How To Measure The Value A Legal Intake Specialist Will Bring To Your Firm

On this blog, we often talk about how a legal intake specialist will save your law firm time and money while securing clients. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to quantify exactly how much of each factor a virtual receptionist brings to your firm.

That’s because each firm’s needs are different. The only way to really know the benefits a legal intake specialist will bring you is to calculate that for yourself.

In this blog, we’ll be building a rubric to do exactly that. You can think of it as a challenge: we challenge you, the attorney reading this, to follow the rubric below across the next week, two weeks, or even a month. If you do, you’ll finally be able to measure the value a legal intake specialist will bring to your firm.

This can be a pain for certain kinds of businesses, but not for law firms. Most lawyers are already tracking their time in six-minute intervals in order to bill their clients! It won’t be tough to find out how much you could be saving if you follow along below.

How Much Time Will I Save?

The first step to measuring the value a legal intake specialist could bring your firm is to figure out how much time you could be saving. Between screening your calls, handling important inquiries, and entering data for you, you might be surprised how much time you’ll be saving. And, of course, if you’re billing by the hour, as 97 percent of attorneys do, time is literally money.

To calculate how much time a legal intake specialist would save your firm, first measure how much time you spend on non-billable phone calls and on legal intakes.

Studies have shown that attorneys spend an average of 1.1 hours a day talking to clients on the phone.

How much of that time is billable? An existing client calling for an update is one thing; a client calling for a consultation is entirely another. And while getting new clients under contract is important and can only be done by you, the actual legal intake can be totally delegated to a legal intake specialist.

Next, measure how much time you spend on data entry from phone calls. Whether that’s transcribing legal intakes into your CRM or just adding a note that an existing client called for an update, every moment you spend on data entry is time you’re not billing but could be delegating. A legal intake specialist could handle that data entry for you, inputting it directly into your CRM!

Lastly, you never know when a call coming into your firm represents real business or just a scam call. The average American receives 3 to 4 spam calls a day, and even just taking the time to look at the phone and recognize a spam call can cost you valuable time.

According to a study conducted by the University of California at Irvine, it takes 23 minutes to refocus on a task after interruption.

Every time a spam call interrupts your work, note that down. If you’re being realistic, you could add in those 23 minutes it’ll take to refocus, too.

How Much Money Will I Save?

If you’re considering a legal intake specialist, odds are you’re thinking about hiring in-house as well. There are certainly benefits to training up a receptionist or secretary to work exactly the way you want them to in order to best represent your firm. Note that if you’re thinking of the intake specialist as support staff, not as a complete replacement for in-office staff, you can ignore this part of the calculation.

There is a straightforward cost/benefit analysis you could do. If you believe a remote legal intake specialist will give you 75 percent of the benefit of an in-house receptionist (even accounting for 24/7 availability), then it will be giving you that benefit at a much smaller fraction of a cost. Whatever a full-time receptionist will cost you, it’s going to be much more expensive than a legal intake specialist.

For this part of the calculation, subtract the monthly price of a legal intake specialist from the cost of wages, hiring, and benefits for a month of in-office staff, and you’ll end up with how much money a legal intake specialist would save you in a month.

Let’s not ignore the cost of training, either.

A 2022 Training Industry Magazine report found that the average cost of training an employee was 1207 dollars.

For lawyers, that cost might be even higher, as it’s time you won’t be billing, on top of the cost of paying for staff that isn’t delivering what you need yet.

This calculation works no matter what kind of legal intake specialist you’re thinking of hiring. If you’re hiring an answering service, you’re really saving money. But even if you’re hiring a 1099 contractor or an equivalent, there’s still plenty of money saved.

How Many More Clients Will I Win?

Now comes the most important part of the calculation, and also the most difficult: how many clients would a legal intake specialist secure for your firm?

It can be difficult to judge when you lose a client you might otherwise have secured if you had someone answering the phones at all hours. It can also be tough to separate the clients that you secured despite your response time from the ones you secured because of your response time.

For this part of the calculation, just count up the clients you missed because you weren’t picking up the phone. This includes both after hours at dinner time, weekends at the kids’ baseball games, and when you’re in court or otherwise too busy to answer the phone.

That’s more calls than you think; only 1 in 3 phone calls to law firms are picked up live.

If you want to be generous, you can count each of these potential clients as clients you would have secured with a legal intake specialist. A more reasonable calculation, however, would be about 80 percent. If you want to be pessimistic you can count 50 percent of the calls toward this total.

Unfortunately, that’s the only easy part of this calculation. For example, if you spoke to a client and they didn’t hire you, would a legal intake specialist have helped? Probably! But coming up with an actual number is very difficult to do. In order to avoid double counting and to preserve the effectiveness of this rubric, we’ll count the value of these calls as actually not having to answer them, which was calculated earlier in this blog.

Putting It All Together

There are some benefits to a legal intake specialist that can’t be measured. For example, take client satisfaction. You’ll get more five star reviews, yes, but unless you’re reading each and looking for where they mention your receptionist, it’s difficult to tell how many were the result of your stellar legal work and how many were the result of a legal intake specialist. Never mind, of course, how difficult it would be to quantify the value of client satisfaction; best to chalk that up as one of the many bonus perks.

So, let’s do the math to figure out the value that can be quantified:

1. Add up all the time a legal intake specialist would have saved you and round up to the nearest tenth of a minute. Then multiply that by your hourly rate.
2. Add to that the amount of money you save, then subtract the cost of the contractor or answering service you hire.
3. Then, multiply the revenue of your average case by the number of clients you might have otherwise missed that a legal intake specialist would have captured for you, based on the calculation in the previous section.

Then, add the number from step 2 to the result from step 3, and you’ll have the total value a legal intake specialist would bring to your firm across your chosen time frame! The total might surprise you.

Find Out How We’d Boost Your Firm For Free

Of course, this is just an abstract thought experiment. If you want to get concrete proof of the value a legal intake specialist will bring to your firm, all you need to do is sign up for our free trial.

Here at Answering Legal, each of our virtual receptionists is a legal intake specialist. That’s because they train for months and only ever answer for lawyers. You can learn more about our legal intake services here.

And that’s not all we do! Our free trial gives firms access to custom integrations with top legal softwares like Clio and Lawmatics. Click here to learn more about our integrations. Free trial users also get access to our mobile app, which makes it easier than ever to run your firm from your phone. Check it out here.

Take your firm to the next level, free of charge. 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.