Why A Legal Intake Center Is A Key Investment For Law Firms

Most investments need time to mature before they can pay off. With perhaps the sole exception of treasury bonds, those investments often have unclear maturation rates and dividends. That’s what makes any kind of investment a risk; you have to put in money upfront with the only guarantee of success being based on your research or the advice you’ve received.

The same principles, of course, apply to investing in your firm. Any kind of money put into your business, whether that be in hiring staff or in acquiring new legal technology software, an investment is a risk, and it’s your hard work before and throughout the maturation process that will guarantee your dividends.

But what if we told you there was an investment your firm could make today that would start paying off in less than an hour, and would result in you doing less work, not more? By delegating their calls to a legal intake center, law firm owners can generate revenue, cut costs, and create the most valuable resource of all: time.

A Legal Intake Center Will Save You Time

We’ll tackle the biggest benefit of a legal intake center first. Delegating your calls to a legal intake center will net you more time to focus on your priorities.

While there are plenty of other kinds of interruption, studies have shown that attorneys spend an average of 1.1 hours a day talking to clients on the phone, and that it takes an average of 23 minutes to refocus on a task after interruption.

Sure, a little more than an hour a day doesn’t look like much. Of course, over two weeks, it adds up to more than a standard attorney’s 9-hour workday! But it gets much worse than that. Let’s assume each phone call lasts 6 minutes. On an average day, that means attorneys field 11 phone calls! If it takes 23 minutes to get back on task after one of these interruptions, that means you’re losing hours of focused, efficient time to phone calls!

Of course, for most law firms, time is literally money. We don’t need to tell you how valuable that time is, because you’re probably already acutely aware of how much 6 minutes of your time is worth! But have you ever considered how much that inefficiency could be affecting other parts of your life?

According to Clio’s 2022 Legal Trends Report, 42 percent of attorneys work Saturdays and 32 percent work Sundays.

For many attorneys, the law is a passion. But it’s not their only passion. The time a legal intake center saves you doesn’t have to be billable. That time could mean making a child’s piano recital, or spending an evening out with a spouse. It could mean meditation, exercise, or even just more sleep!

A Legal Intake Center Will Boost Your Revenue

The next thing investing in a legal intake center’s services for your law firm will net you is more revenue. It’s in the name, after all: a legal intake center will provide a legal intake for every new client caller. Those leads that undergo a legal intake will feel like they’ve already begun the process of hiring your firm.

How is that different from the way things are currently run at your firm? Well, we don’t know exactly what your firm is like, but regardless of your phone handling protocols, we have a statistic to share with you:

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

33 percent of callers to law firms reach a voicemail or some kind of IVR phone tree, which tend to drive leads away rather than converting them. Of course, not every call is a new lead, and not every new lead that speaks to a live receptionist becomes a client.

Regardless, turning that 33 percent into 100 percent will more than double your lead capture rate. Giving your firm the chance to secure those leads the first time they come in will reduce the chances that they’ve already spoken to one of your competitors by the time you call them back.

And that’s not to mention the lead capturing effectiveness of a legal intake center. Dedicated legal intake centers only train their receptionists to answer for lawyers. That means they’re legal intake experts, and stellar representatives of your firm. The quality of the legal intakes performed by a legal intake center is comparable to those performed by in-house staff. Once they’ve undergone a professional legal intake, new leads will feel like they’ve already shared their part of the story with a law firm. You’ll have all the information you need to convert them into clients.

A Legal Intake Center Will Save You Money

As we just discussed, a legal intake center provides you with comparable quality to in-house staff. Through rigorous training and with flexible customization, a legal intake center’s virtual receptionists are often indistinguishable from in-house staff. Lawyers who use legal intake centers often have clients who arrive expecting to meet the virtual receptionist they spoke to on the phone!

A legal intake center provides phone handling of this quality, however, at a much lower cost than in-house staff. We can break down these savings in three ways: saving on wages, saving on training, and saving on 24/7 coverage.

We’ll get the simplest out of the way first. Hiring in-house staff for 24/7 phone coverage is prohibitively expensive. You’d essentially have to triple whatever your normal staffing costs are in order to staff your office to handle those calls after hours. And will they work from your office? If they’re working from home, or you are, you’ve essentially recreated a call center, and you’d have to handle all the call forwarding yourself!

And never mind the cost of training all this new staff.

A 2022 Training Industry Magazine report found that the average cost of training a worker was 1207 dollars.

A legal intake center handles the training for you. By the time their virtual receptionists are answering for your firm, they’re already highly-trained experts. You won’t have to worry about an adjustment period; you’ll get 100 percent of a receptionist’s potential from day one.

And of course, between wages and benefits, a full-time receptionist just costs more than hiring a legal intake center to perform a similar job. Of course, there are benefits you can only get from in-house staff. Often the receptionist is the heart of a firm, greeting clients and passing information along.

We’re not suggesting you should replace your receptionist, if you have one! A legal intake center can be a great way to support their work. Smaller firms and firms that don’t already have a receptionist, however, should certainly consider the benefits a legal intake center can provide them against the cost of hiring a receptionist, though.

Invest In Your Firm With Answering Legal’s Legal Intake Center

We’ve demonstrated how a legal intake center can be a great investment for your firm, but we haven’t tackled the other half of our thesis: that you can get dividends of that investment in an hour!

We made that claim because we can back it up. Here at Answering Legal, we’ll set up our legal intake center services the same day you sign up. Once your free trial starts, we’ll get right on setting up your custom legal intake process and call protocols. Some of our customers have captured clients with cases of a value that more than pay dividends on their investment the same day they signed up!

We can do that because of our stellar staff. Our virtual receptionists are the best in the business. They undergo months of training before answering for our law firm customers, and they only ever answer for attorneys. Click here to learn more about our virtual receptionist training process.

Our tech is also top-notch, and allows us to easily set up your account in time to start paying off your investment the same day! We update our call center technology all the time, adding new features like law firm CRM integrations and a mobile app, all based on our customers’ suggestions and needs. We’re always looking to improve our legal intake center’s capabilities; good enough is never good enough for us!

Give yourself the gift of better revenue and more time. 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.