Why Your Real Estate Law Firm Needs an Answering Service

Real estate law covers a vast, sprawling, complex collection of topics and precedents. Between residential real estate, commercial and industrial properties, government interests, and REITs, it’s one of the most difficult areas of our legal system to understand. And it can vary greatly from one location to another. Real estate law firms help their clients (private citizens, private businesses, municipalities, government agencies, investment firms, and others) to navigate this body of law. 

The challenge here is that much of this work means that real estate attorneys and their teams must be out of the office a great deal. When they’re in the office, they’re usually head down creating contracts, studying zoning issues, crafting mortgage agreements, and more.

That leaves little time for the administrative side of running a business. Tasks like answering phone calls, replying to emails, and responding to web-based queries too often fall by the wayside. This can leave potential clients and existing clients out in the cold, but a legal answering service can help.

The many demands on a real estate law firm’s availability

Perhaps the single greatest challenge a real estate law firm faces in today’s world is availability. There are simply so many demands on your team’s time and attention. Just a few of the most common include:

• Risk mitigation

• Regulation compliance

• Permitting and zoning

• Navigating land disputes

• Property tax matters

• Title problems

• Handling mortgage documents

• Creating accurate, binding contracts

These are just a few of the responsibilities that land on your shoulders. Depending on the client or your area of focus, the list could be even more massive. A legal answering service can take some of that burden off your team, allowing you to focus more fully on important tasks without worrying that you’re not handling communications properly.

The benefits offered by partnering with a law firm answering service

If your team cannot be available for leads and existing clients when it comes to communication, they’re not going to patronize your law firm. Existing clients may get fed up with being unable to reach a live person, and leads will waste little time in turning to a competing law firm. A legal answering service can prevent that from happening. Let’s discuss a few of the benefits to your firm of partnering with such a service.

Increased availability

The first and most important benefit is that your law office enjoys better availability. An experienced virtual receptionist can answer phone calls, reply to emails, respond to web queries, and more while your team handles more immediately important matters. Current clients and potential leads contacting your law firm get the live, human response they want and deserve, and virtual receptionists can also provide information, answer questions, and more to build loyalty with clients and convert potential leads.

Improved lead screening

Given the vast complexity of real estate law, chances are good that you get a lot of calls from potential clients who need a service that you don’t offer. Spending any time with these individuals on the phone is a waste, but it’s often inevitable. And while your phone lines are tied up with low-quality leads, high-quality leads trying to contact you can’t get through. 

A legal answering service improves your lead screening process by weeding out low-quality leads who aren’t a great fit for your office and ensuring that calls from high-quality leads are answered promptly. However, it goes beyond just focusing on answering calls from the right people. Experienced virtual receptionists ask for context and capture names, contact information, and important details your team needs before returning a call from a pre-qualified lead.

Keep your eye on the ball

How often do your team members have to spend extra time digging for information about a client’s past experiences with your firm before calling them back? How often do they drop the ball because details were missing from reports or interaction records? It’s pretty common, but that doesn’t have to be your fate. 

A legal answering service helps ensure that your team stays hyper-focused by providing powerful call intelligence in the form of real-time call data, accurate data visualizations, call recordings, transcriptions, and metadata. You’ll have access to each client’s complete timeline with your law firm, actions completed, the client/lead’s disposition, and more. It’s all about getting access to the bigger picture so you can make more informed decisions.

Move into the digital age

While many clients and potential clients are happy to call your office, a growing percentage prefer digital communications, like web-based chat. Of course, staffing a chat function with in-office personnel is challenging at the best of times. 

A legal answering service can provide AI and human-based web chat services to answer questions, provide guidance, and help convert leads into clients. Plus, the right service will offer this 24/7, ensuring that no matter when a lead has questions, there are accurate answers to be had.

It’s time to make the smarter choice

Struggling to handle in-office communications with just your staff? It’s more than a little challenging, particularly considering the limited availability of your real estate law firm. A legal answering service gives you back your availability and is a smarter choice than trying to go it alone.

At Smith.ai, our virtual receptionists deliver the services you need to better support your clients and convert more leads. From 24/7 answering to lead screening and intake, call intelligence and metadata, call recording and transcription, and web chat, we help your team become more productive and efficient.

To learn more, schedule a consultation or reach out to hello@smith.ai.

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