Your call is not important to law firms, says survey

Cloud-based legal tech provider Clio has just release what it calls the legal industry’s largest nation-wide assessment of client services among law firms. And the result’s sobering. To cut to the chase, law firms often forget to return phone calls, and emails suffer the same fate.

To conduct the study, Clio hired a research firm to contact 1,000 law firms via email and phone with inquiries designed to assess law firm responsiveness and quality of communications with potential clients. Published in this year’s Legal Trends Report, Clio found that today’s legal clients have trouble getting timely and informative responses from law firms nationwide.

“Our assessment of legal services in the United States shows that law firms are remarkably out of sync with the needs of today’s clients,” said Jack Newton, CEO and co-founder of Clio. “We hope that this year’s Legal Trends Report shines a spotlight on the tremendous opportunity awaiting consumers and lawyers, if lawyers can improve both the client-experience and firm-performance dimensions of their business.”

To assess the true state of client service in the legal industry, each law firm included in the email and phone study was contacted with a brief list of questions that a typical potential client would have when they first reach out. Results from the study show that the majority of law firms neglect their emails, and many don’t respond to phone outreach:

• Only 40 percent; responded to the email
• 56 percent of phone calls were answered by a person and 39 percent went to voicemail;
• More than half of firms didn’t respond to their voicemails within 72 hours.