A prospective client finds your firm, picks up the phone, and calls. What happens in the next few minutes decides more than most firms assume about whether that person becomes a client. Clio has tested this twice now, in 2019 and again in 2024, by having researchers pose as prospective clients and contact real law firms. Both rounds found a gap between how fast firms think they respond and how fast they actually do.
What the research found
For the 2024 Legal Trends Report, a third-party research firm contacted 500 U.S. law firms by phone and email, posing as a prospective client, using the same method as the 2019 study. Forty percent of firms answered the phone when called, down from 56% in 2019. Some firms that missed the call phoned back later, but 48% of all firms contacted never answered and never returned the call, meaning nearly half were effectively unreachable by phone. Email was worse: only 33% of firms responded at all.
The 2019 study, summarized by the North Carolina Bar Association, found a similar pattern. Fifty-six percent of calls were answered live, 39% went to voicemail, and 57% of those voicemails were not returned within 72 hours. At the same time, 89% of lawyers surveyed believed their own firm responded to calls and emails within 24 hours. The gap was not between firms and some impossible standard. It was between what lawyers believed was happening at their own front desk and what a caller actually experienced.
Why the gap exists
None of this is because firms do not want the business. It is because the person who would answer the phone is also billing hours, covering a hearing, or already on another call, and a ringing phone competes with paying work that is already in front of them. In the moment, the work on the desk usually wins, even though the call being missed is often the next piece of paying work.
Voicemail does not close the gap either. A caller who reaches voicemail is already free to call the next firm on their search results page, and by the time anyone calls back, some of them will have signed with whoever picked up first.
What actually changes it
The fix is not asking an already-busy staff to be faster. It is making sure the call gets answered and the basic intake happens every time, regardless of who else is tied up. That can be a person whose job is specifically to cover intake, an answering service, or a voice agent that picks up, asks the standard intake questions, and books a consultation directly into the calendar your firm already uses. Any of those beats voicemail.
What should not move is who makes the actual decisions. Conflict checks, fee quotes, and whether to take a matter are judgment calls, and they stay with an attorney. Whoever or whatever answers the phone has one job: capture the enquiry accurately and get it in front of a person fast. Nobody on your team is replaced by that, they just stop being the ones stuck answering the phone between hearings.
A five-minute check for your own firm
Before changing anything, run the same test Clio's researchers ran. Have someone outside the office call your main number at a normal busy hour and again after 5pm, and send a message through your website contact form. Time how long it takes to get a real answer, and notice whether that answer actually addresses what was asked. Most firms that try this are surprised by their own numbers.
If the test comes back badly, the question is not whether to fix it but how to fix it without turning intake into a new full-time job for someone. More on what that looks like, built around the systems your firm already runs, is on our law firms page.