0:00:04.9 Speaker 1: Allie, welcome to today's webinar. It's right at 1 o'clock and we know that everybody's schedule is busy, so thank you so much for finding the time just to sit with us for a little bit listen in to some of the behind the scenes. What we're calling "Out With The Old, In With The 2022. Marketing was very excited about that catchy tag line. Thanks for sitting with us and we're gonna go through a couple agenda items just to kind of set the road map for you. Hopefully, you can see my screen is moving. Meet the team, we've had some shifts here within ARAG over the past year. So we kinda wanted to do a little bit of an introduction here on some of those changes. 2021, we had a lot of initiatives that we were working on, and we wanna give you some updates on some of those projects. You may have seen some of them already behind the scenes and in the works as you're working with your ARAG members, so we wanted to wrap up on those as well. State of the business, give you an idea of what 2021 looked like for us. As well as any trends, obviously, we're in the pandemic, and so we wanted to share some of that information with you, so you can kinda see the behind the scenes on that as well.
0:01:23.4 Speaker 1: And then 2022, we have a lot in the hopper, so we wanted to give you an idea of what we're looking at, some of the things we're piloting, some of the things we're testing, trying to stay ahead of the technology and the legal industry and access to justice, and all of those wonderful things. So we will end with a little bit of a Q and A, if we do not get to any of your questions or to get to all of the questions, I guess I should say, know that Laura and myself and the rest of the attorney experience team, we will get back to you. So what I first wanted to show you is, if you're not familiar with GoToWebinar, we wanted to encourage you to submit questions as we go. So if you look here on your screen, how it's going to appear on your side is on the right panel, there's a little tab that says "Questions". And so throughout the webinar, please feel free to submit those to us, and we would love to address those as we go towards the end or like I said at a later time. We also have two polls, we have two questions, burning questions, I guess I should say, that we're really curious about. As Laura and I are going through our slides today, we're gonna be throwing those up as we go. So when you see those, please interact with that and let us know the answers to some of those questions.
0:02:45.4 S1: I'll start it off though. Again, my name is Allie. I may sound a little familiar to some of you, I may look familiar to some of you. I've been at ARAG for 10 years, and I spent my first six years over here, at attorney experience, then I shuffled over to our sales and client management team, and then I missed the attorney experience side so much that they invited me to come back. So like I said I've been here for just over 10, and I'm really looking forward to helping on the advocate side again. So, Laura.
0:03:16.8 Speaker 2: Alright, well, I will introduce the rest of our team. My name is Laura Carlson, and I'm the senior attorney advocate on the attorney experience team. I began in our customer care team originally, and I've been with ARAG for almost 12 years now so, over in the attorney experience side of things for about four and a half years or so now. We also have Jennifer Guthrie, she came over from our customer care team as well, so she has a lot of knowledge on everything, and she has been with ARAG for four years in total. And Mallory came from our customer care team as well, and she has been with ARAG for nine years. So we have a lot of background and knowledge on a variety of different areas within ARAG, and a lot of knowledgeable people to answer any and all questions that you have. Our fifth team member is our chatbot or ally-bot, and she is behind our attorney log in when you're logged into the portal. And we always encourage you guys to interact with her, 'cause she can answer many common questions that we see come through often. We keep taking steps on making her smarter, and we are continuing to evolve that as we get more questions from our attorneys and inquires on how to make it more self-service.
0:04:39.7 S1: You're right, she's very much our fifth team member.
0:04:43.3 Speaker 2: Yes, she is, she is. [chuckle] And then we'll have our contact information here, we'll have it in a couple of different places today. But you can always give us a call or email us, and all of us have access to that email to give you guys a response and get back to you via phone as well. So yeah.
0:05:07.9 S1: Hang on, there you go.
0:05:11.1 S2: Alright, and our customer care team is there for all things coverage related. They are separate from us, as to where our team is dedicated to assisting you guys with all attorney side of things, your profile questions, we can update anything on your profile or help you get to where you need to update those items. We can answer any fee schedule questions or claims questions. But like I said, our customer care team is there specifically for all things coverage-related. They are the experts in that area. So they are your go-to. As you can see on this slide, it shows that over 2300 transactions are handled per day, which seems like a lot, but believe it or not, that's actually a bit less than what we've seen in years past. And that is due to ARAG creating more ways that members can get help with their legal matter.
0:06:06.4 S2: They're able to create their own cases online, they can also use the customer care chat functionality to chat directly with a customer care representative on the spot. And there's some other enhancing capabilities on our website to help them with that as well. At ARAG, we're working hard to provide as much self-service technology as possible, and one of those things is using the chat bot, like I said, with the customer care side of things, as well as the attorney experience side of things. And so now we were... We are gonna be putting up a poll asking everyone with us today, have you used either the customer care chat bot or the attorney experience chat bot?
