Vacation Stress-Free With A Law Firm Virtual Receptionist

The smaller the law firm, the harder it is to take a break. Who’s going to be manning the helm while you’re off the ship? And even when you do get a break, they can hardly be called relaxing. Anxiously checking emails and taking calls from beachside hotel rooms is not the same as relaxing on the beach, after all.

But what if we told you there was a trick to stress-free vacations as a small law firm owner or solo attorney? A simple hack that would let you actually enjoy quality time with the family or whatever else your vacation entails, without constantly checking back on the firm?

That hack is hiring a law firm virtual receptionist. With your phones handled, your new clients captured, and an easy way to keep track of goings-on in your firm if you really must, you’ll actually be able to take time off without stressing about what’s going on back home.

Leave Your Phones In Good Hands

Small law firm owners and solo attorneys rarely get to take a break from answering the phone. Unlike larger law firms, which have armies of receptionists, legal intake specialists, and even associates to close deals, smaller firms have to handle most new client calls themselves. Even those firms with dedicated receptionists often feel they have to take unscheduled phone calls to make sure they can secure business.

All you have to look at to see this trend is the number of lawyers often working hours they don’t want to.

According to Clio’s 2022 Legal Trends Report, 42 percent of attorneys work Saturdays and 32 percent work Sundays, despite vanishingly fewer attorneys claiming they actually prefer to work on weekends.

But with 24/7 phone support from a law firm virtual receptionist, your phones will be in good hands while you’re away. No matter when someone calls in, they will have a five-star conversation with a receptionist. You can rest assured that every client will feel welcome, and new clients will want to stick with your firm.

For existing clients, just the assurance from a live law firm virtual receptionist that their attorney will be getting back to them ASAP is often enough. The key to securing new clients while on vacation, however, is in the legal intake process. With top-notch legal intake, your leads will feel that they’ve already begun the process of hiring your firm.

Of course, high-level legal intake takes training and practice on the part of your law firm virtual receptionists, which is why you want to look for a service that provides legal answering services exclusively. You don’t want your receptionists to be answering for just any industry. Law firms and their potential clients have special needs, after all. With a specialized service, you can be sure that the receptionists handling your calls while you’re relaxing are well-trained, since they don’t have to train to answer for other industries.

Don’t Miss Any New Clients

Quality legal intake isn’t the only factor making a law firm virtual receptionist a key investment for a lawyer looking to take a break. Simply expanding your phone coverage to 24/7 will bring your lead capture rate up in unexpected ways.

After all, only 1 in 3 phone calls to law firms are picked up live.

Taking that 33 percent up to 100 percent will, it stands to reason, triple your lead capture rate!

Beyond that, however, you need to be able to know your firm is running just fine without you. It’s all well and good to have a law firm virtual receptionist handling your calls and conducting legal intakes, but if all of those details gathered languish on an unread message, it won’t do much good! A legal answering service with call center software that can integrate with your CRM will mean you don’t have to worry. All the data you need to secure a client will be in your CRM when you get back.

Next, you want to make sure that you actually secure the new lead. If you really need to talk to new leads on the phone, a law firm virtual receptionist can transfer the call to you. It’s not ideal for taking a true vacation, but if you’re the kind of lawyer who needs to put a personal touch on everything, it is an option!

Otherwise, you want to be able to automatically send documents to new leads. This can be done through automations with your integrated CRM. Certain programs allow you to set up criteria defining a good client or case and if a new client meets those criteria, send them representation agreements to secure their business. Certain legal call centers which provide law firm virtual receptionist services can also send text messages after calls to accomplish the same goal. With these processes in place, you might actually come back from vacation with some new business!

Monitor Your Firm From Afar

For most businesses, being able to take a few weeks off and never check up on work is a sign that your business is operating independently and healthily, according to Entrepreneur.com. As we mentioned above, the smaller the business, the harder it is to accomplish a true vacation.

But even if you do succeed, one of the worst parts of a vacation is coming back to work and facing an insurmountable mountain of leftover tasks. Imagine: dozens of existing clients looking for updates, dozens of new clients waiting for your contact to secure their business. Talk about the makings of a bad case of the Sunday scaries the day before you return to work!

Hopefully, with the above factors, that won’t be the case. With a law firm virtual receptionist handling your phones, you should be able to come back to work and catch up on what you missed in a single morning. After all, new clients will have undergone a legal intake process and all their information will be in your CRM to easily peruse and follow up on if need be.

Even still, if you find you can’t stay away from work throughout your entire time off, a law firm virtual receptionist will allow you to stay on top of your workload from afar. In case any high-value cases come in that you just have to handle yourself, it’ll be easy to follow up on select cases to allow you to vacation without stressing on your first day back.

A law firm virtual receptionist will take messages after every call and deliver them directly to you immediately. Those messages will contain all the relevant information you need to secure the caller’s business because it will be based on the legal intake process you set up yourself.

And where will those messages be delivered? If you’re using a premium legal answering service, your law firm virtual receptionist will send your messages directly to a mobile app you can access on your phone at any time. From there, you should be able to easily organize your inbox and follow up on whatever business you need to address to be able to truly enjoy your vacation.

Answering Legal’s Law Firm Virtual Receptionists Are #1

If you’ve been reading this blog post and wondering how a law firm virtual receptionist could possibly provide all of these benefits, you’re in the right place. You wouldn’t, of course, be hiring a single virtual receptionist; after all, one person can hardly provide 24/7 phone coverage!

Instead, you’d be hiring a legal answering service, and if you’re in the market for top-notch call handling, Answering Legal is the perfect solution. Our law firm virtual receptionists are the best around. We spend months training our receptionists, teaching them how to answer for lawyers before they ever pick up the phone for a law firm. We can afford to do so, of course, because we are a specialty answering service. Our law firm virtual receptionists are exclusive to lawyers, and never answer for other industries.

And our tech is nothing to scoff at either. We own our own call center tech, so we’re constantly improving our service on the backend in ways you might never notice. But the most noticeable updates are the legal CRM integrations we are constantly adding to our service. Custom-built integrations with most major law firm software are available, and we are always working on adding more. And we have our own mobile app, allowing you to organize and follow up on your calls in real time from the palm of your hand.

See what we can do for your firm before you take time off. 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.