Legal practices
Megan answers every call to your firm, takes the details you tell her to take, and gets qualified callers onto your calendar — including the ones who ring at nine on a Friday night.
Most firms read an empty voicemail box as a quiet weekend. It is not. Pull your call log next to it and the two will not agree, because in legal the missed call leaves no trace at all — no message, no web form, no enquiry to review, nothing to add to a list.
Here is what happened instead. On Saturday afternoon someone finally worked themselves up to the thing they had been putting off for three weeks. They had rehearsed a version of it in the shower. They dialled your number with their heart going, got a recording, and the resolve did not survive the beep. They hung up.
They did not call back. Not because your firm was rejected — they never got far enough to form a view of your firm. The decision they had made was "I am going to call a lawyer today," and the moment somebody answered anywhere, that decision was discharged. The firm that got them did nothing cleverer than pick up.
This is what makes legal different from ordinary businesses. In most industries a missed call is a delayed sale; you call back on Tuesday and you are still in the running. In law it is a completed sale for somebody else, and it is invisible. A firm can lose a meaningful share of its potential caseload over a year without a single artefact of it appearing anywhere in the office.
Which is why intake is not the administrative function that supports the practice. For most firms it is the constraint on the practice — the ceiling on how much work comes in — and it is decided entirely by whether the phone gets answered by a person who knows what to do next.
The specific pages for personal injury, family, immigration, estate planning and criminal defence go deeper into what that looks like in each. This one is about the thing they all share.
A firm's number carries at least eight different conversations. Sorting them correctly is most of what good intake does, and it is the part an answering service cannot do at all.
Nervous, rehearsed, and frequently telling you everything before anyone has asked a question — because they have been holding it for weeks. What they need first is to be heard for ninety seconds and then told plainly what happens next.
They want their attorney, not a form. Being asked to describe their matter again by the firm handling it is how a good client starts quietly wondering whether anyone is actually reading their file.
Every firm gets calls for practice areas it does not handle. A fast, kind, honest no costs a minute and buys real goodwill; a callback three days later to say the same thing costs the caller three days they did not have.
Procedural, time-bound, unmistakable once you know what to listen for. A clerk's call sitting in a general voicemail box over a weekend is the kind of thing that produces a bad Monday.
A colleague sending work over. The most valuable call a firm gets and the most damaging to fumble, because the referrer finds out how it went and adjusts accordingly.
Administrative, deadline-driven, and completely unlike a new matter despite arriving on the same number. Routing it to the right paralegal is the entire job.
A real call from a real person, and one that must be handled without giving anything that could be mistaken for legal advice. Done well it becomes a consultation; done badly it becomes a complaint.
Legal marketing is a crowded industry and your number is on every list ever compiled. Screening these out returns a measurable amount of an attorney's week.
During office hours the issue is not that nobody answers — it is that the person answering is doing four other things. A small firm's receptionist runs the calendar, greets people in the lobby, prepares documents and covers the phones, and calls arriving during a busy stretch go to voicemail from a fully staffed office. That is not a performance problem. One person cannot be on two calls.
Evenings and weekends are where it gets stark. People decide to call a lawyer when they finally have quiet: after work, on a Sunday afternoon, in the small hours after something went wrong. Those callers have the strongest intent and the shortest patience of anyone who will ring your firm all week, and for most practices they reach a recording.
The conventional answer is a legal answering service, and it has two failures that matter. The first is that it takes a name and a number, so every call has to be worked again the next morning by somebody starting from nothing — and by then a share of those callers have retained elsewhere. The second is audible: the caller can tell within one sentence that they have not reached the firm. For somebody already anxious about whether a lawyer will take them seriously, that is a poor opening impression, and it is the impression they carry into the callback.
Megan answers in your firm's name at the same standard at eleven at night as at eleven in the morning, and asks the questions you told her to ask rather than reading a generic script. Whether that is worth having is not really a question you can settle by reading — the forwarding takes a minute to set up and a minute to remove, which is the point of trying it on a weekend.
Take the average value of a matter of the kind you actually want more of — not a blended figure across the whole practice, because an estate plan, a contested custody matter and a contingency case are not the same number and averaging them tells you nothing useful.
Now the harder figure: how many first-time callers did not reach a person last month. Most firms have never measured it, because the evidence of a missed legal call is precisely nothing. Your phone provider can give you inbound against connected, broken out by hour. Ask for the evenings and weekends specifically — that is where it concentrates.
Multiply, then be pessimistic on purpose. Assume most were unqualified, wrong practice area, or people who were never going to retain. Halve what remains. Whatever survives that is real, and in legal the residue is usually large, because a single retained matter can exceed a year of what answering the phone costs.
There is a second effect that never shows up in that arithmetic and is worth more over a decade. Referral is how most firms actually grow, and referrals come from clients who felt looked after — an impression that begins on the first call, before any legal work has been done. A firm that is reachable at nine on a Sunday evening is remembered as a firm that was there, and that memory is what gets repeated at a dinner table two years later.
