Data Shows Most Firms Need to Improve Attorney-Client Communication

The number one complaint clients have about their attorneys is lack of communication.

This isn’t just a difference in expectation, either. Research consistently shows that clients feel they aren’t being properly served by their attorneys in the communication department. In 2024, Clio performed a “secret shopper” experiment. They called and emailed hundreds of law firms for their Legal Trends Report to see how they responded to someone looking to hire them.

In this blog, we’ll dive deep into the data collected from the secret shopper test. We’ll discuss what that data means for the current state of the legal industry, and offer a few solutions to help your firm better communicate with your clients without sacrificing your valuable time.

Attorney-Client Communication Through Email

This isn’t the first time Clio has performed this secret shopper experiment. In 2019, they collected similar data, allowing us to compare how law firms have changed in the intervening half-decade. Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell a nice story:

In 2019, 60 percent of law firms didn’t respond to shoppers’ email inquiries; in the 2024 version of the test, that increased to 67 percent!

The good news is that the law firms that did respond did so quickly: 84 percent got back to shoppers within 8 business hours, which is an incredibly rapid response! That’s up 2 percent since 2019.

A rapid response, however, isn’t always a satisfying one. Legal issues are usually opaque to the people experiencing them, and short of receiving legal advice, consumers are looking for specific information when they reach out to law firms. 18 percent of shoppers found that the law firms that got back to them provided rate information or clear next steps for them to take, and a shocking 2 percent referenced having helped with similar legal issues in the past!

While one could make the argument that email just isn’t as necessary in the days of AI chatbots and social media interactions, it remains the primary digital interorganizational communication tool of most businesses. At the same time, it represents less commitment than an in-person or over-the-phone conversation, so attorneys might feel that an email inquiry is less “serious”, or that it represents more of a “tire-kicker” mentality than a genuine request for help.

On average, attorneys spend 66 percent of their day in their email inboxes, spending 5.5 minutes per message. “Cold” emails, the ones that aren’t from clients, are probably dismissed more than those that pertain to active legal matters because of this conception that they are less serious.

Attorney-Client Communication Via Phone Call

Approximately one-third of the law firms emailed actually responded. The number isn’t much better when it comes to phone calls:

Only 40 percent of law firms Clio called actually answered the phone, down from 56 percent in 2019.

With experience, you might be able to tell the difference between a serious email and a digital window shopper. You could never be 100 percent sure, of course, and you’d miss out on some serious inquiries. But what’s truly shocking about the statistic above is that, unlike with email, it’s impossible to tell the difference between a real lead and someone who is unlikely to hire you.

Attorneys are busy, of course, and can’t always drop everything to answer a phone call. They can always call back, right?

They can, but this study shows that they usually don’t. Only 52 percent of calls spoke to someone, either on the initial call or on a call back. Since 40 percent of the initial calls were answered, that means only 25 percent of the firms that missed calls called the secret shoppers back!

Even when they do speak to attorneys on the phone, new prospects aren’t likely to get the information they need. 12 percent of law firms spoken to provided an estimate of the cost of resolving a legal issue. Understandably, determining the cost of a legal matter ahead of time, without knowing everything about it, isn’t an exact science and can even get you into trouble. But cost is the number one concern for clients, and 88 percent of law firms being unable to provide that information on the first phone call is a sign of misaligned expectations between attorneys and clients.

This statistic is quite frankly shocking. As we mentioned, there is no way to tell whether the phone call you’re receiving represents a qualified lead or not. Law firms are businesses, and the vast majority of clients are going to reach out over the phone to hire you. Missing their call is basically guaranteeing you won’t secure their business. Never calling back puts the final nail in that coffin.

Poor Attorney-Client Communication Is A Big Problem

Communication issues with potential clients present an obvious problem: if you never speak to a new lead, they’ll never become a new client. Of course, there’s always the possibility that you’re at capacity; you might have to clear a few cases off your docket before you can get to new ones.

But communication isn’t just a current revenue issue. Lack of communication with current and future clients will hurt your future revenue as well. 93 percent of legal consumers who didn’t receive a response to their inquiry (no matter the medium of that inquiry) were likely to be detractors to the firms that ignored them, speaking negatively of their experience and possibly even leaving negative reviews.

On the other hand, 39 percent of consumers who spoke to someone on the phone were likely to promote that firm, and 72 percent felt like they received outstanding customer service.

So the obvious answer is to respond, right? When your phone rings, pick it up, and when you receive an email, provide as much information as you can. Unfortunately, most attorneys can tell you where that road ends: always being available ends in more working hours, getting less done, and more burnout.

Solving The Attorney-Client Communication Problem

Attorneys are always in a bit of a bind. Since most bill by the hour, time is literally money, and that incentivizes you to spend as much time as possible on billable tasks like actually practicing the law. But many attorneys also have to juggle the business parts of the law: bringing in and securing new clients.

