In the tech world, there’s an observation known as Moore’s law. It posits that the advancement of technology is exponential, not linear. Though it isn’t a law of physics, anyone looking at technological advancements as disparate as the number of pixels in a smartphone camera to the rapid advancement of AI technology can see its application.

Here at Answering Legal, we’re not immune to change. In fact, we aim for it, and we’re constantly working to improve our service for our customers. This winter, we’re focusing on our new mobile app here on the Answering Legal blog. We’ll be highlighting its functions, giving tips and tricks, and generally just celebrating this new part of our service!

For this blog, we’ll just be covering the basics: how our app works and what it can do for you. In future installments, we’ll be diving deeper into its functionality and giving some inspiration for ways to make the most of this powerful new tool.

Whether you’re a longtime customer or someone brand-new to our service, our mobile app will help you make the most of what Answering Legal can do for your firm. We’ll go into just how it works below.

How Our App Works

The Answering Legal app is an extension of our service. At its simplest, it’s a home base for your messages. Rather than having to sort through text messages or emails, you can easily view all of your messages in one place.

When you’re using our app, nothing about your service necessarily changes on our end. We handle your calls exactly as we always have. Once we connect your app to your service, your messages will be delivered there, as well as to any CRM integrations you have set up. To learn more about our integrations, click here.

Though there isn’t much of a change on our end, the way you interact with our service will change, for the better. Your messages arrive as soon as a call ends and are automatically tagged based on the call types your firm handles most often. It’ll be easy to tell what each message is generally about, since the caller’s name and a brief summary will be visible immediately.

Opening a message will allow you to get more information about the caller and the message they left. From each individual message, you can follow up via email, text, or phone call, using the buttons on the bottom of the message. You can also swipe left or right to the next message in your inbox.

How To Organize Your Inbox

Those are the basics; let’s dive deeper into the organization options available on our app! Organizing is critical to making the most of your firm’s potential. It’s hard to measure the impact of a disorganized inbox, but studies have been done to measure the loss of productivity of a disorganized physical space.

The National Association of Professional Organizations found that the average worker wastes 4.3 hours a week because of a disorganized workspace.

That’s a measurement of time wasted looking for the right document on a messy desk. A disorganized inbox is very similar; if you’re looking for the right email or message, sometimes you can’t find it even with the search function! This waste of time is especially dire for attorneys, for whom time is quite literally money, if you’re billing by the hour.

Save Time By Managing Your Inbox Intelligently

If you’re looking to recover some of that time, we’ve got you covered! There are four basic organizational functions: sorting by call tag, favoriting messages, custom folders, and, of course, deleting messages. You can access any of these in bulk by clicking the circle to the left of each message.

Every call is tagged based on your firm’s most common call types. Each of those tags has a color code so that you can easily tell what kinds of calls you’ve been getting at a glance. If you want to, say, sort by medical malpractice calls, you can do so by selecting that call type in the menu.

The favorites and custom folders sections of the menu, on the other hand, are entirely customizable. You can use these for anything you can think of. Examples include:

• You can favorite messages that need an urgent follow-up
• You could create custom folders for clients or cases
• You can favorite messages that are of a more personal nature
• You could use folders to mark what stage a prospective client is in

Then, finally, you can delete messages that no longer have any relevance or are otherwise not necessary. You can do this from inside the message, in bulk, or even by swiping on the message in the main menu.

We’ll be diving deeper into how to organize your inbox in a future installment of this series! Stay tuned to our blog for more information.

How To Follow Up With Your Clients

Properly organizing your inbox will save you time, letting you keep abreast of what’s going on with your firm in just a glance. Now we’re getting to the part that will make you money: following up with clients.

Following up from the Answering Legal app is as easy as pressing a button. If an existing client has an issue that isn’t urgent, you can send a text or an email right from the app. As long as their contact information is included in the message, just pressing one of the buttons at the bottom of the message will open your phone’s native message or email client and allow you to communicate right away!

Of course, we recommend that you speak to a prospective client on the phone as soon as possible in order to secure their business. And that’s not just talk, it’s backed up by data!

Clio’s 2019 Legal Trends Report found that 79 percent of clients expect a call back within 24 hours of leaving a message.

In today’s on-demand world, clients expect instant results. They’ll often go with the first attorney whose voice they hear live over the phone. Hitting the call button will allow you to be that attorney, as soon as possible. No more waiting till you check your messages back on your computer; you can follow up from your phone, no matter where you are.

By default, the app will call with your personal number, but if you’re worried about privacy, we have you covered! You can select an integration with various softphone apps and use that number instead of your personal number if you want to stay private!

All With Answering Legal’s 24/7 Support

We aren’t kidding when we say you can run your firm from your phone with our new app. Whether you’re managing new leads or keeping tabs on existing clients, you can do it all, right from the palm of your hand.

And we won’t leave you hanging, either. You can file support tickets straight from the app, whether you want to change something about your service or recover a lost message. Our support team is available 24/7 just like our virtual receptionists, and we’re always read to help with whatever you might need.

If you’re an Answering Legal customer, you can download our app on the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. Once you do, let us know! We’ll link your app to your service and you can get started on changing the way you run your firm for the better.

Not a customer but want to see what’s up with our app? Click here or call 631-686-9700 to sign up for our free trial. For a limited time, we’re offering firms that sign up for our service their first 400 minutes free.