One piece of published research is worth knowing here, and worth handling carefully. Harvard Business Review's audit of 2,241 U.S. companies found 23% never responded to an inbound enquiry at all, and that among those that did respond within 30 days the average took 42 hours; a separate study of 1.25 million leads found that firms making contact within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to reach a decision maker as those waiting an hour longer. That research is about web enquiries and outbound follow-up at ordinary businesses. It is not about law firms and not about answering a ringing phone, so treat it as general evidence that responsiveness decides who gets the conversation — not as a claim about legal intake. What it does corroborate is the thing every managing partner has already observed: the caller does not wait.
Against that, answering is billed by the second Megan is actually on a call. A quiet week costs almost nothing. There is no seat to fund whether the phone rings or not, which is what makes round-the-clock coverage arithmetically possible for a two-attorney firm rather than only for the practices with a billboard budget.
Pay As You Go is $29 a month plus $0.88 for each minute Megan spends on calls, with no included minutes. Professional is $199 a month and includes 500 minutes, then $0.45 a minute. Growth is $499 a month and includes 1,500 minutes, then $0.38 a minute. Enterprise is priced by conversation. Every plan includes the entire product — the plans differ by included minutes only — and calls are billed in real seconds, never rounded up to the next minute.
Friday, 9:20pm. A first-time caller has been putting this off for weeks.
MeganThank you for calling Harding & Vance, this is Megan, an AI assistant. How can I help you this evening?
I got a letter from my landlord saying they're starting eviction and I don't really know what to do. I've been meaning to call someone all week.
MeganI'm glad you called. I can't give you legal advice, but I can get you in front of one of our attorneys. Does the letter have a date on it — a deadline or a court date?
There's a date, the 14th. It says I have to respond by then.
MeganThat's the detail they'll want first. We have consultation slots Monday morning — would ten o'clock work? I'll take your name and number and make sure they have the date before you come in.
Monday at ten is fine. It's Dana Whitfield.
An illustration of how Megan handles this kind of call, not a recording of one. Her opening line is the disclosure she actually speaks.
The first thing Megan establishes is whether a caller is new. An existing client asking about their matter is transferred or has a message taken for their attorney — never run through qualification. Nothing erodes a legal relationship faster than being treated as a stranger by the firm holding your file.
The questions that decide whether a matter is worth a consultation differ between practice areas and often between two firms in the same one. You supply them. She asks them. That is the whole difference between an intake and a message, and it is why a generic legal script is worse than useless.
The gap between a caller's resolve and a booked appointment is where firms lose matters, and it is measured in minutes rather than days. Booking while they are still on the line closes it. You set which slots are available for consultations and she fills those and nothing else.
If you do not do criminal work, a criminal caller should hear that in the first minute rather than after a week of phone tag. If you keep a referral list, she can point them at it. The fastest way to become the firm other lawyers refer to is to be the firm that refers well.
Transcript, recording and summary by email per call. An attorney can go through Friday night's calls over coffee on Saturday and decide which one to ring first, which is a different thing entirely from listening to voicemails.
Megan is a receptionist. She answers the phone, screens, takes the information your firm asks her to take, books consultations and transfers calls. She does not give legal advice, does not evaluate the merits of a matter, does not quote fees, and does not tell a caller whether they have a case.
She does not run a conflicts check. That is your firm's process and it stays your firm's process — she collects the names a check needs, and the check is run by the people responsible for it.
We do not represent that a call handled by Megan is privileged or confidential in the professional sense, and no page on this site will tell you otherwise. Attorney-client privilege, the duty of confidentiality, and what your jurisdiction and your carrier require of an intake process are matters for your firm to evaluate against your own obligations — including what a prospective client is told, what is recorded, and where it is stored. We will answer any question about how the system works so you can make that assessment properly. What we will not do is make it for you or offer a warranty in place of it.
Firms handling particularly sensitive matters commonly limit what Megan collects on a first call — enough to identify the caller and book a consultation, no more, with the substance left for the attorney. That is worth deciding deliberately before you go live rather than discovering afterwards that you would have preferred it.
You paid for that click. The caller is on hold for nobody, and the next ad is one tap away.
Read more →Your caller is often ringing from a car, on their lunch break, because it is the only place they can talk.
Read more →An English-only recording ends the call for the people most likely to have needed you.
Read more →They have been meaning to call for four years. Today they finally did.
Read more →The call comes at 3am, and it is almost never from the person who needs you.
Read more →Pay As You Go is $29 a month plus $0.88 for each minute Megan spends on calls, with no included minutes. Professional is $199 a month and includes 500 minutes, then $0.45 a minute. Growth is $499 a month and includes 1,500 minutes, then $0.38 a minute. Enterprise is priced by conversation. Every plan includes the entire product — the plans differ by included minutes only — and calls are billed in real seconds, never rounded up to the next minute.
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