Personal injury
Megan picks up every injury enquiry immediately, takes the accident, the injuries and the insurance details, and gets the caller booked while they are still holding your ad in their hand.
Your intake coordinator left at five. The call routes to the service. Somewhere in your market, a man who was rear-ended on Tuesday and has spent the week telling himself his neck will settle down has just decided, tonight, that he should probably talk to a lawyer.
He found you the way you paid for him to find you. He tapped the number in your ad. He got a recording asking him to leave a message.
You know what he does next, because you have watched this behaviour for years. He does not leave a message. He goes back to the screen he was already looking at — the one still showing three of your competitors, because that is how the auction works — and he taps the next one. Somebody there picks up, spends ten minutes with him, books him for Monday morning. By the weekend he has signed.
Now put a figure on that. Not one of ours — yours. You know what you paid for that click, because you approved the bid. You know your sign-up rate on a call that reaches a human. You know your average fee. The entire loss is computable from three numbers already in your possession, and that is what makes personal injury different from every other page in this library: everywhere else the cost of a missed call is an argument. Here it is arithmetic.
The part that stings is that the spend is not recoverable. You did not lose a prospect. You bought a prospect, delivered him to your own phone number, and failed at the last three feet.
And it happens most on the hours you spend the most: evenings, weekends, and the commercial breaks you chose precisely because that is when people are watching.
A firm that runs every caller through the same collision script mishandles most of them — and a veteran intake person hears the difference before the second sentence.
Sore, worried, and already fielding calls from the other driver's adjuster asking for a recorded statement. That last detail decides how fast your firm has to move, and it is exactly the fact a name-and-number message throws away.
It happened twenty minutes ago. This is not an intake conversation. It is confirming they are safe, that emergency services are on the way, and arranging to talk when they are not standing next to moving traffic.
A grocery aisle, a stairwell, an icy walkway outside a leased storefront. Where it happened and who controls the premises decide whether there is a claim at all — and whether anyone filed an incident report that day, because a report that exists is worth considerably more than one that does not.
Frequently a comp matter rather than a third-party claim, sometimes both, and the caller almost never knows the difference. Whether a non-employer party was involved is the question that decides if this is your case or a referral out.
Not a lead. An adjuster calling about a represented client needs the right person the same day, and putting them through an intake script is both useless and slightly embarrassing for the firm.
The most common repeat call in PI and the one most likely to sour a relationship. They have been waiting months. Being asked how the accident happened by the firm that represents them tells them exactly how closely their file is being watched.
Record services, medical providers, lien holders. Administrative, deadline-bound, and completely different from everything else arriving on the same number.
Better established in two minutes than after a paralegal has spent an afternoon building a file you cannot take. A caller told promptly, and pointed somewhere useful, speaks well of your firm to people who have not yet been in a collision.
This is the mismatch at the centre of every PI firm's economics and it is rarely said plainly. Television, radio, search and streaming all run around the clock. Intake runs nine to five. Every dollar spent outside those hours produces callers who reach a recording, and the spend continues right through the weekend — at exactly the hours when inventory is cheapest and most watched.
The call pattern makes it worse, because it follows the accident pattern. Collisions cluster in the evening and at weekends: the drive home, the drive back from a social occasion, Friday and Saturday nights. Your highest-volume advertising hours and your highest-volume incident hours are the same hours, and not one of them is a Tuesday morning.
Then the pattern that costs the most and gets discussed the least: the busy line. A PI intake team of two, during a campaign flight that is working, is already on two calls. The third caller from that same commercial does not wait — there was nothing special about your firm to him, he saw an ad thirty seconds ago. Overflow in this practice area is not an edge case. It is the peak of every campaign that succeeded.
Most firms bridge the gap with a legal answering service. In a practice area where a competitor is one tap away and the caller signs with somebody inside the hour, a name and number to be worked tomorrow morning is frequently a message returned to a person who is already represented — which is a conversation nobody enjoys.
Megan answers all of them at once, in your firm's name, with no queue. If you want to know what that does to a campaign's real conversion rather than its reported call volume, put her on the overflow line for one flight: the forwarding takes a minute to set and a minute to remove.
PI is the rare practice area where this is not hand-waving. You know your cost per call — campaign spend divided by calls produced, and you can break it out by source. You know your sign-up rate on calls that reach a human. And you know your average fee on a signed case of the kind you actually want more of.
So the cost of one unanswered call is: the acquisition cost, already spent and not recoverable, plus the sign-up rate multiplied by the average fee. Both of those figures are yours. Neither comes from us, and we would not ask you to trust a number we supplied on something this consequential.
