As a personal injury attorney, many times, you are out of the office assisting potential customers. For example, you might gather evidence after an accident scene, interview witnesses, negotiate with insurance companies or represent the client in court. In such times, it might be difficult to pick up calls from other clients even if they are calling you for business. Most clients will hang up and take the business somewhere else when they try calling your office, and all they hear is a disembodied voice or an answering machine. 

If you want to bridge the gap between your legal profession and clients to ensure you deliver timely services or information, you will need an answering service for a law firm to talk to your clients when you are busy with another. Unfortunately, not all these answering services are the same, so how do you choose the right call agents for your firm?

Choosing the Right Call Answering Service for your injury attorney law firm

As a law firm, not every answering service out there is right for your business, meaning you have to outsource professional operators who will benefit your company in the future. The factors you should consider when choosing these companies to include:

  1. Confidentiality of the Plaintiff’s Information 

 In a personal injury claim, the person filing the claim is known as the plaintiff and they are usually calling your firm to seek help recovering compensation from the liable parties after an accident. Most of the information provided during these cases is very sensitive and if it falls in the wrong hands, it can affect the safety of the client and damage their reputation. For this reason, keeping this information private and confidential should be a priority for the answering service whose services you want to retain.

When talking to these call agencies, ensure to inquire about the measures they have to guarantee the information most clients will share when they call your office. Sometimes, a client may be filling a claim while to some extent they are to blame for the accident and subsequent injuries. If a client opens about details like these when calling your office and ends up in the hands of the opposing party or the defendant’s defense team, the claim is lost, or the damages to be awarded are reduced depending on the State you are in. With the right measures to guarantee the plaintiff’s information is not lost, clients filing injury claims will feel confident approaching your law firm, thus resulting in business growth.

  1. Timely Services to Clients Calling After a Personal Injury Accident

Some events like accidents, whether a slip and fall or car accident cannot wait, depending on how serious the accident is. Again, if it’s a car accident, the accident scene is often cleared fast to allow normal flow of traffic. If it is the caller’s first time in a car crash, they are in panic mode. Because of the shock associated with these crashes, they might end up apologizing to the other party or making self-incriminating statements. Others might not be liable for the accident, but they might not know how to gather evidence at the accident stage to be used to seek compensation. At this time, they are likely to call your office for guidance or for you to visit the scene.

There is a need to ensure that these accident or medical malpractice victims don’t wait for long before obtaining help. Injury claims are built on evidence. Even if the other party was at fault, if you cannot provide evidence to prove so, you will lose the claim, or the percentage of damages to be awarded will be significantly reduced. So, you need an answering service that will guarantee timely answering calls to help clients know what evidence they need to collect and preserve. The call agents can also forward the call to one of your injury attorneys, who will go to the scene and begin investigating the case right away. By doing so, the possibility of winning maximum compensation in a claim is improved.

  1. Experience Handling Clients Filing Personal Injury Claim

You need to choose call agents with industry-specific experience. For example, the way you talk to a client calling after committing a crime is different from how you speak to a car accident victim who has sustained life-changing injuries due to someone else’s negligence. So, find a call agency that has worked with injury attorneys in the past and has experience dealing with plaintiffs.

The actions an accident victim takes after the crash are what determines if they will receive maximum compensation or not. If the callers obtain the wrong information from the call operators on what evidence to gather or what to do after the crash, they might fail to collect crucial evidence, for instance, obtaining witness statements but fail to jot down their contact information for future tracking. In cases like these, clients end up with statements but no one to testify in court.

An answering service working with other injury attorneys understands what should be done after sustaining injuries in an accident, at work, or due to medical malpractice. They know what crucial evidence is required during these cases. Therefore, whenever a potential client calls, they can provide proper guidance and ensure that all the required evidence like medical reports, receipts, photos of the injury, and the scene are gathered and well documented.

  1. Round the Clock Services to Address the Needs of Claimants or Potential Plaintiffs

Most of the people filing claims are those that sustain injuries from car accidents, bicycle or motorcycle crashes. These accidents, especially car accidents, occur at night or during weekends and are often caused by drunk or drugged drivers. Many people will reach out to your company in the middle of the night to seek an injury attorney’s services. If you cannot answer the phone, they will hang up and call the next injury attorney on their list.

