Virtual Receptionist For Lawyers: Five Things To Know About Our Message Taking Services

Law firms have a lot to keep track of these days, and it can be all too easy for messages from prospective and existing clients to be misplaced or forgotten about. This is why many firms have begun to invest in a virtual receptionist for lawyers. Phone answering services like Answering Legal can provide a live receptionist team to answer calls on behalf of law offices, and relay attorneys messages from their callers. Our team instantly helps firms become more organized and work more efficiently, while elevating the level of day-to-day customer service they are able to provide.

For those attorneys that haven’t gotten the chance yet to try out Answering Legal and participate in a 7-day free trial of our service, here are five things you may be surprised to learn about our message taking capabilities.

1- We’re Available To Take Messages 24/7

If your law office isn’t answering its phones 24/7, you’re just asking to miss out on new clients or upset the ones you already have. Modern day consumers hate interacting with voicemail, and will often take getting sent to an automated machine as a sign that their time isn’t very important to you. In many cases, callers to your firm won’t even bother to leave a voicemail at all, and will just take their business to a competitor instead.

With Answering Legal in place, you’ll guarantee that all of your callers get to speak with a live person, and never end up getting sent to voicemail. Those calling your office for the first time won’t have to wait to speak with a live representative of your company, as a member of our virtual receptionist staff will always be there to pick up the phone and make a positive first impression. Your existing clients will also appreciate getting a live response when they call into your firm with questions, and seeing that an actual person is handling their message.

2- Our Virtual Receptionist Staff Is Highly Trained

We understand that it can be tough trusting an outside group to handle your office’s calls, many of which are regarding extremely delicate matters. In fact, we wouldn’t be surprised to hear that you’ve tried another phone answering service in the past and had a bad experience. Many of our competitors really struggle with working on behalf of law firms, because they don’t understand that answering the phone for law offices can be extremely complicated and requires specialized training.

At Answering Legal, we work exclusively with the legal industry. This allows us to provide our virtual receptionists with highly focused training on how to properly interact with distressed legal callers. Before ever answering a call on behalf of an actual firm, our new receptionist hires go through months of training on taking messages and performing client intakes for law firms. By the time our receptionists complete their training, they are prepared to handle any call your firm might receive, and do so in an extremely professional manner.

3- When We Take A Message, You’ll Get It Right Away

Any call a law firm receives has the potential to be regarding an important and time sensitive situation. Therefore, attorneys can’t afford to have messages piling up on their desk for hours or days at a time. If a new prospect or existing client requires immediate attention, lawyers need to get back to them in a hurry. Legal consumers won’t have any sympathy for slow response times when they are dealing with life altering issues.

When using Answering Legal, lawyers get all of the messages our service collects from their clients sent to them via text and email. In the age of the smartphone, this means attorneys can instantly check new messages from any location. You’ll know right away whether a caller’s issue is urgent, and requires you to pause what you’re currently doing to call them back. Our receptionists send messages over almost immediately after a call concludes, so you’ll never have to stress over what a missed call could be regarding. You’ll always know right away.

4- Our Receptionists Can Do More Than Just Take A Message

Depending on what field of law your practice, or the types of cases you typically take on, you may want the ability to speak with callers in real time when specific situations or circumstances arise. For example, a caller who has just been arrested may not be satisfied with just leaving a message for an attorney. They may be in the mindset of hiring the first lawyer that is available to talk with them.

Answering Legal receptionists are not only trained in taking messages, but performing live transfers as well. When signing up with our service, you’ll let our team know which situations you’d like our receptionist to simply take a message for, and which situations we should attempt to contact you or a fellow attorney for a live transfer request. So if you want the chance to be transferred in whenever a recently arrested caller contacts your firm, we can help make that happen. And of course in cases where you’re unable to pick up a live transfer request, our receptionist will still be there to record a message or perform a client intake on your behalf.

5- Our Team Can Take Messages From Spanish Speaking Callers Too

Unless you have full-time Spanish speaking staff at your law firm, you could end up missing out on a lot of new client opportunities due to language barrier issues. Message taking and performing new client intakes with Spanish speakers can be particularly challenging if your current phone answering staff is unable to speak their language. Since you always want to give clients the opportunity to speak in the language they are mostly comfortable in, finding a way to accommodate their needs over the phone is a must!

Another major advantage to using Answering Legal is that our receptionist team features both English and Spanish speakers. Whenever your firm receives a call from a Spanish speaker, we’ll always have a Spanish speaking receptionist ready to engage with them. Our receptionist will be able to collect your caller’s information via the new client intake process, and will then send all of that information over to you in message form fully translated. Our bilingual answering service could end up creating countless new business opportunities for your practice.

Remember that 7-day free trial we mentioned at the beginning of this piece. Well if you’d like to try out a virtual receptionist for lawyers for yourself, you can fill out this free trial form to get the process started. You can also call us with any questions at 631-686-9700.