By trade2 min read

For solicitors and law firms

The line is simple and absolute: gather information, book appointments, give no advice. Everything useful sits on the right side of it.

Published 2 May 2026 · Updated 15 August 2026

Law firms have a specific phone problem. Fee earners are in meetings, at court or with clients, and the calls arriving are a mixture of new enquiries worth thousands and existing clients wanting progress updates.

Both suffer from the same shortage of available people, and the second crowds out the first.

New enquiries are made in a moment of stress

Somebody ringing a solicitor has usually worked up to it. An accident, a separation, a dispute, a deadline. If nobody answers, a meaningful proportion do not ring back that week, and some never do.

The firm that answers, takes the details calmly and books an appointment usually gets the instruction, because the caller wanted the decision made.

Progress calls are the volume problem

In conveyancing especially, progress chasing swamps the switchboard and pulls fee earners off the work that would produce the progress being chased.

An assistant that answers every one, takes the matter reference and either provides the update you have made available or logs it for the file handler, changes the economics of a conveyancing department more than anything else on this list.

Easier to hear than to read about

Callwise answers your phone the way this article describes. Ring it, ask it something awkward, and see whether it holds up.

Talk to our AI assistant

Conflict checking at intake

Capture the other side's name before an appointment is offered. Where a check can be run against what you make available, run it. Where it cannot, capture the details and flag for a person to check before the appointment is confirmed.

Getting this into the intake script prevents the awkward conversation later.

Routing by department

Family, conveyancing, personal injury, employment and commercial all need different intake questions and different diaries. A single generic script wastes the opportunity.

The intake questions are also where a firm's real efficiency gain sits, because a well captured enquiry means the first appointment starts halfway through rather than at the beginning.

Sensitive calls

Family and personal injury callers are often distressed. The assistant should be unhurried, should not press, and should have a clear route to a person for anybody who wants one.

It should also never attempt reassurance about the merits of a case. Taking details and booking an appointment is the whole job.

Confidentiality and records

Calls will contain confidential and sometimes special category information. That makes the data questions more important than for most businesses: a data processing agreement, a defined retention period, and clarity on whether data is used for model training.

The upside is that every enquiry now has a transcript, which is better evidence of what was said at first contact than most firms currently hold.

Questions people ask

Could it accidentally give legal advice?

It must be configured not to, explicitly and repeatedly, and tested against attempts to draw it out. Test that specifically before going live.

Is this appropriate for legal aid work?

The intake questions differ but the principle holds. Capturing eligibility information accurately at first contact saves considerable time.

Hear it answer a call

Ring the assistant and ask it the awkward question your customers always ask. If you like what you hear, it will book you in there and then.