How We Answer Your Phones

How do you want our receptionists to greet your callers?

“Good morning! Thank you for calling Answering Legal, how may I help you?”

That’s how we answer our phones here at Answering Legal. We give each of the calls that come into the thousands of law firms that use our legal answering service the same treatment. You tell us how to answer your calls, and our virtual receptionists will repeat it perfectly, every time.

For example, let’s say the name of your firm is John Smith Law. You might want us to answer like this:

“Good morning/Good afternoon! Thank you for calling John Smith Law, how may I help you?”

Or like this:

“Thank you for calling John Smith Law, Milwaukee’s #1 name in personal injury law. How can we help you?”

Whatever your greeting or branding, however simple or complex it is, our virtual receptionists will greet each caller exactly as if they were in your office.

How do you want us to answer your new client calls?

After the greeting, our virtual receptionist will determine if the caller represents a potential new client. They’ll then handle that call based on a protocol you’ve laid out ahead of time.

1: Most law firms want to speak to new clients right away in order to secure their business. We’ll take down their information and let them know they’ll be on a brief hold while we reach out to you.

2: We’ll call you, tell you the caller’s name and the reason for their call. For example, let’s say you’re a personal injury attorney

“Tracy Johnson is calling because she slipped and broke her ankle at her bank. We’ll call you up, tell you the details of the conversation we’ve had with Tracy, and patch that call to you if you’re available.”

Your time on the call and our time on hold is not counted against your minute package, and your personal cell number stays private throughout the process.

3: If you can’t take the call or don’t want to for whatever reason, we’ll get back on the phone with the caller and perform a legal intake. After the legal intake, we’ll let the caller know that you’ve received their information and will call them back as soon as possible, and send you a message with all this information once the call is concluded.

You can customize your legal intake process at any time, based on one of our thousands of scripts or based on something you already use in your firm. Here’s an example of the information we might gather in a simple legal intake for a personal injury firm:

• The caller’s name and contact information
• The date of the accident
• Where the accident occurred
• The injuries sustained
• The insurance companies involved
  

How we handle new client callers is up to you. We can try to transfer every new client live, or we can just perform a legal intake, send you a message, and let you follow up on the call on your own schedule. We can even send messages and make transfer requests to certain members of your firm based on the type of case the call represents. It’s all under your control, and easily changed with a phone call to our support team.

How do you want us to answer your existing clients’ calls?

After the greeting, if our virtual receptionist identifies the caller as an existing client, they will handle the call as you’ve outlined in your call protocols. Our customers usually choose one of these two methods:

1: You can choose to use Answering Legal as your front office. Our virtual receptionists would screen all your calls, announce them to you, and see if you’re available for a transfer. Each caller would be put on hold while we reach out to see if you’d like to speak to them directly. For example:

“Mark Brown has an open case with you regarding a felony charge, and he is calling to confirm that his court date is tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. After getting this information, we’ll call you up, tell you who’s calling and why, and you can decide whether or not you’d like to take the call. If you can, we’ll put that call through to you right away. If you can’t, we’ll take a detailed message from Mr. Brown and send it over to you, letting Mr. Brown know you will get back to him promptly.”

As before, your time on the call and our time on hold is not counted against your minute package, and your personal cell number stays private throughout the process.

2: Often, existing clients’ concerns simply aren’t very urgent. Some of our attorney customers decide that they do not want transfer attempts made for existing client calls. Instead, we’ll take a detailed message and send it to you immediately. You can then decide what kind of follow-up that message requires.

Once again, how we handle existing clients is entirely up to you. If at any time you would like to change any of these options, you can just contact our support team and we’ll make the switch as soon as possible.