0:06:52.6 S1: Yeah, and like Laura said, so if you're familiar with those, so... On the customer care side, so just when you go to ARAGlegal.com, and you're interacting on that portal, you're gonna see that there's gonna be a customer care avenue, I guess I could say that you could chat with them. And then, when you log into your network attorney portal they're on the bottom right side. As soon as you log in, you get to that home page, you're gonna see the little icon pop up. So there's two different ways that you can interact with the chat. And like Laura said, we're really looking to make all of our bots smaller... Or smarter, [chuckle] so that way we can look at the data and understand how we can make it more self-service. Within our leadership and our meetings internally, we talk so much about how can we enhance our technology, so that way everything is getting more self-service focused. And one other thing I was gonna mention is when, like I said, I came from the sales and client management side, before I came over here, and one of the trends that we were noticing is... So Laura was talking about how they have, customer care has over 2300 transactions per day.
0:08:01.7 S1: Something we learned from the pandemic is... We were looking at data from customer care and our... So as soon as they pick up the phone, for example, the length of time that customer care was spending on the call with an attorney or with a member was actually longer. And we were looking at that data and we kept seeing that trend come in, and it's because people in the pandemic just wanted to talk on the phone. They're at home, everybody's mostly at... Especially through 2020 and 2021. And so we just found that members especially, they just wanted to talk. So customer care had a lot of that.
0:08:44.8 S2: And just to call out the last thing on the slide here, 'cause I think it's a fun fact that our customer care team has grown so much in the recent years. In 2017, there was 44 representatives and today, we are approaching 65, and growing, I wanna say. It's really cool to see the growth.
0:09:09.5 S1: Okay, so now I'm gonna move into some of the work that we have already done. And I mentioned this at the very beginning, we've been really busy all throughout 2021. And so here on the upper right side, so the picture that you're seeing, these used to be called Explanation of Benefits. Now we're calling them our case summaries. So we thought we would show you this, this really isn't something that you're gonna see necessarily on the attorney side, it's more, this is what the member gets every single time the attorney submits the claim, and the member gets this sent to them digitally so that way they can see the service that the... And really one of the biggest things for you to see is... Or one of the biggest points of this is not only for them to see the value of having ARAG, but you as their network attorney, showing the value of you as their attorney. So that's one of the recent changes that we've had. Members start a case. So we launched this recently, and if you're not familiar, you actually have the same functionality within your attorney portal, it's for wills and trusts. So if you practice within estate planning, you actually, they... We tested this initially on our attorney side and so within your attorney portal, you can actually go in and create cases for members if they have to do with wills or trusts.
0:10:35.4 S1: Some of you have... We have a lot of utilization on that, so some of you have already found that feature on there. If you need any help, you can call Laura or myself, and we can certainly walk you through that. But we looked at that, and then we decided, well let's roll something similar out to members. Again, self-service, self-service, that's what we keep focusing on. So we launched this back in October, and so members go into their portal, they have a similar set up, but they can do it really for any area of law. And so they create a case, type up a story around what their legal matter is about, it then goes to customer care and for coverage. And keep in mind, we are an insurance company, so for coverage purposes and making sure we're verifying coverage the right way, we do still have a live person reviewing those every time, confirming coverage, getting the attorneys associate to those cases, and all of that. So that's something that we recently launched, obviously, we're always making enhancements to that as we see the data come in.
0:11:33.4 S1: Back to the wills and the trusts that you as the attorney get to do. We are looking at the data that's coming in, and we are at the very, very beginning phase of researching and kind of exploring, are there more areas of law that we can add to the portal for attorneys to do as well. Nothing has been released, of course, so you're not late to the game on that at all, but that's something that we're just in the very beginning stages of looking at.
0:12:05.9 S1: Areas of law. So a couple more things that we have been busy working on. Some of you may have seen a few emails from us over the past couple of months talking about areas of law, encouraging you to go into your profile and make changes to your profile, or just make sure that you're reviewing the areas of law you have on file. Specifically, what matters most is for you to understand consumer contingency for personal injury, estate planning, trust, family law, and real estate matters. Those are the only areas of law that this project actually touched, so if you don't handle any of those areas of law, you don't have to worry about really what I'm gonna talk about here. But if you do, I would just say, if you haven't already, please go into your profile and make sure you're looking at those areas of law to make sure that you're getting... The whole goal is to make sure we're getting you cases that you want. Really what we don't want is for a member... For us to set up a case for a member, and then for them to go to you, and then you look at that and you're like, "You know what? This isn't an area of law that I really practice in, or this isn't a specialty that I have or something that I'm focusing on." Then we don't want that for you, and we also don't want that for the member.
