How Aircall Helped Genuine Legal Become a Unicorn within the Legal Industry

No one calls a lawyer because things are going well. Yet, consumers are often hesitant to contact a legal firm even when they need one because legal firms hold a general reputation of being expensive and impersonal. Genuine Legal, a law firm in Australia, was determined to make legal services more client-centric and affordable for people that need them throughout the country.

With its headquarters in Brisbane and branches across Australia, Genuine Legal is a best-in-class law firm that broke the mold for the way law firms have traditionally delivered legal services.

From the start, Genuine Legal decided to leverage the best that technology could offer them to serve their clients in the most transparent, personalized way possible.

“We're very different from other law firms, as we’re fixed fee, low-cost. We don’t charge per hour...and we offer payment plans. Currently, no other family law firm does this in Australia.”

Recently, we hooked up with Genuine Legal’s founder and CEO, Evgeny Vasilyev to learn more about how Aircall and HubSpot combined to form the perfect pairing to help them create a 360° view of the communications with their clients.

Simplifying Costs and Legal Services

Genuine Legal is one of the largest family law firms in Australia. That’s primarily due to the unique value proposition they offer their clients. Unlike other law firms, Genuine Legal doesn’t charge by the hour. To make things even more affordable, they offer payment plans. The concept behind the fixed-fee model is to be completely transparent on how clients are getting charged. Clients have an easier time saying yes to a contract with a legal firm when they can plan for how to fit the expenses into their budget.

Phone Conversations Are a Key Pillar

At Genuine Legal, phone conversations are a key pillar of customer relationships. With Aircall and HubSpot, processes are now more streamlined, efficient, and personalized.

All calls go through HubSpot regardless of whether the contact originates from a social media platform, live chat, the website, or a customer calls directly. A team of legal assistants stands ready to respond to clients immediately. Clients can talk with a paralegal and upload documents directly inside their file.

When a paralegal or solicitor needs to call a client, they can do it directly from HubSpot via the Aircall integration. Attorneys can easily take things from there because everything is in one, convenient place.

“When they call, we can greet them by name. We can see from their Hubspot profile when they call, how many times, everything… We have better customer service.”

From a growth perspective, the dashboard and analytics give them greater visibility into call volumes and missed calls.

Leveraging Digital Transformation and the Path to Success

Vasilyev attributes the company’s success to its commitment to digitalization, personalization, and a willingness to think outside the box. Using multiple channels including voice email, social media, and chat is an uncommon approach to client interactions within the legal field, and it’s one that gives them complete visibility of every communication with their clients.

“Law firms don't use CRMs in Australia — they use email and paper files. With the connection with HubSpot, everything’s pretty much in one place.”

Genuine Legal uses Microsoft Teams and HubSpot successfully. They weren’t having as much success with phone system providers. Initially, they used Spoke Phone and later switched to Optus Loop. Over time, they experienced a lot of frustration with call quality and steep, rising prices. Aircall offered better call quality and transparent pricing, making it a better alternative. Aircall also solved another of their problems, which was having a system that enabled remote teams.

Aircall’s online ad initially caught Vasilyev’s attention. He was quickly impressed by the transparent pricing model, so he decided to proceed with a trial. The teams were pleased with the results.

While Genuine Legal generally prefers to work with Australian-based companies, upon learning that Aircall was an industry leader in cloud-based telephony with a local support team in Sydney, it was easy to overcome the objection. Ultimately, clear voice communication, transparent pricing, remote capability, dashboard analytics, and having the flexibility of working with HubSpot made switching to Aircall an easy choice.

“The first thing that attracted us to Aircall was transparency on the website pricing. Then we tried it for a week and I got brilliant feedback from our legal systems teams like, wow, finally, the phone's working.”

Increased Productivity and Greater Visibility Among Team Members

Now that Genuine Legal has been able to manage calls more efficiently, they’ve been able to launch new value propositions for clients and they’re getting more and more clients as a result.

The solicitors were elated to be able to listen to call recordings through the analytics dashboard. If they want to hear the exact conversations that have taken place before calling a client, the call recordings are easily accessible as they’re embedded directly into the customer file. Solicitors get all the details and they can be sure they have the proper context before connecting with a client.

“We like the option to record calls because we listen to get notes and everything. It’s very easy. Say, if a legal assistant spoke to a client, we can send a message to a solicitor saying our client said this, and you can send the link to hear the recordings.”

Since they’ve adopted Aircall, Genuine Legal has been able to maximize the potential of the HubSpot integration and deliver better customer service than ever before. Legal teams and solicitors now have access to a 360° view of their customers and they’ve realized greater efficiency and productivity within their operations. Analytics data allows them to use defined metrics to track their progress. With these tools, Genuine Legal is in a great position to continue being one of the most innovative legal firms in the country.

“Even if they [other companies] don't use a CRM, it's still a great product, especially now. When things can go into lockdown tomorrow, we know that our staff can go home and just talk to customers from there.”