The Lawyer’s Guide To 2024

If there’s a theme for this year’s Lawyer’s Guide, it might be this: “Why not now?”

If you’ve been on the fence about adopting new technology, or expanding your staff, that’s our question for you. “Why not now?” Why not adopt that tech tool you’ve been considering, the one that will make communicating with and educating your clients easier? Why not bring in some fresh minds to your firm and shake things up?

Whatever your answers to these questions are, we hope you use the advice in this section to change your mind—to stop worrying about the right time to make an investment, and instead start making the most of the time you have right now. Let the new year be the excuse you need to invest in your firm. You’ll love the return you get down the road.

The Lawyer’s Guide to 2024 looks at the year ahead, but the new year is also a great time to look at the year behind us. If you feel like your firm is falling behind in the technology sphere, it might be a good time to make a change.

In the 2023 Legal Trends Report, Clio found a relationship between technology and revenue: firms that reported better revenue were more likely to be using tech tools for office tasks than those that reported lower revenue.

If that’s not enough to convince you, check out this clip from our legal tech expert for this year: Dorna Moini, CEO of Gavel, an automation infrastructure for law firms allowing them to automate workflows documents and client processes. She lists the three types of software law firms shouldn’t go without in 2024.

Of course, adopting new software carries its own risks. Until you’ve had a good deal of hands-on time with a new tool, it’s difficult to tell how well it will fit into your firm’s workflow, even with a demo. And then there are contracts

In the clip below, Dorna Moini goes over some best practices for figuring out if a software will be a good investment for your firm before making a commitment. Critically, she notes that it’s important to make sure you won’t be left in the dark if something goes wrong by ensuring that whatever software you choose has a great support team.

In 2023, AI was the legal tech buzzword—and don’t worry, we’ll cover AI next! But in 2022, that buzzword was “automation”, and there are plenty of firms that haven’t yet embraced its benefits. But those benefits are very real.

Just by making simple workflow automations, Clio’s 2023 Legal Trends Report found that firms bill 18 percent more of their work than firms that didn’t make these changes.

And that’s just with the bare-minimum of automation! Imagine what you could do with even more.

This topic is right up Dorna Moini’s alley, as someone very invested in the automation of law firms. Check out the clip below, where she lays out the internal and external reasons why you should be focusing on automation in the year to come:

2023 will be remembered in legal tech—maybe even in tech in general—as the year of generative AI. The explosion of Chat-GPT in the winter, and the promise of GPT-4, drove the legal tech world into a frenzy. Everyone was asking: what can AI do for lawyers? Will the legal world be forever changed? Is this going to be the nail in the coffin for the billable hour model?

This frenzy slowed down in May when a firm was censured for citing fake cases generated by Chat-GPT.

But this incident doesn’t indicate that firms should abandon AI, just that they should be careful in how they do it. After all, many firms are using AI in their legal software already, and may just not know it. In the clip below, Dorna Moini discusses how to intentionally integrate AI into your firm, gradually, so that as the technology improves, so does your firm.

Of course, it doesn’t matter how efficient or organized your firm is if it’s a quagmire of forms and questions for your client while you handle their case. The good news is that in addition to streamlining your workflow, legal tech tools can improve the client experience at your firm, too.

The correlation between tech, the client experience, and success is clear: Clio’s 2021 Legal Trends Report found that growing firms are 41 percent more likely to use client portals.

As the legal world grows more and more digital, a good client portal will allow your firm to more easily handle everything from educating new clients to billing at the end of a matter, and all in a way that’s much more convenient for the client. In the clip below, Dorna Moini goes into detail on the importance of client portals to improving the client experience.

Do you feel like you’re working harder than ever before? You’re not alone.

In their 2023 Legal Trends Report, Clio reported that lawyers are working over 25 percent more cases compared to 2016, and billing over 35 percent more hours.

Legal casework is on the rise, and it’s obviously not just that firms have gotten more efficient. Still, if you’re looking to handle more and more work, making sure your team is as efficient as it can be is very important.

Ben Sachs, president of the Landing Group and author of All Rise: Practical Tools for Building High-Performance Legal Teams, joins us for this year’s Lawyer’s Guide to be our expert on all things legal team building. In the clip below, he offers his advice on how to avoid the most common team building mistake he’s seen.

Leadership is a skill like any other. And like many other skills important to being a law firm owner, they don’t exactly teach it in law school. But it’s a very important thing to cultivate, as a lack of quality leadership skills can lead to a breakdown of workflow and cost your firm dearly.

Meeting management software company ZipDo published a report on job dissatisfaction, which found that 35 percent of employees listed a lack of trust in their leaders as a top source of dissatisfaction with their job.

In this clip, Ben Sachs lays out the four qualities that make the best legal teams work—trust, ownership, conflict, and accountability—and what you can do to cultivate those qualities in your team. These qualities build on each other to engender the kind of environment that produces high-quality, efficient, and compassionate work for your clients.

Unlike many CEOs, most law firm owners can’t just focus on running their business. As you well know, owning a law firm is like having two full-time jobs: business owner and practicing attorney.

But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty to learn from CEOs when it comes to running a law firm. We’re happy to welcome Gary Mitchell, Founder of OnTrac® Coach and host of the The LawBiz Podcast™, as a returning guest on this year’s Lawyer’s Guide. In the clip below, Gary lays out tips on how to best win space in your time for your legal practice by focusing on your strengths and building a team to cover your weaknesses.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, law firm culture (and workplace culture generally) was, as Ben Sachs puts it, “serendipitous”. Chance encounters at the workplace led to the generation of a culture that doesn’t really survive the move to remote work.

According to the 2022 Clio Legal Trends Report, only 29 percent of lawyers work exclusively from an office, down from 40 percent in 2019.

Now that lawyers are spending less and less time at the office, that method of culture growth has proven ineffective. In the clip below, Ben Sachs discusses the best way to build a law firm’s culture: intentionally. With a strong culture built up within a firm, the switch from in-office to remote work won’t come with a collapse of the things that make a law firm work.

Hiring isn’t easy. It’s an important process, to be sure, but it’s also a time-consuming one. Not to mention it has a pretty high failure rate!

According to data from Leadership IQ, 46 percent of new hires fail in the first 18 months.

The vast majority of those failures don’t come down to a lack of skills—it comes down to the much harder criterion of attitude, or fit.

In this clip, Ben Sachs presents a few interview questions and what they reveal about the candidate answering them. Skills, he says, are easy enough to determine from a CV or a writing sample; these questions are concrete ways to tell if a candidate will be a good fit for your firm’s culture.

Management is a skill set that requires constant learning for law firm owners. It’s variable, dependent on factors from your own leadership style to the best working practices of your team. And, of course, they don’t exactly teach it in law school!