People involved in car accidents are usually in shock after the crash and what they need is a professional with empathy and one who can assure them all will be well over the phone. Accident scenes are often cleared fast to allow normal traffic flow, meaning that if an accident occurs at midnight, the car wreckages will be towed away after a few hours, and no evidence will be at the scene. Unfortunately, many accident victims don’t know how to gather this evidence, and they might be calling your office at this hour of need to obtain guidance on how to go about it. You must have live operators on the line ready to help these clients.

Your receptionists and injury attorneys often work during business hours, and they may not be available at night or during weekends to answer calls. Therefore, you need an answering service that will make a difference when you and your staff are not in the office by answering calls and routing the urgent ones to an injury attorney. Doing so will make your business reliable and stand out among your competitors.

The Benefits of an Answering Service

Regardless of how hard you work, you cannot handle two clients at the same time. You must focus on one case at a time to improve the chances of maximum compensation. Remember, most of your time is spent conducting investigations, negotiating with insurance adjusters, or representing claimants in court if you decided to file a claim in court. You will have little or no time to answer phone calls, although it doesn’t mean walk-in customers are more important than those calling on the line. Managing to respond to all calls from plaintiffs and, at the same time, pursuing the core agenda of the law firm will benefit your business in many ways. Some of the benefits of injury attorney answering services are:

You Focus on Practicing Law

Injury lawsuits are not won in the office but out there in the field and court. As an attorney, you can’t spend most of your time in the office waiting for incoming calls from potential plaintiffs. Instead, you want to be out there gathering evidence, collecting witness statements, or working with accident reconstruction experts to understand how an accident and subsequent injuries occurred. However, as you do this, you need to stay connected to other clients over the line, and the best way to do this by having phone answering services take care of your customer service. The right call operators will handle your customer needs, and you focus on winning maximum compensation for your clients.

Your Injury Attorney Law Firm Will Be Better Organized

Keeping track of client messages and calls is not a walk in the park. The chats and calls must be kept in a system that makes it easy to retrieve the information and pick priority cases that require clients to be called back immediately. An answering service will give your business a safe portal with easy access to information.

Call Routing and Bilingual Services will Ensure Accident Victims or Plaintiffs Using Different Languages are assisted.

The Spanish population in the country has been on the rise in recent years. Unfortunately, these individuals also suffer medical negligence, slip and fall accidents, and others involved in car accidents. In such incidences, the injured party is likely to seek compensation from the liable parties. The first step they will take towards obtaining full compensation for all the damages is calling your company.

If someone using a different language of communication reaches out to your company, seeking immediate help starting a claim process, you need to answer the call and provide the help needed without a language barrier. A reputable phone answering service will have bilingual call operators and routing services. If a foreigner who is not a native speaker calls the firm, the call agents will understand what they want and provide the necessary services. If the matter in question is urgent, a routing service will be used to direct the call to you because many clients will prefer talking to an attorney directly instead of a receptionist.

Your Injury Attorney Law Firm Remains Accessible All the Time

With personal injury law firms mushrooming everywhere, standing out among competitors is critical for your success. A live call center will help you stay competitive by being available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to help clients. Although the clients might not have the chance to speak to you directly, live operators have basic knowledge on personal injury law necessary to guide the customers as they wait for office hours when you will be available.

The office remains open all through, and if there is an emergency or urgent matter that can’t wait until operating hours or days, you can be connected with the customer to answer the call directly. If no one is available to answer their calls at their hour of need, they are likely to feel frustrated because no one will be available to handle their issues, meaning they will take the business to your competitors who are available round the clock.

You Become an Organized Personal Injury Attorney

As an attorney, planning when and how you will be meeting your clients is critical to the success of your law firm. If you are well organized, you can keep your word depending on the appointments scheduled by plaintiffs. In addition, when a client is filing a claim, they want a legal representative who will give their case all the attention it requires to succeed. An answering service will help you become organized to know the urgent claims that need your attention first.

Personal injury claims have statutes of limitations which are deadlines for filing claims. By differentiating urgent claims from the non-urgent, you can properly manage time to ensure no customer of yours loses their constitutional right to file a claim because their lawsuit was an urgent one but was not prioritized.

Pick the Right Answering Service For Your Injury Attorney Law Firm

Not all law firms that hire call operators enjoy the above benefits. You can only enjoy the advantages of these call agents if you chose the best in the industry. Therefore, because not all answering services are right for your business, you need to keep particular tips in mind when choosing to obtain maximum benefits from the call agents.