- Importance of Virtual Receptionist Services for Law Firms
- Key Benefits of Virtual Receptionists for Law Firms
- How Virtual Receptionists Improve Law Firm Operations
Q: What is a virtual receptionist service for law firms?
A. A virtual receptionist service for law firms involves trained professionals who handle client calls, schedule appointments, and manage client intake remotely, ensuring efficient and professional client communication.
There’s been a marked surge in the number of law firms and attorneys boosting their practice with a virtual receptionist for law firms. This has been a growing trend since the recent boom in virtual law firm models and court proceedings of the past few years, necessitating an equally virtual receptionist for attorneys.
Besides, having a dedicated receptionist has always been a plus for legal practitioners.
With a mind that constantly assesses scenarios and flips through resources and references around the clock, it’s important to have a dedicated professional handle some of your administrative tasks, especially call handling and client intake management tasks. Neglecting these could easily knock even the biggest law firms out of the market.
Today, law firm virtual receptionist services are flexible and easily affordable for everyone in the legal industry, including caseworkers, solo attorneys, paralegals, agencies, and global law firms.
This article takes a comprehensive look at the importance of virtual receptionist services for law firms, the key benefits, the key features, and more importantly, why you should go for Alliance Virtual Offices.
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Importance of Virtual Receptionist Services for Law Firms
Should you get a virtual receptionist because every other attorney seems to be getting one, or are there practical reasons to consider? If there are, what are the reasons?
Client Intake Management
As an attorney, life gets busy quickly, and it’s hard to make time to onboard new clients once you have a few ongoing cases on your desk. Your busy work life also means you are not always available to take calls when a client needs you.
All of these could negatively impact your practice, reducing your client base and slashing your revenue.
By employing legal call answering services, you would have a professionally certified law firm virtual receptionist take your calls around the clock, ensuring all your new and existing clients receive adequate attention.
A well-trained, legal virtual receptionist will enhance your client intake management processes without hassles.
They understand the relevance of legal intake services in enhancing a client’s perception of a law firm and how to assess clients against set criteria to determine whether they are a good fit for your firm.
Fundamentally, a virtual receptionist for law firms:
- Answers all calls promptly, guaranteeing that a client isn’t kept waiting unnecessarily.
- Is trained on client intake frameworks, having a good understanding of how to gather and process client information accurately and confidentially.
- Follows established guidelines to evaluate the client’s compatibility with the firm’s scope and values and book appointments if the client’s needs meet those criteria.
From the general perspective of client management, they handle all your calls and provide proper responses to basic inquiries, transferring critical calls to you or a designated team member when needed. This ensures that your clients feel prioritized, driving significant client retention.
Enhanced Professionalism
Professionalism is of utmost importance to every law practice—law firms, solo practitioners, legal consultants, and more.
Courts, clients, and partners demand it. To stay ahead, you must ensure professionalism is a watchword across all aspects of your operations.
Where better to start than from your touchpoints?
A virtual receptionist for attorneys will stand cheeringly at a law firm’s phone call touch point, waving the firm’s flag of professionalism with prompt and courteous call-handling services that would make anybody at the other end freely testify to your firm’s professionalism.
The heightened sense of professionalism paves the way for law firms in respectable circles.
If not for anything, at least everyone knows that they will always get a response whenever they call your business line. If it’s something critical and you are not available, the virtual receptionist will route the call to you or leave a message, ensuring you attend to them duly.
Promptness shows everyone that you mean business, and that helps boost your law firm’s professionalism and your credibility and reliability.
Operational Efficiency
Modern world, modern problems.
Things were probably easier in the 19th century when lawyers could simply hang their signs outside their offices, lock themselves in, and handle almost everything all by themselves.
Today, running a successful law practice takes a lot of moving parts, all of which you must keep up with or risk running your practice into the ground.
Interestingly, for as much as you’d like to focus on core legal activities—after all, you are an attorney—you cannot neglect the importance of the very thing that keeps your practice in order: administrative tasks.
Whether you are operating a virtual law firm or a traditional firm, it’s simply something you must pay attention to. Otherwise, your operations would be in disarray, and you’d be exhausted in no time trying to keep things together.
A virtual receptionist for attorneys to the rescue!
They also help organize your calendar and keep you updated with relevant information, ensuring that you, other team members, and everyone involved are operating on the same frequency.
There are lots of administrative and call-handling tasks that your virtual receptionist can help you with; it’s important to discuss with your legal receptionist services provider and be clear about your expectations so they customize their service to suit your needs.
Key Benefits of Virtual Receptionists for Law Firms
Since you are here, it’s likely that you already have a plan to employ a legal call-answering service.
