneys usually use our software on their mobile phone or on their computer and they make and receive calls through VXT and that's us. And so we partnered with Filevine.

Luke: Earlier this year, and we're super excited to attend LEXSummit for the first time to talk to personal injury attorneys and continue building on that partnership.

Sophie: And so were there any other phone systems at LEXSummit?

Tom: No, we were the only one there and we were the only one that had an actual integration. So I think a lot of people, when they came up to our presentation booth, had that aha moment when they saw what we could do. So let's say contact syncing, if someone submits a website form and they call me afterwards.

Tom: Is it going to display their name? It'll also display a link to their Filevine contact profile. So you can see who you're talking to pretty quickly, among other things that we can do as well.

Luke: Yeah, so VXT is practically the only phone system in the world that focuses on law firms as Its target customers and so what that means when we Build these partnerships with products like Filevine. Webuild really deep integrations. So the products work really well together. Tom said When you have contacts saved in your case management system like Filevine,They also sync into VXT.

Luke: So whether you're making a call or receiving a call, we're able to display all of that contact information on those calls and automatically save all of the important details from your phone calls to the right place in that software.

Sophie: And you can see how things like contact syncing is so important when we go back to the point of you get a calland that might be the only call you're ever going to get from that potential client. So if you can answer and you've spoken to them once before and you can say, Oh, hi, Tom, how is your broken leg that we were dealing with last time?

Sophie: Because you have the note there, you know why they're calling and it's just going to be a much better experience for the potential

Luke: Yeah, absolutely. And client experience is such an important topic for law firms. It's often a topic of consideration at these events where people come and speak about how you can work on the client experience that you provide. And more and more as technology makes, legal services, more competitive client experience will be such a significant part of the differentiation between law firms.

Luke: And so the law firms that focus on client experience today will be the ones that are successful in the future. And, making sure the tools that you use. to interact with clients, integrate with all of the other legal software that you use at your firm is one of the ways that you can make it really easy for your staff, your attorneys, to provide a really great client experience.

Sophie: And so when people were coming to visit VXT and they learned that we have a really strong integration with Filevine, what font system are they currently using that made them have this aha moment when they realize what an integration can actually look like?

Tom: Yeah, so a lot of people were using a software based phone system. So we saw people using RingCentral, Vonage, Zoom Phone. I think part of what they liked other than the integration was particularly, let's say, data retention. Although these other phone systems, if you can make call recordings or any other type of call log, they do expire after a certain amount of time, which kind of defeats the purpose of having logged it in the first place.

Tom: So they really appreciated that we keep those call recordings that save forever or as long as they need. As well as the ability to save things to a project as well. Because, let's say, the number that we contact sync with may not make sense to save it to the contact, as the contact can have multiple projects, so I think they really liked that part of the the deeper integration, as you said before.

Sophie: So to wrap it up it was a great conference from the sounds of it, but I want to hear the biggest takeaway from both of you. So Luke, I'll start with you. What was your biggest takeaway from LEXSummit

Luke: My biggest takeaway from LEXSummit was that the conference in general was super encouraging. It was great to see so much demand and excitement for VXT, for the VXT integration with File Vine. The US is our fastest growing market, and it's really clear that is only going to.

After seeing the reaction from attorneys on the ground in Salt Lake City. So yeah, that would be my one. And I'm super excited having finished it up.

Sophie: and Tom, your biggest takeaway?

Tom: Yeah, so it affirms a trend that we were already seeing is that people are getting more and more process oriented. So with each time that we go to, people are more trying to get into the weeds, make small changes that make a big difference over a large sample size, especially in personal injury, you have a huge amount of leads, so you have a huge sample size to make gains from there.

Tom: Other than that,we did go to the Nelly concert afterwards and I thought I was a big fan and I think I was the only person there that didn't know the lyrics to the words.Thanks. So I just had to pretend I forgot something and we went back afterwards. So if we go back and Nelly's there, I'm going to know the words this time.

Sophie: Nice. That leads to my final question. Will we be back? But I think we already know the answer to that. We will be seeing Salt Lake city again in 2025.

Luke: Yeah, absolutely. Firevine's an awesome partner and the LEC Summit was such a great conference, so super excited to attend it next year again.

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