Streamline Your Intake With A Legal Intake Answering Service

One of the biggest challenges facing any business is attracting consumers to earn revenue. Most businesses, law firms included, solve this problem with marketing and advertising. But there’s another hurdle to attracting clients to your firm: intake.

According to the 2024 Legal Trends Report, only 40 percent of the 500 law firms they called answered before the call went to voicemail! No matter how much you’re spending on marketing, without picking up the phone, you’re missing out on business.

That’s where a legal intake answering service comes in. You don’t have time to answer every single phone call yourself, and most answering services can’t give lawyers the quality of service their clients require. A legal intake answering service, on the other hand, will not only make sure every caller gets a legal intake, but that your legal intake process is smooth and efficient.

A Legal Intake Answering Service Will Solidify Your Intake Process

The first thing a legal intake answering service will get you is a dedicated intake process. Sure, you might have an intake process already; if it works for you, you can keep it! But some firms are more fly-by-night, and some firms have intake processes that haven’t been updated in a long time and could use a tweak. A legal intake answering service will prompt you to do just that.

Because you’re not training your legal intake receptionists yourself (more on that later), you’ll need to establish a concrete process so that your legal intake answering service can give you the results you need. This might sound like work, but it’s actually a good thing; many firms haven’t sat down and thought about what their intake could be costing them!

Firms with leaks in their intake processes could be losing over $53,000 of revenue a year!

Solidifying your intake process will make your firm run more smoothly, even if you’re just using a legal intake answering service for overnight calls. By taking the time to sit down, analyze your process, find out where the leaks are, and plug them, you’ll be able to make sure you're not missing out on any business.

Don’t worry, though, you won’t have to come up with this entire process on your own! Your legal intake answering service will have sample intakes and suggestions for making the most of their service. You just need to go in knowing what you need, and you’ll come out with a new and improved legal intake process, both for your legal intake answering service and for any in-house intake you might be performing!

A Legal Intake Answering Service Will Save You Time And Money On Training

Of course, just having an intake process is just the first step; whoever’s answering your phones also has to learn it! If you’re just answering the phones yourself, then there’s no problem. But you’ll never be able to grow your firm if you’re not delegating your phone answering. An in-house receptionist can be trained on your intake process, but that can be time-consuming and expensive, though obviously worth it.

According to a 2023 Training Industry Magazine report, companies with less than 1000 employees spent an average of $1420 and 59 hours on each trainee.

With a legal intake answering service, you get to enjoy the benefits of an in-house intake team without having to spend all that time and money on training! The answering service’s receptionists will answer your calls fully-trained on your process.

How, you ask? Well, first of all, they’re already answering for other law firms, so their virtual receptionists are already legal intake experts. They’ve already been trained on legal terminology and processes, and can tell the difference between the different types of cases your firm might be handling at any given time. If you want to read about how this happens, there’s an example of a legal intake answering service’s training process here.

Second, even though your legal intake process might be entirely unique to your firm, the way the legal intake receptionists will encounter it will be just like any other legal intake process they’re used to. They won’t be learning on the job; they’ll already understand how to read and use the information onscreen to conduct a legal intake. You’ll get the same level of quality service indicated by the legal intake answering service’s reviews right away.

And, finally, they’re likely to train their receptionists on your intake process during regular new-customer training meetings, or new customization training meetings if you have to make any changes. Keeping their legal intake receptionists up-to-date on customer preferences is key for a legal intake answering service’s bottom line, so they’re highly incentivized to make sure you’re receiving

A Legal Intake Answering Service Will Integrate With Your Tech

So far, we’ve discussed things many or most legal intake answering services will provide that will help you streamline your intake process. As you might know, however, there is a big difference between the best legal intake answering services and the worst. Call centers, even specialized ones, have a bad reputation, and sometimes it’s the bad apples that are spoiling the bunch.

One of the ways you can tell the quality of a legal intake answering service is in the partnerships it provides with other tech companies. If your legal intake answering service integrates with your legal software, you’re likely dealing with a high-quality service, and you’ll reap the benefits of that in ways that are hard to miss!

Firms using technology to enhance their intake secure 51 percent more client leads and garner 52 percent more revenue than those that don’t!

The reason integrations are so important is because they take the human error out of intake without removing the human element. People hate talking to bots, IVR systems, and voicemail; humans want to speak to humans, especially when they’re distressed by a legal issue.

With legal software integrations, you get the best of both worlds. You’ll have a live legal intake receptionist handling your phones, while also removing all of the time wasted and potential human error introduced by data entry. You’ll be able to automate what happens when new leads call into your firm, all for a small investment of your time and energy setting up workflows at the start of your service.

Integrations make your firm run smoothly, but a mobile app makes your firm run from anywhere. Some legal intake answering services offer an app that lets you review and follow up on messages from anywhere. You won’t have to run back to your office or even power up a laptop to access a cloud software in a coffee shop if you’re on the move; you can just open up your phone and start securing clients right away.

Trust The Best Legal Intake Answering Service Around

We’ve established how crucial intake is to a law firm’s success, and how a legal intake answering service can make that intake smooth, easy, and effective. Now let’s talk about which legal intake answering service to use.

We’re a bit biased, of course, but we’d recommend ourselves: Answering Legal. We’ve got the best legal intake receptionists around because we only answer for lawyers, unlike many other answering services. That level of specialization allows us to spend months training our receptionists, as you may have read about above.

After that training, our virtual receptionists are legal intake experts. They know everything they need to start operating as your firm’s front office, from specific legal terminology and processes to your unique legal intake process and general phone etiquette. Most callers don’t even know they’re speaking to a call center when they call our customers!

And, last but not least, we have a great tech team of our own. We’ve developed our own call center software, which means we’re constantly working to improve it and to add new integrations with top law firm software. And, we have a mobile app that acts as an extension of our service, allowing our customers to run their firms from their phones by reading, organizing, and following up on messages left by their leads and clients.

Make sure your firm is as efficient as it can be. 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.