0:13:23.6 S1: So really what we were trying to do was really define the areas of law and make them more micro-detailed. So if you haven't already done that, please go in there and do that. If you have, thank you so much. And we understand there's been quite a few emails that we've sent out to you encouraging you to go do that. Fee schedule updates. January 1st, I believe, is when the new fee schedule became available to you, out on your attorney portal. It still is out there. So as you know, and if you've been with ARAG for many years, we're always trying to make changes to our... Enhancements and changes to our fee schedule as we go. We had a... A couple of newsletters have gone out recently. I know that one went out, I think it was in the first week of January that also talked about the fee schedule changes, so there were some highlights in there. Some just to call out, now we have a line item, I believe it's on the very last page of your fee schedule, for a new release agreement. It just says release agreement on there. But that is something new. Also, some feedback that we've heard from the attorneys, that's really within our traffic areas of law, we were making it more confusing than it needed to be.
0:14:36.5 S1: So our fee schedule committee really looked at that, and really there was in the past, so prior to 1/1, there was a whole bunch of just line items within your fee schedule under traffic area, specifically that driving privilege defense area. So when you look at that now, we condensed it. I think there was four line items under that area alone, so we condensed that into only two. Also, two other things to mention in regards to the fee schedule, so estate planning matters. You'll see when you look under will package, that area of law has a little bit more clarity around that too. We were getting some feedback that it was... It was just a little too confusing, so we were able to add some clarity around that. And then one final reminder, we mentioned this in our email when the fee schedule updates went out. But as a reminder, employment matters are an exclusion to the plan. So I bring this up purely for COVID purposes that if you have an employee come to you and they want to use their plan against their employer, that is an exclusion. So just keep in mind, we wanted to remind you that so that way you never get yourself into a situation where it's not covered and all that. So any employment matters, that's not something that we would even cover, and we would never tell the member of that anyways, but I wanted to just bring that to your attention.
0:16:03.6 S1: Okay, so some behind the scenes, I guess, is what I look at it, or what I like to call it within ARAG, or state of the business. So we have a couple of fun charts here, you can see there at the top, talking about new clients and member growth. So this is... This was mentioned in the email that you all should have gotten earlier this week in regards to just how ARAG is doing. So as you can see, we have member growth, and 8.7%, we were... We're very proud of ourselves of that, and you can see there, there's just a name... A few of the names of the new groups that we brought on, but 110 in total for... That all started effective 1/1/2022. So you may see some new faces, you may see some new employer groups coming across your desk being referred to you by ARAG, and that's because our sales and client management team have been very busy.
0:17:10.2 S2: Alright. And I will talk about the profile updates, or how to make changes or enhance your profile for this year. So some good things to remember are, if you have multiple locations, be sure to have them all included, that way you can get referrals from all of those locations. You can include up to five additional addresses on your profile and that can be found under additional contact information on the website. And also, it's obvious that you will have an enhancement if you speak additional languages and get them added. So sometimes members will be looking for attorneys that speak a specific language, so that is very helpful to have all of those listed. Be sure, as Allie was saying, especially with our area of law enhancements, to be sure all your areas of law are up-to-date and make sure they're ones that you obviously want to receive referrals for now.
0:18:15.3 S2: And a big one is to be sure to have a profile photo. Members, when they're looking at attorney profiles, if they receive a list or if they're browsing the website, it's very important to them to be able to see who they're going to be contracting, and if they're comparing profile side by side, they're likely to pick the one that has everything filled out and showing the location, maybe a picture of the office where they're going to be going, all of that. It does set you apart from those other attorneys that don't have theirs filled out all the way. In the bio, it's a... It'll be a big thing to add, if you're willing to meet virtually or adding any other virtual options that you have, especially with the pandemic going on, we're seeing that become a more frequent request. If you utilize Calendly, or any other scheduling service, you can add that link in that section. If you would like us to help you write the bio, we do have a webinar that is on this topic in the webinar library that can be found on the website, and you can always give us a call as well for any questions or anything that we think that would help your profile stand out, we'd be happy to help you.
