Stop Missing Client Calls. Automate Your Law Firm's Intake with Voice AI.
A small law firm should use a custom voice AI for call handling to qualify new clients 24/7. This system captures intake details, routes urgent calls, and schedules consultations without manual intervention.
The system's scope depends on your firm's needs. A personal injury practice with a single intake script is a straightforward build. A multi-practice firm requiring different logic for family law, criminal defense, and estate planning requires more complex routing and integration.
We built a voice AI for a 7-person personal injury firm handling 25+ daily intake calls. The system reduced non-billable phone time by 5 hours per week per paralegal and went live in 4 weeks. They now capture every lead, even those that call at 10 PM on a Saturday.
What Problem Does This Solve?
Many firms start with a live answering service like Ruby. While professional, these services charge per minute, and a standard 10-minute intake call can cost over $30. The agents follow a rigid script, cannot ask dynamic follow-up questions, and send a simple email summary. This creates hours of manual data entry, transferring call notes into case management software like Clio or PracticePanther.
Trying to build a do-it-yourself solution with a tool like Twilio Studio is another common failure. These visual builders are designed for simple phone trees, not the complex conditional logic of legal intake. A workflow that asks about accident details for personal injury but marital assets for family law becomes a tangled mess of widgets that is impossible to update. You spend weeks building a brittle system that still requires an engineer to modify.
This leads to a critical failure point. A potential client calls on a Friday night about a case with an impending statute of limitations. The answering service takes a message. The email summary gets buried in a weekend inbox. By Monday morning, the client has already signed with another firm, and you have lost a six-figure case because your intake process relied on manual handoffs.
How Does It Work?
We begin by mapping your firm's exact intake questions for each practice area. We translate this logic into a system prompt for the Claude API, defining the AI's goals and specifying a structured JSON output for every call. This ensures data is consistently captured for direct integration with your existing legal software.
The core system is a Python application built with the FastAPI framework. When a call arrives via Twilio's Programmable Voice API, the application streams audio for real-time transcription. The text is sent to the Claude API, and the AI-generated response is converted to speech and played back to the caller with less than 500ms of latency. The entire service is deployed on AWS Lambda, ensuring it only incurs costs when actively handling a call.
Once a call concludes, the structured JSON data is used to make a direct API call to your case management system using the httpx library. A new matter is created in Clio or MyCase in under 2 seconds, with all intake notes, contact information, and case details populated automatically. A transcript and summary are stored in a Supabase Postgres database for archival, and a notification is sent to a dedicated Slack channel for immediate team awareness.
This architecture handles up to 10 concurrent calls without any performance issues. For a typical small firm managing 300 intake calls per month, the total cloud services cost for Twilio, AWS Lambda, and the Claude API is under $50. We use structlog for structured logging, allowing us to trace every step of a call if an error occurs.
What Are the Key Benefits?
Capture Every After-Hours Lead
The system answers calls 24/7/365, capturing intake details from potential clients who call outside of your 9-to-5 business hours. No lead is ever lost to voicemail.
Pay for Usage, Not for Agents
Your monthly cost is based on call volume, not per-minute fees or human agent salaries. Expenses for a low-volume firm can be under $50 per month.
You Own The Intake System
You receive the full Python source code in your private GitHub repository. You are not locked into a vendor's platform, pricing model, or feature set.
Instant Case Management Entry
New client matters are created automatically in Clio or PracticePanther in under 2 seconds after a call ends. This completely eliminates manual data entry from call summaries.
Intelligent, Not Scripted, Routing
The AI understands caller intent. It routes an urgent 'car accident' call directly to your PI paralegal's cell while scheduling a consultation for a 'divorce question'.
What Does the Process Look Like?
Intake Workflow Mapping (Week 1)
You provide your current intake scripts and grant read-only API access to your case management software. We deliver a detailed process diagram and data schema for your approval.
Core AI and Telephony Build (Week 2)
We build the FastAPI application and integrate the Claude and Twilio APIs. You receive a private phone number to test the AI's conversational abilities with your team.
Integration and Deployment (Week 3)
We connect the AI to your case management system and deploy it on AWS Lambda. You receive credentials to monitor the system as it creates new matters from your test calls.
Monitoring and Handoff (Week 4+)
We monitor the live system for one week to resolve edge cases. You receive the full source code, a technical runbook, and a final handoff call to your team.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How much does a custom voice AI system cost?
- Pricing is a fixed fee based on scope. Key factors include the number of practice areas, the complexity of the intake script, and which case management system requires integration. A single-practice system is a faster build than a multi-practice firm needing custom logic and scheduling. We provide a fixed price after our initial discovery call.
- What happens if the AI misunderstands a caller or a call drops?
- The system is designed to fail gracefully. If the AI cannot understand the caller after two attempts, it automatically routes the call to a human paralegal's direct line. If a cloud service has an outage, all calls are forwarded to a backup voicemail system. We get an immediate alert and can diagnose the issue using structured logs.
- How is this better than a service like Smith.ai?
- Smith.ai uses human agents following a script, which creates manual data entry work for your team. Our system is an AI that integrates directly with your case management software, creating new client records automatically. This eliminates the administrative task of transferring notes from an email summary into your core system of record.
- Can the voice AI handle different languages or accents?
- Yes. The underlying transcription and language models support multiple languages, including Spanish. During discovery, we identify the languages and accents common among your clientele and test the system against them. This ensures high transcription accuracy before the system ever answers a real client call on your main phone line.
- Does the system record calls for compliance?
- By default, we only store the text transcript, not the raw audio recording, to minimize data privacy risks. However, we can enable call recording if your firm's compliance policy requires it. All data, whether transcript or audio, is stored in your private AWS infrastructure, not on Syntora's servers, ensuring you maintain full control.
- How does the AI know if a call is urgent?
- We define urgency triggers with you during the initial mapping phase. For a PI firm, phrases like 'statute of limitations' or 'served papers' can trigger an immediate SMS alert to an on-call attorney and flag the new matter as high-priority in your case management software. This logic is fully customized to your firm's specific needs.
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