Answering, intake and after-hours cover for US law firms, in English and Spanish. Our agents work from your intake script, gather the facts of a matter, and send you a record you can act on without calling the person back.
It answers your firm’s phone in your firm’s name and runs your intake: it takes the call, works through the questions your firm needs answered, and produces a written record of the matter. The output is the first page of a potential case file, not a message slip.
In practice the work splits three ways. It handles first contact from people who found you and called, so a prospective client speaks to a person rather than a recording. It picks up overflow when your team is in court, with a client, or on the other line. And it covers the hours you do not staff, which for most firms is where the calls you never hear about are going.
Everything the agent asks comes from a script your firm sets. Everything the agent does with the answer — flag it, route it, hold it for the morning — comes from rules your firm sets. The agent supplies the coverage and the discipline. Your firm supplies the judgment.
An answering service takes a message. A legal call center takes an intake, which means the details that decide whether a matter is worth your time are captured while the caller is still on the phone.
That distinction is not a marketing one. Ask a message service what happened, when it happened, who else was involved, and whether the caller has spoken to another firm, and you will get a name and a callback number, because that is what the job is. Then someone at your firm has to call back and ask all of it again, by which point the caller has often called someone else.
The other difference is what happens next. A message sits in an inbox until somebody reads it. An intake record arrives with an urgency marker on it, and the matters your firm has told us to flag do not wait for anyone to check the inbox.
Coverage, including nights and weekends
Years running customer operations
SLA attainment
Interactions handled a year
The cost is not the call. It is that a person with a legal problem rarely calls one firm, and the one that picks up is usually the one that gets the matter.
For a firm with a hundred callers a week, a few missed calls are a rounding error. For a firm where one matter can carry a month, they are not. Small firms sit at the end of the scale where the value per call is high and the volume is low, which is exactly the shape that a fixed hire handles badly and voicemail handles worst of all.
The part that makes this hard to manage is that missed calls are invisible. A caller who reaches voicemail at seven in the evening and does not leave a message leaves no trace at all. Your firm cannot review a decision it never saw, which is why the question is worth answering with coverage rather than with reporting.
Every agent on a legal account works in English and Spanish, and a caller who starts in Spanish stays with the same agent. There is no transfer, no callback, and no second queue.
Our agents collect what happened and write it down. They do not assess a case, do not say whether a claim looks strong, and do not answer questions about the law.
Our teams work from the Dominican Republic and the Philippines. Spanish is a first language for the Dominican team rather than a skill added on top, which matters on an intake call more than it does on a support call: a distressed caller describing what happened to them will say it once, properly, in their own language, and paraphrase it badly in their second.
The record reaches you in English regardless of which language the call was in, so nothing about how your team reads a file changes.
That boundary is fixed and it is trained, not hoped for. When a caller asks a question our agent cannot answer — and in personal injury and family matters they ask constantly — the agent records the question in the caller’s own words, tells them the firm will come back to them on it, and moves on. The question reaches you with the file. Nothing gets guessed at, and nothing gets softened to keep a caller happy.
The reason to hold that line is practical. What reaches your desk is then fact rather than an opinion formed by someone outside your practice, and nothing has been said to a prospective client that your firm now has to live with.
We cover the hours your firm does not, including evenings, weekends and holidays, in your local time. That is usually where the calls that matter most are landing, because the events that send someone looking for a lawyer do not keep office hours.
Coverage across the Dominican Republic and the Philippines is what makes overnight US hours ordinary working hours for the people answering. An overnight shift staffed by people working their own daytime is a different quality of call than one staffed by people who have been awake since the previous morning.
What counts as urgent is your rule, not the agent’s judgment. A deadline close to expiry, a caller in crisis, a matter type you have told us to flag: those reach you immediately, by whichever route you specify. Everything else is waiting in a summary when you open your laptop.
Most firms should start with the smallest piece that is genuinely broken — usually evenings and weekends, or overflow when you are in court. You do not need to buy round-the-clock cover, a dedicated seat, or a minimum call volume to find out whether this works.
