Revolutionising call handling for the legal sector

The Ultimate Answering Service for Lawyers and Solicitors

In today's fast-paced legal sector, efficient communication is crucial.

CallChimps offers cutting-edge legal answering services that support existing in-house teams to handle overflow call volumes, after hours calls and even work as your first point of contact to filter out spam and prioritise clients or new clients.

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Our AI-powered system provides exceptional customer service, ensuring your law firm never misses an important call.

Normal outsourced PA and telephone answering services simply do not measure up.

There are too many nuances and considerations for the legal industry – you need a calm, professional tone and the ability to answer key questions relating to your firm.

This is where CallChimps excels – we can take your knowledgebase of service offering, opening times, even hourly rates and other details and combine this with visibility of your calendar (or all of your team’s calendars, or CRM) and handle both mundane calls and specific inquiries, through to appointment bookings. We can even automatically reroute current clients, VIPs or high-value potential clients through to an available agent, if needed.

Never leave a caller to stew in a telephone queue, or leave a frustrated message on your voicemail again.

Free Up Your Time for More Complex Calls and Case Work

Incoming phone calls can be a distraction from more profitable work, even with a in-house receptionist or call handling team, the majority of calls into law firms fall into a predictable pattern of requests that could be answered with reference to your website, knowledge base, or internal systems.

A virtual receptionist, or team of virtual receptionists, powered by the latest AI technology, can ensure all calls are answered within 3 rings, answer questions and take a message, which is transcribed, summarised and a task list generated - these are then sent to you by email, text or event WhatsApp message (or delivered to your CRM) for immediate follow up if needed.

In cases where the inbound call is from an existing client, or perhaps certain keywords are mentioned, then the call can be transferred to a specific individual if they are available. Rules for who receives which calls can be set up, so only priority calls (or callers) are put through to a real person.

Every legal firm needs to carve out time to place outbound calls. However, making outbound calls can often get put aside as the same phone lines are used for more inbound calls. How many law firms would prefer to prioritise phone time to client intake, processing payments and other essential tasks, rather than fielding day-to-day calls?

Appointment Scheduling for Law Firms

CallChimps offers more than a virtual receptionist service for the legal industry. Our appointment scheduling system eliminates the need for an in-house receptionist, integrating with your calendars or CRM to book meetings efficiently. We handle service requests and manage scheduling appointments for multiple agents, considering factors like location and expertise.

Beyond a basic call answering service, we provide valuable appointment setting, calendar invites, and reminders. CallChimps can be customized to allow travel time between scheduling appointments, enhancing your firm's productivity and client service.

Trained on Your Law Firm's Information

One of the reservations lawyers have with call answering services is the ability of someone without years of legal training being able to answer questions about legal services, or even quick questions about specialist subjects like criminal law.

Fair enough, it's hard for a real person to have this depth of knowledge about services offered and specialisms, as well as provide a friendly and professional phone answering service.

But this is exactly why AI-powered call handling works so well. You can provide links to as many documents, websites and other materials as you like to train the AI call handling agents, although they won't be sitting their bar exams just yet.

Audit-Trail, Analytics and Reporting

With CallChimps, all call recordings, transcripts, summaries, task lists and associated messages are stored online in a secure client portal.

This enables you to quickly establish and evidence an audit trail for specific clients or cases, run analytics on call behaviours to identify opportunities for growth and improvement, and generate reports at the touch of a button.

CallChimps vs. Back Office Betties vs. Ruby Receptionists

There are obvious comparisons to make with Back Office Betties (or Office Betties as they are affectionately referred to by many law firms) and Ruby Receptionists. There are lots of other virtual receptionist services that specialise in law firm call answering too, so we'll take a high-level view of the main differences here.

Firstly, CallChimps doesn't seek to replace in-house receptionists or call handling specialists. We can even work alongside established outsourced solutions. But even a full-time receptionist (or outsourced equivalent) needs a helping hand answering calls at busy times.

Answering the full mix of incoming calls from clients, prospects and 101 different types of unwanted callers, day-in day-out, challenges even the friendliest receptionists.

With CallChimps, you have a first line of response - always picking up the phone within 3 rings and answering cheerfully with your law firm's name and asking, "how can we help?"

As with Office Betties, Rubies and other legal call answering specialists, CallChimps can take messages, respond to questions about your business and schedule appointments.

