May 7, 2025 • 9 mins
I spoke with Ted DeBettencourt, a Co-Founder of Juvo Leads, a company that provides human-powered chat services. We discussed the benefits of human-powered chat for law firms, use cases where prospective clients prefer technology to human interaction, and the mistakes professional services firms make when deploying human-powered chat.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Welcome to Reinventing Professionals,a podcast hosted by industry analyst
Ari Kaplan, which shares ideas,guidance, and perspectives from market
leaders shaping the next generationof legal and professional services.
This is Ari Kaplan, and I'm speakingtoday with Ted D. Betancourt, a co
(00:23):
founder of Juvo Leads, a company thatprovides human powered chat services.
Hi, Ted.
How are you?
I'm well, Ari.
Thanks for having me on the show today.
I'm looking forward to the conversation.
Tell us about your backgroundin the genesis of Juvo Leads.
I grew up on Martha's Vineyardin Massachusetts went to college
in Providence Rhode Island.
(00:45):
Then I went to law school at CaseWestern Reserve University , after
my first year of law school, Isaid, I don't really like this.
So I got my MBA as well.
Then I got out and.
Started working at a few jobs, buteventually made my way to a legal
marketing agency up in Boston.
They produce content for law firms.
And I realized there was a lot of otherthings broken with these clients websites.
(01:08):
They had a lot of content, buttheir SEO stunk their PPC stunk.
I started realizing, what we'redoing is just part of the battle.
From there, I started my own SEOcompany, had a few small clients,
probably about five to 10 in Boston.
And then in 20 to 14, they startedusing these chat companies.
So chat would call them up and say,Hey, we can get more leads from chat.
(01:29):
I really liked what they were doing,but they kept blocking phone calls for
my firms and putting pop ups in places.
They shouldn't have.
So I got frustrated and fired themand started answering chats myself.
And what I realized is when Istarted answering chats for my
firms, they got a lot more leads.
So it started as me answeringchats for my five to 10 clients in
Boston has now evolved to us as acompany, answering chats in about
(01:49):
1100 websites around the country.
What are the benefits of human poweredchat, particularly for law firms?
If you're a B2C law firm, so think PI,family, divorce, crim bankruptcy, when
you put chat on a website, you're goingto get 50 percent more total leads for
those sites and the PI space of the topthousand PI sites around the country.
(02:13):
97 percent of them use sometype of chat technology.
Whether it's us or somebody else,if you're not using chat, you're
missing out on a ton of leads.
The main purpose is you putchat on because you get more
website leads when you do chat.
And that's about 50 percent more.
What is it about the chatfeature that produces more leads?
(02:33):
It's another way fora user to communicate.
10 years ago, people only callednow everyone texts messages,
people don't pick up the phone.
It's obtrusive.
Same thing with.
Picking up the phone is a barrierto entry for a lot of people.
We give the option to communicatewith them through a method
they're more comfortable with.
That's texts, that's chatting.
We answer those for them all the time.
(02:55):
The other situation we thinkabout a lot is a visitor, is
sitting on their work computer.
They're on the clock.
They can't pick up the phoneand call a law firm, but they
can easily send a text message.
Send an LSA message, start a websitechat, and that's a new way for
them to communicate with firms.
So firms have to be able to answerthose messages for the clients
that want to talk to them that way.
(03:16):
Are there particularly use caseswhere visitors prefer technology to
humans or prefer humans to technology?
There's a few ways they can do it.
When you call up your cell phone provider,your cable company, and you call up
and you have to press one, then four,then seven, then eight, then three,
then two, then one to talk to a person.
(03:38):
Do you enjoy that experience?
Any type of solution whereyou're pick your own adventure.
Firms use it to varyingdegrees of success.
What we're going to see soon is a betterAI version, we are seeing that on some
big enterprise level corporate websites.
It's getting closer, but what happensis once you get a few questions
in, the AI isn't quite there yet.
(03:59):
So AI and technology will be away for firms to save money on it.
But right now the user experienceisn't nearly as good as
chatting with a human being.
What kind of training is required fora successful Human chat responder.
It takes our chat agents aboutthree months to get fully trained.
(04:21):
So it's not so much if you'reanswering one PI's chats,
you've answered a lot of them.
We do have customizations betweenthe different firms we work
with, were you in a car accident?
When did it happen?
Where did it happen?
Tell me about your injuries,get name, phone, email.
It's not all that complex.
We can layer in a lot of other questions,but this key to having human chat
agents is having them do it fast.
So having a chat agent learn itlike the back of their hand is
(04:44):
what really makes a differencein the different chat companies.
So in my space, four or five big companiesthat all compete for the same law firms.
So we're always trying to outdo eachother in performance and speed is
the one way that we've been able toseparate ourselves from our competition.
Do you combine technologywith human powered support?
(05:06):
We don't, but a firm should.
