How Your Business Can Benefit from a Legal Answering Service

If you have good lawyers on your team and succeed, you should see your reputation, list of clients, and revenue grow. However, the telephone can be your greatest asset or your worst nemesis. Missed calls can mean missed opportunities; even established clients may move on if they can’t reach someone. All the while, your staff has many duties to tend to.

A legal answering service allows your team to stay focused while ensuring no call goes unanswered.

Why Hire a Legal Answering Service?

It’s not to say the answering machine wasn’t a useful invention, but being greeted by a recording is a bit impersonal. For a legal practice, connecting with clients who are dealing with important matters is essential. A call answering service can benefit your firm in the following ways:

Fewer Missed Calls: Calls are answered whether your staff is in the office or not. Your clients can reach you, day or night, and receive the same quality service. Any call volume is managed whether you’re taking time off, meeting with another client, or working a case in court.
Personal Touch: A caller may feel an urgency to contact your firm, whether they have questions about their personal injury case, a lawsuit or settlement, or arrest. With an answering service, you can instantly connect with clients. Hearing a warm human voice can help them feel respected, important, and relaxed—not to mention confident in your ability to solve their problems.
Added Flexibility: Your employees spend less time taking incoming calls and more time working on tasks that help grow your business and revenue. Day-to-day matters are handled by the call center staff, while important calls are relayed to you, letting you tend to the most urgent ones.
Your Firm Appears Larger: The illusion of size gives client’s a better impression of your company, particularly newer customers for whom a positive first impression is critical. While it’s not necessarily true, some clients believe small organizations can’t provide the same quality of service.
Reduced Overhead: Having a full-time receptionist on staff can be expensive for a small law practice, as can be the equipment and space to support the added infrastructure. With an answering service, you just pay for the time you use it.
Less Stress: There’s no need to recruit or hire a professional receptionist, train them, or monitor their performance. Scheduling and absenteeism don’t factor into the equation, either. These are just a few areas where a phone answering service is more convenient.

Where Is a Legal Answering Service Helpful?

For any business, outsourcing customer service is a big decision. Comparing the cost of hiring a full-time receptionist to that of using an answering service for attorneys can give you a clear picture of the better option.

To know if an answering service would be helpful to your business, ask yourself:

Are calls being missed while your staff is busy with other tasks?
Are clients canceling their appointments or simply not showing up?
Do a lot of calls come in after-hours?
At times, do you see a sudden spike in call volume?
Can my client outreach and followup on leads be improved?

A legal answering service can be beneficial to law practices such as:

Bankruptcy
Business/Corporate
Labor and Employment
Criminal
Environmental
Real estate
Family
Entertainment
Immigration
Social Security
Tax/Financial

What Do Legal Answering Services Do?

By calling your firm’s phone number, a client or prospect can reach a live receptionist who is trained in various aspects of your business. Availability varies by provider, but AnswerMTI delivers a 24/7 live telephone answering service. Our agents can handle a wide range of tasks, including:

Greeting Callers: They’ll use your customized greeting every time, making callers feel respected and confident your company can always address their concerns.
Call Screening: Unwanted calls, including spam, can be filtered out. The agent can take messages you can access by phone or online or patch an important call directly to you.
Appointment Scheduling: Full access to your calendar or scheduling application allows the receptionist to book, cancel, or reschedule appointments as needed.
Client Intake Process: A telephone answering agent can ask relevant questions and gather information from a potential client; by the end of the call, all the details needed are in your file.
Bilingual Answering: Our U.S.-based bilingual receptionists speak English and Spanish, so they can assist attorneys and legal clients from various backgrounds, thereby extending the reach of your business to more customers.
Emergency Answering: If a client has an urgent need to reach you after hours, we’re here to help. Our emergency answering service also picks up the slack during storms and natural disasters when your office can’t be staffed. We ensure it continues to communicate and that high-priority messages are forwarded to you.

Choosing the Right Legal Answering Service

Hiring a subpar answering service can ruin your law firm’s reputation. The damage it can cause, especially if it’s unresponsive or disrespectful, can last for years. A high-quality legal answering service avoids such issues and adheres to laws pertaining to confidential communication and prevention of data breaches. Always inquire about the answering service’s availability, quality of service, security policies, terms and conditions, and pricing.

Before choosing an answering service, consult with several companies to determine if they:

Offer specialized services, such as legal support
Will do what you want them to (take messages, route calls, gather information from clients, etc.)
Are available 24/7/365 to be there for time-sensitive matters
Can scale to meet your service needs, from sporadic call support to complete virtual receptionist services
Have worked with other law firms before (testimonials and reviews can help here)

If you’re thinking of hiring a legal answering service, first determine if you need a dedicated receptionist. Also consider the amount of availability you need. Some phone services use remote call centers in different time zones for after-hours calls. At AnswerMTI, our agents are 100% U.S.-based, so they are always ready to help law firms located in any region.

Consider other services needed, in addition to phone answering. AnswerMTI offers a wide range of services to maximize the quality of your customer service. Plus, our proprietary software allows for unlimited scripting, a fast-setup, and online access to messages, service usage, and account information.

How you pay is another important consideration. We offer three pricing plans based on minutes of usage, plus a customized plan. All start with a free trial so you can test out our services and see if they’re a good fit for your law practice.

Sign Up for AnswerMTI’s Legal Answering Service

Since 1982, we have been providing a 24-hour Attorney Answering Service with receptionists trained to handle all types of legal intake calls. No matter what type of practice you run, our professional agents will answer phone calls day or night. You’ll never miss another call again, and every caller will receive the same level of attention and respect.

You can build your relationship with existing clients, attract new clients, improve your reputation, develop your brand image, and grow your business with a legal answering service. Our agents answer the phone promptly, making it easier for you to manage your practice and for attorneys to be more productive. We are fully available whether you work in personal injury, criminal, or corporate law.