0:19:40.8 S1: Yeah, and like Laura said, she really emphasized on that portal or on the attorney profile photo, we cannot stress this enough that we do all sorts of member research and surveys and all of this stuff just to help us understand on the attorney experience side, what is it that members are looking for. What helps them make their decision on which attorney they're gonna use and all of that, and now that we have within the portal, you may already know, but we have ratings and reviews that we rolled out a few years ago, so when members are going on to the attorney search and the attorney finder, they're searching for attorneys that not only fit the criteria that they need for that specific area of law, but one of the easiest and most obvious ways that they choose an attorney is if they have a profile picture, we have data all across the board that shows that, so if you have not done that or if you haven't... Maybe you have a photo out there from a decade or two decades ago, I don't know, just go out there and make sure that it's as updated as it can possibly be.
0:20:51.3 S1: 2022. This is a short list, I guess, is what I'll say for what we have coming. The attorney portal that you used to log in today, it has been in place for many years, and I don't know about you, but I personally feel it needs a facelift, so we are making some changes to the portal to make it more... Like if you go to araglegal.com, and then you look at that design, but then you also look at what your network attorney profile experience is like, they really don't match, and so we want those to match, and that's what we're gonna be working really heavily on for all of 2022. We wanna improve your experience, we wanna make it as easy as possible for you to get in there and submit claims, look at cases, look at coverage information, whatever it is you need to do, and so you're gonna see... Throughout the year, you're gonna see small shifts within that, the first part of that is what we're calling our universal login. It is very important to us that we have your information and our member information as secure as possible, so a lot of companies in general are moving to a universal login situation.
0:22:03.9 S1: Our plan member experience has already transitioned to that, and so next we need to move the attorneys to that. So what does this mean to you? It really doesn't require a whole lot from you at this time, nothing is rolled out, we're looking at earliest in March that this shift will happen and really you'll know that it happens because as soon as you log in or as soon as you go to log in, it's gonna ask you a few additional questions and then you'll be pushed into the same platform experience, so the initial log in and then the... As soon as you land on the homepage of the network attorney portal, we're calling that the dashboard right now, so those two things in tandem are gonna be the first two things that you're gonna see evolve. Is the functionality gonna be the same? Yes. Are you gonna be able to do the same things on the portal? Yes, there's really nothing that's being taken away or anything like that, it's more... We just need to get it more in line for security purposes, and then also the design of it just needs to be improved. So you'll see some of that, we will send out communications ahead of time before anything officially happens, but wanted to give you a heads up on that, and like I said, you'll see things evolve all across the portal throughout the entire year and probably into 2023, so lots of exciting things coming there.
0:23:21.1 S1: Training videos, one of the number one questions that Laura and I get and the rest of our team get is, can you train me? Can you train my staff? Can you train us on how to submit claims? So we could have this idea, and I think we have another poll that we're gonna toss up there as well, but we have this idea around trying to make it easier for you or your staff to submit claims to us, and so we're gonna come up with some really short tutorials. None of us wanna be watching a video for 10 minutes long on how to submit a claim, we're thinking really short clips, so that way to try and equip, or give your team as many tools as possible so that it can be super easy for you to get into our portal, again, we're gonna be making the overall flow of the portal easier anyways, but you can always call us, we can explain it to you via the phone, but we thought this would be a great time for us to be rolling out some training videos to make your life a little easier. Annual survey coming up, so we are gonna be sending that out to you towards the end of next week, I would say Friday is the timeline that we're looking at of next week, so I would really encourage you to fill that out.
0:24:34.1 S1: It takes about 10 minutes for you to complete the survey, and it is so important to us because really what we're wanting to do is understand there's all these projects and ideas and things that we're wanting to test out in the future, and you are our main users and you are the ones that matter the most, because you are the ones that are gonna be actually using any of this functionality that we're gonna roll out, so it's really important to us that have your feedback, your experience in it before we start really developing anything, so like I said, it takes you about 10 minutes, please fill that out, the questions kinda go all over the board, but it's all focused on you as an attorney in your experience on the network. And then lastly, webinars, I can't say mark your calendars 'cause we don't know quite yet the dates of those, but what we've been doing is maybe once a month, maybe it's every other month, we're kind of rolling out different topics that we are hearing about from you, we're not coming up with these on our own, this is all suggestions that are coming from our network attorneys, so we'll be rolling out more content for you in regards to webinars, so be on the look out for those.
0:25:44.6 S1: We will let you know when those are available. And here is Laura and myself, here's our LinkedIn, if you wanna connect with us, feel... You're more than welcome to do so. If there's any questions, we want you to put the attorneys@araglegal.com, that is our team, the all of our attorney experience, that is our address. So feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions. And I know we have time here, I wanted to kinda keep it right at about 30-35 minutes here because of everybody's time, so let me take a look at some questions here.
