Stop Missing After-Hours Calls from Qualified Legal Leads
A custom voice AI agent is best for after-hours legal intake. It asks qualifying questions and summarizes calls for morning review.
We built an intake agent for a 7-person personal injury firm that was losing calls to voicemail. Their after-hours call-to-consultation rate increased from 15% to 40% in the first month. The entire system was designed and deployed in 12 business days.
The system's complexity depends on the number of qualification criteria and the specific case management software integration. A straightforward intake for a single practice area like personal injury is a two-week build. A system with branching logic for family, criminal, and business law that connects to a custom-built CRM requires more discovery and development time.
What Problem Does This Solve?
Most law firms start with a traditional answering service. These services are staffed by generalists who take messages but cannot qualify leads. They often misspell names or misinterpret critical case details, leading to frustrating and unproductive callbacks. A potential client with an urgent need who speaks to an unhelpful operator at 10 PM will call a competitor before your office opens.
A step up is a service like Smith.ai or Ruby, which use either human receptionists or scripted bots. While better than a basic answering service, their scripted nature is a critical failure point. If a caller asks a question outside the script, like "Do you handle cases against construction company X?", the agent defaults to taking a message. This breaks the client's confidence and fails to capture their specific, high-intent query.
Automated IVR phone trees are even worse. They force distressed callers through frustrating menus and have abandonment rates over 70%. The core problem is that none of these solutions can dynamically handle a conversation, ask intelligent follow-up questions, and integrate the results deeply into a firm's unique workflow. They are a patch, not a system.
How Does It Work?
We begin by mapping your firm's exact intake questionnaire into a conversational flow. We use the Claude API to build the core logic in Python, defining key information to extract like incident dates, party names, and injury specifics. This ensures the AI asks the same critical questions your best paralegal would, in a natural, conversational way.
The entire system is packaged as a FastAPI service and deployed on AWS Lambda. This serverless architecture scales instantly from one call to one thousand simultaneous calls and keeps hosting costs under $50 per month. We integrate a dedicated voice-to-text service that provides real-time, accurate transcriptions, and we use `httpx` for non-blocking API calls to your other systems.
Within 2 seconds of a call ending, the FastAPI service triggers. It generates a concise summary, pulls out the structured data, and includes a link to the full audio recording. This entire package is sent directly into your case management system's API, whether it is Clio, MyCase, or a custom Supabase database. Your intake team arrives in the morning to a queue of fully-vetted leads, not a list of cold phone numbers to call back.
We implement structured logging with `structlog` for every call. A simple dashboard tracks key metrics like call duration, qualification success rate, and common drop-off points in the script. If the system fails to process a call summary correctly for any reason, an automated alert is triggered so we can investigate the failure within the hour.
What Are the Key Benefits?
Qualify Leads in 90 Seconds, Not 12 Hours
Get a complete, summarized lead with extracted case details in your CRM seconds after the call ends, instead of waiting for a morning callback on a cold lead.
A One-Time Build, Not a Per-Call Fee
You pay a fixed price for the system build. After launch, you only pay for usage-based cloud hosting, not a recurring subscription or per-minute call charges.
You Own The Intake Logic and Code
We deliver the complete Python source code to your firm's GitHub repository. It's a business asset you control, not a rental from a vendor with platform lock-in.
Alerts on Failed Intakes, Not Silent Drops
We configure AWS CloudWatch alerts that notify us if a call fails to process. You never have to wonder if a lead was silently dropped by a system error.
Connects Directly to Your Legal Software
The system creates new matter or contact records natively in legal CRMs like Clio, MyCase, and Filevine. Your staff works in the tools they already use.
What Does the Process Look Like?
Intake Discovery (Week 1)
You provide your existing intake questionnaire and read-only access to your CRM. We deliver a complete conversational script and a data schema for your approval.
Agent Build and Test (Week 2)
We build the core voice agent using Python, FastAPI, and the Claude API. You receive a dedicated phone number to call and test the agent's conversational flow.
CRM Integration (Week 3)
We write the API connection to your case management software. Successful test calls will create new, correctly formatted lead records. You receive the API documentation.
Launch and Handoff (Week 4)
We port your after-hours number and go live. After a 30-day monitoring period, we deliver the full source code, documentation, and a system runbook.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How much does a custom legal intake agent cost?
- The final price is a fixed quote based on scope. Key factors include the number of unique questions in your intake script, the complexity of branching logic for different practice areas, and the specific case management software you use. A standard agent for a single practice area typically takes 2-3 weeks to build. Book a discovery call for a detailed quote.
- What happens if a caller gets angry or the AI misunderstands?
- The agent is trained to detect signs of frustration. If it fails to understand a caller's response twice in a row, it executes a graceful handoff. It will say, 'I'm having trouble understanding, let me connect you to a voicemail where you can leave a detailed message.' The full audio and transcript are still captured and sent to your team for manual review.
- How is this different from using a service like Smith.ai?
- Services like Smith.ai are shared, multi-tenant platforms using either human agents or rigid scripts. We build a dedicated, single-tenant AI system exclusively for your firm. It uses your precise intake methodology, integrates directly with your software, and you own the code. It is a permanent asset, not a monthly service rental.
- How do you handle attorney-client privilege and data security?
- We build on HIPAA-eligible AWS infrastructure. All data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Call transcripts and recordings are passed directly to your firm's secure system via an encrypted API connection. Data is not stored permanently on our systems, ensuring you maintain a clear chain of custody over sensitive client information.
- Will the voice AI sound robotic and impersonal?
- No. We use modern, high-fidelity text-to-speech engines that offer natural-sounding voices with appropriate pacing and intonation. We select a voice that matches your firm's desired tone, whether it is compassionate, authoritative, or straightforward. The experience is much closer to speaking with a human than interacting with a traditional automated phone system.
- Can the system handle a sudden spike in calls from a marketing campaign?
- Yes. The AWS Lambda architecture is serverless, meaning it scales automatically to meet demand. It can handle one call or hundreds of simultaneous calls without any degradation in performance. You only pay for the compute time you use, making it highly efficient for both predictable and unpredictable call volumes without any manual intervention.
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