We're not saying get rid of the forms onyour website or get rid of your intake.
All we're saying is if you want to getmore leads from your website, put chat
on it, whether it's us or somebody else,and you'll get more leads off the bat.
That doesn't mean every lead we send yoube a case, but that means we're starting
conversations with people on your websitethat you wouldn't have had, but for chat.
(05:31):
Are you indicating specificallythat it's human power, Jack?
Yeah, we pop up.
Hi, I'm Amy.
I'm a real person.
I'm Amy.
I'm Steve.
I'm Bill.
I'm Jack.
How can I help you today?
Do you have a legal question?
We can help you with.
So the key is every year withchat GPT getting closer, we're
getting more and more questionsof people saying, are you real?
We say, yeah.
Ask us a question.
Sometimes they want to takeus on a wild goose chase.
(05:52):
Midway through a chat, when they thinkit's a robot, they'll start saying,
tell me how to bake a cake or somethingcompletely off topic because chat GPT,
you can't get them tonot answer the question.
So we're like, no, this isn't chat GPT.
We're a real person.
How can I help you?
Once they know we're a person, they'rea lot more likely to divulge their
information about their situation.
(06:13):
You've mentioned personalinjury a couple of times.
Is that the most common practice area?
We don't do a lot in the B2B space.
We do personal injury, bankruptcy,criminal defense state planning,
family, those type of practice areas.
If you work in a high rise in downtownBoston and you're talking about your
(06:34):
corporate clients, not a fit for us.
What's the difference betweenthe human powered chat services?
We all have our little anglesthat we niche ourselves down to.
Our big differentiator is inthe first divide, there's the
human powered chats, then there'sthe more robot answering ones.
Then from there and the human poweredone, the robot ones are a little bit
(06:55):
cheaper, they don't have to pay a team.
The detriment of the robot onesare they don't get as many leads.
We maximize the leads for firms.
If a firm is spending, a hundredthousand dollars a month to drive.
Car accident leads to the case.
They want to do everything tomaximize the amount of leads they get.
If you're a smaller firm and you'reless concerned about driving as
many leads as possible, the robotsolutions are a great answer.
(07:18):
Within the chat world,there's a few big differences.
We have quality control thatchecks every chat that we answer.
We're faster than everybodyelse in the market.
We answer LSA messages a type of ad calledlocal service ads within a local service
for our clients and we sign retainers.
No one else does allthose things that we do.
What are the mechanicsof human powered chat?
(07:42):
Let's pretend we're on a website.
Apple pop chat bubble.
That will say, hi, i'm Steve.
Have you been in a car crash?
Is there anything we can help you with?
Someone types in, yeah, that's an autogenerated message for every visitor
they see when they come to the website.
Someone jumps on their keyboardand says, yes, I was in a car
accident, can you help me?
One of my chat agents, we'llsee that message in reply with
(08:04):
the rules that firm gives us.
So when a chat pops up, theyhave the rules on the right.
They read through the rules.
They'll answer it according tothe rules and then they'll have
a real conversation with someone.
The big chat I use whenI was in college was AIM.
Aim a OL instant messenger.
So think of that, but instead ofyou chatting with your buddies in
college or what I was doing it's justone of my chat agents who's paid to
(08:25):
have a conversation in a certain waywith a visitor on someone's website.
How do you see humanpowered chat evolving,
Moving more ai?
We use AI in our summaries and whenwe're finishing a chat, it's more the
front end is what more evolution on.
We came out with video chat a while ago.
(08:46):
So instead of chat popping upand saying, hi, it's a short
video of the law firm owner.
More pop ups, different calls to action.
That's going to be a bigger play.
But I think video will play an everevolving role on the chat side.
Do you incorporate personalityinto your human powered chat?
We try to, when we first started, wewould have some firms tell us, Hey,
(09:08):
please feel free to be funny about it.
And humor is somethingthat's hard to replicate.
We'll have a lawyer.
He's a funny person, it'shard to train a chat agent.
Hey, I'm staring at a car accident.
That's hilarious.
It's difficult to do that effectively.
We abandoned that and said, createa repeatable process that we can
train scoring on chat agents on.
We try to stick to the book there.
(09:30):
This is Ari Kaplan speaking withTed DeBettencourt, a co founder
of Juvo Leads, the company thatprovides human powered chat services.
Ted, thanks so very much.
Yeah.
Thanks for having me on Ari.
It was a pleasure.
Thank you for listening to theReinventing Professionals podcast.
Visit ReinventingProfessionals.
(09:50):
com or AriKaplanAdvisors.
com to learn more.
Welcome to Reinventing Professionals,a podcast hosted by industry analyst
Ari Kaplan, which shares ideas,guidance, and perspectives from market
leaders shaping the next generationof legal and professional services.
