What does an AI receptionist cost for a law firm?

In TalentOS, Ira is one worker at $500 a month, and setup starts at $2,500 once per account. Her call allowance is agreed on the sales call. Whatever you compare her against, price it on your own after-hours call count rather than a vendor's average.

Is an AI receptionist a good idea for a law firm?

It can be, if you supervise it like any other tool. ABA Formal Opinion 512 applies a lawyer's existing duties of competence, confidentiality, communication and supervision to AI. In practice that means reading the transcripts, knowing exactly what the line says to callers, and keeping every decision with a lawyer.

Can an AI receptionist complete legal intake?

For personal injury, Ira runs the full intake from your firm's question set and grades the lead. For other practice areas she answers from the details you publish and takes the caller's name, matter and contact details. Conflict checks, signing the client and deciding the case stay with your team.

Will callers hang up on an AI?

Some will. Nobody we could find publishes a reliable hang-up rate for AI receptionists, so compare against what those callers get today, which is usually voicemail. Ira's greeting says the call is recorded, and she tells callers she is an AI assistant before the call ends.

Are calls recorded, and are callers told?

Every call Ira takes is recorded and transcribed, and her greeting says so. Recording-consent rules differ from state to state, so have your own counsel confirm the greeting fits every state you take calls from.

Will it give legal advice?

No. Ira never gives legal advice, never states a deadline and never turns a caller away. Those stay with your attorneys.

Is it worth answering after-hours calls if most are not cases?

Count them before you decide. A grade sorts the callbacks so the strongest matters are called first, and the callers who are not cases still get their message taken properly instead of waiting in a voicemail box.

Can it answer in Spanish?

Not today. Ira speaks English only. If a real share of your callers prefer Spanish, plan for those calls separately rather than assuming an English-only line covers them.

After-hours personal injury intake: what the first call must capture

In 2024, Clio called 500 US law firms posing as a prospective client. Only 40% answered the phone, down from 56% in 2019, and 48% neither answered nor returned the call (Clio's 2024 Legal Trends secret shop, as reported by the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism).

That study doesn't split the figure by time of day, and nobody we could find publishes a credible after-hours number for US firms. Most of the after-hours statistics in vendor ads have no traceable source. So the honest starting point for a personal injury firm isn't somebody else's average. It's your own phone log.

Measure your own after-hours gap

You can do this in an afternoon, and it's the only number that tells you whether after-hours intake is worth paying for.

Pull a month of call logs from your phone provider. Count the calls that arrived after close and on weekends.
Split them by what happened next: answered, reached voicemail, left a message, called back, and how long the callback took.
Call your own line as a stranger. Try a weekday at 7 pm and a Saturday morning, and listen to what a person who was just in a crash hears. The North Carolina Bar Association has a good guide to this, under the plain title Secret Shop Your Law Firm.

The number that matters is the last one in step 2: of the callers who reached voicemail, how many ever spoke to someone at the firm.

The personal injury first-call checklist

A first call doesn't need to be a consultation. It needs to leave an attorney enough to decide quickly whether to call back first thing. Here is what a complete personal injury intake captures, grouped the way a callback reads it.

The caller

Name, best number, and whether a text is fine.
Whether they are the injured person or calling for someone else.
When they can take a callback, so the callback is a plan rather than a guess.

What happened

The date, and where it happened, down to the state.
What happened, in the caller's own words.
The kind of incident: a car crash, a fall, a dog bite, something at work.
Whether police came, and whether there is a report number.

Injuries and care

What hurts, and whether it's getting better or worse.
Where they have been seen so far: the emergency room, a doctor, nowhere yet.

Insurance and paperwork

Whether the other side has insurance, and whether the caller has their own.
Whether an adjuster has already called, and whether the caller has signed anything or accepted any payment.

Other lawyers

Whether another lawyer is already involved. If one is, take the message and promise nothing: a callback is exactly the contact the caller's own lawyer should be handling.

Two things the first call should never do: decide the matter, or tell the caller a deadline. Whether to take a case is an attorney's judgment, and so is anything about time limits.

Sorting the 9 am callbacks

If ten calls came in overnight, the order you return them in is a decision. Make it on the facts the caller gave, not on whoever left the longest voicemail.

A useful grade looks at three things separately: liability (how clear it is who was at fault), damages (how serious the injuries are and how they are being treated) and collectability (whether there is insurance to recover from). Each part of the grade should name the answer behind it. An attorney reading "B, disputed liability" should be able to see that the caller said they were turning left on a yellow.

Two more rules make a grade safe to rely on:

Missing answers are gaps, not penalties. A caller who didn't know the other driver's insurer hasn't lowered their grade. The gap goes on the list for the callback.
Old incidents go to a person the same day. When the incident is many months old, how fast the firm moves can matter more than the grade.

Recording, and telling the caller

Record every intake call, and say so in the greeting. When the summary says the caller was rear-ended on Friday, anyone on the team should be able to hear it in the caller's own words, and the recording is what lets an attorney supervise what the line actually said.

ABA Formal Opinion 512 is the ethics anchor for any AI on the phone. It doesn't create new rules. It applies the duties you already have (competence, confidentiality, communication and supervision) to the tool. Recording consent is a separate question that varies by state. We haven't summarized the state rules here, and you shouldn't rely on a vendor's summary either: have counsel check the greeting against the states you take calls from.

Callers who are not new matters

Plenty of after-hours calls are not new cases: existing clients asking for an update, adjusters returning a call, medical providers chasing a records request, opposing counsel. They don't need an intake. They need to reach the right person, and that person needs to know they called.

So the line needs your directory: who handles which matters, who leads each team, and who should hear about a caller who asks for someone by name.

How we handle it

This is the job Ira does in TalentOS. She answers the firm's own number in a live voice conversation, 24 hours a day, and answers texts to it.

For personal injury she runs the full intake from your firm's question set, and you choose the questions she skips. She grades the lead A, B, C or R on liability, damages and collectability, and each reason names the caller's answer behind it. The grade comes from written rules, not the AI's opinion, and the AI can only make it more cautious. The caller never hears the letter. They hear one of two things: a consult time, offered from the staff and hours you set, or a callback owed with a due time. An incident more than 10 months old goes to an attorney the same day.

When a caller asks for someone by name, or needs a person, Ira alerts that staff member or their department's lead, as well as the owner. She looks callers up in the TalentOS CRM and logs each call to their record. Every call ends with a summary, the recording and its transcript.

What Ira will not do

Transfer a live call. An urgent call becomes a notification and a text to the owner.
Speak a language other than English.
Give legal advice, state a deadline or turn a caller away.
Run a conflict check or decide the case. Your team makes the callback and the decision.

The one number worth tracking

If you track one intake number this quarter, make it this: how many after-hours callers reached voicemail, and how many of them ever spoke to the firm. It's usually the most expensive number in the firm, and it's usually nobody's job.

See how Ira fits a law firm, what each worker does, and what it costs.