If you’re looking to improve your management of your law firm, the new year is as good a time as any to start. Doug Brown J. D., Chief Learning Officer for Summit Success, LLC and host of the Law Firm Success Strategies podcast, is here to give you some tips on law firm management going into 2024. He’ll discuss mindfulness, having a plan, and focusing on what you do best.

The other side of the same coin, of course, is that if leadership and management is a constant learning process, there will be plenty of mistakes to be made. Even trained business leaders make mistakes; it’s impossible to go through a career as a law firm owner without making some yourself.

Of course, the fewer mistakes you make, the better off you’ll be! Lawyers are possessed of a few different traits that lead to some common mistakes in leading law firms. Here to discuss those traits, those mistakes, and how to avoid them, we have Gary Mitchell, who in the clip below will lay out the most common mistakes he sees lawyers make in law firm leadership.

Though the Great Resignation might be over, law firms are still struggling with staffing their rosters. From looking to grow their support staff to finding new associates, hiring and keeping good talent hasn’t gotten that much easier.

According to the 2023 State of the Legal Industry survey from Thomson Reuters, law firms still had a 20 percent turnover rate in November of 2022.

A lot has changed over the last year, to be sure, but one thing has not: staffing challenges your firm might be facing are almost entirely within your control. Research has found that it is culture, not compensation, that truly determines a firm’s turnover rate. In the clip below, Gary Mitchell has tips on making sure your staff sticks around by properly mentoring them and involving them in your firm.

When running a law firm, there are countless tasks that get repeated over and over again: client intake, onboarding, marketing—the list goes on. Performing those tasks as if they were brand new, discrete events every time is just a waste of time that could be better spent elsewhere.

Of course, coming up with processes for every task is its own way to spend time. In the clip below, Gary Mitchell points out the fact that that time is an investment in your firm. Then, he lays out just what your firm stands to gain from making sure your systems and processes are shipshape.

But who has the time to invest in their systems and processes? In his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, T.S. Eliot famously writes, “There will be time, there will be time…for a hundred indecisions / And for a hundred visions and revisions / Before the taking of a toast and tea.”

Of course, Eliot was a poet, not a lawyer! He probably had a lot more free time in the morning than you do. It’s easy to get caught up in the day to day workings of your firm and forget to take a look at the big picture, insisting that you just don’t have the time.

If you’ve been saying to yourself that “there will be time” to look at your firm’s processes and take them in for a checkup, then, frankly, you’ve been doing it wrong. Oftentimes, there is no best time; instead, you should be looking for the right time. And, according to Doug Brown in the clip below, the right time is right now!

The new year is a time for reflection. People spend time with their families over the holidays and make resolutions about the year to come. It’s as good a chance as any to reflect on how the business side of your law practice is doing!

But if you’re only doing this once a year, you’re likely to be surprised by what you find, and those surprises are not likely to be good ones! In the clip below, Doug Brown suggests a monthly check-in on key business metrics, alongside much more in-depth quarterly reviews.

Support staff have always been a key part of the functioning of any law firm. Outside of the very smallest law firms, without receptionists, intake specialists, and paralegals, it would be very difficult to succeed, at least at the scale most firms can with that support!

As essential as the staff filling these roles are, however, they are an investment. The hiring and training process can be expensive, time-consuming, and sometimes exhausting for all parties involved. It is necessary, however, to train your staff in order to make sure your firm runs smoothly.

Luckily, in this area, we here at Answering Legal are our own experts! For over a decade, we’ve been hiring and training virtual receptionists to answer for our law firm customers. Below, we’ll offer some advice, informed by our experience, on how you can make sure your firm has the best help it can get.

Hiring The Right Candidates

As Ben Sachs said elsewhere in this guide, determining the skills of a candidate is much easier than determining their fit. For our receptionists, we use their resume to tell us if they have the proper skills to ensure every caller gets a positive experience.

The much harder part, however, is determining attitude. To make sure they’ll be a good fit, we use the interview process to let us know what kind of attitude our candidates have. When we interview candidates, we’re looking for a dedication to cultivating positive experiences during every interaction, no matter how small.

It’s a time-consuming process, but we make sure to give it the attention it needs. For your firm, your support staff are often the people your clients interact with the most. Ensuring you don’t cut any corners when it comes to selecting the right candidates is an investment in those interactions to come.

You’re looking for candidates who will stick with your firm, as the investment you’re making will be worth it if they’re going to stick around. But you also want to make sure that your candidates can take constructive criticism, as until their training is done, they are going to be making mistakes.

Training The Right Way

Of course, you want to minimize those mistakes, which is why once you’ve selected your future support staff, you next have to prepare them for the job. While some may come with previous experience in similar roles, every firm has its own processes and workflows, and learning those takes time.

A 2022 Training Industry Magazine report found that the average cost of training an employee was 1,207 dollars.

As far as our receptionists go, we make sure they’re thoroughly trained before they ever pick up the phone for a law firm. That training process involves both general phone handling and legal intake, and takes three months. You can read more about how we train our receptionists here.

Of course, most law firms can’t afford to spend months training their receptionists or intake staff. Most of the training at your firm will have to happen on the job. If you want advice specific to training your receptionists, click here for an in-depth blog post we wrote using our experience. Still, you should try to set aside some time, perhaps weekly for the first few months, to run training sessions to make sure your support staff is on top.

Training Is A Continuous Process

Those training sessions don’t have to stop once they’re up to date on the basics of supporting your firm. In fact, they shouldn’t! Regular training will ensure that your firm is never behind on anything from new clients’ quirks to the new software you’re investing in.

For context, our receptionists undergo weekly and monthly training sessions. The weekly training sessions are to familiarize our receptionists with new firms they have to answer for, and all the custom options those firms have selected.

Since our customers can change their settings at any time, we conduct monthly training sessions as well, to update our receptionists on the requests our customers have made in case they haven’t answered for a particular firm in some time. If you want to read more about how we keep up with the constant changes in the firms we answer for, click here.

Since your support staff doesn’t have to support more than one firm, you likely don’t need to conduct regular training nearly as often as we do. However, quarterly check-ins will pay dividends! You’ll be able to keep up with changes within your firm and check in on any weak spots you notice in your staff before they might become problematic.

You Can Always Outsource

Building a support staff for your law firm is an investment. You’ll spend your time finding the right people and training them, and of course there are costs involved in paying them. The hope is that it will pay off in the long run, providing you with the support you need to better serve your clients.

But if you want to skip all of this legwork, you can hire a third party like Answering Legal to handle tasks better done by someone else. Some firms just don’t have the time to train receptionists, but, as we’ve demonstrated here, we definitely do! The same goes for other outsourcing, too; whatever your needs, you can likely find a third party to delegate it to.

If you don’t have the time to train a receptionist, or want to invest your time elsewhere, outsourcing your phone calls to Answering Legal will make sure you can still have the benefits of a highly-trained receptionist without the time investment.

Save your firm the time and money involved in hiring and training a receptionist. Click here 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.

