Law firms
Both partners are in court, and the phone is having its busiest hour.
It gets the paperwork in front of a solicitor.
It answers on the first ring, takes the names, which side you're on and the date on the paperwork — then stops asking, because in this trade the next question is the one that costs you.
Free for 14 days. No card needed.
“A bloke knocked on the door and handed me an envelope. It says I've got fourteen days.”
Writes the date off the seal exactly as he reads it out and says nothing whatsoever about what fourteen days from it comes to. Takes both parties for the conflict check, then finds him the first appointment there is.
Both partners are in court, and the phone is having its busiest hour.
Their words
Say it the way your callers say it, and watch what it reaches for
The agent has fourteen tools. It has the same fourteen on every one of these pages — what changes with your trade is which one a sentence lands on, and how much of the job is done by the time it puts the phone down.
It hears
“they've arrested my son”
It reaches for
transfer_call
Custody isn't booked by a machine. It names who it's connecting her to and hands the live call over.
The words on those chips are the trade’s, not ours: matter, fee earner, conflict check, prospective client, money on account, client care letter. Get one of them wrong on the phone and the person on the other end knows within a sentence.
Run it
Every line on the job card came from a second you can point at
One call, on a rail. Drag it forward and it fills in. Drag it back and it comes apart — the slot empties, the tool leaves the log, and the confirmation un-writes itself.
Agent
Pargeter and Roe — you're through to the answering assistant. I'm not a solicitor and I can't advise, but I can take the details and get you in front of one. What's happened?
Tools it ran
- Nothing yet — it is still listening.
Enquiry sheet
- Parties, for the conflict check
- Date on the form
- Kind of matter
- In the diary, provisionalPro · Google Calendar connected
Both parties down for the conflict check, and the date off the seal exactly as he read it. Not one line about what the dispute is actually about. Half eight is held, not confirmed — and Wilf was told so twice.
Played back in 14 seconds, or listen to the whole call (1:46) at its own pace. The clock on the rail keeps the written call’s time.
Build this agentThe wall
It will not ask you what happened — or tell you whether you're still in time
Lean on it. The words change as the caller pushes; the answer does not. Push all the way and the only thing that gives is that it stops arguing and fetches a person.
Pressure 1 of 4
Caller
“The letter's dated the second and it gives me till the twenty-fourth. Have I still got time or not?”
Agent
I've got both dates down exactly as you read them. Whether they leave you in time is a solicitor's call, not mine.
The only thing that gives under pressure is the arguing. A caller who needs a date ruled on today gets a person rather than a better-worded refusal — waiting until Monday to find out whether the clock has run is the one thing on this page that can genuinely cost somebody their claim.
The relay
The fee earner on your transfer list, or the duty solicitor if you keep a rota knows in 6 seconds
Three calls stop being intake the moment they start: someone in police custody or ringing about someone who is, anyone with a hearing today or tomorrow, and an existing client who is angry — that last one is a complaint in progress and it needs a person with authority, not an appointment. It pages before it puts anyone through, because in a firm where both partners are in a court building the person who ought to take that call is rarely the person who would pick up.
0.0s
The caller is still talking. They never hear a hold, and they are never told to ring back.
Your rules
It starts briefed for your trade. The brief is yours to change.
Your trade decides what it knows on day one. You decide the rest — and every line you change shows up in how the next call goes, not in a settings page nobody reads.
Names of everyone involved, on every enquiry
The parties and which side the caller is on come before the diary does, so a conflict check can start before anyone rings back.
Say the fee before you offer a time
It reads your published fixed fee off your own documents and says it out loud first, so nobody arrives on the day believing the first half hour is free.
Put custody calls through to my mobile, day or night
Off. The call goes ahead without it.
Same agent, your vocabulary. The trade seeds the prompt; everything after that is yours, and you can read the whole of it in the dashboard rather than guessing at what it was told.
Go live
A number of its own, briefed for your trade, this afternoon
Everything on this page works on some plan. Here is exactly which, so nothing you just watched turns out to be behind a wall you did not know about.
On any plan
Nothing to connect beyond saving a contact and adding your documents.
- Puts the caller through to a person
- Tells your team, during the call
- Writes down the details you asked for
- Takes a message, in the caller's words
- Answers questions from your own documents
Starter — $49 a month
Needs a text-capable number on your account.
- Texts the caller a confirmation
Pro — $249 a month
Needs Google Calendar connected. Until it is, these calls become messages instead.
- Reads your real diary before it offers anything
- Finds an existing booking to change
- Puts the job in the calendar
Your agent gets a new number; we cannot port your existing one, so the new number sits alongside your line and you forward to it when you are ready. Local numbers only — no mobile or toll-free yet.
What you just proved
Six claims. You operated the ones that are filled in.
- Three kinds of call come in, and it knows which is whichTry it
- It understands how your callers actually talkTry it
- Every line on the paperwork came from a second of the callTry it
- It will not say the thing that would land you in troubleTry it
- When it can't finish a call, a person knows while the caller is still thereTry it
- The brief is yours to changeTry it
The one we did not demonstrate
About three calls in ten go unanswered while somebody is in to answer them
Our figure, not a study. Our estimate, in staffed hours only, from the shape of the week rather than a published figure: the busiest hour of a small firm's week is 10 to 11, which is also the hour a litigator is most likely to be in a court building with the phone off; the phones go to answerphone deliberately between one and two; and one person on reception already on a ten-minute call is a busy signal for everyone else in those ten minutes. Out of hours is a separate and much larger claim — from five on Friday to nine on Monday most small firms answer nothing at all, which is arithmetic rather than a statistic. There is a $109-billion-a-year figure circulating for this trade with no published workings behind it; we are not going to print it. Nor should you take ours on trust — a fortnight of your own numbers settles it, and we would much rather be corrected than believed.
