Answering service for UK law firms

The enquiry that decides where a client instructs

Somebody who has just been injured, arrested, made redundant or served with a notice does not shop around at leisure. They ring the first two or three firms that come up, and they instruct whichever one makes them feel they have been heard.

That call rarely arrives at a convenient moment. Fee earners are in court, in a meeting or with a client. Reception is dealing with the post, a walk-in and a conveyancing chase all at once. The call rings out.

Around 85% of callers who reach voicemail never call back, and roughly 80% will not leave a message at all. In legal services that is more damaging than in most sectors, because the value of a single instruction is high and the caller's urgency is genuine. They are not deferring their decision. They are making it, and they are making it with the next firm on the list.

What a law firm actually loses to an unanswered phone

New client enquiries

The highest-value call a firm receives is a first-time enquiry about a live matter. Missing it does not cost you a phone call, it costs you a file. For most firms a handful of these across a year exceeds what the entire reception function costs to run.

Existing client anxiety calls

Clients in the middle of a matter ring for reassurance far more often than for information. When they cannot reach anybody, the anxiety turns into complaints, then into Legal Ombudsman correspondence, then into files that consume more time than they earn.

Calls outside office hours

Arrests, injunctions, evictions and accidents do not respect a nine to five. Neither does the person who has finally sat down at eight in the evening to deal with something they have been putting off for a fortnight.

What a virtual receptionist for your law firm does on a call

Voco answers in your firm's name, in a voice you choose, and works from information you configure rather than improvising. On a typical call it will:

• Establish whether the caller is an existing client or a new enquiry
• Take full contact details, spelled back and confirmed
• Identify the area of law the enquiry relates to and route it accordingly
• Capture the matter reference where the caller has one
• Take a factual account of what has happened, without offering any view on it
• Recognise urgency and follow the escalation route you have set
• Answer the questions you have told it how to answer, such as opening hours, location, parking, whether you offer a free initial call and which areas of law you cover
• Send your team a structured summary by SMS and email within seconds of the call ending

It does not give legal advice, and that is the point

This is the requirement that rules out most general answering arrangements, and it is the single most important thing to establish about a virtual receptionist working for a law firm.

Voco is configured to gather facts and never to interpret them. It will not tell a caller whether they have a claim, what their prospects are, how long they have to act, what a matter is likely to cost, or what they should do next. Where a caller pushes for a view, it says plainly that it cannot advise and that somebody from the firm will come back to them.

It works only from information you have configured. It does not improvise, and where it does not know something it says so and takes details for a callback rather than guessing. A confident wrong answer about a limitation period is not a service failure, it is a professional exposure.

You also control whether the assistant identifies itself as an AI assistant at the start of the call. Most firms choose to.

Enquiries that arrive ready to act on

Most answering arrangements hand a fee earner a name and a number. That produces the least productive callback in the working week, because the conversation starts from nothing and the client has to repeat everything.

Voco captures the enquiry as a record. For a new matter that means the caller's details, the area of law, what happened and when, whether any deadline has been mentioned, whether proceedings have been issued, whether they have instructed anyone else, and how urgently they want to be contacted. The fee earner rings back already knowing whether the enquiry is worth their time and which department it belongs in.

That also lets enquiries be triaged rather than answered in the order they arrived. A time-critical injunction question and a general enquiry about updating a will are both new enquiries. They should not sit in the same queue.

Conflict screening and intake

Voco can capture the details your intake process needs before a fee earner engages, including the names of other parties involved, so a conflict check can be run before anybody speaks substantively to a prospective client.

It does not perform the check or make any judgement about it. It gathers what your team needs in order to make that decision properly, which is usually the step that gets skipped when an enquiry arrives as a scribbled note.

Confidentiality and client data

Law firms process information that is frequently sensitive and sometimes privileged, which makes the data position worth setting out precisely rather than in general terms.

Call data is stored in UK and EU data centres. Voco Digitals Ltd is registered with the ICO. A data processing agreement is available covering your firm as controller and Voco as processor. Recordings and transcripts are encrypted in transit and at rest, retention periods are configurable, and deletion requests can be actioned against an individual caller.

Retention deserves particular thought in a legal context. Because the period is configurable, firms can align call recording retention with their own file retention and confidentiality policies rather than inheriting a default that was designed for somebody else's business. That is a conversation worth having with whoever owns compliance at your firm before you go live.

Answering services across legal practice

The virtual receptionist underneath is the same across legal practice. What changes is the vocabulary, the urgency rules and what a useful enquiry record contains. Each page below covers the specifics.

Solicitors' practices

New client intake, matter enquiries, conflict screening and client care obligations across general practice. Solicitors.

Conveyancers

Quotation enquiries, chase calls from clients and agents, exchange and completion pressure, and the volume of status questions a transaction generates. Conveyancers.

Family law

First contact from callers who are often distressed, careful handling of sensitive circumstances, and urgent matters that cannot wait for the next working day. Family law.

Fitting around the systems you already use

Voco books into a connected calendar where you have enabled that, and otherwise delivers every enquiry as a structured record your team enters once, with everything needed already captured.

If you run a specific practice management or case management system and want enquiries to land inside it, tell us which one. Integration priorities are set by what customers actually ask for rather than by a list on a website.

Getting started

You can be live in minutes. Signing up walks you through a short setup flow covering your firm's details, areas of law, opening hours and the questions your reception team answers most often. Choose a voice, confirm, and the assistant is ready to answer.

Getting it to the standard you would put in front of a client takes a little longer, and in a regulated practice it is worth the time. Budget around an hour to work through your FAQs, set the escalation rules for urgent matters, agree your retention position, and test it on your own line. Most firms do that in one sitting.

There is no setup fee, no contract, and a 30 day money-back guarantee. Plans start from £49/month.

Related: how call handling works, compare answering services, work out the cost of your missed calls, all industries.