FAQ
What are the possible results for inbound calls?
| Response | Outcome | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Live Call | Staff takes calls when available, do intakes and if high-value offers to set appointment with lawyer | Best case but limited hours available to take calls |
| AI Agent | For calls when staff is not available, engages caller conversationally, can screen and answer basic questions, directs to online form to get complete contact info and situation details | Callback request form leads to caller not needing to call another lawyer, available 24 hours |
| Voice Mail | Requests callers to leave name, number and brief message | Familiar but low value and reaction perceptions, message may be unintelligle or incomplete, available 24 hours |
| Answering Service | Live person takes call | Not much better than voice mail, negative reactions if preceived to be deceptive , available 24 hours for a fee |
| Text Back | Sent to caller ID right away or next day | Tells caller what they already know, you didn’t take the call so they should try again |
| No Answer | Not acceptable, will call a different lawyer | Portrays bad image |
What’s the one best reason to do this?
Only 1 in 5 callers leave voice mails. This means you are missing out on 4 of 5 client opportunities. What is the average value of a client? Multiply this amount by the number of clients that tried to call you but left to call the next lawyer on a long list. But you don’t know how many clients you failed to get only the number you did get. Compare this with the $97 a month fee.
Why not use voice mail?
Callers feel neglected when sent to voice mail. If you are the only lawyer in town they have no choice but to leave a message and hope for a return call. Most lawyers compete against hundreds of others. Callers are not going to wait for their message to maybe be sent, received and replied to when they can easily click the next lawyer on the list. These potential clients are gone forever. Even if they leave a message all you have is a name and phone number. You will have to call to find out if the client is valuable or worthless. Of course since nobody answers their phone anymore you are faced with chasing them down not knowing if the case has any value. If you wait a day the client is going to be upset. No big deal for the low-value caller but it is for a high-value caller. Then there is the issue of understanding the client when leaving a name and phone number. Background or line noise, weak signals, soft voices or strong accents can mean lost clients. If you have the caller ID you can call and try to fake why you don’t know the client’s name. Again you waste time that can’t be recovered or billed. Voice mail is almost 50 year old technology. It is obsolete and does not portray the image you want.
How about using an answering service?
Answering services are merely voice mail using minimum wage workers. They are likely bored and not motivated to care about you. Again all they can do is take a name, phone number and perhaps a brief message. It is not advisable to allow them to discuss a case. Callers often get angry when the person they are talking to does not work for the law firm so is useless. Answering services date to 1923… 100 year old technology. OK I guess if you specialize in elder law!
How about a text-back system?
Sending a text asking a caller to call you back during business hours is of very limited value. The caller already knows you did not answer and already has your phone number. No value add was provided. Having an answering service call the caller the next morning only to ask for a name and number so the lawyer can call is equally useless. Is this the best we can do? Conversational AI is a significant win for clients and for you. Here are some real world text back samples.
Can the AI Agent book appointments onto my calendar?
Booking appointments automatically may sound like a good idea. However our testing has shown it to be inherently problematic and impractical. Your intake screens out low or no-value callers in favor of high-value. You are not a restaurant which only needs to lookup times and table size. Your schedule may be variable and erratic requiring frequent updating of available time slots on your calendar. In application few practices actually do this in their busy day. If a client books a time that was not actually available you have to make an embarrassing call to reschedule. It can be extremely difficult to contact a client. It takes time and does not put a favorable light on your practice. Another important factor is that AI is no more proficient at deciphering email addresses delivered by phone than people are. Have you ever struggled to understand callers who seem to mumble with varying accents on a cell with a marginal signal and with lots of background noise? You can reply to the client’s email address only to watch it bounce. Now you will need to call or text to correct the address. This is frustrating and burns up time that can’t be billed out. Just because it’s possible to automate doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to do so. The solution we created is to have you offer appointments in real time you know you can keep.
Whatever the AI Agent Says, You Said
An AI Agent will answer your phone and talk to potential clients. Think about this. Would you hire somebody randomly off the street to do this? AI Agents left to their own devises or programmed by amateurs will say any crazy thing they can think of. Promises, guarantees of outcome, low prices and so on. Why not? Ultimately a company purporting to sell AI Agents better understand the intricacies of law practices and legal ethics as interpreted by a bar association. Whatever the AI Agent says will be attributable to you. As far as the bar is concerned YOU said it and they won’t entertain finger pointing at some vendor. I talked to a lawyer doing immigration nationally who was disbarred in a state because a marketer created a printed piece with font sizes larger and more prominent for statements that could be considered promises. Live and learn. I was consulted on various past legal client acquisition companies by ethics professors that charge $1,000 per hour. I was flabbergasted at the seemingly innocuous and convoluted rules that needed to be carefully followed to ensure compliance. AI agents for law practices is a specialized application as opposed to those for roto-rooter and lawn care. Each of our AI Agents are carefully crafted to represent you professionally and constrained to keep your bar association happy.
