Zabulis Legal. Five calls a day is too few to hire for. Far too many to miss.

O desafio

Zabulis Legal is one solicitor. Vincentas Zabulis is dual-qualified in England and Wales and at the Lithuanian Bar, practising since 2014, taking commercial disputes, debt recovery, immigration and private matters in English, Lithuanian or Russian.

The firm's standard hourly rate is £300 including VAT, and that number is the whole problem. Every call he answers himself is time he is not billing. Every call he does not answer is a matter that rings the firm down the road instead.

The volume is the cruel part. Around five calls a day. A full-time legal receptionist in the UK costs well north of £25,000 before employer contributions, for perhaps twenty minutes of actual talking. No practice this size makes that hire, so the phone goes to voicemail and the website grows a contact form.

Then there is the hire that does not exist at any price. This firm's entire proposition is three languages with no translator in the middle. Somebody fluent in English, Lithuanian and Russian who also knows what a pre-action protocol is, is not a person you recruit. It is a person you look for and give up on.

A solução

Two agents on the firm's number. Elena answers it. Tomas rings back the enquiries that arrive from the site and the ads.

Elena picks the caller's language inside the first sentence, then takes what happened in their own words before anything else. From there she either puts the matter straight into the diary or leaves a message detailed enough that the solicitor can call back already knowing the facts.

What she does not do is give legal advice, and she says so plainly when somebody asks. That boundary is deliberate. A regulated firm cannot have software telling a caller whether they have a claim, and in practice a caller told honestly that a solicitor will answer that question tends to book rather than hang up.

Tomas works the other direction. An enquiry that lands at seven in the evening gets a call that evening instead of on Tuesday morning, which is usually the difference between a case and a form somebody else followed up first.

• 🗣️English, Lithuanian or Russian, chosen in the first sentence, on one number
• 📔Takes what happened in the caller's own words, so the callback starts with the facts
• 💷Quotes the published fixed fees: £75 for a letter before action, plus 15% of what is recovered
• 🚫Does not give legal advice, and says so. Triage and booking only.

Os agentes da conta

Elena

The front desk, in three languages

around 5 calls a day

Tomas

Enquiry callback, same evening

1 to 2 new enquiries a day

Os resultados

At £300 an hour, a solicitor who answers his own phone is paying himself to work reception. At five calls a day, nobody hires a receptionist to do it instead. That gap is where small firms quietly lose work, and closing it is the entire job here.

Além dos números

O verdadeiro salto veio ao descobrir por que os clientes abandonavam em primeiro lugar. As transcrições das chamadas da Callsy trouxeram à tona as objeções recorrentes:

Essas informações viraram melhorias nas FAQs, nas páginas de destino e nos fluxos de e-mail. Tratando as objeções mais cedo para que menos carrinhos cheguem a ser abandonados.

O que vem agora

Lead generation and the answering line are one system, not two. An ad that produces an enquiry at seven in the evening is worth nothing if the enquiry waits until Tuesday, and this firm had both halves of that problem at the same time.

Out of hours is where the margin sits. Legal problems do not arrange themselves between nine and five, and a caller who reaches a person at half past eight rarely rings anybody else afterwards.

The three-language answer scales past this one firm. The same number already serves a UK client who wants English law explained to him in Lithuanian, and that audience is not a small one.