CallChimps vs. other legal call handling services

The main differences between CallChimps and real human services are:

Scalability

Whether you're a solo practitioner or a large law firm, CallChimps can scale its services to match your call volume. This flexibility is often lacking in a traditional virtual receptionist service. AI and highly secure cloud infrastructure means our service can handle virtually unlimited calls in parallel, with the same friendly and professional tone, utterly consistent in our approach.

Consistency

Real person call handling has its pros and cons, but cannot match the unswerving consistency of an AI-powered solution. If you need to ask specific questions on a call, or reply to questions with specific detail from your knowledge base, human receptionists can be great, but they do run the risk of the occasional bad day or slip-up. Rest assured that CallChimps stays on target for your needs 100% of the time, day or night, 365 days a year.

Reliability

CallChimps never has a bad day, never needs to take a holiday and is always there for you whenever you need extra cover. Thinks of us as your infinitely scalable team of virtual receptionists, trained in detail on your firm's capabilities and specifics.

Data and Insights

With the best will in the world, human-based call handling runs at human speeds. It's unrealistic to expect a real person to take messages, transcribe, summarise and generate a task list for every call in a few seconds. CallChimps does all this, for all calls, and then makes these messages available via your secure client portal to search, audit and generate reports from in the future.

Cost

Hourly rates for in-house receptionists are understandably well above minimum wage, and outsourced solutions come at a fairly hefty premium too. CallChimps starts with a free service that includes 30 minutes of call handling each month and this rises to our Premium tier (just £99 per month) which includes 4 hours of call handling time and then just £0.27 per minute after that. Additional services, such as CRM integration, knowledgebase training and reporting are all built into the monthly subscription (which you can cancel at any time, no lock-in) so there are never any hidden costs or surprises.

The CallChimps Advantage in Legal Answering Services

24/7 Availability

Our legal answering service operates round-the-clock, ensuring your law firm is always accessible to clients. Handle thousands of calls at the same time, if needed, and take appointment bookings that never clash.

AI-Powered Efficiency

Unlike traditional call handling, CallChimps uses advanced AI to handle phone calls with unprecedented accuracy and speed.

Cost-Effective

Eliminate the need for expensive outsourced call centers, virtual receptionists or similar. Enhance your existing call answering abilities with overflow handling, out-of-hours call handling and much more. Like a full time receptionist who never sleeps.

Seamless Integration

Our system integrates with your existing software, streamlining your workflow. API integrations with all popular CRMs and workflow management solutions, including (but not limited to): Clio, Lawruler, Lawmatics, and of course non sector-specific solutions like Hubspot, Salesforce and Pipedrive

Customisable Solutions

Tailor our answering service to fit your law firm's specific needs. Provide documents and web content to enable CallChimps to answer complex questions about your business, automate appointment booking and even train your own LLM (large language model - an AI term) so CallChimps engages with clients like your most successful call handlers.

What Makes CallChimps the Best Answering Service for Law Firms

Market-Leading Scalability

Where other call answering services and virtual receptionists can struggle to cover peaks in demand, CallChimps scales with ease, whatever the call volume. Answer thousands of calls at the same time, triage priorities for call transfers and follow ups.

Simple to Set Up - Automatic Training (and No Retraining)

At CallChimps, you only need to set up your preferences once, there is no need to train call answering or call centre staff – our AI pulls the relevant details out of whatever documents you provide us with, as well as content from your website (e.g. FAQs).

CRM Integration and Appointment Scheduling

CallChimps goes beyond receptionist services and offers deep CRM integration, calendar sync and a variety of virtual switchboard services to book meetings in and allow time between meetings so you have time to prepare. Custom plans allow for more software integrations to meet your business needs.

Audit Trails and Searchable Histories

Full audit trail and searchable history of your legal answering service calls – preserved within your client portal for years. Produce reports at the touch of a button and analyse call data for actionable insights and competitive advantage.

Unparalleled Efficiency in Handling Phone Calls

CallChimps' AI technology can answer calls, schedule appointments, and integrate with other software, all while maintaining a personal touch. This level of efficiency is unprecedented.

Specialised for the Law Firms

Our system is designed specifically for law firms, understanding the nuances of legal practice areas such as criminal law and family law. This specialisation ensures that answering calls is handled with the appropriate level of professionalism and confidentiality.