In keeping with our theme of “Why not now?”, we have to ask our readers another question: Why not make that change in your lifestyle now? Why not take a big swing in your career, whether that’s making a serious move toward making partner or striking out on your own?

Whether you think it’s not the right time, or that you’re not ready, we hope our experts’ advice below will convince you otherwise. With wellness issues, making small changes right away is often much more successful than making big swings once or twice a year. And as far as your career is concerned, if you want more than what you’re getting from your work, the only one who can change that is you!

Just a few years ago, mental health and wellness were almost dirty words in the legal profession. Nobody wanted to admit that the entire field had a problem, and instead refused to acknowledge it. Of course, refusing to acknowledge a problem doesn’t make it go away; often it makes things worse!

If it feels like that has changed, it’s because it has! Since the COVID-19 pandemic, wellness has been on everyone’s mind in the legal field, and the whole profession is better off for it. Here to talk about how that’s happened and how it affects wellness in concrete ways, are Becky Howlett and Cynthia Sharp, co-founders of The Legal Burnout Solution, and co-hosts of The Legal Mindset Corner podcast.

Are you where you would like to be in your life and career? Do you even know where that is?

Our expert this year on legal careers and making sure you’re getting what you want out of yours is Dena Lefkowitz of Achievement by Design, veteran of the legal field, coach, and author of Winning in Your Own Court: 10 Laws for a Successful Career without Burning Out or Selling Out. She has some concrete advice: before you go about undertaking a journey of self- or career-improvement, find out where you’re going first!

Dena recommends first figuring out what living well means to you. From there, you can see how far you are from where you are and where you want to be, and can commit to closing that gap. In the clip below, she lays all that out, and more, as part of concrete advice to getting yourself on the journey to wellbeing.

Below the clip, we’ve included a copy of the Wheel of Life exercise Dena refers to, in case you wanted to fill one out yourself!

It can be tough to tell how much time you put in at the office is too much. Lawyers, in general, work long hours and often on weekends.

According to Clio’s 2022 Legal Trends Report, there’s as much as a 35 percent differential between lawyers who like working weekends and lawyers who actually work weekends.

So it’s normal for lawyers to stay at work late and work on the weekend, right? While that may be true, just because something is “normal” for the legal profession doesn’t mean it’s healthy.

There are plenty of signs that you’re working too much for your body and mind to handle—signs you should be keeping an eye out for. Becky Howlett and Cynthia Sharp are here to let you know just what some of those signs are in the clip below.

Attorneys are expected to always be available, whether that’s to new clients or existing ones. And that expectation isn’t a guess. It’s backed up by data:

79 percent of clients expect a response from an attorney within 24 hours, according to Clio’s 2019 Legal Trends Report.

This expectation is exactly why we here at Answering Legal stress returning client calls as soon as possible! But if you’re looking to reclaim some of that time for yourself, Dena Lefkowitz has some advice: talk to your clients! By setting expectations yourself, you can establish the boundaries that will allow you to reclaim your personal time.

Of course, if you’re trying to scale back how much you work, even just a little bit, there’s an important skill you’ll need to learn: how to say “no”.

Attorneys serve their clients. And part of that service is making sure the client is getting the best experience they can. That’s part of why there’s so much pressure on lawyers to say “yes”, whether it’s to a client request or to more work.

But when you acquiesce to every request, you might end up buried in that acquiescence, stressed and burned out from all the different obligations pulling you in as many different directions. In the clip below, Becky Howlett and Cynthia Sharp go into the importance of learning to say “no” as an attorney, for the sake of your career and your health.

As a law firm owner, you’re a leader within your firm, and often, that means what you say goes. But a “my way or the highway” approach isn’t always the best, even when you’re right! And, when you’re mediating a conflict between employees, conflict resolution tactics can help make sure your firm comes out of it stronger.

75 percent of employees across industries in the U.S. believe that their higher-ups could manage workplace conflict more effectively.

Below, Ben Sachs explains how, as law firm leaders, the tools and strategies of professional negotiators are the best fit for resolving destructive conflicts within your firm. He dives briefly into studies on conflict resolution, as well as giving advice on how to handle these arguments when they come up.

It’s easy enough to get up, go to work, get your work done, and then go home, all without interrogating whether or not you’re satisfied with what you’re doing. Then, after weeks or months of days like this, you might realize that in fact, you weren’t satisfied, and you haven’t been for some time.

Now, we’re not saying that by then it’s too late to make a change, but what if you could skip the middle step, where you don’t realize you’re dissatisfied with where your career is? By recognizing the symptoms of oncoming dissatisfaction, you might be able to do just that.

Dena Lefkowitz knows these symptoms, both from personal experience and from her time as a coach. Below, she lays out three of the most common signs that it might be time to check if there isn’t something you’re missing in your career.

When you have so much else going on, it’s tough to decide to make a big change in your career. Obviously, you have a lot of work to do, on top of personal obligations. Who has time to do something risky like add a practice area, switch firms, or to go out on your own?

Truth be told, you might have that time, or else you might need it. There may never be a “best” time, or the “right” time, to change something about your firm or your career.

There are, however, good times to do those things—and that time might be right now. In the clip below, Dena Lefkowitz will list some of the signs it might be time to make a change. We hope that if you recognize yourself or your firm in these, you’ll consider how you might start remedying the situation.

If you’ve read the last few sections of this year’s Lawyer’s Guide and are starting to think it might be time to make moves toward bettering your career in 2024, you’re not alone.

Over half of lawyers under 40 expect to leave their jobs in the next 5 years.

When preparing to make a career-defining move like going out on your own or changing firms, it can be tough to know what to do and what not to do. In the clip below, Dena Lefkowitz has good advice on what not to do: don’t stick to tradition! Instead, think about changing anything and everything if it will get you closer to your goals.

What do you want to achieve in 2024? Do you want to grow your firm? Pull in more clients? Expand your staff? Whatever it is you want to do, you should start writing those things down.

Studies have shown that just writing down your goals is enough to make you 42 percent more likely to achieve them.

But writing your goals isn’t the end of the story, obviously—you have to achieve them! The other side of the coin is that if you’re setting the wrong goals, you’re much less likely to get what you want.

Doug Brown has great advice on the topic of goals: set S.M.A.R.T. goals. In the clip below, he explains exactly what that means, and why you should focus on the specific when making your goals for the year ahead.

How often does the phrase “so much to do, so little time” describe the general outline of your thoughts? Weekly? Daily? Hourly?

Lawyers work hard, and law firm owners especially so. That’s why time management is such a hot topic for attorneys. There are only so many hours in the day, and optimizing how you spend them can be a very effective way to get things done.

In the clip below, Doug Brown points out that you can’t actually manage time—but you are in complete control of yourself and your response to your surroundings. By staying mindful of how you’re spending your time, you can combat the effects of stress and anxiety, which in itself will buy you more time to get things done.

