- Importance of Virtual Receptionist Services for Law Firms
- Key Features of Alliance Virtual Offices’ Live Receptionist Services
- Benefits of Using Alliance Virtual Offices for Your Law Firm
Q: Why should law firms choose Alliance Virtual Offices over other virtual receptionist services?
A. Alliance Virtual Offices provides specialized training for legal receptionists, offers competitive pricing, uses advanced technology, and receives high praise for customer service, making it a superior choice for law firms.
Take a quick look at various rankings of the most stressful jobs, and you’ll find lawyers in the top ten of many rankings.
The occupation is a potpourri of stressors: extremely long work hours, in-depth research across a large volume of resources in the shortest time possible, irate clients whose futures are hoisted on your shoulders—you can go on and on.
On top of all that, you have to keep a clear head to answer calls all day, constantly disrupting your workflow, productivity, and efficiency.
Where care is not taken, lawyering could easily translate to constant stress and disorientation, which does no lawyer—or society—any good.
Hence, there is a regular call from legal welfare organizations for lawyers to prioritize time and stress management.
An article on an American Bar Association (ABA) website put it best:
“Attorneys should only be doing legal work that only we as attorneys are uniquely trained, experienced, and licensed to do. For everything else, let go of the reins and give that work to someone else to perform.”
That counsel has been delivered in many shapes and forms over the years. Thankfully, it is also one that many legal practitioners heed and accept.
Given the nature of legal practices, it is basically impossible to be available to attend to all your work calls. For many law firms, this results in missed calls and poor client intake management.
However, on the other hand, hiring an in-house receptionist can make a significant dent in your budgeting, and most law firms are opting for virtual receptionists for attorneys anyway, given the unprecedented rise in remote legal practice.
Therefore, finding the best legal call answering service is paramount, and we’re here to help with every step along the way.
This article addresses the importance of attorney receptionist services and how the key features and benefits of Alliance Virtual Offices’ live receptionist services position your practice to get ahead of the competition.
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Importance of Virtual Receptionist Services for Law Firms
The questions here are: why should you use legal receptionist services? What should you look forward to when employing a virtual receptionist for attorneys?
From time and stress management to work-life balance, the range of importance attributed to delegating administrative tasks to a law firm virtual receptionist is extensive.
Let’s address that importance from a business perspective across three points:
Client Intake Management
For successful law firms, new clients are as valuable as the old clients and vice versa.
There’s an absolute need to create a balance that makes both existing and new clients feel like a priority.
Sure, once signed with your firm, they are a priority. But you are probably all too familiar with the guilt-tripping that comes from a client when you miss their calls a few times too many. There is a subtle accusation that you are not all about their case, even if it’s a case that’s been giving you sleepless nights.
Legal virtual receptionist services enhance client intake management and overall client management, which are crucial for law firms to handle new and existing clients efficiently.
They ensure all your work calls are answered and your new and existing clients are kept in the loop.
With legal intake services, your virtual receptionist will follow your firm’s established guidelines to process client intakes, in line with the values of your law firm.
Law firm virtual receptionists from reputable providers are generally trained to collect and assess potential clients in a professional manner, determining each potential client’s compatibility with your firm’s services before onboarding them.
Enhanced Professionalism
Recall the ABA quote from earlier, focusing on the part about doing what you are uniquely trained, licensed, and experienced to do.
Although attorneys work with people all the time, that doesn’t necessarily make them the best candidates for call handling or administrative roles—especially when they are under work pressure.
With the best virtual receptionist for law firms, you bring prompt, professional call handling right to the intersection between you and your clients, leads, and legal bodies, invariably enhancing your firm’s professional image and credibility.
No matter who is calling and when they are calling, they will be received by a very courteous and professional voice on your end of the line.
Another important thing to note is that the best legal call-answering services for law firms usually come with dedicated, 411-listed (optional), full VoIP phone systems. These phone systems offer unlimited extensions to any number of employees in your firm. You can even go the extra step by going toll-free with this phone system.
Armed with the charms of courteous and professional call handling, your law firm virtual receptionist uses this feature to appropriately direct clients to you or any other staff that’s available or best suited to handle their critical inquiries at the given time. This feature alone can significantly improve how clients perceive a firm’s professionalism.
