Revolutionize Your Lead Capturing With A Virtual Receptionist For Lawyers

It’s 2024; do you know how well your lead capturing is doing?

For most businesses, lead capturing is the sales team’s job. They develop relationships with potential customers, sell their product or service, and eventually close the deal.

But most law firm owners don’t have sales teams; they have lawyers and maybe receptionists. These are the people whose job it is to convince a client to stick with the firm, and they’re not exactly trained for it.

Whatever you’re doing to secure leads, it’s likely you could be doing more. Without a solid lead capturing strategy, your lead generation and advertising dollars are going to waste. It’s probably time for a change, which is why in this blog we’ll be talking about how to revolutionize your lead capturing with a virtual receptionist for lawyers.

Ensure You’re Available 24/7

First thing’s first: your phones need to be answered all day and all night, every day of the week.

Only one in three phone calls to law firms are answered live.

Assuming you’re picking up every call that comes into your firm during standard business hours (which is a big assumption), that still leaves the other two-thirds of the day unanswered. Sure, fewer calls might come in after 5, but those callers might have more urgent problems that can’t wait for a call back in the morning after leaving a voicemail.

After all, those leads are calling to find legal help, and they’ll often stick with the first live person they speak to. It doesn’t even have to be a lawyer; even though what they think they want is to speak to an attorney right away, what they’re actually looking for is relief from their legal anxiety.

A virtual receptionist for lawyers can provide that relief 24/7. As we’ll discuss in the next section, a legal intake will go a long way toward making leads feel better about their problems. But even just answering every phone call will more than double your lead capture rate.

Think about the above statistic in context. Obviously not every phone call represents a new lead, but if even half of them do, then tripling the number of phone calls you answer will lead to a huge spike in your lead capture rate.

Perfect Your Legal Intake Process

As we mentioned above, new leads want relief from their legal anxiety when they call a law firm. The most obvious solution they’re seeking is to speak to a lawyer, but it’s not the only solution. A virtual receptionist for law firms can provide them the relief they’re looking for through a legal intake process.

What callers to law firms are looking for is to feel like they’ve taken a step toward solving their legal problems. They want to put that problem in a trustworthy professional’s hands so that they don’t have to worry about it anymore. By taking new client callers through your custom legal intake process, a virtual receptionist for law firms can do that.

The key to this legal anxiety relief lies in legal intake training. Plenty of firms have online intake forms that they use to collect web leads. Forms like this don’t work on phone leads, however, because they’re looking for a personal experience.

And most of your clients will agree: Clio’s 2021 Legal Trends Report showed 70 percent of clients prefer to conduct their first conversation with an attorney over the phone.

Your virtual receptionist for lawyers can’t make the client feel like they’re just filling out a form. They need to feel like they’re having a conversation with a compassionate professional, someone who knows what they’re talking about. Listening compassionately and carrying on the conversation while collecting all the information you need to secure a client’s business is exactly what a virtual receptionist for lawyers is best at.

Once the caller has told their side of the story, a virtual receptionist for lawyers will let them know that the attorney will get back to them as soon as possible. The entire experience will make new leads feel like they’ve already hired your firm, making it much less likely that they’ll seek out another attorney while they wait for you to get back to them.

Make Follow-Up Easy And Effective

The last step to lead capturing is something only you, the attorney, can really achieve: getting the new lead to sign a representation agreement and become a client. You want to have the last say, and make sure you’re only picking the best clients for your firm.

But that doesn’t mean that a virtual receptionist for lawyers can’t help your follow-up process. First and foremost, a virtual receptionist for lawyers will buy you more time to follow up on a new lead.

Clio’s 2019 Legal Trends Report found that 79 percent of clients expect a call back within 24 hours of leaving a voicemail.

That means the vast majority of new leads expect a follow up in less than 24 hours after leaving a voicemail. Of course, since 2019, American consumers in general have become more accustomed to instant gratification, but a virtual receptionist for lawyers can combat that. After having told their side of the story to a live receptionist and being told that an attorney will get back to them, new leads will be much more patient.

But that doesn’t mean they will wait forever! If you’re available and want to indulge in some instant gratification, a virtual receptionist for lawyers can transfer new client callers to you directly. That will make your new leads feel like the most important thing to your firm, which is not something they’ll be able to say about every law firm they’ve encountered in their search!

If you’re not available, a virtual receptionist for lawyers can take a message for you and send them immediately. That message will also contain the results of your legal intake process, meaning you’ll know everything there is to know about their case.

You’ll be able to tell at a glance if a case is right for your firm, and have everything you need to get in contact with that lead. From there you can follow up on your schedule, confident that you’re going to be able to secure their business when you speak to them.

Hire Answering Legal As Your Lead Capturing Partner

We discussed above that not many law firms have sales teams or lead capturing specialists. Answering Legal’s customers, however, do.

Our virtual receptionists for lawyers are the best in the business. They undergo months of training before ever picking up for a law firm, including legal intake training. They learn the ins and outs of answering for lawyers, including practice-area specific terminology they have to be familiar with.

We can afford to train them for so long because they only have to train to answer for law firms. Other than answering our own phone calls as part of training, they’ll only ever answer for lawyers. If you’d like to read more about our training process, click here.

We’re proud of our staff, but they’re not the only thing that makes us the best lead capturing partners around for law firms. We own our own call center technology, which means we’re constantly working on improving it, including by integrating with more and more law firm software every month. And we have our own mobile app, where our customers can read, organize, and follow up on messages all in one place.

Make sure your firm is always ready for new clients. 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.