About £70 for each call you get back, or $90 on US fees
Our figure, not a study. Ours, and it carries every call that is worth nothing. A first matter actually instructed averages about £2,000 — a will is a few hundred, a residential conveyance more, a modest probate more again. Roughly one inbound call in five is a genuine new enquiry rather than a client chasing, an estate agent, the other side, the court or somebody selling you search-engine work. Three in ten of those enquiries instruct, and we treat six in ten of the missed ones as gone for good, because most voicemails are never returned and a person with a legal problem rings the next firm on the page. £2,000 × 20% × 30% × 60% is £72. The $90 is the same arithmetic on a $2,500 US matter, held as a separate figure rather than converted — we are not running an exchange rate through a page about honest numbers. Seven of every eight recovered calls are worth nothing directly, and that is the point of the figure. Personal injury and criminal defence run four to ten times it and deserve their own number; a wills-and-conveyancing practice is under half. Multiply it by your own volume if you like — we are not going to print the total for you.
- Four in ten prospective clients don't reach a person, and most of them never hear back.
- Clio, Legal Trends Report, 2019-10. A third-party mystery shop of US firms advertising family, criminal, bankruptcy, employment and business work: 500 phone calls and 1,000 emails. 56% of calls were answered by a person, 39% went to voicemail, and 57% of the voicemails left had no callback inside 72 hours. Clio sells practice-management software to law firms.
Questions
What law firms owners ask first
My callers have just been arrested, or their mother's died. They need a human being. And if that thing says one word that sounds like advice, it's my practising certificate on the line, not yours.
Both halves are true, and neither is an argument for the answerphone that is there now. Start with the part he hasn't said, because it is the bigger risk: in this trade the danger on an intake call is not what the phone says, it is what it hears. Rule 1.18 and Opinion 510 mean a prospective client who never signs anything and never pays a penny can conflict the firm out of acting against them — and the other side is often the larger instruction. The receptionist who is genuinely good at her job, who draws the caller out and gets the whole picture, is manufacturing that exposure with every extra question. This one cannot dig. It takes the parties, which side, the matter type and any date, and stops, which is what Opinion 510 says intake ought to do anyway. It has no view on merits, offers none, quotes nothing beyond the fees you publish, clears no conflicts and accepts no instructions. On the calls he is describing — custody, a child at risk, a bereavement, a hearing tomorrow — it doesn't try; it hands over mid-sentence. And every call is transcribed and sits with the enquiry, so a partner can read exactly what was said, which is more than can be said for the note the junior took last Tuesday. It is not competing with him at 4:40 on a Friday. It is competing with nothing.
Can it run a conflict check?
No. It takes the names of everyone involved and which side the caller is on, and stops there; a person runs the check against your files. That is also why nothing it says is a confirmation. The appointment sits in the diary as provisional, and the caller is told that out loud and again in the text — because a firm that has to ring someone back and unbook them has a much easier conversation when it never promised in the first place.
They'll start telling it the whole story anyway. Doesn't that conflict me out regardless?
Less than you think, and the difference is the question that never gets asked. A caller who volunteers three minutes of narrative has told you what they chose to tell you; a caller who is drawn out with “and had he done that to anyone else?” has been walked through the parts that are actually significantly harmful, which is the Rule 1.18 exposure. So it does not interrupt, it does not probe, and the enquiry sheet holds the parties, which side, the kind of matter and any date they read out — nothing else. Where it is honest to be uncomfortable: the call itself is transcribed — and recorded, on Pro and above — and either is information received. That is your retention policy's problem, not a thing a vendor can wave away, and this is the one trade where we would tell you to set that policy short and mean it.
Will it say anything at all about a time limit?
No — and not even to agree with a caller who has already looked it up. The rule people find online is three months less a day; what they don't find is early conciliation stopping the clock, or the effective date of termination not being the day somebody was told to go. Being confidently wrong about a date is how a prospective client is reassured out of the door and how a complaint arrives instead. It writes the date down as the caller reads it and gets them booked.
Can it tell an existing client where their matter is up to?
No. It does not discuss a matter, it will not confirm to a caller that a named person is a client of the firm, and it cannot take instructions. It puts the message on the file with what they actually said in it and pages the fee earner. Ask any practice what its complaints are really about and it is hardly ever the legal work — it is the three weeks of silence, and it starts life as the third unreturned chase.
Legal enquiries carry special category data. What happens to the call?
It is transcribed and the transcript sits with the enquiry, in our database in Ireland (eu-west-1), so a partner can read exactly what was asked and what was refused. Before you switch it on, that transcript is a document your DPO has a view about: health, criminal allegations and Article 10 offence data arrive on the first call in this trade. The transcript is not the only copy of the call: a recording, on Pro and above, stays with the provider that captured it, as does any copy a voice provider keeps of the call. Twilio and ElevenLabs keep theirs in the United States; we have not confirmed Cartesia's country. The AI disclosure is not a setting and cannot be turned off: a greeting written without it, like the opening of the sample call above, has it added on a real call; the recording notice is a switch, and in a two-party-consent state you turn it on.
Start
Put it on your law firms line
Fourteen days free, no card. Point your calls at it when you are ready, and take them back the moment you are not.
It answers on the first ring and tells the caller it is an assistant.
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