Intelligent Call Screening

Our AI can effectively screen calls, ensuring that urgent matters reach the right person immediately.

Client Intake

Gather essential information from potential clients, streamlining your intake process.

The Impact on Your Law Practice

CallChimps provides 24/7/365 call answering services for the law firms, with unlimited parallel call handling. This is possible through the use of the very latest AI technology, underpinned by highly secure cloud-based infrastructure.

By choosing CallChimps, your law firm can:

Enhance client experience with prompt, professional responses
Increase efficiency by automating routine call-based tasks
Reduce overhead costs associated with traditional receptionist services
Focus more on legal work and less on call management
Capture more leads by never missing a call

The impact of call answering services on a law firm

Evaluating Answering Services for Lawyers and Solicitors

Law firms have long since moved away from relying on an answering machine to answer phone calls out of hours or when lines are busy. Most legal firms choose a dedicated legal answering service to deliver the level of legal call handling their clients expect.

With this in mind, legal practices need to carefully evaluate the differences between virtual receptionists and answering services which claim to support their needs.

Here are some useful questions to ask when evaluating each service.

How scalable is your service - calls come in peaks and troughs, so it's important to be able to handle multiple calls simultaneously
How deeply can your agents understand our business? Callers may want answers to questions on the call, sometimes just taking a message isn't enough. Is their recall faster than an AI trained on thousands of pages of FAQs and other documents?
How quickly can you answer the phone? Can you guarantee 100% of calls will be answered within 3 rings, no matter when the call is placed?

How do you summarise each call, and how quickly can this summary and task list be provided to the right person within the firm? What options (e.g. email, text, WhatsApp) are available for these notifications?
Do you have call transfer rules if the caller is a known client? Can these rules be set up to only transfer if the particular employee is free, or perhaps have a fall-back in case of unavailability?
Do you book appointments if we share calendar or CRM systems with you? Will you allow a specific amount of time between appointments and send notifications and reminders both internally and externally?
Will you provide access to all call recordings, transcripts and call summaries in a secure searchable portal? Will it be possible to produce audit trails for particular clients and conversations, analyse data and report on it?
Do you provide a custom phone number, and if so, can this be tailored to the location of the office (or be a mobile number)? Can you support multiple phone lines for multiple offices or departments? Custom phone numbers enable you to maintain your professional image with a dedicated business phone number.
How long does it take to get started? Can we run a proof of concept ahead of rolling a more complex set up?
What are the costs? Do you have a minimum contract length? How many minutes are included in the cost each month and how much does it cost if we go beyond that allocation? Are there any other additional costs to be aware of?

The Difference Between Real People and AI as an Answering Service

When evaluating the options for a legal answering service, law firms will undoubtedly need to weigh up the differences between services delivered by people and legal answering services based on technology (particularly AI).

Technology Sounds Like Technology, Right?

In the past, it's likely that most of us have encountered the horrors of IVR systems which reel off a prerecorded message and ask you to "press 1 for..." or similar. Or, more painful still, systems which ask you to say "yes" or "no" or provide other details and then fail to understand your accent or just plain English! With over a decade of these systems causing problems, thankfully they are considered outdated technology now, with leaps forward in AI speech recognition and synthesis (e.g. ChatGPT's most recent voice recognition and speech synthesis capabilities).

Deep Knowledge of the Legal Sector and you Firm

Answering questions no longer needs a UK-based live person on the call, but can be done just as well (and sometimes better) by virtual receptionists based on the latest AI technology. Lawyers and solicitors can fine-tune answering service responses to questions by providing links to the business website, FAQs and other law firm documentation. This helps the AI deeply understand the property businesses and provide answers to each caller's questions immediately.

Lead Capture

Furthermore, AI-driven call agents can conduct rigorous lead capture (returning to any unanswered questions in different ways), as well as taking phone calls at any time of the day or night, 7 days a week, 365 days per year.

Human Quirks and Fallibility

AI call handling offers consistency and efficiency that human receptionists can't match. While humans may be chattier, this can increase costs in time-based billing. AI provides a friendly yet direct approach, reducing call times. Unlike human receptionists who may have off days or call in sick, AI maintains consistent quality and can handle high call volumes simultaneously. This ensures reliable service without the risk of human-related performance fluctuations.