What are your expectations? How would a virtual receptionist for attorneys benefit you?
Let’s provide some perspectives:
Cost-effective Solution
If you ask several attorneys why they use a legal virtual receptionist instead of an in-house legal receptionist, cost-effectiveness will be at the top of the litany of benefits they list.
This begs the question: how cost-effective are law firm virtual receptionist services?
As of July 2024, the base salary of a legal receptionist ranges from $37,180 to $46,707, with the average pegged at $41,460. This number is closely supported by Glassdoor’s assessment, which pegs a legal receptionist’s salary at an average of $39,137 per year.
Those are huge numbers compared to what you will spend on law firm virtual receptionist services per year.
For instance, the base plan for Alliance Virtual Offices’ virtual receptionist services costs $125 per month and comes with 50 live answering minutes, amounting to $1,500 per year.
Suppose you run a busy office with higher call volumes, so you step up a bit to 200 minutes for $260 per month with all the bells and whistles like attorney appointment scheduling, business phone number, and an online control panel, among others.
You will be spending only $3,120 annually, and if you do the math, you will see that you are easily saving between $34,060 to $43,587 annually.
Whichever way you want to look at it, the amount you’ll save is too tempting to pass up. This is especially true when you consider that your virtual receptionist is basically the same legal receptionist that you would have traditionally hired in-house for tens of thousands of dollars.
The money saved can significantly improve lots of legal operations in your firm.
Note: Virtual receptionist costs provided here are based on Alliance Virtual Offices baselines, which are admittedly more affordable than that of other top providers offering something similar or slightly less for as high as $660. Additionally, Alliance Virtual Offices occasionally offers discounts and coupons that you can look out for and maximize to get the services a lot cheaper.
So, those tempting numbers are only applicable to Alliance Virtual Offices’ virtual receptionist plans.
Increased Client Satisfaction
Everything about customer service aims toward customer satisfaction. But it’s easy to miss the mark if you approach it with the wrong means and strategies.
To guarantee client satisfaction, you must ensure that you are working with a virtual receptionist who understands the sensitive nature of legal practices and how to safely navigate interactions in the legal sphere.
A professional virtual receptionist can make whoever is at the other end of the line calmer or happier than they were before they called by addressing them attentively in a courteous tone.
Additionally, they can help the client resolve some issues right on the spot, especially along the lines of legal intakes and appointment scheduling.
Overall, the professional and knowledgeable approach to customer interactions adopted by certified legal receptionists amounts to increased client satisfaction.
Focus on Core Activities
An article published on the American Bar Association’s website says 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.”
Trying to do everything by yourself while working overtime on nights, weekends, and even vacations does no one any good.
Unfortunately, such is the life of many attorneys, sometimes leading to detrimental consequences that affect their practice.
Thankfully, you don’t have to go the route of the eternally stressed attorney.
Hiring a law firm virtual receptionist can take a huge chunk of the administrative workload off your shoulders, allowing you to focus more on core legal work.
Scalability
Legal receptionist services offered by Alliance Virtual Offices are designed to be flexible and scalable, allowing you to scale up as you grow or scale down as seasonal demands change your legal call handling needs.
No matter how big you grow and wherever you go, you can be sure that your virtual legal assistant will be right there with your firm.
Our services extend beyond U.S. borders into other countries across the globe, including Mexico, Canada, UAE, and the U.K., effortlessly attending to clients from varying backgrounds.
We offer unlimited local and long-distance minutes and toll-free numbers, enabling your firm to handle large volumes of calls.
More importantly, scaling is as easy as adjusting your plans and adding more professional virtual law firm receptionists to your team for a few hundred dollars.
These provisions guarantee consistent support regardless of how big your firm grows, sparing you the worries of shelling out cash on additional services or unnecessarily transferring your records to another provider.
How Virtual Receptionists Improve Law Firm Operations
Let’s take a look at some of the features that make the benefits of virtual receptionists accessible to law firm operations:
- Customizable call handling: The flexibility of professional law firm virtual receptionist services offered by credible providers means that you can easily personalize some call handling options, such as:
- Call routing: Who should your virtual receptionist transfer the call to when a client calls with certain concerns? Bear in mind that the service comes with a national 411 registered phone number with extensions available for all team members.
- Message taking: Would you like to leave custom messages for your clients, in the case of certain events? Do you need the virtual receptionist to take messages and send summarized versions to you?
- Appointment scheduling: Do you have criteria that your virtual receptionist should follow when scheduling appointments?
