What’s It Like Interacting With Our Legal Virtual Receptionist Team?

When signing up with Answering Legal, you’re not just getting a service that will work for you, but a service that will work with you. How you utilize our legal virtual receptionist team on a day-to-day basis, is entirely up to you. You’ll get to decide when our receptionists should assist you in handling calls, how they should handle your calls overnight, and what details should be included in the messages they send you.

Below we’ll give you an inside look at what it’s like engaging with our legal virtual receptionist team, and let you hear thoughts from some of our current attorney customers.

Working With Our Team During The Day

What happens if your office misses a call? Well without Answering Legal, the caller will end up having to deal with your voicemail. Most legal consumers won’t be all too thrilled with that these days, and in most cases, they’ll immediately start calling other firms in your area for help handling their case. With our legal virtual receptionist team in place, law firms have a much different experience.

“When phones are busy, there are overflow calls that simply cannot be answered by our in-house staff,” said Orlando attorney Ken Eulo. “Before Answering Legal, these overflow calls would not always be relayed to us, or the calls would be significantly delayed. This likely cost our firm significant sums of money and upset the morale of current clientele. With Answering Legal, I cannot say that we have missed a single phone call.”

When using our service, you can have your incoming calls directed over to our virtual receptionist service after a certain amount of rings. This way your callers will always get the live attention they seek, even when you and your staff can’t get to the phone. After the call concludes, you’ll get a message from the Answering Legal virtual receptionist that handled your call, clearly stating the important details from their exchange. This information will allow lawyers to get back to callers they missed in a hurry, and walk into that conversation already briefed on the caller’s original reason for contacting the firm.

Our legal virtual receptionist team is of course able to provide much more than a basic answer and message service would. Simply inform us on how you want to see certain types of callers handled, and we’ll in most cases be able to meet your requests.

“Their team is very versatile, so they are able to live-transfer calls to us when necessary, as well as recording messages through call, text, or email, ”said New York traffic violation defense attorney Michael Palumbo. “I just explained the profile of what I wanted in the messages that they take, and they make sure to get all of that information to me.”

Working With Our Team After Hours

When it comes to handling calls outside of normal office hours, attorneys have a lot of options. Most lawyers, however, will opt to stop answering calls at a certain hour so they can enjoy their evenings in peace, and will have all of their firm’s calls immediately forwarded over to our virtual receptionist team. For law firms like Dale Carson Law and Zirkin & Schmerling Law, this has been a very effective strategy.

“We forward our phones to (Answering Legal) after we leave the office, so usually around 6 pm,” said Jackie Carson, office manager at Dale Carson Law. “They will patch calls with potential clients up until 10 pm, then overnight, they will take messages and email them to me until we are back in the office around 6 am.”

For criminal defense law firms like Dale Carson, which see many of their new client opportunities come in after hours, our virtual receptionists have become a significant asset.

“If someone gets arrested around 11 pm one night, they might be scheduled to see a judge at 9 am the next morning,” Carson said. “Their family is trying to reach a lawyer to represent them on short notice. With Answering Legal, I’ll have messages right when I wake up in the morning about court appearances, so I can get back to them right away.”

For law firms such as Zirkin & Schmerling, working with our virtual receptionists has helped their staff better balance work and personal time, while still meeting the legal needs of their community.

“With Answering Legal taking over our after hours calls, we have been able to find success in keeping to our core values and being there for people who are in need of help,” said Allen Walker, VP of Strategic Services at Zirkin & Schmerling. “Answering Legal has allowed all of our lawyers to go home and not worry about answering calls after hours. We are no longer worried about missing a call from a current client or setting up a potential new client. Answering Legal takes care of it all.”

Receiving Texts And Emails From Our Team

One of the main ways attorneys will hear from our legal virtual receptionist team is in message form. As we’ve already mentioned, attorneys will receive a message after every call handled by one of our virtual receptionists, recapping the entire call. That message can be sent to you in both text and email form, allowing you to easily check new messages from our team from any location.

“We find the texting services to be the most useful,” Eulo said. “Every message is texted and emailed to law firm employees within seconds of the phone call. Other answering services we sampled would send notifications, but these notifications were often significantly delayed, resulting in lost clients who hired other firms during the delay in communication.”

Before being allowed to handle calls on behalf of real law firms, our virtual receptionists go through an extensive training program, in which they are carefully schooled on how to collect information from law firm callers and how to put together messages for attorneys in a hurry.

“All of the messages that come in from their team are always accurate and timely,” said Palumbo. “Their team is really good at understanding the questions and problems that callers are having and then addressing those in a clear and concise way.”

Now that you’ve heard what other attorneys have to say about our virtual receptionist team, it’s time to start interacting with them yourself. Get started with a free trial of our service here or call us at (631)686-9700 for more information.