Five Tips For Getting More Out Of Our Lawyer Answering Service

If you’re reading this blog post, and you’re already using Answering Legal, feel free to scroll past this introduction and start checking out the five tips listed below for getting more out of your lawyer answering service experience.

If you haven’t yet tried Answering Legal, we still encourage you to check out the below tips to learn about all of the incredible benefits that come from signing up with our 24/7 phone answering service. However, before exploring this post, you may want to educate yourself on the basics of our service.

Here are a few other blog posts to check out:

• Why You Should Get Ahead Of The Curve On Hiring A Legal Virtual Receptionist Service
• Why Your Legal Intake Services Need To Be 24/7
• How Using A Legal Virtual Receptionist Service Can Create More Time In Your Work Day

Now let’s get to those tips we promised.

Tip #1- Increase Your Marketing Spend

If your firm’s past advertising campaigns have failed to bring many new clients, we encourage you to try again with the Answering Legal receptionist team behind you. Without the support of a 24/7 lawyer answering service, it’s likely that your office failed to answer many of the call-ins generated by your marketing efforts.

Today potential clients rarely respect office hours, and usually won’t have patience for leaving voicemails. Because of this, there is a great deal of pressure on law offices to be answering calls live during after hours, weekends and even holidays if they want to actually capitalize on their new lead opportunities.

With Answering Legal you not only get 24/7 live phone coverage, but 24/7 lead capturing coverage. Our receptionists are all highly trained on performing the legal intake process, and can help your practice make the right first impression on those calling in after finding you online, even during times when you’re unavailable. Once your firm starts capturing a higher percentage of its leads, you should start seeing significantly better results from your advertising.

2- Utilize Our Bilingual Phone Answering Team

In 2020, just about every lawyer has a high number of people in their area whose preferred spoken language is Spanish. Yet, a lot of modern law firms still struggle with accommodating Spanish speaking prospects over the phone.

By offering bilingual receptionist services, you could be opening your practice up for a rather significant amount of new clients. Spanish speaking callers will immediately feel more at home when talking with a receptionist that is fluent in their preferred language, and as a result, much more likely to become a client for your firm.

Answering Legal always has highly trained Spanish speaking receptionists ready to answer calls on your firm’s behalf. Whenever your office receives a call from a Spanish speaking prospect, one of our bilingual receptionist team members can provide a live response, make the caller feel cared for, and take them through a full legal intake process. All of the information collected during the intake process will be sent over to you in message form fully translated. We’ll also let you know in the message that the caller was a Spanish speaker.

3- Let Us Help Manage Your Calendar

Scheduling disasters can occur at any moment in a law office that’s lacking in proper receptionist help. Double bookings and forgotten appointments can cause embarrassment for attorneys, frustration for clients, and often lead to unnecessary conflict.

Most answering services out there won’t be able to help you manage your schedule, because they either simply don’t care to, or can’t access your calendar. At Answering Legal, appointment scheduling is a premium feature available to all of our customers, and comes at no additional cost.

Our lawyer answering service has the ability to integrate with most calendar softwares, including Google Calendar, meaning we can accommodate the calendaring needs of just about any law firm. Once our receptionists are given access to your work calendar, they’ll be able to book new appointments with clients on your behalf, allowing you to dedicate your efforts to more important tasks. Giving new prospects the opportunity to book an appointment right away will typically make it much more likely that they’ll move forward with your firm.

4- Set Up Intelligent Dispatching

Did you know that Answering Legal can direct calls to specific members of your staff, so that you don’t always need to be on call? It’s true!

Our service offers all law offices the chance to set up an intelligent dispatching system for our receptionists to follow. This feature will prove to be particularly valuable for firms that see a high number of new client opportunities during overnights. That’s right, we’re talking to you, overworked criminal defense attorneys.

Setting up intelligent dispatching with Answering Legal is simple. Just let us know which person at your firm should be our first point of contact for a particular time period, and we’ll make sure the protocol is put in place and always followed.

Our receptionist team will still be available to pick up any calls your staff can’t get to during overnights and weekends. When one of our receptionists does pick up a call and identify a new client opportunity, they’ll ask the caller to briefly wait on hold, and reach out to your designated contact for that period of time. We’ll either then transfer the call over to your specified staff member’s line or take a message from the caller if your employee is unavailable.

5- Hand Off All Your Calls To Us When You Vacation

Thanks to our lawyer answering service, attorneys are no longer forced to choose between sacrificing invaluable vacation time or missing out on new clients. Answering Legal has been helping attorneys take time off for years, and is able to ensure that new opportunities don’t pass their firm by while they step away and take some time to refresh.

When an Answering Legal customer decides to take a vacation, they can choose to turn on full-time call forwarding to our service. Under this call forwarding option, all of your office’s incoming calls immediately get transferred over to our service to be answered on the first ring by our receptionist team.

At the conclusion of every call our service answers on your firm’s behalf, you’ll be sent a message recapping all of the pertinent information from the call. The message will be in text and email form, and can be viewed right from your smartphone. While you’re enjoying their vacation, all lawyers need to do is check in with their mobile device periodically. If one of the messages indicates that a caller’s situation is time sensitive, they can jump into action, knowing that they’re only interrupting vacation time for a worthwhile reason.

Have questions about how your firm can make the most of its Answering Legal service? Give us a call at (631)686-9700.

Not currently a customer? Get started now by signing up for a 7-day free trial.