Many attorneys fear outsourcing their legal intake could potentially jeopardize their business due to call center operators not being equipped to respond to law firm inquiries.
Some attorneys’ uncertainties include the operator not knowing:
- The legal industry and the correct terminology
- How to answer certain legal questions and respond in every situation
- The right tone to use when dealing with legal clients
- The importance of empathy when it comes to those who have been injured or in an accident
- How to control calls to make sure all of the necessary information is collected
It’s important to note that quality is key when it comes to choosing an answering service.
A quality legal answering service has highly-qualified, professional legal intake specialists in place who excel on every call because they have been thoroughly trained and are up-to-date with the latest legal in the legal industry and mass tort news.
What does a legal intake specialist do?
A legal intake specialist is responsible for performing legal intake for a law firm. Intake specialists carefully question prospects to ensure only qualified leads can access the lawyer. The best intake experts can take a prospect from “call to contract” in a single phone conversation. However, this requires special training.
To ensure you are partnering with the right service, make sure to ask questions about the training process. Read on for a more in-depth explanation of the steps each specialist should go through to prepare them to answer incoming inquiries and perform intakes for your law firm.
Legal Terminology
If a potential client calls a law firm using complex language, the legal intake specialist should be able to understand the root of the problem in order to react and respond effectively.
Extensive training should take place in order to prepare specialists for every situation, so they can respond as if they are a professional sitting inside your law firm.
This training should be ongoing and consist of basic legal terminology, as well as campaign-specific terminology.
Empathy & Psychology
Equally important is knowing the appropriate tone. Specialists should know each and every caller has a different issue and may require a different approach.
Many inquiries to your law firm will come from people suffering severe injuries, financial problems, or other unfortunate circumstances. And so, intake specialists should be trained to respond to callers with empathy and support.
It can be daunting to describe a traumatic event to a stranger on the phone, so its important callers are spoken to in a genuinely patient and caring manner. Not to mention, just the idea of reaching out to an attorney can be intimidating. Specialists should be trained in psychology and empathy to make callers feel as comfortable as possible during the intake process, and be able to help them explain their situation.
Call Control
The whole point of an individual calling your firm is to get help. In order to be of assistance, your law firm needs as much information as possible about the caller and their situation. This is vital, since you need to know whether or not the caller qualifies and, if so, what the next steps will be. Also, it’s hard to follow-up without basic contact information.
This is where call control comes in.
Intake specialists need to be able to direct the call, while still allowing the person to tell their story to gather all of the accurate information necessary. If the conversation is going off track, the specialist should be able to circle back around to ask the proper questions to complete the intake form.
Alert Trains Expert Legal Intake Specialists
With specialists trained in legal terminology, empathy, psychology, call control— as well as your law firm’s requested script and the specific campaign at hand— when you partner with Alert, your leads will be taken care of.
Our training system is ongoing and robust. The initial training to handle any type of legal call is only the beginning. We continually provide frequent and thorough training to our specialists to ensure satisfaction on the other end of the phone and help increase your conversion rates—while holding up your reputation.
