Why Specialized Training Means Everything When It Comes To Legal Virtual Assistant Services

In just about every area of life, you’re likely to get better results from a specialist than from someone that provides a general service. This is true of doctors, lawyers, chefs, and even phone answering services.

You were probably on board with us for the first three examples, and a little confused on the last one. Does using a specialized phone answering service really make that big a difference? Well if you’re an attorney, hiring a company that puts its receptionists through specialized training is crucially important. In fact, it can often be the difference between gaining and losing out on a new client.

In this blog post, we’ll explain why specialized training matters so much when it comes to answering legal phone calls, and we’ll do so by introducing you to the company that offers the very best legal virtual assistant services.

Meet Answering Legal

We’re a phone answering service that operates on a 24/7/365 basis, employs both English and Spanish speaking receptionists, and provides live call transferring. We also offer affordable pricing plans for firms of all different sizes, and even give new customers the opportunity to try out our service for free for 10 days.

Why might you want to use a service like Answering Legal? Because, without someone available to answer your office’s phones every minute of the day, you’re likely to miss out on a ton of new client opportunities. Our receptionists will be there to pick up every call your office can’t get to, including calls during after hours, weekends and holidays. We’ll stop your callers from being sent to your voicemail system, a well-known destroyer of new client opportunities.

Thousands of attorneys trust Answering Legal to handle their office phones, and secure new leads for their firm. So why do so many attorneys prefer to use our virtual assistant services? There are after all a lot of other answering services in existence, many of which offer some variation of the features we mentioned earlier (although most struggle to replicate them exactly). Well perhaps the biggest thing that sets Answering Legal apart from the rest of the pack is its remarkable legal intake receptionist team.

Why Does Our Receptionist Team Have An Edge Over Others?

We’re glad you asked. You see most phone answering services are more concerned with the number of calls they answer, rather than the quality of the calls they answer. It’s somewhat understandable, since most phone answering services are fielding calls on behalf of doctor’s offices, construction companies, realtors, and several other types of businesses. Expecting their receptionists to offer any kind of expertise in one particular field is simply unrealistic. For these services, the goal is to just keep the calls quick and simple.

Of course, quick and simple doesn’t quite cut it when answering phone calls for a law office, does it? Try to rush a caller explaining their serious legal issues, and your firm is likely to come off as cold and uncaring. Try to keep things too simple and neglect collecting important case information, and your firm is likely to come off as incompetent.

With Answering Legal, our receptionists actually are able to become experts in answering legal phone calls, because our company only answers calls on behalf of law offices. In fact, we’re pretty confident the skill level of our team of receptionists will be on par with even the most experienced in-office legal receptionists.

What Makes Our Receptionists So Qualified?

Another great question. Well if you want an in-depth look at what our legal intake receptionists go through before being allowed to answer phone calls on behalf of real lawyers, you can check out our four-part blog post series on their training process. This is a subject we’re happy to be transparent about, because we’re truly proud of our receptionist team and all they are able to do for law firms.

In the series, you’ll learn that all new Answering Legal receptionist recruits go through a 90-day training period where they are carefully schooled in not only standard phone answering protocols, but in performing full legal intakes. For those unfamiliar with the term, legal intake is a process in which a member of your staff takes a first time caller to your firm through a list of carefully crafted questions. These questions are designed to help extract important information about the caller and their case. When the process is done correctly, lawyers end up receiving all the information they need to properly access a potential new case, and callers are left feeling assured that your firm is the right one to handle their legal matters.

During the training process, our receptionists become well-versed in what type of questions they should be asking, when working on behalf of certain types of law practices. This is important, since the legal intake questions for a criminal defense lawyer will be much different than that of a family lawyer. On the other side of 90 days, our receptionists are fully prepared to engage with customers in just about any legal phone call situation, and will be ready to help your law firm turn new leads into satisfied paying clients.

Ready to get started with Answering Legal? Fill out this form or call 631-686-9700, to speak to one of our customer success experts about beginning a free 10-day trial.

Need more reason to try out our service? Learn here why a live answer means everything to your customers.