Setup takes one working session with your team. We need your matter types, the questions that qualify a matter, what your conflict check requires, what counts as urgent, and where the record should land. That conversation is the work; everything after it is configuration.
If it works, adding hours or people is a change to the same team rather than a move to a new one. And if you answer your own phone reliably and rarely miss a call, we will tell you not to do this. That is a shorter conversation than three months of paying for something you did not need.
We do not arrive with a legal intake template and ask you to fit your practice into it. We sit down with your firm, work through how you actually qualify a matter, and build the script from that.
This is deliberate. We are a customer experience company, not a law firm, and the questions that separate a viable matter from a waste of a week are yours. A provider that claims to know them already is describing somebody else’s practice. What we bring is the discipline: the order the questions are asked in, what a complete record contains, where a caller gets to say something the script did not anticipate, and where the agent stops.
You keep the script. Change it whenever your practice changes, and the agents on your account work to the new version.
Tell us how many calls you think you are missing after hours, and what you would want to know about each one. If the honest answer is that it is not worth doing, we will say so. Talk to VoiceTeam.
VoiceTeam holds SOC 2, HIPAA, COPC and PCI DSS certifications.
For legal intake the one that usually matters most is HIPAA. Personal injury and medical malpractice callers describe injuries, treatment and providers in the first two minutes, which means the record reaching your firm contains medical information whether or not anyone planned for that. It is handled under HIPAA rules from the moment it is taken.
The rest is ordinary discipline rather than a certificate. Access is limited to the agents assigned to your account and their supervisor and is removed when someone comes off it. Retention is set by your firm before launch. Controls are audited rather than asserted, and if your firm needs the specifics for its own compliance review, ask early and we will provide them.
Most firms do not know how many intake calls go unanswered, because a caller who reaches voicemail and hangs up leaves no trace. Tell us your hours and your matter types, and we will tell you whether cover is worth it.
An answering service takes a message and passes it on. A legal call center runs your intake: it works through the questions your firm needs answered while the caller is on the phone, and delivers a structured record instead of a callback request.
No. Our agents gather facts. They do not assess a case, comment on whether a claim is strong, or answer questions about the law. When a caller asks a legal question, the agent records it verbatim and it reaches your firm with the file.
Intake records are treated as confidential from the first call, not from the point where your firm decides to take the matter. Access is limited to the agents assigned to your account and their supervisor, and it is removed when someone comes off the account. Retention is set by your firm before launch.
Yes. Adverse party details and anyone else named in the matter are captured as standard, unless you tell us otherwise. Where the details suggest a possible conflict, the record is flagged and routed to your team, and the caller is told only that someone from the firm will be in touch.
Yes. Agents on legal accounts work in English and Spanish, and a caller who starts in Spanish stays with the same agent rather than being transferred. Records reach your firm in English whichever language the call was in.
Yes, including evenings, weekends and holidays, in your firm’s local time. Coverage is built across the Dominican Republic and the Philippines, so overnight US hours are staffed by people working their own daytime.
Smaller than most providers will quote. Firms usually start with evenings and weekends only, or with overflow during the working day, rather than with a full seat. If your volume genuinely does not justify it, we will tell you.
Most of the time goes on script build, agent training on your matter types, and testing against calls you have described. We give you a realistic date once we have seen your intake requirements, rather than an optimistic one up front.
With your firm, from your practice. We take your matter types, the questions that qualify a matter, your conflict requirements, your escalation rules and your record format, and turn them into a script your agents work to.
Intake is shaped by the script, so the practice areas we cover are the ones your firm defines. The shape that fits this model best is a practice where each call is worth a great deal and the volume is low — personal injury, family, immigration, criminal defense and employment work all sit there.
VoiceTeam holds SOC 2, HIPAA, COPC and PCI DSS certifications. For legal intake that matters most in personal injury and medical malpractice work, where a caller describes injuries and treatment and the record you receive contains medical information from the first call.