Operational Efficiency
Running a law practice involves a lot of moving parts, and office administration is somewhere at the core of all those. It is a crucial element necessary for keeping everything in order, whether you are running a virtual law firm or a traditional firm.
Virtual receptionists can improve overall operational efficiency by managing administrative tasks like:
- Appointment scheduling
- Custom recordings
- Help desk management
These are in addition to call answering, routing, screening, conferencing, and other basic tasks commonly handled by legal receptionist services.
Your virtual receptionist can help you with many administrative and call-handling tasks. It’s important to discuss these with your provider and be clear about your expectations so they can customize their service to suit your needs.
Key Features of Alliance Virtual Offices’ Live Receptionist Services
Now that you know what to expect from the best virtual receptionist for law firms, what key features can help meet those expectations?
Customizable Call Handling
The receptionist will always work in line with your guidelines and brand values, ensuring that you maintain consistent professionalism across the board.
Hence, the need to discuss your expectations with the provider to enable proper customization cannot be overemphasized.
Legal call-handling services offer customizable call-handling options, including call routing, message taking, and appointment scheduling.
The process is simple: provide the necessary instructions and guidelines, and your Alliance Virtual Offices virtual receptionist will take it from there. If you’d like, you can even provide a script, too.
These pointers set criteria that enable your virtual legal assistant to adjust their approach to become an extension of your law firm and maintain your brand voice across all call-handling tasks.
Legal Intake Expertise
Generally, law firm virtual receptionists are trained to be courteous and professional while embodying the ideals of legal call-answering etiquette.
In addition, Alliance Virtual Offices provides specialized training to receptionists to handle legal calls and client inquiries effectively.
Provided training includes:
- Confidentiality: Legal virtual receptionists are trained to fully understand the sensitive and confidential nature of legal roles. They are also instructed to follow privacy policies to maintain confidentiality in and out of work hours while acknowledging the implications of doing otherwise. Confidentiality is a watchword both in call handling and document management.
- Time management: Receptionists learn effective time management, enabling them to prioritize tasks and keep things going in fast-paced law firms.
- Technical know-how: In addition to the phone systems, virtual receptionists are trained to use other legal technologies, including e-signature platforms, document management software, law practice management software, and calendar systems, depending on the role’s demands.
- Legalese: Receptionists learn legal terms to enhance all communication and interactions with clients, leads, and legal bodies.
Alliance Virtual Offices also considers the unique needs of each firm as a reference point for determining other areas in which your assigned virtual legal assistant can get further training to ensure better delivery.
Seamless Integrations
Alliance Virtual Offices’ attorney receptionist services and the associated software and tools, including the VoIP phone system and calendar app, are designed to integrate seamlessly with some common law practice management software and tools, such as Clio and MyCase.
Third-party integrability greatly streamlines operations, ensuring continuous workflow from our virtual receptionist software and tools through your existing systems and platforms.
Moreover, with a user-friendly interface and enhanced integrability, you can rest assured knowing that you don’t have to spend money acquiring additional tools to enhance integrations or provide additional staff training.
Professional and Courteous Service
Impressions are currencies in the legal environment and are in continuous demand; they extend beyond the first impression.
Aside the superiority of our receptionists’ professional certifications, we also take pride in our receptionists’ exceptional display of courteousness, warmth, and professionalism while maintaining a calm tone and demeanor, irrespective of the nature of the interaction.
Alliance Virtual Offices law firm virtual receptionists’ training emphasizes promptness, politeness, and thoughtfulness when handling legal calls and other administrative tasks. These considerations equip our receptionists to create and maintain positive impressions for clients beyond the first interaction, making them the best virtual receptionists for law firms.
Benefits of Using Alliance Virtual Offices for Your Law Firm
If you are thinking about getting the best virtual receptionist for law firms, you’ll surely want to know the benefits they will be adding to your firm.
Cost-effective Solution
There is no argument that using a virtual receptionist for attorneys is more cost-effective than hiring a full-time in-house receptionist.
The basic salary of a legal receptionist in the U.S. typically ranges from $37,180 to $46,707, according to Salary.com. And that’s doesn’t consider other benefits, like paid time off and insurance.
