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Recently on the Lawyerist LAB, there was a whole string of discussion regarding how lawyers answer their phones. As usual when lawyers talk about things like this, I was surprised to hear how many lawyers are answering their phone when they are in the office.
I guess I should not be surprised, though, because I used to answer my own phone when I was first in practice and did not know any better. I felt overwhelmed by all there was to do in the early years of my business (even when i did not have a whole lot of clients) and yet when the phone rang, I lunged for it.
It might be a client, or even better, a prospect!
Little did I realize how answering my own phone was slowly, but surely, ruining my business.
These are the three reasons why you should never, ever, ever answer your own phone or take an unscheduled call (except in the case of an emergency).
1. Productivity
When you allow the phone to interrupt you and your day even for a few minutes, you will often find yourself at the end of the day wondering why it feels as if you did not get anything done. (A Microsoft study indicated that it can take as much as 15 minutes to get back on task after an interruption and then it often takes longer to get the task completed. Add up those 15 minutes and you can lose a whole lot of day.)
2. Precedence
When you answer your phones, you are setting a bad precedent for your clients. They begin to think they can just call you up and get you on the phone whenever they want. Then, when they cannot reach you immediately, they get cranky.
3. Positioning
People like to hire busy lawyers. When you answer your own phone, your prospect subconsciously thinks less of you. Think about it – have you ever called your doctor’s office and gotten her or him on the phone right away? No, of course not!
So, what can and should you do instead?
First and foremost, hire someone to answer your phones. Voicemail is no good. It is frustrating (especially if you have a complicated phone tree like one lawyer I called last week) and playing phone tag is a big waste of everyone’s time.
If you cannot afford a full-time person, consider an answering service. Not just any answering service though. Make sure they have experience with lawyers, will answer the phone based on your script and not just bark “Law Offices” into the phone, and have trained their people to answer the phones with a smile.
Call Ruby and Total Attorneys both have great services. (And if you mention I sent you, each of them will likely give you a free tryout period.) I believe Total Attorneys can even schedule appointments for you, which is really important because as you will see below, you want all your phone calls to be scheduled.
Second, right from your initial meeting with your prospects establish that you do not take unscheduled phone calls. Make sure to do it in a way that helps your clients see why this is actually beneficial them because it does not waste their time playing phone tag with you and because it allows you to focus on your client work instead of being constantly interrupted, which allows you to do better work for them.
Last, block separate time each week for two types of calls – those from prospects and those from existing clients. Then, it’s easy to for your scheduling assistant to schedule return calls for you or for your answering service to direct your clients to TimeDriver, Genbook, or BookFresh to schedule with you directly.
Once you get control over how your phones are answered, you are going to be amazed by how much more productive you are and how much more respect you garner from your prospects and clients.
As the CEO and founder of the Family Wealth Planning Institute, Alexis is revolutionizing the way legal services are provided to families and small business owners throughout North America. Join Alexis' Law Business Revolution and receive over $22,500 of practice-building resources with no strings attached. 
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As an answer-my-own-phone type (but who also uses Call Ruby), I wrote about this a few days ago on my blog: http://bit.ly/dobjPX To be fair, Ruby picks up when I am with a client, on the phone or out of the office. I also block out power hours when I need them. So someone who calls really only has maybe a 50-50 chance of having me pick up immediately. Still, I can’t count the number of clients I landed or kept because I was able to be responsive to them. That starts when they call or email.
This is a very provocative post that may help many attorneys. I think that tip #1, regarding productivity, should not be a mandate as much as a process of weighing whether answering calls adds or subtracts to a lawyer’s practice. Most busy family law attorneys, for example, have some way of limiting or controlling client calls so that other work can be completed. But in some practices the phone calls are the productivity. Lawyers probably should not think that they are required to always answer their own phones, but they may choose to if it helps their practices more than it hurts.
#2 and #3 are just like squeezing on one end of a balloon. The other side of #2 is that there are some clients who are offended at being screened because they are sure that the ”important“ calls get put straight through to the lawyer, which is typically the truth. When you answer your own phone, the client knows that their call is just as important as every other call the lawyer gets.
It may be true that people like to hire busy lawyers but once they hire you, they think their case is the most important case in the world and they want to be treated that way. There are other ways to convey that a lawyer is busy besides not answering calls yourself. I have never heard of a client who fired a lawyer because the lawyer answered too many of the client’s calls.
Whether a lawyer should answer calls from prospective clients really depends on the type of practice and the conversion rate. If only 1 out of 10 calls becomes a client, then it may not be a good use of the lawyer’s time to answer all of those calls. But if you’re in a niche practice area where the conversion rate is much higher, the lawyer answering the call could easily be the difference between landing and losing the client.
I had a secretary in the typical big law set up: 1 partner and 2-4 associates per secretary. Mine never answered a single call for me.
Valid points in the post however, from my experience (online marketing), not answering your phone is the biggest reason why small businesses lose potential new customers. Of the thousands of customers who use Yodle for their online marketing, those that either answer their phone consistently or use our answering service (free btw) have vastly better conversion than those who do not. I agree with Eric in that it may depend on the type of practice you run but all in all, when someone finds you on a search engine and then calls you, if you don’t answer, they will hit the back button and then click on and call your biggest competitor which may make you more productive with the task at hand but certainly out one new client.
The only reason for a lawyer to answer their own phone is to charge the client for the privilege. If the Retainer Agreement specifies that each phone call will cost the client $100 plus $5/minute (with a pre-paid Retainer; no Retainer, no on-demand phone privileges) a time and billing program with a built-in Timer, such as PCLaw™, will make picking up the phone a profitable experience. Any lawyer who perceives phone calls as an interruption fails to understand that it matters not which client is paying for the time, as long as “a” client is paying for the time.
@Steve: But see this: http://nyti.ms/94nx5m. Just because you can bill for the time doesn’t mean you should. I would rather boost my fees to help absorb the cost of a receptionist than nickel-and-dime my clients.
@Steve: If I tried to charge a client $100 plus $5/minute for a phone call, I would have zero clients. Why? Because I practice consumer law — debt collection defense and Chapter 7 bankruptcy, plus suing under the FDCPA and other consumer protection statutes with fee-shifting provisions. That means almost all of my work is either flat-fee based or contingency. There is no place for outsourcing phone calls in my practice area. The advice to NOT answer your own phone, or to ONLY answer a call if you can bill for it, isn’t really relevant for a lot of practice areas or small/solo firms, and it seems to be coming from folks who have a service or product to sell.
Having someone else answer the phone for you and then forwarding the caller to you creates an illusion of authority and power on your part, impressing the customer. It also create the illusion of a bigger business.
Creating an illusion is generally something lawyers should stay away from, especially when it pertains to the size of a lawyer’s law firm.