Can You Trust A Law Firm Receptionist Service To Engage With Prospective Clients?

Getting people to call your law office is no small task these days. In order to gain the attention of new leads, you’ll need to learn how to navigate a highly complex online marketing world. And even if your marketing is on point, you likely have more competing firms in your area than ever before, that will be going after the same clients as you.

This is why it is extremely important that when you are able to get a prospective client to call your office, you make the most of the opportunity. And one thing you must provide all new leads these days is an immediate response. You must give prospects a live person to speak with over the phone no matter what day or hour they call in. If you send a caller to voicemail, you’re just asking them to start calling around to your competition for help.

With live phone answering being such a priority these days, many attorneys have started exploring law firm receptionist service options to help improve their ability to capture new clients. But should you really trust an outside company to handle those new leads you work so hard to cultivate? The answer is… it depends. We’ll explain further below.

How Using The Wrong Receptionist Service Could End Up Costing You New Business

As is the case with just about any other type of business, not all phone answering services are created equal. Many call centers you’ll find are super low quality and should be avoided at all costs.

Some basic receptionist service red flags to watch out for include:

• The service outsources calls: If a company hasn’t trained their receptionist staff themselves and doesn’t have the ability to closely monitor their team, how can they be trusted to maintain a high level of performance when engaging with your callers.
• The service has overwhelmingly poor reviews: If the wide majority of people that are talking about a service online give it a poor rating or have terrible things to say about what they provide, why should you expect your experience with the company to be any different?
• The service has suspiciously low prices: If a call center is offering monthly pricing packages that seem too good to be true, you’ll definitely want to get more info before moving forward with them. They may only be able to charge less, because they have a limited (or non-existent) in-house receptionist team. Also be on the lookout for additional fees and overage charges that aren’t being shared upfront.

Once you start eliminating some of the lower tier phone answering options from your search, you’ll still be left with a good amount of services to choose from. But even when selecting amongst some of today’s more established virtual receptionist names, there will still be some red flags for lawyers to watch out for.

These additional red flags include:

• The service lacks experience working with law firms: Answering calls for a law office is a lot more challenging than most receptionist jobs. Trusting a receptionist with minimal legal phone answering experience to help with signing up new clients seems less than wise. When looking through a company’s online reviews, pay extra close attention to what attorneys have to say. And if there are no lawyer reviews, well...
• The service doesn’t offer advanced features: Calls centers that simply answer the phone and take a message may be fine for some industries. Law offices, however, need receptionists that are trained in performing tasks like legal intake, live call transferring and appointment scheduling. Otherwise their callers will generally be left unsatisfied and unsure about moving forward with the firm.
• The service isn’t available 100% of the time: Your next game-changing client could be calling in at any moment, which is why you need a highly trained receptionist ready to pick up the phone 24/7. Phone answering services that take overnights, weekends or holidays off simply won’t cut it for your law firm.

So we’ve just gone over a lot of red flags that attorneys will need to look out for when selecting a law firm receptionist service.. As you can imagine, finding a service that is able to overcome all of these red flags is an incredibly difficult task. So far we’ve only come across one that can truly be trusted to provide elite customer service to a law firm’s prospective clients, and do so 100% of the time.

Why You Can And Should Trust Answering Legal With Capturing New Leads

That’s right, Answering Legal is indeed the only answering service lawyers should allow to answer their phones and speak to their new leads.

For those that don’t already know, Answering Legal is a 24/7 phone answering service that has been exclusively working with the legal community since 2013. Just in that one introductory sentence alone you can see that we check off some key boxes on the list of qualities attorneys should be looking for in a phone answering service.

That 24/7 nature of our business means that our highly trained virtual receptionist team is available to answer calls on behalf of a law office at literally any time. We can make sure that you always have a live representative of your company ready to speak with potential new clients, no matter when they reach out for help. And since we only serve law firms, we’re able to give our receptionist team members extensive training on handling legal phone calls, and executing those advanced tasks we mentioned earlier (legal intake, live call transferring and appointment scheduling).

Our virtual receptionist team has helped thousands of law firms improve the first impression they make on new leads over the phone. Our team will be able to make your prospects feel heard, let them know that they’ve reached a place that can help, and begin the process of onboarding them as a client. Trust us, the people that call your firm are really going to appreciate that.

If you don’t want to take our word for it, we encourage you to check out our Google reviews, and see for yourself some of the great things lawyers have to say about the Answering Legal experience. You can also check out some of our recent case study blog posts for evidence of how our service can impact a legal practice.

Check out our case studies on:

• Law Office Of David T. Cox
• Law Offices Of Lonny Fish
• The Fishman Firm
• Brian D. Perskin & Associates P.C.
• Dale Carson Law

Of course the best way for you to learn if our company is a good fit for your firm is by trying us out for yourself. Answering Legal offers all lawyers the chance to participate in a 7-day free trial of service. You can sign up for the trial by filling out this form or giving us a call at 631-686-9700.