Bringing The Answering Legal App Into Your Firm’s Workflow

Here at Answering Legal, we’ve added a new tool to our customers’ tool belts: our mobile app! Our app allows lawyers to view, organize, and follow up on all their messages, all from one place.

Of course, any tool is more useful if you know how to use it. On the Answering Legal blog, we’ve dedicated a whole month’s worth of posts to giving tips and tricks on how to use our mobile app as effectively as possible.

In this blog, we’ll be explaining how you can fit this tool into your firm so it works best for you. We’ll give tips on how to turn our mobile app into a cog in the client-capturing machine of your law firm.

Getting Legal Intake Right

Second only to answering every call, legal intake is the most important part of our virtual receptionists’ jobs. It’s the glue that holds a new client caller to a law firm, allowing the attorney the opportunity to seal the deal by following up with a phone call themselves. If you’d like to read more about how we handle legal intake, click here.

Long-time customers will know we have sent messages via email, text, and even fax in the past! The contents of the legal intakes our receptionists perform have always been included in the messages we send, but now all of them are contained in one easily organized and accessed place: your Answering Legal app.

Legal Intake And The Answering Legal App

It’s easier than ever to make sure the relevant information gets to the right person, whether it’s you, the attorney, reading the intake before following up with a new client, or someone else in your law firm. Just by hitting the share button, you can send that message via email, text, or any other compatible app on your phone to the person who needs to see it.

If, for whatever reason, you’re referring that client to another attorney, you can share the message the same way, ensuring that client need not repeat themselves when speaking to the other attorney, and saving your colleague some time.

Using that same button, you can copy the contents of the message to insert into any app where you might want the information. The app saves the message as a raw text file, which is easily converted by any number of software applications into the kinds of information that program needs. You can easily paste or upload the file into a CRM or legal intake management software, for example, and create a new client file immediately. This makes data entry that much faster—and we can make it even faster with a step we’ll discuss later.

Following Up And Securing Leads

Of course, once your new lead has undergone a legal intake, the ball’s in your court. Even though clients tend to feel like they’ve begun the process of hiring your firm after a legal intake, you could still lose them to the competition if you don’t follow up with them.

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

Luckily, the Answering Legal app makes it easy: from any message, you can just click the relevant contact type button and follow up! You’ll call, send an email, or text from your phone’s native app for that form of contact.

If your default email is a personal one, all you need to do is add your firm’s email account to your phone and set it as your default account. And if you’re worried about giving out your personal number when you call, we have a solution for you in the next section!

Of course, we recommend reaching out to prospective clients as soon as possible. But the Answering Legal app can be a part of whatever your new client acquisition process is.

For example, some lawyers don’t take unscheduled calls so they can focus on getting work done. If you have a certain time each day in which you respond to new client inquiries, you can set up reminders on your phone to check the app and call up new leads. If you’re feeling fancy, you can even have your phone automatically open the app at a certain time each weekday!

Setting Up Integrations

You might not know this, but Answering Legal integrates with the legal software your firm uses, and the list of integrated apps is growing every month! At the most basic level, our integrations with legal CRMs allow you to skip on data entry by automatically entering the messages our receptionists take into your client databases. There’s more we can do, too; if you want to learn more about our integrations, click here.

With your service linked to both a CRM or legal intake management system and our app, you’ll essentially be receiving notifications on your phone that will alert you to a new client profile on your CRM. You can follow up or look for more information in either app. And, if you want to adjust a lead’s place in your pipeline, you’ll get a convenient reminder in the form of a notification whenever they interact with your firm over the phone.

In addition, there are built-in integrations in our app that allow you to keep your personal phone number private! When following up via phone or text message, after pressing the relevant button, you’ll see a plus sign to the right of the option you just pressed on the bottom of your screen.

By pressing that button, you’ll be able to link your Answering Legal app to various softphone apps. Our beta testers found that in many cases they wanted to keep their number private, so we did some work behind the scenes that allows you to follow up with clients without compromising your personal information.

We integrate with the top softphones, and with ones our customers have requested! Simply add a softphone app to your list (you can have up to 3), and whenever you try to follow up, you’ll be sent to that app with the number ready to dial or text.

Making Sure You Have The Support You Need

With Answering Legal, our app, and our integrations, you’ll be able to bring your whole law firm into one smooth workflow. From first contact to end of matter, every part of your firm’s process can be seamlessly integrated, making your firm more efficient than ever before.

There’s a lot you can do with that kind of efficiency, but let’s face it: since most attorneys bill by the hour, you’ll not just be saving you time, you’ll be saving money. Phone handling, data entry, and organization are all essential tasks that aren’t billable.

By streamlining your firm’s workflow through integration throughout a legal matter, you’ll free yourself up to get more work done. Or to spend that time however you choose! And through all that, Answering Legal will be there, with 24/7 phone coverage and support, making sure you’re capturing clients so you can handle the legal work.

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.

Want to bring your firm to new heights? Click here or call 631-686-9700 to sign up for our free trial. For a limited time, we’re giving firms that sign up for our service their first 400 minutes free!