Feel free to let your provider know how you’d like certain tasks handled and provide instructions or scripts to enable your virtual receptionist to follow through and maintain your brand voice and values across all call-handling tasks.
- Legal intake expertise: Legal intake services and call handling demand a high degree of professionalism, as well as confidentiality and privacy, which is a big concern for most Americans, according to Pew Research.
Professional certified virtual receptionists receive training across numerous areas of customer service in the legal industry, specially preparing them to efficiently handle law firm client management tasks and other legal intake services.
Training exercises include privacy policy compliance, technical knowledge of law practice management software and tools, time management and prioritization skills, and legalese to enhance official interactions.
- Seamless integrations: Third-party integration capability is one of the hallmarks of attorney receptionist services that are truly designed to ensure maximum benefits for law firms.
Legal virtual receptionist apps, such as appointment schedulers, should be integrable with top law practice management platforms like MyCase and Clio. Check to ensure that associated tools and software can be easily integrated with your existing systems for streamlined operations and continuous workflow.
- Professional and courteous service: Professionalism and courteousness are common attributes of law firm virtual receptionists. These attributes are particularly important for imparting a positive first impression to clients and getting them on board with the law firm. They are equally important in handling subsequent customer interactions to drive customer retention.
These are key features to look out for when hiring a legal call answering service or employing a virtual receptionist for law firms.
Why Choose Alliance Virtual Offices for Your Law Firm
With nearly 20 years of industry leader experience and about 90% positive reviews across Consumer Affairs and Trustpilot, Alliance Virtual Offices’ legal call handling service is easily the best choice for law firms across the U.S. Why?
Virtual Receptionist Services Tailored for Law Firms
There are hundreds of remote law firm virtual receptionists in the market, but only a few can truly provide verifiable indicators of their efforts towards ensuring that their virtual receptionists are specially trained and their processes specifically designed for legal call handling.
All our law firm virtual receptionists have experience or a marked interest in the legal industry. We provide specialized training, upon their general receptionist education, to enhance their performance in the high-pressure environment of law firm client management.
Additionally, our processes and tools are designed for legal customer service, allowing law firms to customize them as they deem fit to further maximize their legal call answering service.
Superior Customer Service
Like many other providers, we can tell you that we have the best customer service. But if all the providers say they are the best, how then would you know which one truly is?
Listen to what the customers are saying.
About 90% of our reviews and client feedback on independent review platforms, like Consumer Affairs and Trustpilot, are positive, an inarguably impressive testimony of the exceptional customer service we provide.
Competitive Pricing
In the debate on virtual receptionists vs. in-house receptionists for law firms, cost-effectiveness is usually the major factor. Inarguably, law firm virtual receptionist services always win in that context.
However, it’s crucial to note that affordability should never come at the cost of quality.
At Alliance Virtual Offices, we offer competitive prices across all our virtual receptionist plans without compromising on quality or superiority.
We can keep our prices down because we have a deeper understanding of the call-handling industry and our own exclusive technologies, which help us cut down on third-party costs.
So, don’t be surprised when you read all the positive reviews, assess our array of features against our competitors’, and find that we are offering a lot more for less while having more reviews—both in numbers and positivity.
For instance, where we offer 200 (customizable to more) live minutes per month at $260, Ruby, Abby Connect, and Pat Live offer the same number of minutes with fewer features for $680, $549, and $360, respectively.
Advanced Technology
As mentioned earlier, Alliance Virtual Offices live receptionist services come with our exclusive technologies, which are very impactful in streamlining call handling operations for enhanced productivity, reliability and efficiency of service delivery.
First, your virtual receptionist plan provides a full online control panel that provides a real-time overview and control of your law firm’s client management history.
Also attached are appointment scheduler apps with easy integration capabilities and a VoIP business phone system with multiple extensions to keep you and your team members connected wherever you are in the world!
Wrapping up: Streamlining Your Law Practice with Alliance Virtual Offices Virtual Receptionist for Law Firms
If you are reading this, we can safely conclude that the chicken crossed the road to tell you to use Alliance Virtual Offices virtual receptionist services for law firms.
With specially trained law firm virtual receptionists from Alliance Virtual Office, you can rest assured knowing that your clients are safe and well-attended to in the hands of a legal intake expert with skills that can markedly improve your firm’s operational efficiency.
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
The full benefits of hiring legal receptionist services, including cost-effectiveness, increased client satisfaction, more focus on core activities, and scalability, are guaranteed.
From specially training our receptionists to provide professional and courteous service to offering customizable call-handling solutions and seamless integrations, Alliance Virtual Offices virtual receptionist service has everything you need to improve your law firm’s legal call handling.
