The Best Law Firm VoIP Phone Systems

You can’t run a law firm without a business phone number. Even if you’re a true solo, you’re going to want the degree of separation that comes with having a dedicated phone number for your law firm. Imagine, not just clients having your cell phone number, but anyone who comes across your marketing and advertising!

There are plenty of ways to solve this problem, of course. Before the days of nationwide internet connectivity, people would use landlines as business phones and forward their calls to their cell phones when they left the office. Nowadays, however, clients love being able to text and even video call their lawyers, features that can be difficult to manage on just a landline phone.

Luckily, in this case, technology has kept up with client demand. With a law firm VoIP phone system, you can have the best of both worlds: a business phone number and the ability to text and even video conference from it! The only caveat, though, is that you might have to pay a monthly fee to get the best quality service. At the end of this blog, we have a list of recommendations to make it easy to find the law firm VoIP phone system that best fits your firm’s unique needs.

Why Pay For A Law Firm Cloud Telephone System?

There are, of course, free solutions to the issue we just described. It’s easy to find law firm VoIP phone systems like Google Voice that won’t charge you for a virtual number. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. While you may not be paying with your wallet, you’ll be suffering in other areas. For example, unless you signed SMS compliance paperwork, you don’t legally have a business phone number, and if you used it for business purposes like SMS advertising, you could be fined.

So what are you getting when you pay for a law firm cloud telephone system? Well, for one thing, you’re getting a system that will scale with your practice. Free options might seem fine for solos, but as your firm (hopefully) grows, a law firm VoIP system will grow with it, enabling you to add lines and features a growing business needs.

Perhaps most important, however, is that by paying for a law firm cloud telephone system, you’re making sure you own your own phone number. It’s easy to port a phone number from one provider to another, like switching cell phone providers. There’s sometimes a nominal fee, but some services will cover that fee for you. There’s no downtime in the porting process, and all phone providers legally have to port, so there’s no need to worry about losing the number that’s on your marketing.

Here at Answering Legal, we encourage every one of our customers to take control of their phone number, and highly recommend that you do it too! Certain free law firm VoIP phone systems make it difficult to forward calls to answering services, and the services that do forward from those providers often charge extra to do it. If you’re looking to combine your law firm cloud telephone system with an answering service, you’ll save money on your answering service by using one of the providers below!

Best Law Firm VoIP Phone Systems

Corvum

• Features: Standard, with some designed for lawyers
• Integrations: Clio
• Lowest VoIP Price: $25/month

Like Answering Legal, Corvum was built for lawyers. Corvum offers everything a lawyer needs from their phone system, as well as some features that other law firm cloud telephone systems usually offload to integrations, like automated time tracking for your legal matters. They integrate with Clio, and have a Zapier integration suite in beta at the time of writing.

RingCentral

• Features: Comprehensive, AI-enhanced
• Integrations: Clio, Lawmatics, Salesforce
• Lowest VoIP Price: $30/month

RingCentral is the biggest law firm VoIP phone system among Answering Legal customers. At a competitive price, they offer a comprehensive, AI-enhanced feature set that scales well with your practice, and they integrate with a lot of the tools lawyers are already using.

Dialpad

• Features: Advanced, AI-enhanced
• Integrations: Clio, Salesforce
• Lowest VoIP Price: $27/month

Dialpad offers an advanced feature suite with a focus on AI. For now, AI features are a side focus of many companies, and only really available to the largest law firm VoIP phone systems providers. Dialpad is different, as AI is their main focus. If you’re interested in a tech-forward solution, Dialpad might be your choice!

Vonage

• Features: Extensive, AI-enhanced
• Integrations: Clio, Salesforce
• Lowest VoIP Price: $20/month

Vonage is one of the biggest VoIP providers nationwide. They offer a robust cloud communication platform for a surprisingly affordable base price, since they work at enterprise scale. Like other large providers, they offer AI-enhanced features like transcription, and integrate with CRMs like Clio.

Nextiva

• Features: Wide-ranging, AI-enhanced
• Integrations: Salesforce
• Lowest VoIP Price: $30/month

Nextiva is another of the biggest VoIP providers in the world, and is used by small businesses and international conglomerates alike. They offer integrations with CRM tools used across all kinds of industries, like Salesforce, as well as a suite of AI-enhanced features.

Ooma

• Features: Standard
• Integrations: Clio, Salesforce
• Lowest VoIP Price: $20/month, no contracts

Ooma offers a standard suite of features perfect for a small business like a law firm. What makes them stand out is just how user-friendly their systems are. In addition, they emphasize that their competitive price is completely contract free!

OpenPhone

• Features: Standard, AI-enhanced*
• Integrations: Salesforce*
• Lowest VoIP Price: $20/user/month

OpenPhone offers a user-friendly interface with a focus on small businesses and team-focused business management. Their pricing structure is truly flexible, as well, allowing firms to scale their phone systems up as they grow and only pay for what they need.

Line2

• Features: Second phone number
• Integrations: None
• Price: $10

Line2 is a great option for solos who don’t need anything too complicated. It’s as simple as this: a second phone number you can access through an app on your phone! The simplicity of the service is reflected in the price, too.

8x8

• Features: Robust, AI-enhanced
• Integrations: Salesforce
• Lowest VoIP Price: Contact sales

8x8 (Eight By Eight) is another global VoIP phone system provider, and is well-suited to growing law firms. Unfortunately, as of the time of writing we were unable to find a pricing structure comparable to our other entries, so you’d have to contact them to see how they’d fit into your budget.

Invest In Law Firm Communications Systems

Clio’s Legal Trends Report has demonstrated that the more technology law firms use in their legal intake, the “stickier” their firms become, the stickier they are, the better their revenue. Sure, client portals and webforms absolutely count, but so do phone systems and answering services!

The options above represent an actual budget item on your firm’s balance sheet, as opposed to the free VoIP providers we discussed above. But for that investment, you’re getting scalability, ease-of-use, and power over your own phone number. It’s absolutely worth your monthly fee to pick up one of the options above, or another one that you feel fits your firm better.

The law firm VoIP phone systems above are all popular among lawyers like you: our customers here at Answering Legal. They work well with our service, and let us easily implement our conditional call forwarding, or “rollover forwarding” using custom protocols. That lets our customers handle calls themselves when they’re available without ever missing a call, because after a few rings calls get routed to our receptionists!

Take control of your phone systems. Click here or call 631-686-9700 to sign up for our free trial. For a limited time, we’re offering firms that sign up for our service their first 400 minutes free.