Maximum Lawyer

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Do you want to improve client communication for your firm? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, Devon Slovensky, founder of a Southwestern Virginia Family Law Firm, shares how her team maintains high standards of client communication amid rapid growth. Speaking at a MaxLawCon 2025, Devon introduces the “client happiness call” initiative—which has improved client communication for her firm.

A firm’s client communication can really make or break its success. Devon shares how her firm’s client happiness calls have been used to determine gaps in communication. Doing this ensures that attorneys are held accountable to what they say they will do. Having these calls also ensures clients are prioritized and attorneys are doing their jobs. Creating a system for this can include having a client happiness coordinator and some sort of CRM to manage these calls and input and retain information.

Devon speaks to unhappy clients and how to unearth this and understand this as a lawyer. Most of her clients are satisfied, but it can be tough to admit when you as a lawyer can’t deliver something 100% because of whatever issue that presents itself. Understanding this can create confidence in a lawyer in having better communication with clients on realistic expectations. Avoiding unhappy clients includes keeping them up to date on their case, explaining things that they don’t understand and being honest about next steps.

Listen in to learn more!


  • 3:10 Client Communication Gaps and Accountability
  • 4:08 Building the Client Happiness Call System
  • 7:58 Metrics and Board Visualization
  • 10:01 Attorney Confidence and Common Issues
  • 12:06 Unearthing Quietly Frustrated Clients


Connect with Devon:


Tune in to today’s episode and checkout the full show notes here. 

Creators and Guests

Host
Tyson Mutrux
Tyson is the founder of Mutrux Firm Injury Lawyers and the co-founder of Maximum Lawyer.

What is Maximum Lawyer?

Maximum Lawyer is the podcast for law firm owners who want to scale with intention and build a business that works for their life.

Hosted by Tyson Mutrux, each weekly episode features candid conversations with law firm owners, business experts, and industry leaders sharing real strategies and lessons learned in the trenches.

If you're ready to grow your firm with less stress and more support, this is your next must listen. Subscribe today.

Devon Slovenksy 00:00:07 All right. Can you guys hear me now? All right. I was just telling Tyson, we need to talk about putting me between gym and the coffee break. if we. If I come and talk next year. But anyways, my name is Devin Levinsky. I run a family law firm in southwestern Virginia. The last time I came and I spoke at Max Lorcan, we were talking about crossing the $1 million barrier and the financial processes and procedures that we put into effect to make that reality. But now, as our firm has continued to grow, we've run into new problems. I don't know everything that's going on in every case, and it drives me a little crazy. So, show of hands here. How many people here? A little Type-A control freaks. Okay, keep those hands in the air. And then also, can we have the other hand, anybody who is trying to grow their law firm? Because I think that's a lot of people here. Not everybody. Some people just want to make their firm better.

Devon Slovenksy 00:00:59 So we've got so many people with two hands in the air. You're trying to grow your law firm, but you also want to be in control of everything. And, you know, that's one of my weaknesses as a business leader. I want to know everything that's going on. In addition to that, we have a very high standard for client communication. In my firm, we have what I would call an SLA standard, where we monitor to make sure that all of our clients get responses within three hours, three business hours for any email they get. And we've got a good system that makes that not too hard on our attorneys, but it's a standard we have, so we really care about our client experience. And I want to talk to you about how we have implemented this year, a client happiness call project, so that we're regularly in touch with our clients. And I get that peace of mind knowing that our clients are getting the communication that they've come to trust us for and that they deserve.

Devon Slovenksy 00:01:57 so we started the client Happiness Calls just to increase that level of contact. For me to be able to have essentially quality assurance in my firm. And we're both trying to get structured data, but also some non structured data. I mean, you know, sometimes something comes up and there's no checkbox in our system. Like does client have vacation next month. But we care and we want to be able to ask them about that and follow up conversations. So we've launched the client Happiness Calls. It really helps the connection that people have with our law firm. So again, why are we doing this? Our caseloads have increased. We're currently carrying about 220 family law cases right now. And as a result of that, you know, I can't know everything that's going on. And sometimes we're not communicating as well as we can. Every client has a different level of communication that they need. And our lawyers are some of the best family law lawyers in Virginia. And, you know, the best lawyers are really not the great at explaining, well, we're going to do this affidavit, you know, affidavit exactly this way, and then you're going to sign it and you're going to talk to the notary, and you're going to you're going to sign it first, and the notary is going to sign it.

