Legal Services
Of routine calls deflected from lawyer time
First response time, down from a nine-minute average wait
About
The firm set out to free its lawyers from routine phone calls and raise service consistency. FAQs, bookings, and document requests made up 57% of call volume, average wait time ran nine minutes, and lost context on transfer created real malpractice risk. We built a conversational AI front desk that answers, books, and hands off with full context attached.
Industry
Legal Services
Company size
100 – 500 employees
Founded
1994
The Company
A firm where routine calls were consuming billable time
The firm is a mid-sized law firm whose intake line fielded a high volume of calls that had nothing to do with substantive legal work — appointment bookings, document status requests, and answers to frequently asked questions were absorbing meaningful attorney and paralegal time.
With FAQs, bookings, and document requests making up 57% of total call volume, the firm's most expensive resource — lawyer time — was routinely spent on calls that required no legal judgment at all.
The challenge
Nine-minute waits and context lost on every transfer
Average wait time before a call was answered ran nine minutes, and when a call did need to be transferred to the right attorney, the context from the original conversation was frequently lost — the client had to re-explain their situation from scratch, and any detail the client mentioned but the transferring staff member forgot to relay simply didn't make it through.
Beyond the service-quality cost, lost context on transfer carried genuine malpractice risk: a detail a client mentioned early in a call that didn't reach the attorney handling the matter was a detail that could matter later.
The Solution
Whisper transcription, GPT-4 handling, and full-context handoffs
We built a conversational AI front desk where Whisper transcribes incoming speech, GPT-4 answers routine questions directly or books appointments where appropriate, and Elastic APM logs every step for audit and quality review. When a call genuinely needs an attorney, the system hands off through CRM integration with the full conversation context already attached.
The system was scoped deliberately to routine categories — FAQs, bookings, document status — rather than attempting to handle substantive legal questions, keeping the boundary between automated and attorney-handled work clear and appropriate for a law firm's risk profile.
The Results
44% deflection, four-minute response, 25% lower cost per contact
44% of routine calls are now handled without attorney or paralegal involvement, and first response time fell from a nine-minute average wait to under four minutes for calls that do need a human. Cost per client contact fell 25% as routine-call handling moved off billable staff time entirely.
Because every escalated call now carries its full conversation context, attorneys picking up a transferred call start from where the client actually left off rather than asking the client to re-explain — closing the malpractice-risk gap that lost-context transfers had been creating.
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