This is Ari Kaplan, and I'm speakingtoday with Ted D. Betancourt, a co
(00:23):
founder of Juvo Leads, a company thatprovides human powered chat services.
Hi, Ted.
How are you?
I'm well, Ari.
Thanks for having me on the show today.
I'm looking forward to the conversation.
Tell us about your backgroundin the genesis of Juvo Leads.
I grew up on Martha's Vineyardin Massachusetts went to college
in Providence Rhode Island.
(00:45):
Then I went to law school at CaseWestern Reserve University , after
my first year of law school, Isaid, I don't really like this.
So I got my MBA as well.
Then I got out and.
Started working at a few jobs, buteventually made my way to a legal
marketing agency up in Boston.
They produce content for law firms.
And I realized there was a lot of otherthings broken with these clients websites.
(01:08):
They had a lot of content, buttheir SEO stunk their PPC stunk.
I started realizing, what we'redoing is just part of the battle.
From there, I started my own SEOcompany, had a few small clients,
probably about five to 10 in Boston.
And then in 20 to 14, they startedusing these chat companies.
So chat would call them up and say,Hey, we can get more leads from chat.
(01:29):
I really liked what they were doing,but they kept blocking phone calls for
my firms and putting pop ups in places.
They shouldn't have.
So I got frustrated and fired themand started answering chats myself.
And what I realized is when Istarted answering chats for my
firms, they got a lot more leads.
So it started as me answeringchats for my five to 10 clients in
Boston has now evolved to us as acompany, answering chats in about
(01:49):
1100 websites around the country.
What are the benefits of human poweredchat, particularly for law firms?
If you're a B2C law firm, so think PI,family, divorce, crim bankruptcy, when
you put chat on a website, you're goingto get 50 percent more total leads for
those sites and the PI space of the topthousand PI sites around the country.
(02:13):
97 percent of them use sometype of chat technology.
Whether it's us or somebody else,if you're not using chat, you're
missing out on a ton of leads.
The main purpose is you putchat on because you get more
website leads when you do chat.
And that's about 50 percent more.
What is it about the chatfeature that produces more leads?
(02:33):
It's another way fora user to communicate.
10 years ago, people only callednow everyone texts messages,
people don't pick up the phone.
It's obtrusive.
Same thing with.
Picking up the phone is a barrierto entry for a lot of people.
We give the option to communicatewith them through a method
they're more comfortable with.
That's texts, that's chatting.
We answer those for them all the time.
(02:55):
The other situation we thinkabout a lot is a visitor, is
sitting on their work computer.
They're on the clock.
They can't pick up the phoneand call a law firm, but they
can easily send a text message.
Send an LSA message, start a websitechat, and that's a new way for
them to communicate with firms.
So firms have to be able to answerthose messages for the clients
that want to talk to them that way.
(03:16):
Are there particularly use caseswhere visitors prefer technology to
humans or prefer humans to technology?
There's a few ways they can do it.
When you call up your cell phone provider,your cable company, and you call up
and you have to press one, then four,then seven, then eight, then three,
then two, then one to talk to a person.
(03:38):
Do you enjoy that experience?
Any type of solution whereyou're pick your own adventure.
Firms use it to varyingdegrees of success.
What we're going to see soon is a betterAI version, we are seeing that on some
big enterprise level corporate websites.
It's getting closer, but what happensis once you get a few questions
in, the AI isn't quite there yet.
(03:59):
So AI and technology will be away for firms to save money on it.
But right now the user experienceisn't nearly as good as
chatting with a human being.
What kind of training is required fora successful Human chat responder.
It takes our chat agents aboutthree months to get fully trained.
(04:21):
So it's not so much if you'reanswering one PI's chats,
you've answered a lot of them.
We do have customizations betweenthe different firms we work
with, were you in a car accident?
When did it happen?
Where did it happen?
Tell me about your injuries,get name, phone, email.
It's not all that complex.
We can layer in a lot of other questions,but this key to having human chat
agents is having them do it fast.
So having a chat agent learn itlike the back of their hand is
(04:44):
what really makes a differencein the different chat companies.
So in my space, four or five big companiesthat all compete for the same law firms.
So we're always trying to outdo eachother in performance and speed is
the one way that we've been able toseparate ourselves from our competition.
Do you combine technologywith human powered support?
(05:06):
We don't, but a firm should.
We're not saying get rid of the forms onyour website or get rid of your intake.
All we're saying is if you want to getmore leads from your website, put chat
on it, whether it's us or somebody else,and you'll get more leads off the bat.
That doesn't mean every lead we send yoube a case, but that means we're starting
conversations with people on your websitethat you wouldn't have had, but for chat.
(05:31):
Are you indicating specificallythat it's human power, Jack?
Yeah, we pop up.
Hi, I'm Amy.
I'm a real person.
I'm Amy.
I'm Steve.
I'm Bill.
I'm Jack.