You have to be available to new clients to make money, or you risk their detractions online and to their friends and family as well as, of course, losing their business. At the same time, you need to spend time practicing the law in order to bill the clients you do have. Luckily, these conflicting issues do have shared solutions, and like many issues facing the legal world, a smart use of technology and delegation can get you out of this bind.

Round Out Your Attorney-Client Communication With A Chatbot

Potential clients want to speak to a human representative of the law firm they’re seeking out as soon as possible, of course. The younger your client base, however, the more likely they are to be temporarily satisfied with an AI chatbot:

34 percent of Gen Z and 25 percent of millennials have used AI-powered chatbots to get legal help.

Of course, these chatbots have to stop short of actually offering legal advice. But if you’re too busy to answer emails and phone calls, AI chatbots can be a great way to secure web leads that would otherwise have slipped through the cracks.

Once the chatbot has gathered a web lead’s information, you can reach back out to them via the medium of your choice when you have the time, allowing you to take a little bit more control over your communication schedule.

Delegate Your Inbox To Improve Attorney-Client Communication

Ironically, email is one area where improving your communication with new leads and clients might not need to involve technology.

Automated instant-response emails can help buy you some time, but if they don’t respond to a lead’s specific inquiry, they won’t be very helpful. Other kinds of automation, like AI-powered inboxes, might one day provide a technological solution to this problem, but as of the time of this writing, AI is much better suited to summarizing and drafting individual emails than it is to running an entire inbox on its own, not to mention a lack of legal-specific AI email tools at the moment.

This answer is going to sound old-school, but it works: delegate your email. After all, before the digital age, lawyers would dictate letters to secretaries who would transcribe them. These same secretaries would also sort through their mail to determine what was actually worth the attorney’s time.

If you have the staff, you can delegate inbox management to someone in your office. Set up protocols to decide which emails can be handled by your staff and which need your direct attention. Those protocols would have to be specific to your firm, but an easy way to differentiate between these two types of emails is asking, is it billable? If it is, obviously it should be handled by an attorney. If not, chances are it can be delegated.

If you’re a solo or on a tight budget, there are services that will allow you to outsource your inbox at low cost. Outsourcing might feel less personal than in-office delegation, but it can also get you 24/7 email coverage, meaning that when you wake up every morning, your inbox will be well-organized and your to-do list much shorter than you might be used to!

Get 24/7 Attorney-Client Communication With A Legal Answering Service

Somewhere between the all-tech solution of an AI chatbot and the low-tech solution of delegating inbox management lies the solution to making sure you answer every phone call: hiring a legal answering service.

Many law firms have receptionists to help them handle phone calls, which, frankly, makes missing 60 percent of calls even more shocking. But it makes a little more sense when you consider that it can be expensive to get 24/7 coverage in-office. Nine to five, after all, only represents a third of the day, even if it is the busiest third. A legal answering service allows you to sidestep that problem by providing 100 percent phone coverage 24 hours a day.

That, of course, is the delegation side of the benefits of a legal answering service. Nowadays, many answering services also offer technological solutions like integrations with law firm CRMs to help smooth out their customers’ workflows.

Particularly tech-savvy firms might have highly automated workflows, with follow-ups and reminders and payment notifications all scheduled based on the state of a legal matter. One thing that can be hard to automate, however, is the response to inbound phone calls. People still prefer speaking to a live human being when they call a law firm, so AI automation is, for now, out of the question. Delegation to a legal answering service with CRM integrations can get you the best of both worlds.

Bringing inbound phone calls into your tech stack with a legal answering service will, of course, increase the number of phone calls you answer, and thereby increase the number of cases you bring in every month. But it will also make managing those cases easier. Those same automations mentioned above can also be performed for inbound phone calls, allowing you to offload the data entry associated with the beginning of a legal matter to your virtual receptionists, all without lifting a finger.

Make Attorney-Client Communication Easy With Answering Legal

If there’s a theme to this blog, it’s that it’s imperative to save time when you’re practicing the law. And as far as attorney-client communication goes, nobody saves time better than Answering Legal. Not only will you get the best 24/7 legal answering service around, but we’ll also handle all the setup for you.

Our receptionists only answer for lawyers, which means they’re well-equipped to handle calls coming into your law firm. They perform hundreds of legal intakes every day to the custom specifications of each of our law firms. The benefit here, of course, is that you’ll receive highly-trained, expert phone handling without having to do any of the training yourself.

The same theme applies to our CRM integrations. As part of setting up your service, we’ll also set up direct integrations with your CRM of choice. We integrate with the biggest legal CRMs on the market, and are always adding more integration partners to our roster.

The best part? All of the above is included in our free trial, and more. 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.