The Most Overlooked System in Your Office
Phone systems are the most overlooked piece of technology in a law office, and one of the most consequential. Your phone is how a prospective client finds you, how opposing counsel reaches you, and how a court coordinator gets an answer. It matters as much as email - and it's usually the last thing anyone looks at.
“They said they called and nobody picked up.”
Someone with a legal problem rarely calls one firm. They call three, and the firm that answers is usually the firm that gets the case. Voicemail doesn't compete with a person. And when an existing client can't reach their attorney, confidence starts eroding on the first attempt, not the third.
Most of the time this isn't anyone's fault. It's a system that was set up years ago for an office where everybody sat at a desk all day - one that has no idea the person being called is in a deposition, and no plan for what to do about it.
We build phone systems that route around reality.
- Calls follow the person instead of the desk.
- Ring groups make sure someone picks up rather than leaving it to whoever happens to be nearby.
- Calls after hours land somewhere deliberate instead of dead-ending.
Calls follow the person instead of the desk. Ring groups make sure someone picks up rather than leaving it to whoever happens to be nearby. Calls after hours land somewhere deliberate instead of dead-ending.
“Just call my cell.”
It's the fastest fix available, and it works right up until it doesn't.
Once client communication moves to a personal phone, it's happening on a device the firm doesn't own and can't see.
What that puts at risk:
- Those calls and messages sit outside the firm's records - which matters for retention, and matters more if anyone ever asks what was said and when.
- Nobody else at the firm can cover that line when the attorney is unavailable.
- When an attorney eventually leaves, the client's contact number leaves with them
Attorneys need to be reachable from a courthouse hallway, a home office, or a car. They just shouldn't have to hand out a personal number to do it. We set firms up so an attorney can take and place calls from anywhere using the firm's number - so the number belongs to the practice, not to the phone in someone's pocket.
Why this comes from us
When a call drops or the audio breaks up, a firm with a phone vendor and a separate IT company gets to watch them point at each other. The phone company says it's the network. The IT company says it's the phone service. Meanwhile nobody can hear the client.
We support the phones and the network they run on. There's nobody to hand you off to, because all of it is ours to fix.
That reaches further than most firms expect. We run the cabling ourselves, fiber included - so a new office gets wired, networked and answering calls from one company, on one schedule, with one person accountable for the date. And because a modern phone system depends on your internet connection, we build that side too: with redundant connections and automatic failover, the phones keep working when a line goes down. More on that here.
Every installation gets built around how your firm actually answers the phone, not dropped in from a template. Training for attorneys and staff is part of it - a phone system nobody understands is a phone system nobody uses.
We've been deploying and supporting business phone systems since 2008.