Devon Slovenksy 00:03:10 You know, they don't care about that kind of stuff, but the clients think it's a big deal. And these client happiness calls help us know when there have been gaps in our communication. Maybe we have a super detail oriented client and they need to understand everything. So also we're humans. We can be at fault. You know, maybe we don't know something's happened. Maybe we, God forbid, you know, told our client we were going to have some draft of something last week and we didn't get it to them when we said we would deliver. We want to be able to give our clients an opportunity to hold our attorneys accountable for that. Now, I personally can't imagine hiring a lawyer and not being willing to say to the lawyer, hey, I don't understand what's going on. I don't feel comfortable with the legal strategy, but our clients are often intimidated by us, and they don't necessarily feel comfortable telling us when they don't understand something, when they don't feel comfortable with something or something just doesn't sit right with them.

Devon Slovenksy 00:04:08 And this gives our clients an escape valve so they can let us know before their case is done. And they're telling the rest of the community about how they just didn't feel right. Something wasn't right about what was going on in their case, and there may have been a really good legal reason for it. I mean, how many people do have case types with notwithstanding what Tyson had talked about today? Sometimes strategically, it makes sense to kind of let the case chill for a little bit. I mean, that's a legitimate strategy for me and family law under certain case, case types. And we need to make sure the client is comfortable with that. So how did we put this together? Well, there's people and then there's processes and systems that we had to do. So we have a client happiness coordinator. She happens to be our intake person. But I want to talk to you today about how it doesn't have to be your intake person. I think this is a great job for a college student who is trying to figure out if they want to go into law, if this is a field they want to be in.

Devon Slovenksy 00:05:07 and I think that's a great place to find your first client happiness coordinator. And it's a part time job, and it just needs somebody who's who's really warm, maybe somebody who's been in a service injury industry, retail, restaurants. Then we created a pop, a project board that populates all the data because I am a tech automation nerd. So I wanted to be able to gather data on this, see what's going on, see visual process. I need graphs and charts. So and then, you know, this is a process of trial and error. And I'm just going to show you where we are now. We've got a lot of room for improvement in this process. So to date we've done about 1200 to 1400 client happiness calls this year. And this is how the process works. So a client calls us and the client details are populated into the Client Happiness Coordinators project board which is derives off of our main board. We do this in Monday, but you could do it in asana or click up or any other case, project management software like that.

Devon Slovenksy 00:06:06 Unfortunately, case management software just doesn't do this. Well, first call the intake coordinator is going to send a welcome text message first, just letting them know who they are and that there are another point of contact in the firm. And normally before we start doing the client happiness calls, the intake coordinator is going to talk with the paralegals on the case, just, you know, normal human connection. What's going on with this person? You know, if somebody's mother died yesterday and the attorney knows that and we had a call about it yesterday, we're probably not going to call that client for a client happiness call that day. And, you know, we do occasionally have the chronically unsatisfied clients that we know. There's nothing we can do. And we just hope their case gets closed soon. And if we know there is nothing we can do to make somebody happy, we may choose to not be constantly reminding the firm that you know that we exist and that we're just going to hopefully get that case closed.

Devon Slovenksy 00:07:00 We ask for questions. We've kept these the same. These were the questions we came up in April because we wanted this to be able to get some structured data. And we may edit these, but we'll talk about these a little bit more. My we've got a video from my intake coordinator I'm going to share with you. We document the responses so I can see the responses. They get pushed into our CRM so everybody can see them on Clio. And the attorney gets an automated email update about the result of the call in their inbox. The calls can, you know, lead to know escalation, which is about what 90% of the calls, 90% or more of the calls end up resulting in, or they'll get escalated to the legal team or the billing team to answer and resolve questions. And we're looking for a first to response to any issues that are raised within 24 hours. I wanted to show you a little bit of our client happiness board. So we have a client that I dearly love. We call her Taylor Swift around the office She is not actually Taylor Swift, but, here she is.

Devon Slovenksy 00:07:58 This is our Monday board setup. If you want to get an idea for how to visually break this out, but you can see we're doing these client happiness calls, every month you can see the first client happiness call and then the subsequent ones and the results we've got from those. And again, they push to the CRM and the client, or the attorney on the file also gets an update at the end of the call. And you can tell this client is routinely satisfied with our services. And you better bet that Taylor Swift is going to be getting a request for a review at the close of her case. Just the metrics I keep. This is a nice thing about Monday. You can aggregate metrics. This was a snapshot from yesterday. Already this far into October, we're about 80% done with our client happiness calls. The Reds are people who didn't answer. the blacks are ones that have, we haven't attempted to reach yet. And then you'll see the results on the right hand. We've got one billing complaint and we've got one legal issue so far this year.

