How Legal Virtual Assistant Services Can Take Your Firm’s New Client Intake Process To The Next Level

Why do the best lawyers sometimes not get the best financial results? Well it might be because their firm is doing a poor job of marketing, and if that’s the case, lawyers should turn to our legal marketing discussion groups on Facebook and LinkedIn for some expert guidance. But, if after a little investigating, you conclude that marketing isn’t your main issue, you’ll probably want to take a closer look at the way your firm is handling its incoming leads.

Having a poor new client intake process will cost you clients. New leads need to be handled both swiftly and professionally, and the best way to ensure that they always are is to invest in legal virtual assistant services.

What Is A Legal Virtual Assistant?

A legal virtual assistant is a trained legal receptionist that can answer phone calls on behalf of you firm from a location outside of your office. When deciding on legal virtual assistant services for your firm, Answering Legal needs to be your first call.

Here are a few reasons why:

• Answering Legal is a specialized phone answering service, that only picks up the phone on behalf of attorneys. This allows us to offer specialized training to our receptionist team members and specialized features that legal professionals love.
• Answering Legal is ready to answer your phones 24/7/365. After signing up with our service, the days of callers getting lost in your voicemail will be over. All new leads calling into your office will get to speak with a live person, and do so right away.
• All Answering Legal receptionists go through months of legal intake training, before being allowed to answer calls on behalf of attorney customers.

There are a lot of things that make Answering Legal the best answering service choice for attorneys, but in this blog post, we’re going to focus in on our receptionists’ legal intake training.

Why Is Legal Intake So Important?

In the past, it was lawyers that had just about all the power in exchanges with consumers looking for legal help. But, in the digital age, where consumers have access to instant information about all of the best firms in their area right at their fingertips, the power has drastically shifted. Today legal consumers can be much more discerning when choosing a lawyer, and first impressions mean everything.

Where many law firms fail in making a quality first impression, is when executing the new client intake process.

Some disastrous new client intake mistakes include:

• Sending customers to voicemail: Modern consumers are quickly losing patience with automated machines. Sure they might still leave messages for Grandma, but they likely won’t wait around for hours for some lawyer they never met before to call them back. They’re more likely to hang up and try calling one of your competitors.
• Not having established intake questions in place: Just winging it when gathering personal and case information from a new caller will more times than not lead to mistakes being made, and important details being forgotten about. This can lead to lawyers coming across as unprepared and incompetent in their follow-up conversations with new potential clients.
• Not having the right people performing your legal intakes: Lawyers are typically too busy to be executing the process themselves, and will often rush through the process when they do. Having other staff members who haven’t been properly trained in performing legal intakes try and do them, can also end quite poorly. Experience matters!

Making mistakes during the new client intake process will more times than not result in a caller running for the hills. And can you really blame them? If your firm can’t handle collecting information, why should they feel comfortable putting their legal future in your hands.

How Does Answering Legal Help With Lead Capturing?

So let’s talk a little about what will happen if you decide to sign up with Answering Legal. First off, you’ll get to experience a free trial period, which allows you to try out our service for 10 days without any cost or commitment. Before the start of your trial period, we’ll work with you on personalizing the way we answer your phones, which can include customized greetings and intake questions relevant to your practice.

Once your service is set up, any incoming call your office is unable to answer will be picked up by a member of our legal intake receptionist team. Remember, this receptionist will be highly trained, and will have already performed hundreds, and in some cases thousands of new client intakes before. Once a caller to your office is identified as a first-time caller, our receptionist can reach out to you to see if you’d like the call transferred your way. If you can’t hop on the call, our receptionist will begin collecting the customer’s information, using the list of pre-established legal intake questions, that have been customized towards your type of law.

What Benefits Will Your Firm See?

Providing new callers with this type of experience will go a long way in building their confidence in your firm. Right from the start, they’ll see that your firm is caring, attentive, and organized. New customers will also likely be pleased with the fact that you’re beginning to handle their case right away, and even in cases where you’re not immediately available to speak with them, your firm is at least taking some action by gathering their case information.

Utilizing legal intake professionals will also ensure that all the personal and case information you collect from callers is always accurate and precise. This will make life easier for lawyers, when they follow-up with new customers, and prepare to start building their case.

Ready to sign up for our free 10-day trial? Call 631-686-9700, or fill out this form.

Want to read more about out free 10-day trial first? Click here.