The most cost-effective Alliance Virtual Offices virtual receptionist plan costs $125 per month and comes with 50 live answering minutes, amounting to $1,500 per year.
But let’s say things get really busy around your law firm, and you want to go for a premium plan with more bells and whistles for $260 per month. You’ll be spending $3,120 per annum, saving substantial costs over the $34,060 to $43,587 annually for a traditional receptionist.
That’s money that can significantly improve lots of legal operations in your office.
Understandably, Alliance Virtual Offices virtual receptionist service is the most affordable virtual receptionist plan across select, reputable virtual receptionist providers in the industry—all while providing more useful features.
So, those tempting numbers are only applicable to Alliance Virtual Offices’ virtual receptionist plans.
Increased Client Satisfaction
Some law firms fall into the trap of subscribing to legal call-answering services that use AI robots or regularly switch receptionists. These practices easily ruin business reputations by creating an atmosphere of inefficiency, inconsistency, and unreliability.
It takes a lot of effort for clients to trust or go ahead with an attorney who wouldn’t make an effort to get a human to handle their calls. When you check that box, the expectations shift to a demand for professionalism and consistency.
As an attorney who’s done a substantial amount of business calls, you probably get thrown off a bit when different persons answer your calls every time you call a particular office, and you must introduce yourself or refer to your previous inquiries over and over again. That could be enough reason to call it quits if you have nothing binding with said office.
That’s not the case with Alliance Virtual Offices.
With Alliance Virtual Offices, your clients are never put in such an awful position. Our law firm virtual receptionists are available for the long run and are trained to recognize and establish professional relationships with repeat callers, making them feel a sense of belonging when interacting with your law firm.
Alongside other attributes, this practice greatly improves clients’ satisfaction and drives retention.
Focus on Core Activities
Having the best virtual receptionist for law firms on your team is more relief than you are probably imagining at the moment.
They are the key to unlocking operational efficiency in law firms. For starters, they:
- Instantly free you from administrative tasks, allowing you to focus more on your core legal work.
- Help centralize operations at the intersection between you and your clients, keeping all relevant team members abreast of client situations and routing calls based on set criteria.
- Sort some critical administrative tasks, such as lead qualification and appointment scheduling, which help you capture more leads effortlessly and boost your revenue.
More importantly, you’d surely feel a substantial relief from the burden of time and stress management, incredibly improving your work-life balance.
Scalability
The Alliance Virtual Offices virtual receptionist service for law firms is a service that grows with you.
Your firm could grow from one to multiple offices, with some in cities outside the U.S., but we’d still fit your call-handling needs and goals.
Our flexible plans allow solo practitioners, law firm owners, and managers to scale up or down as their needs grow or fluctuate with seasons and events.
Our virtual receptionist services scale with your law firm, providing consistent support regardless of call volume.
Why Choose Alliance Virtual Offices Over Competitors
With about 20 years of industry leadership and impressive ratings on Consumer Affairs and Trustpilot, Alliance Virtual Offices’ legal receptionist service is inarguably the best choice there is to make.
Here are the whys:
Moving Forward with the Best Virtual Receptionist for Law Firms
Clearly, legal receptionist services are essential business growth strategies for forward-thinking law firms that want to streamline operations, boost client management, and enhance operations while focusing on legal activities.
Alliance Virtual Offices’ legal call answering services empower law firms with seamless integrations, customizable call handling, and specially trained law firm receptionists with legal intake expertise and exceptionally professional and courteous delivery.
We do all these at an affordable rate, saving you at least $30,000 annually.
Further Reading:
- Technologies Powering Virtual Office Spaces
- Empowering Independence: A Guide for the Modern Independent Business Owner
- Maximizing Customer Value: A Guide to Customer Retention Analysis
- Green Marketing Definition: What It Is and How It Works
Our services are largely proven by customer testimonials on independent review websites to be the superior solution among top competitors.
More importantly, alliance virtual offices attorney receptionist services are flexible and scalable, growing with your business every step of the way—you need not worry about consistency and continuity.
That said, if you are looking for the best virtual receptionist for law firms, you know where to look!
