We called 87 law firms. Here's how many picked up, and why you should care.
Every firm says it never misses a call. We spent four dollars finding out.
The short answer
We called 87 personal injury firms three times each, outside office hours, from a real number. A person picked up 1 call in 4. Nearly 1 in 2 went straight to voicemail or a phone menu. 26 firms never picked up once. And when the missed call sat on their phone, 2 firms out of 87 called it back. Two.
The whole test cost under four dollars. You can run it on your own line tonight.
Why we did this
Every law firm I talk to says the same thing: "We never miss a call." Then I ask who picks up at 5:40 pm on a Tuesday, and the room gets quiet.
So instead of arguing, we called.
How we did it
- 87 personal injury firms. Tampa Bay, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta, Houston, Orlando, plus 37 in other metros. 21 bigger firms, 66 smaller. No firm is named here.
- Three calls per firm, one in each window: Sunday late morning, Monday lunchtime, Tuesday after 5 pm. Local time, main published number.
- Each call lasted a few seconds. No story, no pretext. We only wanted to know who picks up.
- Every call came from a number that could receive a call back. Then we waited.
- The carrier's answering-machine detection tagged each call as a person, a machine, or unknown. Unknown stayed unknown. We didn't round in our favour.
What happened
Monday lunchtime was the best window. One call in three reached a person. Tuesday after 5 pm was the worst: more than half went straight to voicemail or a menu.
And "straight" means straight. Of the 119 calls that hit a machine, 104 did so within one second. Nobody let it ring. The system picked up instantly and sent the caller to a menu.
Two honest ways to read the overall number. Strict: a person answered 27% of calls. Generous: if every unconfirmed pickup was a human, 53%. I use the strict one. A caller who hears a menu and hangs up has reached nobody.
By firm
- 29 firms picked up all three times. Good.
- 32 picked up once or twice.
- 26 firms never picked up. Three calls, three machines.
- A confirmed human voice at least once: 39 firms. Never: 48.
The firms that answer, answer fast. When a person picked up, the median was 2 seconds. There is no middle. A line is either staffed for that hour or it isn't.
The callbacks. This is the one that should bother you.
A missed call from an unknown number sat on 87 phone systems. Two firms called it back. One inside a minute. One the next afternoon, 14 hours later. The other 85 did nothing.
Pickup rate is a staffing problem. Callback rate is a mindset problem. It tells you whether the firm sees a missed call as a lead or as noise. Back in 2019, Clio found more than half of firms didn't respond to a voicemail within 72 hours. Seven years and a lot of phone software later: 2 out of 87.
By city
Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston picked up on about six calls in ten. Atlanta and Orlando on about four in ten. Six to ten firms per city, so take it as direction, not a ranking. The firm matters more than the city.
Is it just us being harsh?
No. Clio has been secret-shopping law firms during business hours for years.
| Study | When they called | A person answered |
|---|---|---|
| Clio Legal Trends, 2019 (500 firms) | Business hours | 56% |
| Clio Legal Trends, 2024 (500 firms) | Business hours | 40% |
| Law Systems line check, 2026 (87 firms, 3 calls each) | Outside office hours | 27% |
Business-hours pickup fell from 56% to 40% in five years. Outside hours, we got 27%. Nobody else has published an outside-hours number from actually calling firms, which is why every answering-service blog recycles Clio's.
Why you should care
I'm not putting a dollar figure on this. Your number depends on your fee, your city and your intake. A made-up one would be a guess. The mechanism is enough.
Someone gets rear-ended on the way home. In the parking lot, still shaking, they search and call. They call more than one firm. Harvard Business Review looked at 2,241 companies: a lead contacted within an hour was nearly 7 times as likely to qualify as one contacted an hour later, and 60 times as likely as one contacted the next day.
Your line sends them to a menu at 5:40 pm. They hang up. They dial the next firm in the results. That firm picks up in 2 seconds and signs the case.
Here's the part that stings. You never find out. No voicemail was left, so nothing shows on any report you run. The case didn't go to a competitor in your books. It simply never existed.
That's the leak. It's invisible by design.
What to do about it, in order
- Get your own number. Call your main line outside hours, three times, from a phone your office doesn't know. Twenty minutes. Free.
- Text back inside 60 seconds. Every missed call gets a text from the firm's number with a real name and a question. Half the callers are still holding the phone.
- A human calls back inside 5 minutes. Not the attorney. Someone whose job it is, on a rota, with a script, who can qualify and book on the attorney's real calendar. That's the intake desk we build: client intake and updates for law firms.
- Overflow. Not picked up in 15 seconds, it rings a cell phone on a rota. A menu is not overflow.
- Fix the greeting. If a machine must answer, its first line is a person's name and "we call back within 10 minutes", not a list of extensions.
- A Monday log. Every missed call of the week, who called back, how long it took, what happened. The owner reads it on Monday. Unmeasured, it slides back within a month. We build this into the partner profitability dashboard.
On answering services, since someone will ask. They pick up. That beats a menu. What they don't do, unless someone wires it, is qualify the caller against your criteria, book on the attorney's real calendar and write the conversation into your case system. Most firms we audit have a service and still leak at the handoff.
Questions people ask
What percentage of calls do law firms miss? Outside hours, 73% of our calls didn't reach a confirmed person and 46% went straight to voicemail or a menu. During business hours, Clio's 2024 secret shopper found 40% answered and 48% of firms "essentially unreachable".
Do law firms answer the phone on weekends? Sunday late morning: a person answered 24% of our calls, 47% went to voicemail or a menu. Weekends were no worse than Tuesday after 5 pm, which was the weakest window at 55% voicemail.
How fast should a law firm call back a missed call? Text inside a minute, a person inside five. HBR's numbers: contact within an hour is 7 times more likely to qualify the lead than an hour later. For an injured caller phoning several firms, five minutes is the real ceiling.
Should a law firm use an answering service? If the alternative is a menu, yes. But treat it as the pickup, not the intake. It won't qualify, book on the real calendar or write to your case system unless that's built.
How did you decide a call was answered? The carrier's answering-machine detection tagged each call a person, a machine, or unknown. We report all three. Unknown counts as picked up, not as a person, and the headline uses the strict number.
Want the same test on your line?
Book the operations audit. We call your firm outside hours, read your last 60 days of calls and intake forms, and show you exactly where inquiries stop. That's where the rest of this starts: what we check and what you get.
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Sources: Law Systems line check call log, 27-29 September 2026 (260 calls, 87 firms). Clio Legal Trends Report 2019 press release (500 firms phoned, 56% answered by a person, 39% voicemail, more than half did not respond to voicemail within 72 hours). Clio Legal Trends Report 2024 press release (500 firms, 40% answered, 48% essentially unreachable). Harvard Business Review, "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads", March 2011 (2,241 companies; 7x and 60x response-time findings).