How Working Solutions uses eWebinar to boost case participation to 45%

Employment lawyers are faced with a lot of moving parts, and not just inside the courtroom. One of the biggest challenges they face involves communicating with thousands of clients in a way that is efficient and effective for everyone involved.

For Working Solutions, maintaining that level of communication became increasingly challenging as the firm took on massive class actions and mass arbitrations. Phone calls and email blasts simply didn’t scale, and the team needed a better way to share important updates without sacrificing the personal connection clients expect from their lawyers.

Chris Davis, founding partner of Working Solutions, spoke to us about how his firm uses eWebinar to communicate efficiently with large groups of clients, reduce repetitive calls and emails, and create a more personal client experience.

Hi, Chris! Can you start by telling me a little bit about yourself and your company?

Sure. My name is Chris Davis. I'm the founding partner of Working Solutions law firm, which is a full-service employment law firm in New York City, with offices in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.

What are some examples of the types of cases that you try at your law firm?

We’re employment litigators, so we handle litigation matters, from complaint through to the final verdict. That includes discovery depositions, trial preparations, and trials. In addition, a lot of the matters we manage are pre-litigation or demand-letter-stage matters.

We also do consultations, primarily for professionals in the financial industry and in professional services. We deal with partnership disputes, employment offers, those types of things.

A lot of the cases that we litigate relate to employment discrimination claims; usually pregnancy, disability discrimination, FMLA leave, equal pay claims, unpaid minimum wage or overtime, and retaliation or being fired for having complained about any of those things. We bring those on a collective class or mass arbitration basis.

Can you tell me how your firm uses eWebinar?

We love eWebinar. We use it all the time. I'm a very strong advocate for the platform; it's completely changed our capacity to handle certain types of matters and to communicate on a broad basis with existing clients and continue communicating with them.

“Litigation is fast-moving, and eWebinar lets us stay in touch with a lot of people and upload videos that answer questions we would otherwise be asked a dozen times over email.”

Litigation is fast-moving, and so are the arbitrations we file. Things change constantly. eWebinar allows us to stay in touch with a lot of people and upload videos that answer questions that are asked (questions that we would previously be asked a dozen times over email). We can address all of those through a series of eWebinars on a rolling basis. So it’s been very helpful and time-efficient.

Can you share a little more about how you use eWebinar and what you were doing before?

Before eWebinar, we struggled with communicating with our clients. For example, we’ve had a few class actions with over 1,000 class members, and now we have a few mass arbitrations with thousands of class members. And when they proceed on an individualized basis we have to communicate with people about settlement offers and whether or not they wish to settle on an individualized basis, and stay in touch with them about all the aspects of the case. So we’ve managed that with two solutions.

“eWebinar allows us to communicate important information to clients with a personalized touch.”

One is Avochato, which is business texting, because the bulk of our communications are by text. But there are communications that we send out that are too long to communicate to everyone in a text. We send those through videos in eWebinar, which also allows us to put a face to our communications.

What were you using before? Were you just making a bunch of phone calls?

Yes, and it was unmanageable. We got overwhelmed with individual calls. We would also send out an email blast and get back 800 individual responses. It was madness.

“Before eWebinar, we would get overwhelmed with individual calls or send out an email blast and get back 800 individual responses. It was madness!”

Did you have to hire more people to make all those calls?

Yes, we had to hire more people for certain class actions, just to answer phone calls.

And it’s not uncommon for a settlement to teeter on the brink of disaster because of a rebellious faction within the class. I remember going to a union meeting hall in South Brooklyn to address 100 tech workers about why they were actually getting a very good deal for a settlement. I had to do that because I didn’t have an alternative way to meaningfully communicate with them.

"We had to staff up more for certain class actions, just to answer phone calls."

Now that we use eWebinar, we can share necessary information and answer questions by using the chat function. Instead of saying the same script to 100 people over and over again in a phone call, we record it once. Then if they have questions, those questions are more meaningful and get directed to the right people.

All the chats that come through are sent to a Slack channel and we have a paralegal who responds to all of them and escalates them if they are ones that a lawyer needs to handle. We love the Slack integration because it’s allowed us to respond quickly to chats. We have multiple staff members watching that channel.

"The way eWebinar integrates with Slack lets us respond quickly because we have multiple people watching that channel."