For a long time, work-life balance was the legal world’s wellness buzzword. The idea that there is some amount of work that won’t be too much or too little, that leaves space for life outside of it without compromising success, is an attractive concept, especially for lawyers, who often work weekends and late nights.

But as time has gone on, experts have grown to question the very idea that that perfect balance exists between work and life. That’s why we’ve asked our experts the question: does work-life balance exist?

Becky Howlett and Cynthia Sharp, at least, say no. Instead, in the clip below, they recommend deciding on what success looks like for you; is it more time with your family? Is it a more successful law firm? And once you know what you want, you can set goals and work toward them. There is no perfect work-life balance; instead, you need to set one for yourself and constantly work to achieve it.

The cumulative impact of chronic stress and anxiety on the human body is a topic still undergoing active research. However, one thing is clear: living with chronic stress affects your health.

Research shows chronic stress can be linked to higher incidences of everything from heart disease to certain kinds of cancer.

We’ve asked Cynthia Sharp and Becky Howlett about daily wellness tips because life happens on a minute-by-minute, day-by-day basis. It’s easy to get caught up in your daily routine and deny yourself basic necessities in the service of more work—in the clip below, Becky mentions that lawyers often forget to eat lunch! Check out some concrete, simple wellness strategies you can implement today, rather than putting it off for when you have time.

If the theme of this year’s Lawyer’s Guide is “Why not now?”, then we must apply it to mental health and wellness as well. If you or someone you know is in need of help, then why not seek it out now?

Of course, we understand the stigma and difficulties associated with seeking help for mental health and wellness issues, as discussed above by our experts Becky Howlett and Cynthia Sharpe. That’s why we’re offering a list of resources for lawyers here at the end of our section on wellbeing in the law.

Traditional resources for mental health and wellness issues work just as well for lawyers as they do for anyone else. Resources like 12-step programs, counseling, and various hotlines are as good an option as any for someone seeking assistance.

But there are some resources specific to lawyers that are less well-known, but good to keep in mind as well. Someone in need might find it easier to speak to someone in the legal world who might understand what they’re going though. We’ll list some of these resources below.

Lawyer-Focused Resources

The Institute For Well-Being In Law, known as IWIL, started in 2016 as a national task force formed by the ABA to tackle the myriad wellness issues the legal industry faced. In 2020, that task force became IWIL, an organization focused on making lawyer’s lives better.

IWIL advocates for better policy on every level from municipal to international, creates and collects resources to help lawyers struggling with wellness issues, and helps fund and direct research into the state of mental health in the legal field and any treatments that might help. To access these resources, click here to visit IWIL’s website. They are dedicated to providing help for lawyers at all stages of their careers, from law students to law firm owners.

Lawyer Assistance Programs are funded by state bar associations that provide confidential resources to lawyers who need help. Supported at the national level by the ABA, your local LAP will have resources nearby that can provide assistance with any mental health or wellness issue you may have. Click here to find contact information for state-wide LAPs. The ABA’s list has at least one resource for each of the 50 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico.

The Lawyers Depression Project was created by a group of legal professionals who suffered from mental health conditions and decided to build something to help others struggling similarly. They offer peer-to-peer support group meetings online, with optional anonymity, as well as hosting a forum for lawyers suffering from mental health issues. Click here to find their website, from which you can sign up to receive an anonymous email address and join.

We would be remiss if we didn’t mention The Legal Burnout Solution here as well. In 2020, Becky Howlett and Cynthia Sharpe decided to use their knowledge and expertise to offer lawyers a resource to combat burnout and other issues rampant in the legal world. Offering everything from retreats, CLE courses, and online meditation videos, The Legal Burnout Solution is a great place to go if you or someone you know is in need of help.

Getting The Help You Need

We like to keep a jovial tone here on the Answering Legal blog, and our Lawyers’ Guide is no exception. It is the holiday season, after all; a time of rest and joy around the country. But the holiday season is also a high-stress time for everyone, not just attorneys. That’s why there’s no better time to find help if need be.

The resources listed above are a great place to start if you or someone you know needs help. Many people feel that needing help is shameful, or that telling others about your problems might cause them to see you as weak, or not fit to be an attorney.

With the work the organizations listed above (and others) have done, that notion is slowly but surely fading away. Someday soon, we hope, that notion will be gone. But until then, remember that there is no shame in suffering, and that getting help is the first step to leading the life you want to live, both in your career and outside of it.

At the very least, in this case, we don’t have a controversial opinion: you should be investing in your firm’s ability to reach new clients! Whether that’s advertising, developing relationships, or PR, the best time to build on your firm’s brand should always be “right now!”

After all, if you’re not out there advocating for your firm, how can you expect your clients to do it? Getting your firm’s name out there is a key step toward growth. Below, we have some experts giving advice on how to do that most effectively.

Business development is often a bit of a mystery for lawyers. After all, it’s not something taught in law school—which, you may have noticed, is a bit of a theme with the advice our experts provide!

Gary Mitchell’s business development advice is, on its surface, simple: make better and deeper connections in the coming year. In practice, that means going to meet your clients where they are. Gary recommends going to your clients’ workplaces, picking up the phone to call them off the books, and, in general, showing you care. That will ensure they come back when they need your services.

As our marketing expert this year, Philip Fairley, President of The Rainmaker Institute, has a lot to say to attorneys. After working with over 23,000 attorneys since 1999, his advice for the year to come is this: focus on video!

It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, or overproduced. In the clip below, Fairley recommends making video content and using it to educate your clients on legal issues, answer frequently asked questions, or let them know what the process of a particular type of case will be like after hiring you. Producing one of these videos every week, Fairley says, will lay the groundwork for local virality and brand visibility to your prospective clients.

Once you have that video content, you can easily transform it into content for every platform your firm has a presence on. Omnichannel marketing, as Philip Fairley explains in the clip below, is a great way to take advantage of the work you should already be doing.

It sounds like a lot of work! But as Fairley points out, if you’re making videos for YouTube or Facebook already, you can very easily turn that content into other forms of content for other platforms. This way, you can get your name out there everywhere your potential clients are likely to see it.

Marketing is always an investment, of course. But for law firms, it can seem like the market is so competitive it’s easy to get drowned out by others spending more, resulting in low returns on your marketing efforts.

In the clip below, Philip Fairley lays out just how to make sure your marketing investment gets the returns you’re looking for, in every channel. By focusing on LSAs and running your social media marketing campaigns correctly, you can get your firm’s name out there without breaking the bank.

Search engine optimization was once the talk of the town, across all sectors. Making sure your law firm’s website had good SEO so that you ended up in the top results of relevant searches was key to being discovered online.

Since then, however, online searches have changed. Local service ads cover the top results in almost every category, and the front page of most every search you do is dominated by the biggest firms and aggregators. That leads us to the question: is SEO still important for law firms?

In short: yes! In the following clip, Philip Fairley lays out why it’s still important to make sure your webpages and even your video content has been given the SEO treatment, even though advertisements have taken over most of the top results on Google search.

