Securing Five-Star Reviews With A Virtual Receptionist For Lawyers

Forget your results, forget your rates; the most important part of your firm, the thing all of your prospective clients are looking for before they hire you, is your review average. Usually on Google but sometimes available elsewhere, those three, four, or five stars are what will determine if your leads call you or move past you to their next option.

Of course, that review score is based on your actions. If you practice the best you can, treat your clients right, and charge fairly, you can be sure you’ll have a decent review average. But how can you ensure an exceptional average?

The answer to that lies in how you treat your callers. It’s not just your clients who will leave you reviews, after all. By ensuring that your client experience is stellar, that your prospective clients get good treatment, and that even those who will never hire you come away from an interaction with your firm with a positive impression, you’ll make sure your reviews are attractive to incoming clients. A virtual receptionist for lawyers will make that process easy. Read on to find out how.

Making Sure Your Clients Have The Best Experience Possible

Let’s face it: existing clients don’t usually have urgent concerns. Sure, sometimes they’ll have important information about their case or unexpected events that might change your strategy. But by and large, after the first few meetings, they’ll mostly be calling for updates.

That doesn’t mean they should be ignored! In fact, the conclusion is the opposite. They might think their inquiry is extremely important, or they might think it’s a minor issue. Either way, they’re going to be upset they’re being ignored, either because they feel it’s just a six-minute phone call or they believe it’s very urgent.

You can’t answer all of their phone calls either.

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

If you answer every existing client call, regardless of its urgency, you’ll never get anything done! Sure, many of those calls are billable. But so is the time you spend on their case. If your firm bills by the hour, as most law firms do, efficiency is key to handling the kind of volume you’ll need to make your firm grow.

What’s an attorney to do? Well, a virtual receptionist for lawyers can solve this quandary. A theme you’ll notice throughout this blog is that the people calling law firms aren’t actually looking to speak to a lawyer. They’re looking to make sure their legal issue is heard. Having a virtual receptionist for lawyers on the line 24/7 to listen to your existing clients’ concerns will keep them happy and ensure a glowing review when their legal issue is resolved.

Most importantly, a virtual receptionist for lawyers will accomplish this without getting you involved directly. They’ll listen to the caller, take a message, and assure them you’ll be getting back to them as soon as possible. Then, they’ll send you the message as soon as the call is over, and from there you can decide when and how to get in touch with the client! After all, maybe their concern just needs an email, or a text message. If it does need a phone call, you can schedule that call when it best suits your schedule, ensuring as little of an interruption as possible.

Making Your New Leads Feel Heard Is Key To Securing Their Business

New leads are both the reason you want to get five-star reviews and, if everything goes well, a source of those reviews themselves. New clients are the lifeblood of any firm, and the most important subsection of potential reviewers we’ll be discussing today. Luckily, making sure new leads stick with your firm is the exact specialty of a virtual receptionist for lawyers.

First and foremost, a virtual receptionist for lawyers will ensure every single new client caller speaks to a live person on their first interaction with your firm. Given that very few callers even leave voicemails anymore, this alone will increase a new lead’s satisfaction with your firm.

A virtual receptionist for lawyers can also transfer new client callers to your phone directly, if you’d like. Depending on your preferences, you can have a virtual receptionist act as your front office, patching new client callers over to you based on a predetermined schedule. They’re the most important part of your business, after all; making them feel like they’re the most important part of your firm will encourage them to stick with you.

If you don’t want to interrupt your work and disrupt your efficiency with a transfer, we understand. In that case, a virtual receptionist for lawyers can perform a legal intake.

Only 1 in 3 phone calls to law firms are picked up live.

Because a virtual receptionist for lawyers is available 24/7, you’ll be turning that 33 percent into 100 percent. A legal intake lets a new lead tell their side of the story to an empathetic and professional voice on the other side of the phone. Once they feel like they’ve been heard by your firm, many will already feel like they’ve begun the process of hiring your firm!

Each of the factors above has two effects. They make your new client callers happy, and they make your new client callers more likely to stick with your firm. Each of those effects, in turn, feeds into each other; a happy new lead is more likely to stick with your firm, after all. And, when a happy new lead becomes a happy client, they’re more likely to leave you a five star review.

A Virtual Receptionist For Lawyers Will Keep Non-Client Callers Happy

Five-star reviews are, ultimately, very much under your control. Bad reviews, on the other hand? There’s not much you can do about those, assuming, as we always do, that you treat your clients with respect and do your best work for them.

The truth is that most of your bad reviews don’t come from clients.

According to general market research, less than half of consumers leave reviews after doing business.

The majority of happy clients don’t leave reviews, but you can be sure an unhappy person is going to make their opinion heard.

In fact, most of a law firm’s bad reviews come from people who were never going to be your client anyway. If you’re a personal injury firm, for example, and someone who doesn’t have a personal injury case calls, they’re going to feel brushed off when they’re informed that you can’t help them. Law firm phone answering staff has to contend with people who ask: “What do you mean you can’t help me? You’re a lawyer, aren’t you?”

A virtual receptionist for lawyers will help avoid bad reviews. First of all, actually picking up the phone and speaking to someone will help assuage the fact that the caller has likely just wasted their time and yours by calling a firm that can’t help them, despite their urgent legal issue. Then, since a virtual receptionist for lawyers will know your law firm as if you had trained them yourself, they’ll be able to say that your firm doesn’t handle the type of case the caller is calling about.

That might sound like exactly what an in-house receptionist would do. And that’s the point! The difference is that a virtual receptionist for lawyers will do that for every caller, 24/7, and at a fraction of the cost.

It’s important to remember that your review score is an average of all your reviews. Thus, avoiding bad reviews is just as important as ensuring you collect good ones.

In fact, it’s extremely important: Online reviews were the most important criteria for selecting a lawyer in 2022, according to Clio’s Legal Trends Report in that year.

New leads might read one or two individual reviews, and maybe they’ll check out a testimonial on your web page, but they’ll mostly be looking at your average score. Even just ten percent one- or two-star reviews can really tank your average and lower your firm’s reputation in the eyes of online legal consumers.

Use Answering Legal’s Expertise To Get The Reviews You Need

Here at Answering Legal, we have a 4.9-star average rating on Google Reviews, based on over 800 individual reviews. We’re not saying this to brag—okay, not only to brag—but rather, to demonstrate that we know what we’re talking about.

How do we get those reviews? Well, first, like you, we make sure we do our best work. Our virtual receptionists for lawyers only ever answer for lawyers. That means we can afford to train them to be experts. By the time their 90-day training period is over, they have far beyond a layperson’s understanding of the legal process and what each practice area needs from their answering. To learn more about how we accomplish this, read more about our training process here.

Our virtual receptionists for lawyers are also supported by top-of-the-line answering service technology and a 24/7 support team. We offer integrations with the biggest law firm software in the business, and are always adding more offerings based on our customers’ needs. For example, we developed a mobile app based on our customers’ recommendations, and built it from the ground up to serve their needs.

Lastly, however, we do what all businesses should do: ask their customers to tell everyone their honest opinions about our service online. If you’re not already asking your clients to

Want to take advantage of our 5-star virtual receptionists for lawyers, 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.