How To Identify The Best Virtual Receptionists For Law Firms

Learning how to be a successful attorney doesn’t stop at law school. There are so many things about being a lawyer—and especially a law firm owner— that many would say you don’t start learning how to be successful until after law school!

One of the key skills lawyers learn on the job, as it were, is delegating. The smaller your law firm, the harder it can be to accept that you can’t do everything. Learning to let go of the things you’re better off letting someone else handle is an important step on the path to running an efficient law firm. After all, isn’t your time usually better spent elsewhere?

If you’ve already internalized that lesson and are looking to delegate your phone answering to experts, we’ve got the blog for you. We’ll show you the four traits to look for in the best virtual receptionists for law firms, so you’ll know exactly what you need when shopping around.

Make Sure There’s Legal Intake Training

You’ll notice we didn’t just mention legal intake. Hopefully, any virtual receptionist service answering for lawyers will offer legal intake, as it is key to converting leads into clients.

But services answering for multiple industries can only afford to teach interchangeable skills. These receptionists will usually be trained in general customer intakes, the kind that would be serviceable for plumbers, lawyers, and electricians.

They can’t take the time to train their receptionists the intricacies of answering for lawyers, which is why specialized legal intake training is actually quite rare among virtual receptionist services. That kind of training, however, is what you want to stand out from your competitors and secure more new leads for your law firm.

Thomson Reuters’ 2023 State of Small Law Firms report found that 66 percent of small firms found challenges acquiring new client business, ranking it as the third biggest challenge facing small firms today.

Legal intake training will allow the best virtual receptionists for law firms to capture clients without the immediate involvement of a lawyer. New leads will feel like they’ve already begun the process of hiring the firm they’ve called, once they’ve told their story to a receptionist who is very clearly representing a law firm. This investment will make it possible for firms to focus on what they do best while experts handle their phones.

You’ll Want To Look For Disciplined Message Taking

There’s a difference between taking a message and taking a message well. When you look at the messages taken by a virtual receptionist, you want to be able to immediately tell who was calling, why they were calling, and whether or not it’s urgent.

That difference is found in the details. The best virtual receptionists for law firms will be sending the contents of the legal intake in new client messages, so you can immediately tell if a case is worth chasing and call that lead back to secure their business.

You might think that message taking isn’t all that complex, or that you could be served just as well by using voicemail and letting clients leave their own messages. There’s just one problem with that: voicemail doesn’t work anymore.

According to Clio’s 2019 Legal Trends Report, 79 percent of clients expect a call back within 24 hours of leaving a voicemail, but 64 percent of voicemails left for law firms by new leads are never returned!

That 24-hour deadline gets extended when the clients in question are being assured by a live receptionist that you’ll get back to them as soon as you can. Not to mention it’s much easier to read a brief message than it is to listen to an entire voicemail!

In order to be successful, message delivery needs to be flexible. The power of delegating your phone answering is that you gain flexibility. You don’t have to be tethered to your phone or your desk. You should be able to access your messages no matter where you are, and the best virtual receptionists for law firms will be able to deliver messages via multiple methods.

Finally, your messages should also be delivered immediately. You don’t want your receptionists sitting on urgent messages while they take a break. The best virtual receptionists for law firms will send messages immediately after calls—your phone should be constantly buzzing with new notifications!

Don’t Get Left Alone If Something Goes Wrong

No matter what tool you’re adopting for your firm, you want to make sure it has a support team. The more complex the software, the more you might end up needing the support. While a virtual receptionist service isn’t actually all that complex on the lawyer’s end, round-the-clock support is still a vital feature the best virtual receptionist for lawyers will have.

With 24/7 support, you’ll be able to ensure that whatever virtual receptionist service you hire is going to give you a positive experience. The idea that a call center is a one-size-fits-all service that will cause more problems than it solves is a misconception, one you can read more about here. But when human elements are introduced into any process, being prepared is always the best move.

Making sure that you have backup in the event something does go wrong will make those times much easier to handle. The best support will mean your virtual receptionist service will be able to deliver on anything from administrative issues like changing call forwarding options to addressing client complaints to even lost messages or call recordings!

Specialization Is The Key

At the end of the day, specialization is the most important quality to look for in the best virtual receptionists for law firms. “For law firms” shouldn’t just be for show! If your receptionist is a specialist in answering for lawyers, their service will probably ensure the best of the other three qualities are included in the service.

Answering for lawyers is different from answering for electricians, dentists, and accountants, and it shows if you’re not an expert. Services that don’t specialize will have higher error rates, or receptionists who take a plumbing intake instead of a legal one. Services that can afford to specialize will also be invested in providing receptionists highly-trained in legal intake, detailed message-taking, and having 24/7 support.

After all, only one in three phone calls to law firms are answered live.

You’re entrusting your phones to these receptionists because there are better uses for your time. You’re looking to stand out from your competition and bring that 33 percent up to 100. Don’t you want to make sure the receptionists helping you do that are experts themselves? By going with a specialized service, you’ll be making sure you have the best chance to turn those callers into clients.

Look To Answering Legal For Support

What do all four of these traits have in common? They’re key pillars of what makes Answering legal different from other answering services.

We’ll let you in on a little secret: if you’re looking for the best virtual receptionists for lawyers, you’re in the right place. We spend months training our receptionists to be legal intake experts. They only ever answer for lawyers. And we deliver our messages immediately, via email, CRM, or our mobile app.

We’ve done some deep dives into what makes our service different from the rest. To see how we handle legal intake, click here. To learn how our message taking service works, check out this blog post. And, to see how it all starts, take a look at our training process in this blog series.

Get the best of the best, for free. For a limited time, we’re offering firms that sign up for our service their first 400 minutes free. Click here or call 631-686-9700 to sign up for our free trial.