How can I help you today?
Do you have a legal question?
We can help you with.
So the key is every year withchat GPT getting closer, we're
getting more and more questionsof people saying, are you real?
We say, yeah.
Ask us a question.
Sometimes they want to takeus on a wild goose chase.
(05:52):
Midway through a chat, when they thinkit's a robot, they'll start saying,
tell me how to bake a cake or somethingcompletely off topic because chat GPT,
you can't get them tonot answer the question.
So we're like, no, this isn't chat GPT.
We're a real person.
How can I help you?
Once they know we're a person, they'rea lot more likely to divulge their
information about their situation.
(06:13):
You've mentioned personalinjury a couple of times.
Is that the most common practice area?
We don't do a lot in the B2B space.
We do personal injury, bankruptcy,criminal defense state planning,
family, those type of practice areas.
If you work in a high rise in downtownBoston and you're talking about your
(06:34):
corporate clients, not a fit for us.
What's the difference betweenthe human powered chat services?
We all have our little anglesthat we niche ourselves down to.
Our big differentiator is inthe first divide, there's the
human powered chats, then there'sthe more robot answering ones.
Then from there and the human poweredone, the robot ones are a little bit
(06:55):
cheaper, they don't have to pay a team.
The detriment of the robot onesare they don't get as many leads.
We maximize the leads for firms.
If a firm is spending, a hundredthousand dollars a month to drive.
Car accident leads to the case.
They want to do everything tomaximize the amount of leads they get.
If you're a smaller firm and you'reless concerned about driving as
many leads as possible, the robotsolutions are a great answer.
(07:18):
Within the chat world,there's a few big differences.
We have quality control thatchecks every chat that we answer.
We're faster than everybodyelse in the market.
We answer LSA messages a type of ad calledlocal service ads within a local service
for our clients and we sign retainers.
No one else does allthose things that we do.
What are the mechanicsof human powered chat?
(07:42):
Let's pretend we're on a website.
Apple pop chat bubble.
That will say, hi, i'm Steve.
Have you been in a car crash?
Is there anything we can help you with?
Someone types in, yeah, that's an autogenerated message for every visitor
they see when they come to the website.
Someone jumps on their keyboardand says, yes, I was in a car
accident, can you help me?
One of my chat agents, we'llsee that message in reply with
(08:04):
the rules that firm gives us.
So when a chat pops up, theyhave the rules on the right.
They read through the rules.
They'll answer it according tothe rules and then they'll have
a real conversation with someone.
The big chat I use whenI was in college was AIM.
Aim a OL instant messenger.
So think of that, but instead ofyou chatting with your buddies in
college or what I was doing it's justone of my chat agents who's paid to
(08:25):
have a conversation in a certain waywith a visitor on someone's website.
How do you see humanpowered chat evolving,
Moving more ai?
We use AI in our summaries and whenwe're finishing a chat, it's more the
front end is what more evolution on.
We came out with video chat a while ago.
(08:46):
So instead of chat popping upand saying, hi, it's a short
video of the law firm owner.
More pop ups, different calls to action.
That's going to be a bigger play.
But I think video will play an everevolving role on the chat side.
Do you incorporate personalityinto your human powered chat?
We try to, when we first started, wewould have some firms tell us, Hey,
(09:08):
please feel free to be funny about it.
And humor is somethingthat's hard to replicate.
We'll have a lawyer.
He's a funny person, it'shard to train a chat agent.
Hey, I'm staring at a car accident.
That's hilarious.
It's difficult to do that effectively.
We abandoned that and said, createa repeatable process that we can
train scoring on chat agents on.
We try to stick to the book there.
(09:30):
This is Ari Kaplan speaking withTed DeBettencourt, a co founder
of Juvo Leads, the company thatprovides human powered chat services.
Ted, thanks so very much.
Yeah.
Thanks for having me on Ari.
It was a pleasure.
Thank you for listening to theReinventing Professionals podcast.
Visit ReinventingProfessionals.
(09:50):
com or AriKaplanAdvisors.
com to learn more.
Popular Podcasts
True Crime Tonight
If you eat, sleep, and breathe true crime, TRUE CRIME TONIGHT is serving up your nightly fix. Five nights a week, KT STUDIOS & iHEART RADIO invite listeners to pull up a seat for an unfiltered look at the biggest cases making headlines, celebrity scandals, and the trials everyone is watching. With a mix of expert analysis, hot takes, and listener call-ins, TRUE CRIME TONIGHT goes beyond the headlines to uncover the twists, turns, and unanswered questions that keep us all obsessed—because, at TRUE CRIME TONIGHT, there’s a seat for everyone. Whether breaking down crime scene forensics, scrutinizing serial killers, or debating the most binge-worthy true crime docs, True Crime Tonight is the fresh, fast-paced, and slightly addictive home for true crime lovers.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.