Throughout multiple industries, generative AI has been the tech buzzword of the year. The explosion of tools like Chat-GPT and Google’s Bard AI (just to name a few) seems to have had everyone talking.

But the technology behind tools like Chat-GPT, large language models, has been around for a long time. And for Philip Fairley, the best use of that kind of tech is in automating your lead-nurturing process. In the clip below, he describes how to do just that.

But Fairley’s advice also comes with a warning: using generative AI like Chat-GPT in public-facing ways (blog posts, social media, etc.) should only be done for ideas and outlines. He cautions against using this tech to generate content, because, as he puts it, it won’t be generating anything unique. Check it out in the clip below!

Unless you’re lucky enough to be the only lawyer in your local area who does what you do, your firm has to reckon with the competition. Once upon a time, small firms existed in the shadow of much bigger firms, promising a more hands-on and personal experience, but advances in technology and a proliferation of small firms have made it so that is no longer always the case.

In 2022, Thomson Reuters’s small law firm survey found that 72 percent of small firms considered their biggest competitors to be other firms of the same size.

If your biggest competition is firms of a similar size, how do you make sure you can differentiate yourself from others offering that same hands-on experience? In the clip below, Michelle Calcote King, Principal and President of Reputation Ink, lays out the best way firms can distinguish their brand in a crowded market.

Knowing and being known to your local market is key to thriving within it. If you’re operating in your local area, becoming a featured expert in your local media can be an effective way of getting your name out there where potential clients can see it.

In the clip below, Michelle Calcote King even points out that local exposure can translate into national exposure, for firms that aren’t locally-focused. She outlines how to use local stories and features to demonstrate your expertise to national outlets.

The law can often be arcane and difficult to understand to a legal lay person. Lawyers can gain a lot from explaining these situations to those who didn’t go to law school, and one of the places one can do that is in your local media. The question, then, is how?

In order to foster a relationship with your local media, Michelle Calcote King explains in the clip below, you have to first prove your value. By reaching out with your credentials and providing analysis, you can start the process of featuring in your local media’s coverage of your legal niche.

When it comes to PR crises, the Boy Scouts’ motto applies: be prepared! While many firms might never experience it, bad press can be devastating, especially today, in the hyper-online digital world.

In the clip below, Michelle Calcote King recommends being proactive. The spotlight being on your firm can be a good thing! But if there are things that might be found when the spotlight gets turned on, you should be prepared to address them or remove them. And, of course, if the crisis comes, don’t be afraid to hire someone to help manage it.

If you’ve reached this point in our section on extending your firm’s reach, you might be wondering: “How is this going to help me generate leads?” The answer is that it won’t! At least, not directly.

PR is not lead generation; it’s about building a brand. As Michelle Calcote King describes in the clip below, building the credibility and visibility of your brand will make your lead generating efforts more successful! When your name is recognizable, the prospects who see your marketing will be more likely to trust it.

The process of bringing new clients into your firm has many steps. First, clients have to be made aware of your existence, through advertising, word-of-mouth, or PR. Then, they need to be convinced that you can solve their problems, so they call you. Finally, you need to make sure that once they call your firm, they decide to hire you.

That last step, one often neglected by law firms, is lead capturing. Law firms invest a lot of thought, money, and energy in those first two steps, naturally. But often, lead capturing can fall by the wayside, as it is the least straightforward part of the process.

That leads many law firms to question whether improving their lead capturing is a vital part of their marketing success. In this part of our Lawyer’s Guide, we wanted to answer the question with two ways of thinking about the problem: lead capturing as a good way to capitalize on your marketing investment, and lead capturing as make-or-break for marketing campaigns.

Capitalizing On Your Investment

Investment is our theme for the Lawyer’s Guide this year, and marketing is one of the most important investments law firms make year over year. Without an influx of new clients, after all, most businesses would fail, and law firms are no exception. Repeat clients and referrals are an important part of the equation, but they can’t be the only source of revenue if you want to succeed!

The referral capture rate for lawyers is only 2.8 percent, after all.

Then, to answer our previous question, we can pose another question: is there any other investment where you would not put 100 percent effort toward making sure it paid off? For example, would you hire someone as a support staff member and not train them? Buy a new software for your firm, but never learn how to use it?

Certainly there are law firms that do make these mistakes, but they’re not ones you want to emulate.

In the same way, investing in lead generation without also focusing on your lead capturing is making an investment without putting full effort into capitalizing on it. Without lead capturing, you won’t be getting the full scope of benefits from your marketing campaigns.

It’s Make Or Break

The other way of looking at lead capturing’s relationship to marketing success is that it is of make-or-break importance. It sounds dramatic, yes, but it’s a valid perspective. Your marketing efforts just won’t pay off if you’re not focused on making sure clients stick with your firm after that first call.

To put it in perspective, other businesses, whether they sell products or services, often have sales teams that specialize in closing the deal. They turn qualified leads into clients and customers.

While some large firms have begun hiring sales professionals, calling this move unconventional is a bit of an understatement.

We’re not saying you should go out and hire a sales team! But without it, law firms are at a unique disadvantage when it comes to lead capturing. To demonstrate just how important lead capturing is for marketing campaigns, we’re going to use some round numbers below just to make the point easier to illustrate.

Think about it this way: if your marketing reaches 100 people, and 20 of them are qualified leads, a lead capture rate of 50 percent would mean 10 clients. If you’re paying per click, you paid for 100 interactions, but only ended up with 10 of the 20 clients you might have otherwise secured. Now, for law firms, those ten clients might be plenty or they might not. But you cannot deny that a return of 50 percent is disappointing, when a little bit of effort can push it up to 80 or 90 percent!

Making Sure Your Lead Capturing Is Up To The Task

We’ve demonstrated that raising your lead capture rate is crucial to making sure your marketing is successful, and we’ve mentioned that law firms are at a disadvantage compared to other kinds of businesses when it comes to lead capturing. So how does a law firm make sure firms stick with them after that first phone call?

Luckily, there are several ways to tackle this problem. Our marketing expert, Philip Fairley, mentioned one of the big ones when he was discussing AI in legal marketing: lead nurturing.

A prospective client’s first interaction with your firm is not the end of the relationship. Just because a lead wasn’t sure if they should hire you over the phone doesn’t mean you should give up! Your legal intake process should have gotten you all the information you need to nurture that lead.

Lead nurturing is the process of convincing leads that haven’t quite made up their minds about you that you’re the right person for the job. You do this by providing them with value—in a law firm’s case, that would be information. Sending them emails and videos that explain complicated legal concepts they might be worrying about. Business-facing firms might instead send statistics about the kinds of problems the businesses you serve might be facing if they don’t hire you.

Hire A Legal Answering Service

If you’re not currently nurturing your leads, you absolutely should be! It’s worth the time invested, especially if you can automate or otherwise speed up the process.