Why AI is better for legal call handling-1

How to Get Started with CallChimps Legal Answering Service

Setting up CallChimps to provide your business with a legal answering service really is as simple as following these three steps.

Sign up for our telephone answering service here, telling us a little bit about your business and whether you would like a mobile or landline number to use.
Select which CallChimps tier you would like for your legal answering service - our first two tiers can be set up through the online sign-up process entirely, but the higher two tiers require a callback to ensure we have all the specifics we need.
Go live on the same day, feel free to test it out by calling your new number (the first 30 minutes at least are free) and get in touch if anything isn't 100% as you'd like it.

Get started with the legal answering service from CallChimps

Try our Pro plan for free!

Find out why customers prefer our Pro plan, with a risk-free 30-day free trial.
Cancel or downgrade to our Business (free) plan at any time.

24/7/365 Call Handling
60 min of call time included
Personalised greeting
Answers questions about your business
Call transcripts and summaries sent to your email and/or phone
Unlimited parallel calls: 100% answered within 3 rings

See all plans here

CallChimps Pro

60 min call time included - £0.37 per min thereafter

Starts at

£29Free for 1 month

Then, starts at £29/month

FAQ

Don’t Sit There Scratching Your Head...

We get asked a lot of questions, so here are answers to some of the most common ones.

Is CallChimps right for larger organisations?

Whether your business is large or small, CallChimps has a solution for you. While CallChimps helps many small teams and new businesses, it's equally adept at serving larger organisations.

As a cutting-edge virtual receptionist and answering service, CallChimps offers scalable solutions that can handle a high volume of incoming calls efficiently. Its advanced telephone answering service adapts seamlessly to the complex needs of bigger companies, ensuring that every caller receives prompt, professional attention.

Whether you're a growing startup or an established corporation, CallChimps' flexible business solutions can streamline your communication processes, freeing up your in-house staff to focus on core tasks while maintaining excellent customer service standards.

What is the difference between a telephone answering service and a virtual office?

While both offer valuable support for businesses, a telephone answering service and a virtual office have distinct differences. A telephone answering service, like CallChimps, primarily focuses on handling calls, providing a virtual receptionist to answer your calls, take messages, and manage customer inquiries. It's an excellent solution for businesses needing professional call answering and message management all on one call.

On the other hand, a virtual office offers a broader range of services. In addition to telephone answering, it typically provides a physical business address, mail handling, and sometimes meeting room access. This comprehensive package allows a company to establish a professional presence without the cost of a traditional office space.

Both services can use your company name when answering calls, maintaining a consistent brand image. However, the virtual office goes a step further by offering a physical address for your business correspondence.

Ultimately, while a telephone answering service concentrates on managing your calls and messages, a virtual office provides a more complete package of business support services. The choice between the two depends on your specific needs and how you want to present your company to clients and partners.

Does CallChimps replace my telephone team?

The short answer is a telephone answering service does not mean you need to replace your in-house team. CallChimps works as a seamless extension of your existing business to handle incoming calls.

Reserve your real people for higher value calls and customer services. The call handling service from CallChimps can manage calls when your agents are stretched, or out of office hours, providing a reliable system to handle enquiries and ensure messages reach the appropriate person within the business in a timely manner. - no more missed calls!

How Does an AI Answering Service Compare to a Call Centre?

An AI answering service like CallChimps represents a modern evolution in handling service for businesses, offering distinct advantages over traditional call centres. While both provide telephone answering capabilities, AI services excel in efficiency and scalability, making them particularly attractive for small businesses and larger companies alike.

Unlike a call centre, an AI-powered telephone answering service operates 24/7 without human limitations, consistently providing high-quality call answering and message taking. It can seamlessly handle fluctuating call volumes without the need for additional staffing, a common challenge for traditional call centres.

AI services also offer more personalised interactions. They can be programmed with your company name and specific telephone answering protocols, ensuring each call is handled according to your business needs. This level of customisation extends to how calls are routed and messages are delivered, often surpassing the capabilities of a typical call centre.

Moreover, AI answering services usually provide a dedicated telephone number for your company, enhancing your professional image. They can efficiently manage a wide range of services beyond basic call handling, including appointment scheduling and customer inquiries, often more cost-effectively than traditional call centres.

In essence, while both options offer valuable support, an AI answering service provides a more flexible, efficient, and often more economical solution for modern businesses seeking professional telephone management services.