AI for law firms
An AI receptionist for law firms that knows what it isn’t allowed to say.
It answers at eleven at night, takes the facts an intake sheet needs, and stops dead at anything resembling advice. Every call arrives at your desk as a transcript.
The calls a firm misses are the ones that came at the worst moment
A firm’s phone doesn’t ring evenly. It rings while the attorney is in a hearing, while the paralegal is on the other line with the clerk, and at nine on a Sunday evening when someone has finally sat down and decided to do something about the thing that has been keeping them awake. That last call is the one that matters and it is the one nobody is there for.
Most people won’t leave a voicemail for a lawyer. They will call the next firm on the results page. Whoever picks up gets the conversation, and it is usually not a question of who is the better firm.
Legal intake is a specific job, not a message
An answering service takes a name and a number. That beats voicemail and it is not intake. What your intake sheet needs is the type of matter, when it happened, who the other side is, whether anything has been filed, whether there is a date on a calendar somewhere, and how to reach the person again.
That is a scripted, repeatable conversation, and it is a different script per practice area. A family matter and a personal injury matter and a probate matter need different questions in a different order. We write those with you before anything answers a call.
- Matter type first, because it decides every question after it
- Dates and deadlines captured verbatim, never paraphrased
- Names of every party mentioned, spelled back and confirmed
- How urgent it is, in the caller’s own words
It will not give legal advice, and it says so out loud
This is the boundary the whole build is arranged around. The assistant is told what it may state as fact — your hours, your locations, your practice areas, what a consultation involves, how long you usually take to call back. Everything else is out of bounds.
When a caller asks whether they have a case, what the statute of limitations is, whether they should sign something, or what they should do next, it does not guess and it does not soften the refusal into a hint. It says it is an assistant, that it can’t give legal advice, and that it will get the details in front of an attorney.
Every call opens with the assistant identifying itself as an assistant, not as a member of staff. Anyone who asks for a person gets one immediately. That is not a setting we leave to the client to choose.
A conflict screen at the front of the call, not after the consultation
The assistant can’t clear a conflict and we would not let it try. What it can do is ask for the names — the caller, the opposing party, anyone else involved — and check them against a list you maintain, before anyone at the firm has spent an hour on the matter.
A hit doesn’t produce a decision. It produces a flag on the record and a note that a human has to look at this one before a consultation gets booked. The point is that the names are collected consistently on the first call, which is the part that goes wrong when intake is done by whoever happens to be free.
The after-hours call from someone in genuine distress
A meaningful share of a firm’s evening calls come from people having a bad night. An arrest, a violent incident, a served petition, a diagnosis. That caller does not want a scripted intake and handling them badly is worse than not answering.
So the assistant is built to detect that and get out of the way. Distress, an emergency, an in-custody call, anything about immediate safety — it stops the script, gives the direct number or the emergency instruction you specified, and if you take a night line it transfers. Firms whose daytime calls are usually people in crisis should run this after hours only, and we will say so.
Florida Bar advertising rules apply to a machine too
The assistant is speaking on the firm’s behalf, which means what it says is subject to the same rules as your website and your mailers. Nothing it says claims a specialty you are not certified in, promises an outcome, compares the firm to another firm, or offers a free consultation unless you actually offer one and want it stated that way.
The script is written down, it is fixed, and you approve it before it goes live. If your marketing counsel wants to read it first, that is a normal week and not an obstacle.
Nothing runs unsupervised
For the first two weeks the firm reads every transcript. Not a sample — all of them. That is where you find the question it answered too confidently and the practice area it routed to the wrong attorney, and neither of those shows up in a demo.
After that it keeps logging everything and it keeps escalating rather than guessing. We don’t publish an accuracy figure for this, because any number we gave you would be about somebody else’s firm and somebody else’s callers.
It is built to fail towards a person.
How we scope every client-facing build
It is not a replacement for your intake person
If you have someone good on intake, this does not replace them and we would not sell it that way. It takes the calls they were never going to get to — the second and third simultaneous call, the evening, the weekend, the fortnight they are on vacation.
What your intake person gets back is a filled-in record instead of a callback list. What the firm gets is that nobody who called at nine on Sunday has already retained somebody else by Monday.
Questions
The things people ask before they hire us.
It is constrained to a written script and a list of facts about your firm, and advice questions are an explicit refusal path rather than something it is left to judge. It can still misread an ambiguous question, which is why it offers a human early and why you read the transcripts.
It states that it is an assistant, that it can’t give legal advice, and that nothing is engaged until an attorney speaks with the caller. Your own disclaimer wording goes into the script and you approve it before launch.
It collects and confirms the party names and screens them against a list you keep. A possible match is flagged for a human. It never clears a conflict itself.
You tell us which ones — an existing client mid-matter, a specific opposing counsel, a judge’s chambers, anything you name. Those transfer or go to a direct number without running intake.
Yes. It picks up the language in the first sentence and stays in it, and the summary reaches you in English either way. In South Florida this is usually the reason a firm calls us.
In your accounts — your phone number, your CRM, your storage. Florida is a two-party consent state for recording, so if you want calls recorded the disclosure goes into the greeting.
Keep reading
Related pages
Want to hear what it would say to your callers?
Tell us how intake runs now and which calls are getting missed. We’ll come back with the script and a scope — including if the honest answer is that a text-back would do the job for less.
No pitch deck, no discovery-call gauntlet. One conversation, one straight answer.