Evaluate the handoff—not just how the receptionist sounds.

List the caller types and situations that consume the firm’s attention today. A useful evaluation covers prospective clients, current clients, courts, opposing counsel, law enforcement, vendors, spam, wrong numbers, and after-hours emergencies—not only a clean new-lead script.

• Which calls should interrupt an attorney or on-call person?
• Which calls should create a structured intake or routine message?
• Which callers require identity or relationship checks before any transfer?
• What may the receptionist never say, promise, or disclose?

Ask what the firm receives after the call. A transcript alone still makes staff do the extraction. The useful output is a concise summary plus structured fields such as contact details, matter type, jurisdiction, incident or deadline facts, current representation, consent, urgency signals, and requested next step.

• Questions and required fields can differ by practice area.
• The caller can correct a name, number, date, or other misunderstood fact.
• Missing information is visible instead of silently invented.
• The service records the source, timestamp, and routing outcome.

A demo should show what happens when the preferred person is unavailable, the transfer fails, the caller is vague, or the model is uncertain. Require explicit fallback behavior: try another approved target, take a message, state an honest callback expectation, or direct an immediate safety emergency to the appropriate emergency service.

• Urgency is based on documented facts and firm rules, not caller frustration alone.
• The system never claims that an attorney was notified unless that action succeeded.
• Transfers use approved numbers, schedules, and known-caller rules.
• Failures and retries are visible to the firm.

Document recording and notice choices, transcript retention, notification content, tenant access, vendor subprocessors, deletion needs, and the jurisdictions the firm serves. Ask vendors to distinguish implemented controls from planned certifications and marketing language.

• Firm users see only their firm’s calls and settings.
• Email and SMS alerts minimize sensitive content by default.
• Test calls use fictional facts, not privileged or confidential matters.
• Changes to routing and instructions are attributable and testable.

The service should reduce retyping and phone tag. Determine whether it can recognize existing callers, create or update a lead, attach the summary, schedule against an approved calendar, assign an owner, and expose sync errors. Until a direct integration is proven, require a practical export or import path and a clear source of truth.

Normalize proposals around the same call volume and workflow. Include base fees, per-call or per-minute usage, overages, setup, phone numbers, transfers, recordings, integrations, human fallback, support, and the staff time needed to correct or re-enter records. The cheapest answer is expensive if valuable callers still disappear after the call.

Begin with after-hours, overflow, or a narrow call type. Establish a baseline and measure answer rate, usable-intake rate, urgent-escalation precision, time to first human follow-up, booked consultations, qualified matters, and corrections per call. Expand only after the evidence supports it.

• Review a sample of ordinary calls, not only exceptions.
• Run the same fictional scenarios after material playbook changes.
• Track false escalations as well as missed urgent calls.
• Give every open matter an owner and a scheduled next step.