How A Legal Virtual Receptionist Will Fix Your Scheduling Issues

Law firm owners lead hectic professional lives. They have to manage legal work with client communication and administration of the firm. And with most firms billing by the hour, time is literally money, only adding to the pressure to balance all these aspects of the business.

It’s easy to see, then, why managing a calendar is such a stressful part of the job for lawyers. The calendar has to be full of consultations with new clients, because new clients are the lifeblood of any business. But with a full calendar, it can be difficult to get work done!

What if we told you there was a simple solution to many of your scheduling woes? From making sure your schedule is full of new clients to ensuring you’re able to get work done, a legal virtual receptionist can address many of the scheduling problems law firms face.

You Have Too Much Empty Space On Your Calendar

We’ll be up front: a legal virtual receptionist can’t help your firm if your phone just isn’t ringing. Reviewing your marketing campaigns and other ways of getting your firm’s name out there might be in need in that case. If nobody’s calling, it doesn’t matter how we answer your phones, after all.

But for the law firms who have invested in their lead generation, a legal virtual receptionist will help you with your lead capturing.

Remember, only 1 in 3 phone calls to law firms are picked up live.

That means that just by answering every call, your lead capture rate will more than double. But that’s not all! Legal virtual receptionists can schedule appointments for you to ensure that these clients stick with your firm.

Not just that, but if you want to speak to the caller, a legal virtual receptionist can transfer them to you directly! If you want to guarantee that a new client hires your firm, that kind of personal touch is the best way to do it. But even if you don’t have the time to talk to new clients, every caller will undergo a legal intake.

With these factors in play, your calendar will be full of appointments and consultations. But once your calendar is full, you might run into other problems, like not having enough time to work or double-booking your calendar.

Your Calendar Is Too Full Or Double-booked

Filling your calendar is great, but if it’s not done right, you can be left running from engagement to engagement without any time to actually practice the law. Beyond that, if your schedule is too full, you won’t be flexible enough to adapt to any changes that come your way. Finally, double booking might be the worst calendaring issue next to an empty schedule.

We’ve solved one problem, only to create three more! So how does a legal virtual receptionist help fix these issues? We can tackle them one at a time below.

In order to make sure you aren’t overbooked, you need to determine when you want to be available to new clients. Obviously, your calendar can’t be totally full of consultations and other meetings; you need time to work! Blocking out that time in your calendar is the best way to make sure that you do it.

Luckily, a legal virtual receptionist will help you have more time to work!

According to Clio’s Legal Trends Report, 71 percent of clients prefer their first contact with a lawyer to be over the phone, and studies have shown that attorneys spend an average of 1.1 hours a day talking to clients on the phone.

Simply delegating your phone answering will save you a lot of time every day. That time will add up, day over day, week over week.

Once your calendar is in order, a legal virtual receptionist will never double book you. You’ll only be booked based on your pre-determined availability. So, if you’ve decided you want inbound phone leads to schedule appointments within three specific hours each week, your legal virtual receptionist, they’ll fill those three hours with consultations without ever double-booking you.

You’re Spending Too Much Time On Calendar Management

If managing your calendar becomes too much of an issue, a legal virtual receptionist can help. Once you’ve figured out your availability, you’ll be able to sit back and relax while a trained specialist schedules new client appointments into your calendar.

New callers will only be able to schedule appointments according to your availability. You won’t have to worry about your calendar being filled up with appointments from leads who don’t actually have cases for you, either. Legal virtual receptionists will be able to tell the difference, for example, between personal injury cases and family law cases, and won’t schedule the latter if you only practice the former.

And your clients will thank you. Many lawyers have trouble communicating with their clients, either letting them run rampant over their schedules or outright ignoring them.

That’s why, in 2018, Clio’s Legal Trends Report found that law firms have customer satisfaction scores analogous to airlines, banks, and credit card companies.

Establishing boundaries and managing client expectations while still giving them what they want will help you improve your client experience and boost your satisfaction levels through the roof.

Not only that, but your preferred calendar management tool can integrate with your legal answering service. If you use Google Calendar, you’ll be able to review and reschedule appointments made by new clients through your legal virtual receptionist with ease. If you’re using your CRM to manage your calendar, you can easily keep track of scheduled appointments. The best legal answering services will integrate directly with your CRM, so you can use it as a single tool to manage your whole firm.

And with every new client scheduled, you’ll receive a message indicating they scheduled an appointment. You can organize and follow up on these messages right from your phone. This way, you’ll never be caught by surprise when something is added to your schedule.

Solve These Problems With Answering Legal

Once you get your phone ringing and your calendar organized, a legal virtual receptionist will make running a law firm easy. Your schedule will be full of new client consults, your inbox full of existing client inquiries, and you’ll be able to focus on your work all the while.

And if you’re looking for the best legal virtual receptionists in the business, look no further than Answering Legal.

What makes us the best? Our legal virtual receptionists live up to the name. They only ever answer for lawyers, and they spend months training to do just that before ever picking up the phone for a law firm. Click here to learn more about our training process.

We’re immensely proud of our staff, but they’re not the only thing that makes us stand out. We own and develop our own call center tech, which means we are constantly updating and improving upon it. Our system integrates with many major law firm CRMs, and we’re constantly adding more to the list. And we have our own mobile app, where lawyers can organize and follow up on new client callers right from the palm of their hands.

Make filling your schedule with new client consults easy. 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.