You already paid for that lead. Then it went to voicemail.
Your paralegals are drafting. Your receptionist has three lines and a walk-in. After five o'clock the phone goes nowhere. Meanwhile the click that produced that call cost you somewhere between $150 and $500, and the caller is already scrolling to the next firm.
What an unanswered call actually costs
In legal, the lead is expensive before anyone picks up
Most businesses lose a prospect when a call goes unanswered. A law firm loses a prospect it has already bought, at some of the highest acquisition costs in any industry.
- $150 to $500
- Cost of a single personal injury click
- $442
- Average cost of one paid personal injury lead
- $1,500 to $5,000
- Typical acquisition cost per signed case
Research on inbound response times puts the cost of slow intake at roughly 46 lost clients and around $200,000 in revenue a year for the average firm surveyed. Not from a lack of marketing. From nobody picking up the phone the marketing paid for.
And speed decides it
Twenty five minutes is the difference between a client and a competitor
Contacting a lead within five minutes makes a firm roughly twenty one times more likely to qualify it than waiting thirty. The median law firm takes thirteen minutes to respond to an online lead, and only a quarter manage it inside five.
Meanwhile 83% of legal clients now expect a same-day response. Someone who has just been in a car accident is not waiting patiently by the phone. They are filling in the next form.
21x
more likely to qualify a lead contacted inside five minutes, against one contacted at thirty.
25%
of firms actually respond inside five minutes. The rest are handing over the difference.
The fix
A dedicated intake coordinator, not an answering service
Not a call centre reading from a card and not a chatbot. One person working exclusively for your firm, trained on your practice areas, your case criteria and your intake process. Here is what that looks like across the life of a lead.
First 5 minutes
Answer, qualify, conflict check
- Live answer rather than voicemail, including the calls that land at 4.55pm
- Screening against your case criteria so attorneys only speak to qualified prospects
- Conflict of interest pre-screening before anyone gets too far into the facts
First hour
Book it before they call the next firm
- Consultation booked straight into the right attorney calendar
- Confirmation sent while the conversation is still fresh
- Intake paperwork issued with clear instructions on what to bring
First week
Convert the ones who did not sign yet
- Structured follow-up on every unsigned retainer rather than whenever someone remembers
- Chasing medical records, police reports and the documents that stall a file
- Flagging matters where a limitation deadline makes speed genuinely urgent
Ongoing
Stop clients interrupting your attorneys
- Handling the constant "any update on my case" calls that break billable focus
- Appointment confirmations and document reminders
- Keeping the case management system accurate rather than three weeks behind
1/200
Roughly one in two hundred applicants clears our full five-stage screen: English fluency, empathy testing, technical aptitude, live communication drills and culture fit. Empathy matters more here than in any other industry we place into.
Who you actually get
- Two or more years working remotely for companies in the US, UK, Canada or Australia
- Works your business hours and sits in your Slack for the full day
- Exceptional English, clear enough that a distressed caller never has to repeat themselves
- Already fluent in CRMs, case management systems and phone systems
- Stable internet, a quiet workspace, and a plan for power outages
Your first call with a prospective client is often the worst day of their life. We screen for people who can hold that conversation properly, not just process it.
Proof it works
Different industry, identical bottleneck
PJ ran a Detroit cleaning company doing $50,000 a month and was the constraint in his own business. He hired one remote assistant at $6 an hour, trained her properly over several months, then built a team of four. The company now does over $2 million a year, and one of those hires runs it as General Manager.
We have not published a law firm case study yet, and we are not going to invent one. The mechanism is the same either way: the person best placed to grow the business stops being the person answering the phone.
Read the full story- $600K
- Before
- $2M+
- Today
- 233%
- Growth
- $6/hr
- Starting rate
Included with every placement
Global OS, and an hour with me every weekday
Finding the person is the easy half. Every placement comes with Global OS, the onboarding system we built from placing over a hundred people, covering how to define the role, build their workspace, train to mastery and hold standards.
You also get me in Slack for one hour every weekday through your first thirty days. Not a support inbox, an actual hour every working day.
Worth being straight about the timeline: a coordinator handling straightforward intake is useful within weeks, but someone genuinely fluent in your practice areas and case criteria takes a couple of months of real training. Firms that plan for that get far better results than firms expecting week one competence.
Built for legal intake
- Intake scripts by practice area, including personal injury, family, criminal and immigration
- Conflict of interest screening checklist
- Consultation booking and confirmation workflows
- Follow-up sequences for signed and unsigned retainers
- Confidentiality, privilege awareness and handling sensitive medical records
- Thirty day training milestones and intake KPI tracking
What it costs
You pay your coordinator directly, between $6 and $9 an hour, which is roughly $1,040 to $1,560 a month for full-time work. Hirevado charges one flat placement fee, once. We never take a percentage of their wages and there are no recurring fees to us.
Occasionally we find candidates with formal legal education or paralegal experience in their own jurisdiction. They command more than the range above, and for firms handling complex intake they are usually worth it. Tell us if that matters to you and we will screen for it.
3-month guarantee
$1,499
90 days of unlimited replacements
6-month guarantee
$2,499
180 days of unlimited replacements
Set that against your cost per signed case. If a coordinator converts two or three matters a year that would otherwise have gone to voicemail, the placement fee and the coordinator's entire salary are both already covered.
Stop buying leads you do not answer
Tell us about your practice areas and intake process and we will screen against them specifically. Most searches put three vetted candidates in front of you within five business days, and there is no cost to review them.