How law firms can use live chat to win more clients

In the years we have been working with the legal profession, we haven’t seen a game-changer embraced by so many law firms quite like Live Chat.

At Moneypenny, the demand for our managed live chat (chats handed by real people rather than bots) by law firms has gone up 115% in the past 12 months! Pre-pandemic, 35% of legal chats resulted in a lead or new business. However, during lockdown, we saw that increase to 65% for many firms.

A main factor for this is the fact that live chat helps to remove the friction from your website which may prevent someone from reaching out, e.g., a complicated site, or lack of quote options.

So, why are we the experts on managed life chat? Well, we’ve developed our people and technology recipe, which is proving extremely popular across all sectors, including law.

We’ve put together this guide to explain the benefits of live chat for you law firm, and the different ways it can encourage people to work with your firm.

Adding Live Chat from Moneypenny to your website is an easy five-minute job - much like adding Google Analytics code.

There are numerous benefits associated with the use of live chat, all of which can enhance your law firm’s website and ultimately gain you more clients. We’ve highlighted some of the most important benefits below.Using live chat to ‘extend’ opening hours is ideal for websites with high traffic during evenings and weekends. Just as people ‘couch surf’ for houses on Zillow in the evenings, they also do the same for other life admin - including legal advice.Interestingly, 46% of chats Moneypenny answers for law firms take place out of office hours or at weekends. That's a lot of potential missed cases without live chat, so giving prospective customers a real person to talk to is a great way to ensure you don’t miss new clients.

Live chat is perfect for a busy website that people might struggle to navigate, which can often be the case for many law firm sites that handle complex or specialist cases.Let’s step into your website visitors' shoes for a moment: they’re busy and potentially distressed, and the last thing they need is to feel overwhelmed by choices. This is where live chat for law firms can help, by directing people to what they need to see fast.

Many law firms cover multiple areas of practice, which can confuse people browsing website pages. Here, the language and text used on your live chat message can be tailored to the specific page it appears on.For example, many people searching for a real estate attorney are wanting a quote for their services, so a proactive chat message asking the visitor if they are looking for a quote can prompt them to make an inquiry.

Here, Live Chat is ideal for firms that are asked repeat questions. Live Chat offers relevant, direct and real-time help based on the content the person is viewingIf the same questions keep coming up, you can use Live Chat as an interactive FAQ tool. It’s a great way to start a conversation and then obtain contact information to book a follow-up call and to drive more inquiries into your case pipeline.It helps you to understand exactly what people need to know from you , and encourages people to leave their details once they’ve asked a question.

It can take multiple visits to your website before people feel ready to take the next step and ask for legal advice. Live chat can act as a friendly way to encourage people to contact you.

80% of customers say they are more likely to do business with a company if it offers personalized experiences - Epsilon research

Live chat can recognize returning visitors to your website and welcome them back with a bespoke message, which could be all it takes to get them to officially inquire with your firm.And, according to Salesforce, 59% of people say personalized engagement based on their previous interactions with a website is very important to winning their business.

The nature of your law firm may mean that your live chat is the go-to for routine questions that don’t require a tailored response by a real person. If this is the case, an automated chatbot could be the best option for your website.This clever feature starts by asking your visitor to specify the details of their inquiry. If they click on a request for a quote, their inquiry will be sent straight to your in-house team or a live chat agent.For anything else, they will be asked to choose from one of the following options to progress their query:

Adding live chat from Moneypenny to your website is an easy five-minute job - much like adding Google Analytics code. Just follow the process below and you’ll have a live chat for your law firm’s website in no time at all!

If you’re interested, we’ll also need the following information to get you started. Of course, you can update and change any of these details with your dedicated account manager at any point. We’re here to help you!

it’s not just live chat services that we offer here at Moneypenny. We’re the leading phone answering service company in the US, giving you your very own in-person or virtual receptionist to handle all your incoming calls.Get in touch with Moneypenny today to see how we could help your business boost its productivity, or head over to the Moneypenny blog. for even more in-depth articles like this one.