Three Answering Legal Features That Lawyers Can’t Afford To Be Without While Working From Home

Working remotely presents a lot of challenges for lawyers, especially for those who usually depend on an in-office receptionist to help direct the majority of their incoming calls. But, if you’re like most attorneys right now, you aren’t in a position to just sit around and wait out the current pandemic. You need to keep answering calls, so your practice can continue to make money.

We’ll cut right to the chase in this blog post, since we know you don’t have time to waste. Answering Legal is a 24/7 live receptionist service built specifically for attorneys. Anytime lawyers can’t get to a call, our receptionist team is available to speak to new prospects and existing clients on their behalf. Our staff has been successfully working from their homes for several weeks now, and we have continued to serve the legal community without any interruption. We offer week-long free trials to any firm that wants to try out our service, as well as pricing plans for budgets of all different sizes.

Now that you know the basics of our service, let’s discuss some of the Answering Legal features that attorneys will quickly grow to rely upon while working from home.

Advanced Message Taking

Our service makes keeping track of new lead opportunities and existing client requests incredibly simple, mostly because you’ll be able to do so from any location, including your home office. Anytime after one of our virtual receptionist team members speaks with one of your callers, you’ll get a message from our service. Our receptionist will record your caller’s personal information and the details of their reason for calling, then send that information over to you via text and/or email message.

Messages you receive from Answering Legal can range from a question about an on-going case to the full legal intake information of someone interested in hiring you. No matter what the message is regarding, we promise you’ll receive it without delay, have it available for viewing right on your smartphone or laptop and that the message’s details will always be 100 percent accurate. With the power to track new client opportunities now essentially in the palm of your hand, you’ll be able to easily prioritize which callers require a call back from you right away and which callers can be addressed at a later time or by a colleague. During these uncertain times, you don’t want to let a single new lead go to waste, which is why our advanced message taking feature is a must-have tool for your practice.

Overflow Call Handling

Most attorneys have pretty full plates at the moment. Serving clients remotely isn’t easy, and you may be spending a large portion of your day making video calls, figuring out how to use new legal softwares, or even just giving your spouse a break from the kids. We know lawyers are going to miss some of their incoming calls, and that’s okay, as long as you have Answering Legal behind you. With our service, you can set your phone system up so that our receptionist team picks up incoming calls after a certain amount of rings. With this feature in place, you’ll still have the opportunity to answer calls, but will never have to stress about your callers being left unattended if you can’t get to the phone.

Legal consumers were pretty impatient creatures before this pandemic began, and over the past few weeks that level of impatience has been ramped up to 11. Everyone is scared right now and is looking for immediate answers to their problems. If you send a new lead to your voicemail, they won’t leave a message and patiently wait for a call back, but they will quickly move on to calling your competition. And if you repeatedly send existing clients to your voicemail, they may start to feel like they’re being neglected, and come away with negative thoughts about their experience using your firm. The good news is, that with overflow call handling from Answering Legal, you’ll never have to worry about any of this. New leads and existing clients will get the live attention they seek right away, and your firm will always be providing a superior level of customer service.

Call Routing and Transferring

While overflow call handling will certainly make your life easier during this time, Answering Legal’s call routing and transferring abilities takes your ability to manage your home office to another level. Our service gives lawyers full control over when they get the opportunity to answer their calls and when calls should be forwarded directly to our service. For example, if you want to answer calls during normal working hours, but once the clock hits five you want our receptionist team to fully take over, we can make that happen. If you end up needing to step away for an extended period of time to deal with an emergency situation, you can request that all of your calls be directed to our service full-time. We’re ready to assist as long as you need us to. Our routing system creates endless call handling possibilities, and ensures your firm is always prepared.

Answering Legal’s live call transferring is a feature you’ll find particularly useful when trying to capture new business. Many of the lawyers that use our service request that when a new prospect calls their firm for the first time, they be contacted by our receptionist team. Our receptionist will collect the caller’s name and reason for calling, ask to briefly put the prospect on hold, and then see if the attorney is available to have the call transferred over to their phone line. The end result of this is lawyers being able to make the best possible first impression on those considering using their firm by delivering them information in real time.

We don’t know what tomorrow will bring, but we do know that with Answering Legal in place, your firm will always be prepared to address the needs of callers and win new business. As you can tell by reading this blog post, our service has a lot to offer. And we didn’t even get a chance to talk about our bilingual receptionist team, appointment scheduling or customizable setup. The next step in the process is for you to check out our many features for yourself, and experience how they make your remote working life significantly better.

Fill out this free trial form or call (631)686-9700 to get started with Answering Legal. Have questions about using our service? Schedule an appointment to speak with our account executive Chris Ferguson.

Regardless of whether you decide to move forward with our service, we at Answering Legal hope you and all your loved ones are safe and healthy during this trying time.