But if you’re already nurturing your leads, and you still want to boost your lead capture rate even higher, there’s no easier way than making sure every call is answered, and every caller gets a great experience. Answering Legal’s team of virtual receptionists for lawyers is the perfect way to do just that.

Our receptionists are trained for months to give prospective clients an experience that will make sure they come back to your firm. They’re experts in legal intake, providing professional and empathetic responses to your clients’ often-distressing legal issues. And, if that’s not enough, our system can transfer callers directly to you so that you can put the finishing touches on a client’s business.

Boost your lead capture rate sky-high. Click here 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.

A new year means new opportunities. For some, it means traveling to conferences to connect with other people in the field and grow your network of contacts and friends. For others, it means a new year full of time to build on what came before.

In this section, we have a schedule of conferences and other legal events to come in 2024, as well as recommendations for podcasts and books to read and listen to on your free time or on your commute.

• Trial Lawyers Summit – January 18 – 21, 2024, Miami Beach, FL
• Institute For Well-Being In Law Conference – January 23-25, 2024, Virtual
• Legalweek – January 29 – February 1, 2024, New York, NY
• ABA Tech Show – February 14-17, 2024, Chicago, IL
• Legal Marketing Association’s Annual Conference – April 3-5, 2024, San Diego, CA
• ABA Annual Spring Conference – April 10-13, San Diego, CA
• AILA Annual Conference On Immigration Law – June 12-15, 2024, Chicago, IL
• ILTACON 2024– Aug 11-15, 2024, Nashville, TN
• 2024 World Technology Law Conference – May 8-10, 2024, Washington, D.C.
• LEX Summit (Filevine User Conference) – September 8-10 2024, Salt Lake City, UT
• Clio Cloud Conference – October 7-8, Austin, TX
• AIPLA Annual Meeting – October 24 to 26, 2024, National Harbor, MD 
• The Summit (National Solo & Small Law Firm Conference) – Not yet scheduled

Crisp Game Changers Summit – Not yet scheduled

Law Firm Marketing Hacks

Let’s face it: law school prepares lawyers for a lot, but very rarely does it make them great marketers. Luckily, there are people like Andy Stickel out there picking up the slack. Stickel, a veteran marketer, discusses new ways for lawyers to attract more clients—and the right clients—every episode.

The Maximum Lawyer Podcast

Maximum Lawyer puts out a lot of content advising law firm owners. From podcasts hosted by Jim Hacking and Tyson Mutrux themselves to ones featuring guest hosts, if you need a podcast for your morning commute, the Maximum Lawyer Podcast will be able to supply you almost every day. Tune in to hear law firm owners give advice based on their own experiences that will help you take your firm to the next level.

Think Like A Lawyer

Joe Patrice, editor, and Kathryn Rubino, editorial staff, both AboveTheLaw, host this show about the regular things in life seen through a lawyer’s perspective. Every week, they welcome guests and panelists from AboveTheLaw and elsewhere to offer their perspectives on the week’s legal news and other topics.

Legal Toolkit Podcast

If you’re looking for a great legal tech podcast, look no further. Host Jared Correia, CEO of Red Cave Law Firm Consulting, doesn’t just discuss tech on this show, but there’s no denying that’s one of its major appeals. Each episode, Correia and his guests discuss everything from tech tips to management strategies.

The Answering Legal Podcast Network

We’d be remiss if we didn’t recommend our own podcast network. Hosted by everyone from lawyers to lawyer coaches to our own Director of Marketing, our podcasts tackle different parts of the legal profession. From wellness to business development and management tips, you’ll find everything you may need to round out your legal life. Check out a quick description of each of our shows later on in this guide!

Unshackled: Reimagining the Practice of Law by Paul Llewelyn

Attorney Paul Llewelyn has experienced the legal profession in ways few others have. Having been both a barrister in the UK and a lawyer here in the US, he has a unique perspective, one that he shares in this book about how the legal profession could be rebuilt to better serve both lawyers and clients. Llewelyn proposes a plan to improve lawyers’ lives, which would then lead to increasing client satisfaction, and a better world for the entire legal profession.

If you’d like to hear the author discuss the premise of his book, check out this clip from our Everything Except the Law podcast, where Paul Llewelyn has quite a bit to say about the practice of law from its beginnings: law school.

All Rise: Practical Tools for Building High-Performance Legal Teams by Ben Sachs

As the title suggests, Ben Sachs’s book isn’t just theory. Using his background in business and in law, in All Rise he goes deep into the science of good team-building, referencing case studies and research done across multiple disciplines. After all, if running a law firm is a lot like running a business, then clearly there’s a lot to be learned from how other businesses build their teams. If you’re to build a better team inside your firm, look no further.

When Ben Sachs was on Everything Except the Law, he gave a bit of a preview of what he discusses in his book. Watch the clip below if you’d like to hear him discuss the traits that make up great teams across industries.

Winning in Your Own Court: 10 Laws for a Successful Career without Burning Out or Selling Out by Dena Lefkowitz

A legal career can be a stressful thing to maintain. Dena Lefkowitz knows that firsthand, having moved from all different corners of the legal world before becoming a lawyer coach. In this book, she lays out stories from her coaching clients about lawyers of all kinds struggling with their careers. With each, Lefkowitz goes into detail about how she and those lawyers tackled their career struggles, whether that be in law firm owners with business development issues or lawyers wanting to make partner. You’ll leave this book with plenty of strategies to take your career where you want it to go.

Dena Lefkowitz took a lot of inspiration from her own career. In the Everything Except the Law clip below, she tells host Nick Werker about how poorly law school prepared her for her first job, and how she thinks that contributes to the “epidemic of misery” she wrote her book to combat.

Niching Up: The Narrower the Market, the Bigger the Prize by Chris Dreyer

When Chris Dreyer talks about legal marketing, lawyers should listen. Chris is the CEO and founder of Rankings.io, an SEO agency that specializes in making sure personal injury firms stand out from their many competitors. In this book, he goes into one of his strategies for doing just that: narrowing your firm’s niche. Dreyer lays out his own personal journey, strategies for becoming an expert in a smaller market, and the benefits your firm stands to gain by doing so.

And this isn’t just theory. Check out this clip from Everything Except the Law, where Chris Dreyer gives examples of places where niching up can increase the value of your legal services!

Legal Business Development Isn’t Rocket Science : 250+ Easy & Actionable Ways to Grow Your Book of Business (In Less Time and with Greater Results) by Steve Fretzin

Steve Fretzin, host of the BE THAT LAWYER podcast and business development coach, prefers to call himself a “business development therapist”. In a way, this book is kind of like therapy for your firm: it presents a lot of little things you can incorporate day by day to make your business healthier and more successful. Taking from his over 20 years of experience in legal business development, Fretzin details concrete strategies for marketing and networking that will have your firm growing in no time.

