What Can the Person Answering a Law Firm Phone Tell You Before Any Attorney Does?

Ask an intake coordinator at a law firm what happens on a first call and the answer sounds nothing like what callers expect, because the first substantive conversation with a firm is almost never with an attorney at all. It is with an intake coordinator or a legal assistant who takes the details, runs the conflict check, decides which attorney the matter belongs to, and frequently knows within a few minutes whether the firm will take it. What follows is composite and paraphrased rather than quoted from any one person, and it is organized around the questions callers ask least often.

What the First Call Is Actually Deciding

Three things at once, they describe. Whether the matter falls inside a practice area the firm handles, which is a considerably narrower question than the public assumes. Whether there is a conflict, which is why the full names of everyone involved are asked for before anything else happens. And whether the timeline is workable, since a matter arriving days before a deadline may be declined for that reason alone regardless of its merits. A caller who supplies all three quickly gets a useful answer quickly, including the answer that this is not the right firm.

What Callers Misunderstand About the Money

The deposit, consistently and by a wide margin. Callers hear a retainer figure as the fee for the matter, when it is a balance held in trust and drawn against as work is performed, and intake staff describe explaining that several times a week to people who are relieved rather than alarmed once it is clear. The second is the consultation itself: whether it is free, what it costs, whether the fee is credited against a later engagement, and how long it runs are all things an office will state plainly, and a surprising share of callers never ask.

What Makes a Caller Easy to Help

A short ordered account and the documents to hand. The most productive calls are the ones where a caller can say what happened in four or five sentences with dates attached, name the other parties, and read from a contract when asked to. The least productive are not the complicated matters. They are the calls where somebody has an account of a grievance rather than of events, and where the dates and documents are going to have to be assembled later anyway, at which point the same conversation happens a second time.

What they suggest having in front of you is short: full legal names of every person and business involved, the date the matter started and the date of the most recent development, any letter, notice or filing already received with its date, whether anybody else has been consulted about it, and the outcome you are hoping for stated in a single sentence. Assembled beforehand, that turns a twenty minute call into an eight minute one and moves the matter to an attorney a day or two earlier than it otherwise would.

The Questions Callers Should Ask and Rarely Do

Four, they say, and none of them is about the outcome. How quickly does this firm typically respond to a client message, which is the single largest source of dissatisfaction later on. Who will be the day to day contact. What will the firm need from me, and by when. And is there a deadline in my matter that I should know about right now, which intake staff can answer more often than callers expect, because they see the same categories of matter constantly and know which ones carry a clock running underneath them.

What Happens Next, and What Happens on a Decline

The normal sequence they describe is a callback or scheduled consultation within a few business days, an engagement letter within a week of that consultation if the firm takes the matter, and a first substantive step once the deposit has cleared the trust account, with anything slower worth asking about rather than waiting through. Two habits in the meantime cause problems: contacting several firms at once is sensible and worth disclosing, and continuing to correspond with the other party while a consultation is pending frequently changes the facts an attorney is being asked to advise on.

When a firm declines, most say so quickly and many suggest a direction, whether that is a different practice area, a bar association referral service, a legal aid organization, or a route that involves no attorney at all. Callers tend to hear a decline as a judgment on the merits of their problem when it is usually a statement about practice areas or capacity. The advice they give is to ask one more question before hanging up, which is who would you call given what I have described, because the answer is free and comes from somebody who watches this market every day.