The first firm to respond usually gets the client
Legal enquiries are urgent, high-value, and almost never exclusive — someone with a problem contacts several firms in one sitting and retains whoever engages first. Mazingi answers on your website the moment they arrive, establishes the practice area and whether anything is on a clock, and puts a usable intake in front of the right attorney.
Free plan forever · paid from $29/month · one line of code
What an unanswered enquiry costs law firms
Enquiries arrive when nobody is at the desk
Arrests, accidents and served papers happen at night and at weekends. A contact form checked on Monday is a client who retained someone else on Friday.
Practice area decides who should even see it
A family matter, a personal injury claim and a business dispute go to different people. Undifferentiated enquiries sit in a general inbox while the right attorney never learns they exist.
A missed deadline is worse than a missed lead
A statute running or a court date next week changes the urgency of an enquiry completely. That has to surface in the first minute, not during a callback three days later.
The questions it asks, and why in that order
The law firm template asks what type of matter it is — family, personal injury, estate, business, criminal — before anything else, because that answer decides who should handle it. It then asks for a sentence or two on the situation, which gives the attorney enough to assess fit without turning a chat window into an interview. Its last qualifying question asks whether there is a deadline or court date coming up, and that flag is the one that changes what happens next.
Every question is editable — the template is a starting point, not a fixed script.
Law firm template — 6 questions
- 1What name should we put the request under?*
- 2What phone number is best to reach you?*
- 3What email should we use to follow up?*
- 4What type of matter is this (family, personal injury, estate, business, criminal)?*
- 5In a sentence or two, what is the situation?
- 6Is there a deadline or court date coming up?
* required before the lead is counted as qualified
How it sounds on your site
A legal intake service that is awake when the enquiry arrives
Legal answering services and intake call centres bill per call and read a script somebody else wrote. As a virtual receptionist for your firm, this works from your own material: it identifies the practice area, notes any date that sounds like a limitation period, routes the intake to the right attorney, and tells the enquirer plainly that it is not a lawyer and cannot advise them.
Questions law firms ask
- Will it give legal advice?
- No. It captures the practice area, a short summary in the enquirer's own words, and any deadline. It answers questions only from your own published content and will not interpret a situation or suggest what someone should do.
- Does it flag urgent deadlines?
- It asks directly whether there is a deadline or court date coming up, and the answer arrives on the enquiry. That single question is often the difference between a callback tomorrow and a callback in an hour.
- Can it route by practice area?
- Practice area is the first qualifying question, and it arrives on the emailed intake so the enquiry reaches the right attorney rather than a general inbox.
- Is a chat transcript confidential?
- Treat it as you would any pre-engagement website enquiry — it is not privileged, and no attorney-client relationship is formed by it. Practices commonly add that wording to the widget greeting, which you control.
- What about enquiries outside our jurisdiction?
- It asks for a ZIP code and, when it falls outside the areas you have set, responds with your own wording — most firms use a referral message. The enquiry is still logged and flagged, since a referral relationship has value of its own.
- How is this different from a legal answering service or intake call centre?
- Cost shape and consistency. Those bill per call and vary with whoever is on shift; this is flat monthly and asks the same intake questions in the same order every time, then routes by practice area rather than dropping everything in one queue.
- Can a virtual receptionist do client intake without giving legal advice?
- Yes, and the line is enforced rather than hoped for. It gathers the matter type, the timeline and the contact details, states clearly that it cannot give legal advice, and hands anything substantive to an attorney.
Other industries
Stop losing the after-hours enquiries
Point it at your website, pick the law firm template, paste one line of code.