For a preview of what you’ll learn from this book, watch this clip from Steve Fretin’s appearance on Everything Except the Law. In it, he explains how attorneys often ignore cross marketing, and how that can doom a law firm’s business development efforts.

2023 was a big year for us over at Answering Legal. We started the Answering Legal Podcast Network so that we can better serve our industry, providing lawyers with advice from veterans in the field to improve their firms and their lives.

And we just launched our official app, making it so much easier for our customers to communicate with their clients and secure new ones! Below, we’ve got some information for those of you who want to keep up with what we’ve been up to in the past year.

As we mentioned above in our tour of legal podcasts, this year, we launched the Answering Legal Podcast Network. Including our already established podcast Everything Except the Law, the ALPN has six great podcasts for lawyers looking to learn from the experts. Below, we’ll give you a brief overview of each pod, and a sample episode to check out!

Inside Answering Legal

Our newest show, Inside Answering Legal gives the audience a behind-the-scenes look at how Answering Legal works. From interviews with lawyers describing how our service changed their firm to spotlights with long-term staff who can tell you everything there is to know about Answering Legal, this is the show where you will learn just about everything there is to know about our service.

Taryn Winter Brill, or TWB, is your host for this show. She’s worked as a correspondent for Good Morning America and the CBS Early Show, so she’s a perfect fit to give you a peek behind the curtain here at Answering Legal. On Inside Answering Legal, you’ll learn everything there is to know about our company and our service, from how attorneys use our service to what day-to-day life is like in our law firm call center.

Check out the inaugural episode, where TWB interviews Marketing Director and host of Everything Except the Law Nick Werker about Answering Legal, podcasting, and how he ended up where he is in the company.

Everything Except The Law

Like the name implies, Everything Except the Law (or EETL as we call it) is a podcast about everything that’s part of being a lawyer that isn’t covered in law school. While you won’t be learning much about the actual practice of law, you will hear experts opine on everything from wellness to the business of law.

Nick Werker hosts EETL, the oldest member of the Answering Legal Podcast Network. For over 50 episodes, he has used his penchant for storytelling to weave personal anecdotes with professional advice alongside guest experts from across the legal spectrum.

On Everything Except the Law, you’ll hear advice on just about everything about being a lawyer except advice on the actual practice of law. We’ve had guests discuss legal marketing, the difference between British and American legal systems, the advent of AI technology, and much, much more!

Check out the most recent episode of EETL, where host Nick Werker speaks with Dan Ambrose about Trial Lawyers University, the most damaging mistakes committed by lawyers during trial, and what the best trial lawyers tend to have in common.

Law Firm Success Strategies

Law Firm Success Strategies is a podcast about finding success in business and in life through planning, processes, and better leadership. Your host for this show is Doug Brown, JD. He’s an entrepreneur and a lawyer who uses the things he’s learned to coach law firm owners and CEOs on how to get more from both business and life at Summit Success, LLC.

Tune in to Law Firm Success Strategies if you’d like to hear about topics as wide-ranging as finding a better balance between work and life, how to build a better team for your law firm, and how to be a better leader.

Our spotlight episode of Law Firm Success Strategies was filmed in front of a live virtual audience at our Summer Reboot Camp this year, and features guest Walt Hampton, JD, founder of Summit Success, LLC and a mentor of Doug’s. They discuss how they have used mindfulness to help lawyers find success in their businesses, and how you can do it too.

The Earley Show

Attorney Christopher Earley is no stranger to the difficulties of running a law firm. After all, he’s been doing it for over twenty years! Using that experience, he and the guests on The Earley Show will offer advice and strategies on how to better run your practice so that you’re offering your clients the best possible experience.

When you tune in to The Earley Show, you’ll hear the perspectives of practicing attorneys discussing how they found success, advice on building the best teams they can, and much more.

In the below episode of The Earley Show, Christopher Earley interviews Ali Awad, the CEO lawyer. They discuss Awad’s upbringing, the effect it has had on his career in law, and much more!

The LawBiz Podcast™ With Gary Mitchell

As the name implies, The LawBiz Podcast™ With Gary Mitchell is a show about the business of law. Host Gary Mitchell of OnTrac Coaching is a widely-acclaimed business coach with thirty years of experience coaching lawyers on how to better run their business.

On this show, you’ll hear from a variety of experts from all corners of the legal world, from legal marketers to partners, all with one goal: better business development for lawyers. That means the show covers everything from better marketing to better management!

Check out a great episode of The LawBiz Podcast™ With Gary Mitchell below. In it, our host speaks with Greg McIlwain, Office Management Partner at McMillan LLP, about leadership, business development, and more.

The Legal Mindset Corner

The Legal Mindset Corner is a podcast dedicated to tackling the unique challenges that face lawyers today, from ethical concerns to wellness issues and more.

Hosts Cynthia Sharp and Becky Howlett are the founders of The Legal Burnout Solution, which offers meditations, courses, and retreats to help address any number of wellness challenges facing lawyers. Both were practicing lawyers who faced and overcame some of the ills of the legal profession and decided they wanted to help others do the same.

By listening to The Legal Mindset Corner, you’ll learn strategies for handling the challenges of being a lawyer. Experts of all kinds join Cindy and Becky to discuss everything from daily practices to long term strategies to overcome the problems facing lawyers in today’s hyper-competitive world.

Check out a fantastic episode of The Legal Mindset Corner below, where hosts Cindy and Becky interview Cedric Ashley, former law firm owner and current lawyer coach, about implicit bias and its effects on law firms.

This year has been an exciting one for Answering Legal. We launched the Answering Legal Podcast Network, we had a rousing success at our Summer Reboot Camp, and we’ve partnered with some great companies to integrate with our service. What we’re most excited about, however, is changing the way our customers interact with our service by launching our new mobile app.

Run Your Firm From Anywhere

With the new Answering Legal app, you’ll be able to run your firm by just glancing at your phone, no matter where you are. All your messages will be stored in an easy-to-use inbox. They’ll be flagged by call type, so you can filter down to your most important new leads instantly. It’s never been easier to grow your firm on the go.

Never Miss Another Call

When we say never, we mean it. Our receptionists are available 24/7 to pick up the phone when your clients call. As soon as that call is over, messages will be sent straight to your app. You’ll be able to prioritize incoming calls based on their urgency instantly.

Secure Clients On The Go

And with built-in follow up buttons, you’ll be able to secure clients immediately after their call ends, or whenever you get the chance. You decide! All the client’s relevant information will be in their message. All you’ll need to do is click the phone, email, or text message button, then you’ll be able to reach your new leads instantly and secure their business.

Available Right Now!

Click here if you’d like to download the Answering Legal App. It’s free for existing Answering Legal customers. If you’re not a customer but would like to see what our app can do for your service, click here to sign up for a free trial.

There’s no time like the new year to take a good hard look at your firm. Did you meet your goals for 2023? Did you exceed them? Where might your firm need a little bit of extra help?