The one you have probably never pulled is the denominator. Ask your phone provider for inbound calls against connected calls, broken out by hour of day and day of week. Most firms have never seen this report, and the first look is uncomfortable — not because intake is doing badly during business hours, but because of the block of unanswered calls sitting in the 5pm-to-9am band where all the advertising was still running.
Multiply that block by the figure from the first paragraph. In most firms the result exceeds the entire intake payroll, and it is being spent every month whether or not anyone measures it.
There is published research on response speed worth knowing, and it needs handling carefully rather than quoted loosely. Harvard Business Review's audit of 2,241 U.S. companies found that 23% never responded to an inbound enquiry at all, and that among those which did respond within 30 days the average took 42 hours. In a separate study of 1.25 million leads, firms making contact within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to reach a decision maker as those that waited one hour longer. That work covers web enquiries and outbound follow-up at ordinary businesses — it is not about law firms, not about answering a ringing phone, and it makes no claim whatsoever about sign-up rates. Read it as general evidence that speed decides who gets the conversation. Your own window, against a caller holding a phone full of your competitors' ads, is a great deal shorter than an hour.
Against all of that, answering is billed by the second Megan is on a call. A dark month costs nearly nothing. A month where the flight performed costs more, because the flight performed. That is the correct shape of cost for a business whose call volume is a function of media spend.
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.
Saturday, 7:45pm. Megan does not yet know who this is — a client, an adjuster, or a new case.
MeganThank you for calling Braddock Injury Law, this is Megan, an AI assistant. How can I help you today?
I don't really know if I'm even calling the right place. I got rear-ended Thursday, my neck's getting worse, and the other guy's insurance keeps ringing me wanting a statement.
MeganYou're in the right place, and I'm sorry — that's a lot at once. Two quick things so I can get you to the right person: have you been seen by a doctor since Thursday, and have you given that adjuster anything yet?
Just the ER that night, soft tissue. And no, I haven't said anything to them, I wasn't sure if I should.
MeganI can't advise you on that — an attorney needs to — but it's exactly why I'm not going to leave this until Monday. One of our attorneys is on call this evening and I'm going to get you straight through. Can I take your name and the best number, in case we're cut off?
Marcus Ellery. This number's fine.
An illustration of how Megan handles this kind of call, not a recording of one. Her opening line is the disclosure she actually speaks.
Almost every PI firm that uses Megan keeps its coordinators and puts her on busy-and-after-hours forwarding. The team keeps every call it can take. She takes the second and third simultaneous caller from the same commercial, plus every evening, night and weekend. That is exactly the shape of the leak, and nobody has to be replaced to close it.
Date of incident, mechanism, police report or not, treatment so far and where, what insurance is involved, whether anyone has already made contact, and whether a statement has been given. With those fields an attorney sorts the evening's calls in thirty seconds rather than listening to eleven voicemails.
A client asking about their settlement and an adjuster calling on a file are routed as what they are. This matters more in PI than in most practice areas, because your clients wait a long time and call often — and the fastest way to make somebody feel like a file number is to ask them how the accident happened.
Workers' comp when you do not take comp, out of jurisdiction, past the statute, below a threshold you apply — you define it and she establishes it early and honestly. A prompt, kind referral costs you nothing and is remembered by somebody who will one day know a person who was hurt.
Transcript, recording and summary emailed per call. In a practice area where speed to contact drives sign-up rate, the operative property is that a partner can act on a 7:45pm call at 7:50pm from a phone, rather than at nine the next morning from a message pad.
She does not evaluate cases. She will not tell a caller whether they have a claim, what it might be worth, whether they should give a recorded statement, or how long they have to file. Those are legal judgments, and a receptionist offering them — human or otherwise — creates a problem that lands on your firm rather than on the receptionist.
She does not quote fees or explain contingency terms. She can say that your firm handles this work on contingency if that is a fact you have given her, and leave the rest to the attorney.
She does not run conflicts checks. She collects the names one needs — the caller, the other parties as the caller describes them — so that your check runs on real information before a consultation rather than at it.
And we make no representation that a call handled by Megan is privileged or confidential in the professional sense. Whether this intake arrangement fits your obligations — around client communications, recording, retention, what a prospective client is told and where the data sits — is a judgment for your firm against your jurisdiction's rules and your carrier's requirements. We will describe in as much detail as you want how calls are handled, recorded, transcribed and stored, so the assessment is a real one. We will not make it for you, and any vendor offering a warranty in place of the information should be treated with suspicion.
Where a caller is describing something happening now — they are at the roadside, they are hurt, no ambulance has come — intake stops. The job is 911 and safety, and a conversation later.
The caller who reaches voicemail does not leave one. They call the next firm on the list.
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 →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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