Is an AI Agent an advantage for advertising?
Whenever you don’t take an inbound call you risk losing a potential client. You can pay $5 to $500 per click on Google Ads. If you capture half the callers that won’t leave a message on voice mail theoretically you could reduce your ad spend by half for the same net results.
How does this work?
We set up a dedicated phone number that you forward calls to from your main customer number. You decide when to forward. It’s advised to do this after hours, on holidays, while away from your office during work days and when traveling. We set up your AI Agent with a carefully crafted prompt which contains guidelines for the client interactions. We also write answers to common questions prospective clients may have so the AI Agent can engage the client. We connect to various LLMs (Large Language Models) like OpenAI based on evolving performance metrics.
Who controls what the AI Agent says?
The LLM selected provides the intelligence for the call. This is customized for your specific application by carefully programming a prompt which contains the instructions the AI must adhere to. We do not allow the AI to make up replies on the fly. We constrict responses to what’s practical for legal practices and importantly to closely follow legal ethics rules.
What does the AI Agent sound like?
We select from the latest voices offered by the AI Voice Generator suppliers. You select female or male. Check out the demo on the home page.
Are you sure that prospective clients will be OK with this?
Look at the alternatives. 1. No answer (callers keep dialing), 2. Voice mail that can only take messages (that may or may not be heard and replied to), 3. Call center answering service with bored minimum wage agents with a high turnover that don’t know you or able to discern legal urgencies and in any case can only take messages, or 4. Intelligent AI Agent that is competent, never bored, cheerful and sympathetic, available every minute day or night, screens callers, and sends call summaries to you immediately. You can then decide to call back right away to capture a valuable client or wait until later.
Will prospective clients be put off talking to some robot?
All of us talk to AI every day. Most companies are using AI for customer service calls and sales. Siri, Google Assistant and Alexa have acclimated us to talk to and interact with a non-human voice. As the technology advances it is becoming increasingly difficult if not impossible to tell the difference. The Turing Test where a person can’t tell the difference is on the verge of being passed.
How does the AI Agent work?
The AI Agent is an orchestration layer over three modules:
1. Listen. When a person speaks, the client device (whether it is a laptop, phone, etc) will record raw audio. This raw audio will be transcribed on an external server to create transcription text.
2. Think. The transcription text will be input into a prompt (coded instructions to achieve desired behaviors) and run through an LLM (Large Language Model) which is the core intelligence that simulates a person. This is a computational model designed for natural language processing.
3. Speak. The LLM outputs text that now must be spoken. That text is turned back into raw audio that is playable back at the user’s device. This process is done on an external server.
To construct a custom AI Agent requires meticulous prompt engineering so the output suits the application. In this case taking phone calls, answering basic questions about the practice and persuading callers to submit details such as contact information and situation details. Critical here is to not violate legal ethics rules. The objective is to engage callers conversationally to capture them as clients before they contact other lawyers.
Is your price fair?
Apple paid $200 Million to buy Siri in 2010 and invested much more since then. Google Assistant development is estimated as high as $30 Billion. Amazon has lost over $25 Billion on Alexa. Our price for a personal AI Agent is $97 per month.
How is Law Call best qualified to build AI Agents for legal practices?
1. Expertise. Grounded with degrees in science and engineering.
2. Technology. Research to source the best affordable AI technology and continuously update as new technology becomes available.
3. Prompt Engineering. The core instructions to the AI must be technically correct and also be practical for a legal practice. Without understanding the realities of the intake process the AI will be useless.
4. Legal Marketing Expertise. We have over 30 years experience building online brand name lawyer referral and directory businesses as well as intake expertise at a family practice.
5. Ethics Rules. Extensive experience over multiple projects often with sessions by expert consultants. Gained an appreciation of the subtleties of rules which have many nonobvious interpretations.
Compare the above with the typical enthusiast players who are enamored with AI as a technology but lack any real world business experience. Most target roto-rooter, landscaping, appliance repair and so on. They are not qualified to create agents for professional practices with complex legal guidelines and serious consequences for violating laws.
*See the About page.