Here's What Makes Answering Legal A Top Legal Intake Company

From the outside, it can be tough to compare one legal intake company to another. If you take two companies and compare their services, it can appear that they offer basically the same features. Each of their websites will obviously be trying to convince you that their legal intake company is the best option for your firm.

We have an insider advantage, however; we here at the Answering Legal blog know what makes a good legal intake company because we are one. We’re not here to tell you why we’re the best, however. We’re here to tell you what to look for in a legal intake company, based on what makes us a top contender in the industry.

Three things make a top-notch legal intake company stand apart from the rest: virtual receptionist training, 24/7 coverage and support, and top-of-the-line answering service technology. Below, we’ll go into more detail about how each of those factors improves our service, so that when you’re shopping around for a legal intake company, you know what to look for.

We Have Specialized Legal Intake Training

First and foremost, what makes or breaks a legal intake company is their staff. Our virtual receptionists are our front line, making good impressions both on your clients and on our customers. They’re the most important part of our business.

That’s why we spend months training them before they ever pick up the phone for lawyers. Our training team engages new receptionists with training sessions, tutorials, practice calls, shadow calls, and, finally, answering the phones for Answering Legal itself! You can learn more about our training regimen here.

All of that training, however, is just to get our virtual receptionists ready to answer the phone. The next step is getting them ready to answer for lawyers. First, our staff has to be familiar with legal terminology. They’re going to need to be able to distinguish between different legal practice areas, understand basic legal procedures well enough to take good messages, and know why, for example, the clerk of courts might be calling an attorney. For lawyers, these concepts are commonplace, but, then again, you did go to law school!

The biggest step in getting our virtual receptionists ready to answer for lawyers, is, of course, legal intake training. Putting the legal concepts they just learned together with our thousands of legal intake scripts, we’re able to make sure our virtual receptionists understand what law firms are looking for out of their legal intake, and what new leads are looking for when they call a law firm. Most importantly, we prepare them to answer for any law firm, regardless of practice area.

At this point, you’re probably asking yourself how we can afford to train our employees for months before they’re answering for our customers. And it’s a good question! The reason we can give this kind of specialized training to our staff is because we only answer for lawyers. This specialization is the number one thing you should look for in a legal intake company.

We’re Optimized For 24/7 Coverage

The next most important thing you should look for in a legal intake company is 24/7 availability. Obviously, you’re looking for an answering service to handle your calls when you’re not available, and most of those hours are going to be after standard business hours. At the same time, you’re probably also thinking that you don’t get many calls outside of your standard business hours.

That’s where you’d be wrong. Only 1 in 3 phone calls to law firms are picked up live!

Yes, most law firms get the majority of their calls during business hours. But according to the statistic above, that doesn’t mean these law firms are actually answering their phones! 24/7 availability means 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. You’ll be turning that 33 percent into 100 percent.

How will that affect your firm? Simply put, if you’re tripling your calls answered, you’re likely at least doubling your lead capture rate. Sure, not all of those incoming calls represent new clients, and not every new client caller is a good fit for your firm. But by answering every call, you’re giving your firm its best possible chance to succeed.

Most legal intake companies are going to be available 24/7, of course. The objective most law firms are trying to achieve when bringing on an answering service is picking up the phone after hours, when it’s especially expensive to have in-house staff handling the phone. But not every legal intake company is going to have 24/7 support.

Our support team is available around the clock to assist our virtual receptionists in handling calls. We like to promote from within, so our supervisors and support specialists are experts at handling problem calls our receptionists might need help with. Our support team is also available for any late-night support issues our customers might encounter. Need to make a change to your account at 2 AM? Just give us a call or submit a support ticket, and we’ll get right on it.

We Own Our Own Call Center Technology

Part of what makes 24/7 coverage possible for Answering Legal is our answering service technology. We own and develop our own, proprietary call center software. That means we’re not beholden to sudden unplanned outages for updates, for example. We are always in control of our service, which is a key part of what makes us a top legal intake company.

That also means we’re constantly working on upgrading our tech! We’re always listening to our attorney customers and implementing changes based on their needs.

Our CRM integrations are a perfect example of us upgrading our tech based on our customers’ requests! We integrate with the top software in the legal industry, like Clio and Lawmatics. But we are always working on adding new integrations based on what our customers use, and even have the capability to set up custom integrations with less common software to better suit a variety of different law firms. You can read more about our integrations here.

Along similar lines, our customers requested a mobile app, so we developed one based on their suggestions. Then, when it was almost ready, we beta tested it amongst our customer base, and further developed the app based on their recommendations! Now, our customers can monitor their firms’ incoming calls from the palm of their hand. If you want to learn more about our mobile app, click here.

This responsiveness to our customer’s needs is only possible because we own and develop our own call center software. That kind of independence is exactly what you want to look for in a legal intake company.

Invest In Your Firm With Answering Legal

The purpose of this blog is to help a law firm owner who is considering hiring a legal intake company to pick the right one for their firm. If you make sure that whatever company you choose excels in the above three categories, you can’t really go wrong.

Of course, Answering Legal excels in the above categories! We used ourselves as the model for a top legal intake company because we believe we’re at the top of our industry.

If you’re not yet convinced, please feel free to read more about our legal intake here. Our staff is among the best in the business, and so they perform among the most thorough and effective legal intakes you can find. You won’t go wrong trusting us to handle your phones.

Invest in your firm by investing in stellar legal intake. 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.