Devon Slovenksy 00:08:59 But we aggregate all of this data on a monthly basis. And then I can dig in a little bit further if I need to. So what does it doing for us. So we've done this 1200 times this year and we've reached hundreds of clients. I had a client that I thought I was doing that standing job for. I mean, she was my my favorite client. I mean, she had a meritorious case. She was a domestic violence victim. She had a special needs child. And I cared so much about her case. And any time she emailed, she probably got a response when within an average of one business hour and we met all the time and I answered all of her questions. And frankly, she's a really anxious person, and she wasn't happy. And I didn't know. I didn't know I was doing all of the things. And I found out that my favorite client, that I'm pouring my heart and soul into her case, actually wasn't happy. So I was able to talk to her more and help her understand why, Despite the fact that I am a family law attorney, we still needed to get some other experts involved in her really complicated case, and she just didn't quite get it.

Devon Slovenksy 00:10:01 And I didn't know that was a problem because she was too shy to let me know about that, and I was able to repair the relationship. So a lot of this is about addressing the clients that are quietly unhappy, and unearthing those quietly unhappy clients that aren't going to tell you to their face that they're unhappy. But when your name comes up in a conversation with a friend hiring a lawyer, they're going to say, hey, she was okay, and we want to avoid those. So one thing that was great for me is as a family law attorney, I can never win a case. I can never get you 100% of the assets, and I can never get to 100% of the time with your with your children. I can't win. And because of that dynamic, I assume in my head that my clients are always unhappy with me because my cases are never perfect. This has been wonderful to see that our clients actually, for the most part, are satisfied. And it's been so good for attorney confidence as well, because I think the personality types that become lawyers can be so self-critical.

Devon Slovenksy 00:11:08 And this has given us more confidence in the work that we do. So when we do unearth an issue, what we find most of the time, surprise, surprise, it's a communication issue. We're in touch with our clients all the time, but still we run into issues where our client didn't understand this or couldn't articulate this, and we're actively unearthing those pieces of confusion so that we can address them. And then of course, our scheduling or delay issues. And maybe there's a good explanation for why there's a delay. But this way we explain it to our clients. So what we're finding our clients value communication versus speed. If we can tell them there's a reason your case is taking a while. They normally understand. They normally accept that, but they need to understand why. So making sure that we speak with them about next steps. Sometimes the attorney forgets to do that, and we find out through the client happiness that they didn't understand what happens next. And that's what your clients always want to know.

Devon Slovenksy 00:12:06 So again, the big value here was unearthing the client quietly frustrated clients that are not going to be out in the community promoting us after our case is done and making sure that our clients during normal slowdowns, they still feel value. well, let's see, here is our client, happiness coordinator, Olivia, and I'm going to see if this video will.

Devon Slovenksy 00:12:32 Play I don't know okay. Oh all right. I don't know if the AV team.

Devon Slovenksy 00:12:41 Is able to.

Devon Slovenksy 00:12:41 Make that video play, but.

Devon Slovenksy 00:12:42 If not, we can just skip.

Devon Slovenksy 00:12:43 Over it.

Devon Slovenksy 00:12:53 All right. Looks like we'll not be hearing from Olivia today. But if you were to hear from Olivia, she would talk to you about some of the add ons that we get from this. Obviously, as we refine this program, this is going to start being a place from which we're going to start requesting client reviews. But another really awesome thing from this project has been finding ways to help our referral partners as well by helping our own clients.

Devon Slovenksy 00:13:17 So we've helped clients get connected with estate planning firms at the end of their divorces. We've helped clients set up trusts, you know, get matched to set up trusts. We've matched them with counselors and therapists. And so this has been another value add for our client, where they perceive that we really do care about them beyond just let's get the divorce done. So again this is a call for you to listen differently to your clients and give another way for your clients to communicate with your firm. It's a way for the type A types like me to know that your quality of representation is caring through, and it's so important that this role is somebody independent from the legal team working on the case. And that's why we've structured this this way. And what I want to do for you all, for being here today is I've put some resources here on the client happiness quarter, client happiness quarter position. So we've got, I believe, a job at a job description and then our processes and procedures on how we do these calls, which we're constantly refining.

Devon Slovenksy 00:14:35 But again, thank you so much for this. I am in the Max Lorcan Guild community all the time and happy to discuss more of how we do. The client happiness calls with you at any time, so thank you again.