How To Use A Criminal Attorney Answering Service

Criminal defense attorneys have difficult, important jobs. While the vast majority of criminal cases are settled via plea bargain, criminal defense attorneys are still high up among attorneys for litigation needs. That means you need to be constantly juggling litigation, the non-litigative parts of your legal practice, and the business side of your firm.

Dealing with all of that at once is what makes your job difficult. Finding the right balance between work done at a desk, work done in a courtroom, and the travel time between the two is hard enough! Owning a law firm adds another full-time job on top of that.

Luckily, there are tools and strategies you can use to make your life easier. A criminal attorney answering service is one of those tools. Just by taking client intake off your hands, a criminal attorney answering service will help your firm grow and make running your firm easier, all at once. Below, we’ll describe how to use a criminal attorney answering service to get more done.

Forwarding Your Calls To A Criminal Attorney Answering Service

In order to use a criminal attorney answering service, you have to first forward your calls to their call center. A good answering service will take care of this step for you, luckily, so you won’t have to worry about the technological side of it. But there are still decisions to be made!

You have to choose when you’d like to forward your calls to your criminal attorney answering service. To get the most out of your investment, you should make sure to analyze your call coverage needs, and how much time you want to spend on the phone.

Over 50 percent of law firms don’t answer the phone when it rings.

Many criminal attorney answering services will offer 24/7 coverage; in fact, those are probably the only ones you should be considering! After-hours calls can be a problem for any attorney; choosing between prioritizing your personal life and your business can be a difficult choice, after all. But criminal attorneys might have it even harder, as there are many kinds of crimes, like DUIs, that are much more likely to happen after quitting time.

You might want to have the opportunity to have your in-office staff handle any calls that come into your office during business hours, but have your criminal attorney answering service take all of the other calls. Or, you might want 24/7 call forwarding, just to make sure you never miss an important call. Some criminal attorney answering services even offer rollover or overflow call forwarding, where they only pick up the calls after they ring in your office a few times to ensure you have the chance to give your clients personal service!

Any way you slice it, deciding which style of call forwarding you want is an important first step to making the most of a criminal attorney answering service. It’s not a one-size-fits-all situation; in fact, there may be times where you may want to switch call forwarding styles, such as if you go on vacation! The best criminal attorney answering services will work with what you need and be able to change these settings on the fly.

Establishing Criminal Attorney Answering Service Protocols

Whatever your call forwarding options, there are going to be moments when you want to speak to a caller. Sometimes, for example, a new client urgently needs to speak with you, and in order to secure their business you’ll have to take their call. Often, if you don’t take their call immediately, they’ll just call another attorney, especially in a time-sensitive situation like a criminal case.

80 percent of callers who reach voicemail don’t leave a message.

Other calls are less urgent, or would work fine as a message and don’t need direct response, as is the case, for example, with a clerk of courts calling to update an adjusted court date. In that example, all you need to do is read the message and adjust your calendar accordingly.

A criminal attorney answering service helps accomplish both these goals through call protocols. A call protocol is essentially an instruction list, establishing the necessary steps to be taken when encountering a specific type of call. Most calls fall into one of three categories: existing client, new client, or other.

Existing client protocols can be tricky for criminal attorneys. If your clients are incarcerated, for example, it can be extra tricky to establish protocols that ensure that you can communicate with them in case of an emergency. Most other attorneys can send their existing clients straight to leave a message with their receptionist, but there can be difficult situations criminal attorneys need to handle immediately.

There are ways around this; for example, you could schedule a time in your calendar when calls can be patched straight through to you. This would also work for your new client calls; though new client needs can be immediate because you want to capture their business, establishing boundaries will help you get work done.

For other calls, most attorneys decide to let their callers leave a message with the criminal attorney answering service. You can, however, also specify that if, for example, a family member calls, they can be patched straight through to you. This category is really taken on a case-by-case basis; whatever your needs, your criminal attorney answering service will be able to help.

Customizing Your Criminal Attorney Answering Service

What you’ve just read constitutes a good chunk of the customization many criminal attorney answering services allow their customers to undertake, but the real customization comes into play during each individual call. We’ve discussed how to make sure your calls get answered, and how they’ll be answered, but we haven’t discussed what happens during each call.

The first thing, of course, will be a greeting. Every caller will hear your custom greeting from the virtual receptionist answering on your behalf. This greeting can be as simple as “Smith and Smith Law Firm, how may I help you?” But it can also be as complicated as “Thank you for calling Smith and Smith, where we construct ironclad criminal defenses.” It’s a little silly, of course, but reinforcing your branding in your greeting can help callers understand that they’ve reached the right place to help them right away!

Next, for new client callers, comes the legal intake. There’s a lot criminal defense attorneys need to know about their new leads. There are a lot of details like the exact charges at hand, the date of the arrest, the next court date, which county or municipality the court will take place in; the list goes on and on. Whatever you need to know, however, your criminal attorney answering service can handle.

Firms that use technology in their intake see a 52 percent increase in revenue.

All of that information, along with contact information, will be included in the messages you receive from your criminal attorney answering service. But existing clients and other kinds of callers will also leave messages. You’ll be able to customize the information gathered there, too, so that you always know what’s going on at your firm.

Finally, some criminal attorney answering services also integrate with popular legal software. You can establish automations so that when a new client caller’s message is sent to you, it’s also sent to your CRM, and from there automated educational materials or other followups can be sent based on your CRM’s automation capabilities. You can make sure your criminal attorney answering service fits your firm’s workflow without too much adjustment.

Answering Legal’s Criminal Attorney Answering Service Has You Covered

We’ll be honest, you’re not likely to find an answering service that exclusively serves criminal defense attorneys exclusively. Answering for attorneys is already a niche; answering exclusively for criminal defense attorneys is a niche that’s likely too small to sustain.

Luckily, while Answering Legal does answer for other practice areas, many of our customers are criminal defense attorneys. Add to that the fact that our service is 100 percent customizable, and we’re proud to call ourselves a criminal attorney answering service.

But we’re not just a criminal attorney answering service, we think we’re the best. Sure, we’re biased, but we have good reason to be. We only answer for lawyers, meaning we can train our virtual receptionists for months until they’re legal intake experts. Check out our training process here.

In addition, we directly integrate with the most popular legal software in the industry. Add that to our proprietary software and mobile app, and you’ll find that we’re the best around to help you stay on top of your firm. Not only that, but we’re always improving.

Try the best criminal attorney answering service, no strings attached. 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.