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0:26:38.3 S1: One of the questions that came in is how are fees determined? So it's a great question, I appreciate that. So we internally, we have a couple... There's many, many aspects to this question or to this answer, we have a fee schedule committee, and internally, we meet quarterly, I wanna say, we look at our currency schedule, we look at what we're seeing in regards to the industry, we know... So Laura and I are located in Iowa, that's where ARAG is located in the United States if you weren't aware of that, we know that attorney fees or just cost of living things are not going to be the same price as it is here in Iowa versus Miami versus Montana, or New York City, wherever you may be located. So we have to be super cognizant of that. And we understand that areas of law, that also is going to impact you as an attorney, and that particular area of law, what type of work you have to do based on what state you're located, and there's different laws for every state, of course, so we have a fee schedule committee that look at all of that, and they look at all of those pieces too to make sure that we are meeting the needs of the attorneys and staying ahead of any sort of trends that we're seeing.
0:27:54.1 S1: The other thing that we do is you may be familiar with when you go in to submit a claim to us, we actually ask you, and I don't believe at this time it's a required field for you to complete, but we ask you about halfway through that claim form, how many hours did it take for you to complete that legal matter, and we ask that because we're using that, so if you're not filling that in right now, I would really encourage you to fill in that field when you get to it on the claim form, because we use that data to understand if we see that an attorney, if we see a trend that attorneys are taking more time for a revocable trust or whatever the area of law may be, we want to make sure that we're paying fairly for that, if you are having to spend way more time on it because maybe a law has changed or there's something within your state that is shifting.
0:28:52.0 S2: I see that we got another question here, which is, how can I as an attorney help to grow ARAG's business? There's a couple of different things that I would recommend for that. And we do on our website, when you're logged into the attorney portal, under the Resources tab at the very top, there is a link where you can click on the ARAG marketing center, and that will have all kinds of marketing materials that you can include on your email picker or on your website to show that you are a proud ARAG network attorney and you accept it. So that kind of gets that information out there, also, if you have any attorneys that you know of that are not on the network, you can refer them to join the ARAG network, and the best way to do that is to log into the website and on the home page, it will say refer a friend right there, so you can fill that out and once they are active and joined on the network, you will actually get $100 referral bonus. So it benefits you as well.
0:30:01.7 S1: Another question that I see is, is there a list of company plans with ARAG? So I think what you're asking is, is there a list that I could see how the clients in... Show me the master list of all the clients that ARAG supports? So we have contracts with each of our clients, and not all of our clients give us permission to say their name. So we aren't able to give a full list of the company names and all of the partners that we have, we are over 1000 clients that we have in total within our book of business, something that you can do... And I meant to talk about this in one of my earlier slides when I was talking about them. I showed the two charts and it had the sales and the state of the business. So today, within your attorney portal, you don't have the functionality to be able to go in there to see how many members are in your area, confidentiality purposes, that's why we can't do that, but if you want to give us a call, we can always tell you, within 30 miles of you, 20 miles of you, we can't give you the exact names of all of the members, but if you're just trying to understand how many people are in my area, we can tell you that number.
0:31:17.2 S1: So if you wanna give us a call or maybe you're looking at opening up a satellite location in a certain area, and you want to understand, Okay, if I open it up in this area, how many... Is that a good idea? Is there very many members in that area for us to even be able to service, so we can always tell you that information as well. How often is case assist updated? Laura would you say that's updated like by the second?
0:31:47.3 S2: Yeah. And I saw that one... That question in there too. And I think the way that I'm reading it is, how long is a case assist confirmation or how often is that updated? And it is immediate, if a member were to call in and make any changes to their confirmation form, it'll update immediately and show what their new coverage is, if it makes any changes to it, or if an attorney does that as well. It'll update immediately.
0:32:20.9 S1: And then one more question that I see coming in, and then I think we'll wrap up, and of course, any other questions that we aren't able to get to today, like I said, we will get back to you via email, but one more that I see came in, is there a way for attorneys to see the entire attorney directory or is that only available to clients? You are correct, that's only available to clients it is kind of similar to what I was saying earlier on, that you can't see the names of members, it's the same concept, you can't see the names of other network attorneys within the area, we don't have that directory available to you from within your attorney portal. Okay, well, we kind of went over our time, kind of not, but if you have any other questions, here's our email address, it's still up here on the screen that you can see, so we would love to talk to you, like Laura said, our team has been shifting and evolving, and you have a lot of new faces here within the team, which is nuts because we've all been here for what feels like a million years, so we are here to help you and answer any of your questions that you may have, and thanks so much for attending today and taking some time out of your day.