Important Questions To Ask When Hiring An Answering Service For Law Firms

It’s usually pretty easy to tell when your law firm is in need of phone answering help. If your office is receiving a lot of calls, but is failing to convert most new leads into actual clients, you need live phone answering assistance. If your current staff is providing poor customer service over the phone, and it’s resulting in your practice getting less than stellar online reviews, you need outside receptionist help.

Identifying you have phone answering issues isn’t very hard, but what can be challenging is finding the right place to get help. While there is no shortage of answering services to choose from these days, there are only a select few that meet the call handling standards of a law firm. When hiring an answering service for law firms, you’ll want to ask the following questions to make sure your calls end up in the best possible hands.

Are Their Receptionists Experienced In Handling Legal Calls?

Answering phone calls for law firms is different than picking up the phone for most other businesses. People call law offices with serious problems, often centering around issues that can have a major impact on their quality of life. When someone calls your law office, you want to make sure the person speaking on behalf of your firm is not only polite and professional, but highly comfortable engaging with legal consumers.

When reaching out to a phone answering service for the first time, ask them if all of their receptionists are experienced in fielding legal calls, and how much experience they actually have. Don’t be afraid to question them about the specifics of their training process. If they are hesitant to provide full details, it probably means their receptionists don’t receive much or any legal specific training, which will be a big problem for any lawyer that ends up using their service.

Is Their Service Open 24/7?

When consumers call a law firm, it’s usually with a problem that is not only serious in nature, but requires urgent attention. You can’t know when a new prospect will call into your firm for the first time, but one thing you can be certain of is that if you send them to voicemail, you’ll lose their business. If your law office isn’t answering calls 24 hours a day with a live voice, you could be letting a ton of new client opportunities walk out the door.

Growing practices can’t afford to pass up on any new opportunity, which is why investing in a 24/7 answering service is a must. Don’t bother wasting your time with receptionist services that don’t provide overnight or weekend coverage. If you’re going to pay for additional phone answering help, you want to make sure they are helping you capitalize on not just some new client opportunities, but all new client opportunities.

Do They Handle Legal Intake?

Capturing new clients is hard work, and that’s usually because people looking for legal help expect a lot from their first phone call to your office. According to recent data, 42% of consumers say that if they like the first lawyer they speak with they won’t need to speak with any others. This tells us that a lot of people calling a law firm aren’t looking to shop and compare, but want to get the handling of their case started as soon as possible.

If you are going to be relying on a phone answering service, it is essential that their receptionists are fully trained on performing new client intakes. When you can’t get to the phone, your phone answering staff must be able to collect both personal and case information from your new leads and do so in a highly efficient and organized fashion. Having a quality new client intake process in place will build confidence in your new leads, as you’ll be letting them know that the handling of their case is beginning right away. If a phone answering service you speak with isn’t already providing legal intake, move on right away.

Do They Provide Bilingual Receptionists?

A great answering service for law firms will not only help you capture the leads you already have, but help you generate new clients as well. While some attorneys may not view communicating with Spanish speakers as a necessity, the truth is they are limiting themselves greatly by not offering bilingual receptionist service.

There are now an estimated 41 million US residents speaking Spanish in their homes, which means a good portion of just about any American lawyer’s community is made up of people whose preferred spoken language is Spanish. With the right bilingual answering service behind you, you can start advertising to Spanish speakers in your area, and open the door to an endless amount of new client opportunities. If your competitors aren’t offering Spanish speaking services, this could give you a tremendous competitive edge.

What Does Their Pricing Look Like?

Don’t be the lawyer that automatically chooses the answering service with the seemingly cheapest pricing plan. As we’ve mentioned in this piece, phone answering at a law office is nothing to mess around with, and in many cases you’ll get what you pay for with cheap services. Instead you’ll want to ask phone answering services questions like how they generate individual prices for firms, do they charge extra for additional features, do they offer overage protection, do they charge by the minute or call, do they force you to sign long-term contracts. The answers you receive to these questions will tell you a lot about whether your firm can trust a particular service, and whether or not you actually want to do business with them.

Final Thoughts

As you do your research on today’s most popular answering services, you’re likely to see that most fail to provide satisfactory answers to the five questions listed above. We’ll save you some time, and let you know that the only service that is truly able meet the high phone answering standards of law offices is Answering Legal.

So how does Answering Legal go about answering the above questions?

• Since our service only answers calls on behalf of law offices, we’re able to provide specialized legal phone answering training to our staff. All of our receptionists go through months of training, before being allowed to answer the phone on behalf of real attorneys. And yes, we’re happy to share the details of our training process with you.
• Our call center remains active 24/7/365. Even on holidays we remain up and running. Signing up with our service guarantees that you’ll always have a live trained professional answering the phone when a potential client reaches out to your office, even if the call comes in the middle of the night.
• During our receptionist training period, we dedicate a significant amount of time to learning how to execute the legal intake process. By the time our receptionists start working for real, they’ll have performed the process hundreds of times, and we’ll always know how to make your new prospects feel comfortable and valued. Our service also allows lawyers to customize the intake questions we ask, ensuring that we collect all the information you need from a new prospect in order to move forward with their case.
• Our call center is always fully staffed with Spanish speaking receptionists, meaning that we’ll always be ready to help lawyers provide bilingual phone answering services. Our receptionist team can even take your Spanish speaking customers through the legal intake process, and send all the information they record back to you fully translated.
• With our pricing, we always aim to be as transparent as possible. No tricks and no games. While we can provide you with a custom quote, we won’t be able to provide you with an official monthly rate or minutes package until you complete a 7-day free trial with our service. During this trial period, you’ll get the chance to experience our answering service for law firms firsthand and see if you actually like using it. Meanwhile, we’ll get the chance to properly measure your office’s call handling needs, so we can offer you the best pricing package possible.

To get started with your 7-day free trial of Answering Legal, fill out this form or call us at (631)686-9700. To learn more about what it’s like being an Answering Legal customer, check out this recent case study.