There’s no shame in looking to get every advantage you can for your firm. In today’s hyper-competitive legal world, it’s basically a requirement. So if your firm needs a boost, hire Answering Legal. We’ll discuss five of the many ways our receptionist team will benefit your firm in the coming year.

Better Lead Capturing

We train our virtual receptionists for months before they ever pick up the phone. Why? Because they’re only ever going to be answering for lawyers. We never answer for any other industry, and we want to make sure our receptionists are doing their job as well as possible.

That kind of training makes our virtual receptionists legal intake experts. They know exactly how to get the information you need from your clients without scaring them away by making them feel like they’re just filling out a firm. And, when your new leads undergo a legal intake, they’ll be more likely to stick with your firm. Our receptionists will fulfill their expectations for what hiring an attorney is like.

Not to mention that all of this is available 24/7. Just by being able to capture clients that call in after hours, you’ll find your client list growing. Add in a better capture rate while you’re in the office, and you have a recipe for success in the year to come.

More Flexibility

You never know what life is going to throw at you. Hopefully, the last few years have been uneventful. But being flexible enough to handle whatever comes while making sure your business is thriving is key to making the most of any year.

With our virtual receptionist team, you’ll spend much less time on the phone. During business hours and outside of them, our receptionists will handle your phone calls so you don’t have to.

That means you don’t have to be tethered to your desk. You can focus up and put your nose to the grindstone at your desk if you need to, absolutely. But if life takes you away from the office, you won’t have to put your firm on hold, even if it’s just for a few hours. No matter where you are, you’ll be able to run your business and secure clients.

Expand Your Client Base

Marketing, of course, is the main way you expand your potential clients’ awareness of your firm. Without it, you’d be stuck with the leads brought in from referrals or organic searches. But there are other ways of growing your client list; you can expand your pool of potential clients by changing things about your firm.

Because our virtual receptionists are available 24/7, you’ll be expanding your client base to include potential clients who may not be able to reach you during normal business hours. People with long shifts, shifts that aren’t nine-to-five, or jobs that don’t give them a lot of time to make phone calls would all be more easily able to reach you.

Our answering service is bilingual, too! No matter when a Spanish-speaking lead calls, they’ll be able to speak to a bilingual virtual receptionist who can help them explain their legal issue without a risk of miscommunication. Depending on your local area, a bilingual receptionist might be a must-have or a valuable asset that sets you apart from your competition.

More Time To Get Work Done

Of course, if you’re servicing more clients, eventually there comes a time when you simply have too much work to do. Luckily, our virtual receptionists can handle the phones if you need to get work done.

You’ll be spending a lot less time on the phone. Of course, you’re free to use that time however you like. But if you’re feeling overworked or overwhelmed, that time will come in handy.

On average, a lawyer spends 1.1 hours on the phone with clients every single day!

Multiply that out across a week and you’ll be regaining six extra hours on average to do your legal work.

Better Client Experience

Perhaps most importantly, your clients will appreciate our virtual receptionist service. Just being able to speak to a live human being whenever they call instead of a voicemail will make them much happier.

New clients, of course, will appreciate having their story heard by an understanding and professional receptionist. Many of our attorney customers even choose to have new clients transferred immediately to their personal phone number, pending their availability. If not, those new leads will be able to schedule consultations on that very call, so they feel like they’ve made some progress toward solving their legal issue.

Existing clients, on the other hand, will be able to leave a message with our virtual receptionist, who will assure them that the attorney in question will get back to them as soon as possible. While that doesn’t sound too different from a voicemail, we can assure you that for clients, it is. Talking to a human being is something that can’t be replicated, no matter how advanced the technology is.

Try Us For Free

We’re confident that our virtual receptionists will help your firm grow in the coming year. So confident, in fact, that we’re putting our money where our mouth is.

We’re offering every firm reading this their first 400 minutes of Answering Legal for free, no strings attached. Check out the next section below to find out more about how it works, or just click here to sign up.

The best way to make the most of 2024 is to make sure you’re in a position to capitalize on all the improvements you have and will be making to your firm. If you’re upping your marketing game, or focusing on the client experience, or leveling up your technology to make your work more efficient, you’re going to want to be able to capture more clients to make all your investments pay off.

If you’re looking for an easy way to do just that, sign up for our free trial! You’ll get 400 free minutes of top-quality answering, no strings attached. If that sounds too good to be true, read on to find out just what you get from a free trial with Answering Legal.

How Your Free Trial Works

Here at Answering Legal, we don’t believe in giving anything less than 100 percent of our effort. That’s why even our free trial is an important part of our onboarding process. We’ll use the free trial period to make sure we have everything right about your service before you ever pay a penny.

That means we will customize your call protocols, your legal intake process, and your transfer protocols. But it also means you get instant access to integrations with your favorite legal software and our brand-new mobile app. You’ll be able to seamlessly unite Answering Legal with your firm’s workflow, for free, all for just fifteen minutes of your time.

In fact, every one of our service’s premium features will be available for free throughout the free trial. You’ll have access to custom legal intakes, custom integrations with legal software, and more, and we’ll never ask for your credit card information. For 400 minutes or for 14 days—whichever comes first—you’ll get an inside look at how Answering Legal can change your firm.

How To Sign Up

Simply click here to sign up for our free trial. You’ll be taken to a calendar and asked to select a time that works for you to speak with one of our account executives. Don’t worry, we know how busy attorneys are! The call will take just fifteen minutes of your time.

In that signup call, one of our account executives will run you through the finer details of our service and get your customization requests in. We pride ourselves on being incredibly customizable, so every aspect of our service is customizable. Need a specific greeting on every call? You got it. Want to make sure every new client caller gives you a piece of information unique to your practice area so you can close the deal? No problem.

After that, our setup team will get to work, and within a few hours, you’ll have our receptionists representing your firm. From then until you’ve used 400 minutes of the service or 14 days have passed, you’ll have a world-class team of receptionists on your side, 24/7, free of charge.

What Happens After

Once those 400 minutes have passed, our analysis team will work with you to come up with a minutes package that suits your firm. In a call, we’ll let you know how many minutes you used, what that projection looks like per month for your firm, and what kind of package your firm might need.

From there, we’ll ask you to sign up for the service for good. But up until this point, we haven’t gotten any credit card information from you. That means if you’re not satisfied with our service for any reason, you can walk away, no strings attached.

We’re pretty confident, however, that you’ll decide to stick with us once you see what we can do for your firm. Once you’re capturing clients while you work, enjoying your off hours thanks to our 24/7 coverage, and getting rave reviews on your new receptionist team from existing clients, we don’t think you’ll want to go back.

Make sure you’re ready for the year to come. Click here to sign up for our free trial. You’ll get everything we mentioned above, and more, all for just fifteen minutes of your time.

Thanks for reading! If you have any feedback to share about the information in this guide, you can email [email protected]