How 24/7 Legal Intake Services Will Change Your Firm

At the beginning of a journey, a small change in your direction or heading will have a huge impact on your destination. The longer the journey goes on, small changes will have less impact on where you end up. It can feel like, when you’re years into a path, the only way to change your heading is to make a big, risky decision.

What does this have to do with law firms? Well, while a lot of attorneys take big risks early in their careers, law firms, like many businesses, are very risk-averse once established. After all, founding a law firm was a big risk in itself! Once you’ve found a rhythm that works, why make a big change?

What if there was a small change you could make now, regardless of how long you’ve been running your firm, that would have a huge impact on your firm’s day-to-day operations? By acquiring 24/7 legal intake services for your firm, you could completely change the way your law firm operates.

Legal Intake Services Will Secure More Business For Your Firm

We’re not in the business of beating around the bush at the Answering Legal blog. The biggest change your firm will experience after acquiring 24/7 legal intake services is very simple: more business.

First and foremost, 24/7 coverage will mean you never miss a new client call.

Only 1 in 3 phone calls to law firms are picked up live.

Of course, not every call coming into a law firm represents new business, so we can’t say your lead capture rate will triple. But answering every call will more than double your lead capture rate, no matter what percentage of your calls represent new leads.

That’s not even taking into account the effectiveness of your legal intake. The virtual receptionists who operate legal intake services only have one job: to perform legal intakes for the law firm they’re answering for. If you have great phone answering help already, supporting them with 24/7 legal intake services may not increase the quality of your legal intake, but it certainly won’t diminish it! New leads will leave calls feeling like they’ve already begun the process of hiring your firm.

How will this change your firm? Well, obviously, you’ll have more work to do. If you’re looking to grow your business, more incoming leads is a necessary first step. From there, you might decide it’s time to expand your firm and bring in some more help, whether that’s in the form of paralegals or other attorneys.

Legal Intake Services Will Get You More Information

Have you ever had a prospective client begin a sentence with, “As I explained to your receptionist”? It may not even be conscious, but it is a negative reaction to being forced to explain themselves over and over.

Legal consumers are beset by problems they can’t solve themselves. It makes them feel powerless, and hiring a lawyer is supposed to be reassuring. When they have to explain themselves over and over, it lowers their confidence in your firm.

24/7 legal intake services ensure that this never happens again. You’ll be able to create (or recreate) your firm’s ideal legal intake process, and you’ll have all that information on hand when you need it. In the next section, we’ll go into a little more detail on exactly what having all that information can do for your firm.

In addition, legal intake services will be able to make sure your firm finds the right cases. First, they’ll weed out cases that your firm simply doesn’t handle. You may have referral networks in place for criminal defense cases as a personal injury lawyer, but you certainly don’t want to spend your time handling those referrals yourself.

As a law firm owner, you probably have a good idea what kinds of cases work best for your firm. Over time, you’ve probably developed a keen understanding of the value and probable outcomes of the cases that come to your desk. While closer inspection is always valuable, there is immense value to being able to glance at the contents of a legal intake and see if the case is up your alley. 24/7 legal intake services allow you to do that with every single case that comes in.

Legal Intake Services Will Put The Information You Need In One Place

As we mentioned above, there’s a lot of value in making sure you always have the information you need on a prospective client’s case at your fingertips. You can perform the function of an expert in their problem without having to do much research on your own, which will make your firm seem better suited to solving their problem while saving you time.

But how does that work, exactly? Well, legal intake services often integrate with law firm software to make reviewing the data easy. Do you have an incoming call or upcoming appointment with a prospective client? You can just check your CRM, the way you would with an existing client, to learn what you need to know in order to seal the deal.

That works if you’re at your desk, but what if you’re on your way back from court and need to secure a client? Often, your CRM will have an app that allows you to access that information from anywhere. Legal intake services also sometimes have their own apps that allow you to see your incoming messages and find the one you need to secure a lead’s business. Just make sure you’re not driving when you do!

According to integration service Zapier, 73 percent of workers spend one to three hours a day searching for information or a particular document.

Each of these features are solutions to the information problem that can sometimes plague law firms. Sometimes, in hectic situations, the signal-to-noise ratio on internal law firm communications can approach that of the playground game of telephone: everyone who receives the information changes it (in this case accidentally), so the more hands you have between you and the information, the less accurate it is.

But that doesn’t have to be the case! There’s a solution to this problem that doesn’t involve micromanaging every part of your firm: legal intake services. In this case, the signal-to-noise ratio is one hundred percent; your legal virtual receptionist will perform the legal intake and write down everything mentioned in the phone call. All you have to do is read the message, and you’ll have everything you need. Nothing will be lost in translation.

Answering Legal’s Legal Intake Services Will Change Your Firm

The most important thing to look for in your legal intake services provider is exclusivity. If their call center answers for multiple industries, then they’re not a true legal intake services provider; they’re just a call center that happens to answer for lawyers.

Here at Answering Legal, we understand that lawyers have special needs when it comes to answering and intake. That’s why our legal intake services are exclusive: we only ever answer for lawyers.

That means we can afford to train our virtual receptionists to be legal intake experts. After all, if they’re only answering for lawyers, we can focus the bulk of our training on legal intake! Our virtual receptionists train for ninety days before ever picking up the phone for law firms. We’re serious about our training; the final step before they’re cleared to answer for law firms is answering our own phone calls! If you’re interested in our training regimen, click here.

Above, we mentioned that the best legal intake services will integrate with your law firm CRM and have their own mobile app. Well, we didn’t make that up; we know from experience that these features are valuable to law firms because our customers requested them! We’re always working to improve our service, so we are constantly adding new integrations with law firm software. Click here to learn more!

Change your firm’s direction with just a phone call. 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.