Why a 24 7 Answering Service is a Must Have For Law Firms

In our previous post, we discussed the most important statistics to know regarding how potential new clients search for attorneys and what happens leading up to and after the initial phone call to a law firm. In case you haven’t read the 7 Things You Didn’t Know About Law Firm Marketing, read it here! If you have, let’s explore why a 24 7 answering service is a must have for law firms!

Let’s discuss a few things.

1. You’re already spending money on search marketing.

In all honesty, you really should be if you want to be successful in today’s era, and here’s why: According to Google, 96% of people seeking legal advice use a search engine. Not only that, but 74% of those people end up contacting the law firm by phone once they are ready.

What does this mean?

Well, a vast majority of your potential clients are searching for you online. A vast majority of those same searches are going to contact you by phone! This means you need to ensure that 100% of those phone calls are answered so that you can capture that caller’s business!

How do you do that?

According to Forbes, 72% of callers do not leave voicemail messages when calling a business. So trusting a voicemail with your potential new clients is out. Forwarding calls to your cell phone after hours is a start, but even you can admit that you can’t answer your own phone 100% of the time. Even if you answered your phone every single time it rang, calls get dropped, you might not have service, or your battery might die. Anything can happen, so you’ll never actually get EVERY call.

You need a 24 7 answering service.

Not only that, but you need a highly skilled, professionally trained answering service that can keep the image of your law firm as pristine as possible. Having an answering service trained exclusively for law firms will help you obtain new clients, display a total sense of professionalism on the phone, and will even help free up your time during business hours since you won’t constantly be tethered to the phones!

2: When you speak to a potential new client on the phone, they usually hire you.

A lot of attorneys know that when a potentially new client calls in for assistance, the best thing you can do to obtain that caller’s business is to have the lawyer speak with them directly, right away. This usually comes in the form of a 15 minute free phone consultation followed by the scheduling of an appointment to further discuss the matter at hand and the official hiring of your firm.

According to FindLaw 72% of people looking to hire an attorney hire the first one they speak to! What does this mean for your firm? You better speak to potential new clients as soon as possible!

How can you speak to as many potential new clients as possible? The answer is… you guessed it: having a 24 7 answering service.

Here are two ways having a 24 7 answering service will help you speak to more potential clients.

People trust people, not answering machines.

#1: Even though your answering machine might say that you’ll call the potential new client back, they don’t trust that their voicemail will ever be heard. By having a 24 7 answering service, the virtual receptionist answering the phone will assure callers that you will get back to them promptly, when you finish court, or within the hour. This will stop the caller from trying to find another attorney, because they have been assured by a real person that you will help them with their case!

Your answering service can transfer calls to you.

#2: Your 24 7 answering service can patch calls from potential clients, wherever you are! Today’s attorney is on the go, moving from the office, to court, and meeting all over town. That’s why having a professional receptionist who knows which calls to transfer into you is so important! You can do everything you need to do, not have to spend your entire budget on an in-house receptionist, and still obtain new clients.

3: Your referrals don’t happen the way you think they do.

A lot of lawyers think that once their name is given out as a referral, they are sure to capture that referral’s business. This is not necessarily true. Even if that person receives your name as a referral, he/she will most likely search online for you, find your phone number, and like the majority of clients that we discussed before, will try to call you! If you don’t answer that phone right away and don’t have an answering service, that referral is going to look for help elsewhere.

According to Google, 62% of legal searches don’t use branded terms. Example: people search “personal injury lawyer Texas” instead of “Law Office of Dewey Cheatem and How.” This means that the people looking for you don’t know you exist yet! If you are lucky enough or skilled enough to appear on the first page for the results of these queries, it is absolutely imperative that you answer the phone to cash in on the opportunity at hand! When someone who got your name as a referral goes online to search for you, it’s important to answer the phone right away, or the potential client will search one of these non branded terms and call someone else!

A 24 7 answering service can’t solve all of the problems you have, but i definitely solves a lot of the issues with your influx of new clients.