Also, we now carry far less risk of people feeling like they’re being left in the dark and revolting because of it. Now, through our eWebinar videos and updates, they can see we’re doing a ton of work. They feel like they know me when they do speak to me, because they remember me from the videos in eWebinar.

In fact, I had a mediation two weeks ago, and the client told me that he retained our firm because we were the lawyers who seemed the most human. So I think eWebinar is really helpful for allowing businesses to get in front of a big audience and really let your personality be revealed.

We’re also going to start using eWebinar for marketing purposes.

Tell me more about how you’re going to use eWebinar for marketing!

We’re going to start making very short videos, one to three minutes long, relating to topics like “Do I have a case?” and “Can I get more severance?” and “How is Working Solutions different from other law firms?”

“We’re excited to start using eWebinar for our marketing needs.”

We’ll explain the nuts and bolts, and then those short videos will direct people to different information channels to learn more. We’ll use eWebinar for the longer videos. People will learn, and those who don’t have cases will drop off and those who do will pursue more information. After that, we might have a live Q&A where we can share even more information.

Can you elaborate some more on the benefits you’ve seen since adopting eWebinar?

It definitely increases our participation rate. This is a big deal because historically a lot of people drop out after they realize that they have to do more than simply sign up for a class action. There are forms to fill out, they might have to attend a settlement conference call, they might have to sit for a deposition. But with eWebinar it’s much easier to walk people through each step and also retain them. Previously, it wasn’t unusual for us to see 10-20% participation in a total class. But since we adopted eWebinar and Avochato, we’re seeing 45% retention for our mass arbitrations.

Has eWebinar made your team’s life easier?

Definitely. We don’t get as many calls as we used to. And although we still get people who are angry, it’s not like they used to be when there was a court-facilitated notice that went out and we had limited resources for communicating that to people!

How do your clients feel about eWebinar’s hybrid format?

We haven’t had any negative feedback about it. People just have questions. We get gripes about how we made a video too long, or how we chose to deal with certain content, but never anything negative about the eWebinar platform. I think clients truly appreciate that a lawyer is making the effort for them, and I think the videos we drop into eWebinar help communicate that we are on their team.

What do you love most about eWebinar?

So much! It’s allowed us to do something we couldn’t do before: provide a more personal experience between the lawyer and the client. Lawyers are notoriously busy, and it can be difficult when you’re monitoring a lot of different clients and cases; you want to do so efficiently, but that’s hard to do when a lot of the questions are repetitive.

“eWebinar has greatly reduced the amount of repetitive questions we have to answer.”

For instance, we used to get a lot of questions asking “When can I settle?” The answer was always “We don’t know.” We used to say it a million times. But now, there’s a way to say that within eWebinar. We can say, “As much as we want to be able to predict, we are ethically not allowed to guarantee outcomes.” We can’t even say if the case will settle. However, we can say in eWebinar that, for example, 95% of a certain type of case has settled in the past, and project our confidence that way.

Who would you recommend eWebinar to?

I’d recommend it to other class action lawyers, particularly those who are in the mass arbitration space, which for employment lawyers is pretty much everyone. eWebinar is really an essential tool for class action lawyers and lawyers who have to figure out how to project-manage communications with large groups of clients, and that’s becoming increasingly critical with these mass arbitrations that are actually playing out as if they’re individualized cases.

"eWebinar is an essential tool for class action lawyers, and for any lawyer who has to project-manage communications with large groups of clients."

We have obligations as lawyers to stay in touch with people and to keep people reasonably informed of developments. There are all sorts of ways that eWebinar is useful for getting those messages out, from explaining the retainer agreement to explaining the process, to explaining our obligations and the client’s obligations, to discussing what the client needs to provide to us in terms of discovery.

Thank you, Chris! We’re so happy to hear that eWebinar has made a difference for Working Solutions!

If you’re an employee or employer in need of employment law representation in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, or Massachusetts, contact Working Solutions. They are highly skilled in the areas of discrimination, wrongful termination, sexual harassment, unpaid wages, FMLA violations, severance agreements, and more.

…And if you’re a business leader looking to scale customer training, generate leads, or deliver engaging on-demand webinars without sacrificing the human touch, click here to get started with eWebinar!