AI receptionist for law firms: intake, conflict details and consultations, never advice

It's 6.40 on a Tuesday evening. Your receptionist left at half five, the fee earners are either in a completion or on their way home, and the switchboard has gone to voicemail. Someone who was told this afternoon that they're being made redundant rings three firms from the results page. The first two go to voicemail. The third picks up, takes their details and books them in for Thursday. That third firm gets the instruction. An AI receptionist for law firms is there to make sure your firm is the one that picks up, without letting the call stray into the one thing it must never do, which is give legal advice.

This page is for small and mid-sized firms: a high-street practice doing conveyancing, wills and family work, a two-partner employment boutique, a sole practitioner in immigration, a criminal defence firm with a duty rota. It covers the calls a solicitors' office actually gets, how a solicitor AI receptionist can run first-contact intake in the right order for your conflict search, what it must hand to a fee earner, and what it costs. It also covers what the SRA expects from you, because nothing an AI says on your line falls outside your regulatory duties.

The calls a law firm gets

Most of what rings a solicitor's office is predictable. That's why automation can help. The calls that aren't predictable are also the ones with the highest stakes, which is why the setup matters.

New matter enquiries

These are the calls you most want to catch, and the ones most often lost. They come in a few recognisable shapes:

• "How much do you charge for..." Conveyancing quotes, a will, a lasting power of attorney, a probate application, a settlement agreement review. Many of these callers ring four or five firms and go with whoever gives a clear answer first.
• "I need to speak to someone about..." Divorce, a dismissal, a dispute with a builder, a boundary problem with a neighbour. These callers want reassurance that the firm does this kind of work and an appointment.
• "Do you do legal aid?" Common for family, housing and criminal work. The answer depends on your contracts, and the assistant can give it from your own information.
• Referrals. "My estate agent gave me your number" or "my accountant recommended you". Useful to record, because referral sources tell you where work comes from.

Calls about existing matters

Clients chasing progress ("Has the search come back yet?", "Did the other side reply?") are a large share of calls at most firms, and a big source of complaints when they go unanswered. An AI receptionist can't tell them anything about their file, because Klugon doesn't connect to case management systems. What it can do is take the message accurately, with the client's name, the matter and what they need, and flag it so the right person calls back. That alone changes how a client feels about the firm.

Third parties

The other side's solicitor, the estate agent asking whether contracts have been exchanged, the court, a barrister's clerk, a surveyor, a lender. These callers need a named person and they'll usually leave a precise message. The assistant should take it, never confirm anything about a matter to a third party, and flag it.

Urgent and out-of-hours legal calls

Some areas of law don't keep office hours. Someone has been arrested and is at a police station. A tenant has had the locks changed. A parent wants to stop a child being taken abroad. An injunction hearing is tomorrow morning. These are never calls for an AI to manage. They need a person, and the assistant's only job is to recognise them and route them, which the section below on handovers covers.

When the phone rings at a solicitors' office

The pattern is familiar to anyone who has worked a law firm switchboard. Monday mornings bring everything that happened over the weekend: separations, arrests, accidents, tenancy disputes. Lunchtime brings people calling from work on their break, which is exactly when your reception desk is thinnest. Late afternoon brings conveyancing chasers, as buyers and sellers try to get an answer before the end of the day. Evenings and Saturdays bring the private-client and family enquiries from people who can't talk freely at work.

Seasonality in legal work

Family practitioners often talk about a rise in divorce and separation enquiries in January, after the strain of Christmas, and again in early September after the summer holidays. Conveyancing follows the property market, so it is busiest in spring and early autumn, with a rush to complete before Christmas. Employment work tends to track redundancy rounds, which cluster around the end of a company's financial year. Private client work picks up whenever wills come into the news, and around the end of the tax year for estate planning. If you know your own peaks, you know when an assistant answering the overflow earns its keep.

What an AI receptionist for law firms handles

The aim is narrow and deliberate. The assistant takes the administrative half of the first conversation so your fee earners spend their time on the legal half.

Structured first-contact intake

For every new enquiry, the assistant collects the same set of details in the same order, whatever time it is and whoever answered. The order matters more in a law firm than anywhere else, because you need to run a conflict search before the caller tells you their story.

A good intake script for a general practice firm looks something like this:

1. The caller's full name, phone number and email.
2. The area of law, in a few words ("divorce", "unfair dismissal", "buying a flat", "dispute with a builder").
3. The names of the other people or organisations involved: the spouse, the employer, the seller, the builder, the landlord.
4. Any associated names you'd also search: a business the other party trades through, a co-owner, a parent company.
5. For property matters, the address.
6. Whether there's a date coming up that the caller has been told about.
7. How they found the firm.

Then it stops. It tells the caller, politely, that the solicitor will go through the details once the firm has done its standard checks, and it books the consultation or takes the details for a callback.

Conflict checks are done by your staff

This is worth being completely clear about. The assistant collects the names. It does not run the conflict check, and it can't, because Klugon doesn't connect to Clio, LEAP, Actionstep, Osprey, Proclaim or any other practice management system. The enquiry lands in Klugon as a lead with the parties' names attached, and appears in Slack or Zapier if you've connected them. Someone at the firm runs the search in your own system and decides whether you can act.

Until that has happened, the assistant must never say or imply that the firm is acting. "I've booked you an initial consultation with Priya on Thursday at 2pm" is fine. "Priya will be representing you" is not. Write that line into the instructions in plain words, and test it.

Booking initial consultations

Klugon books into its own built-in calendar, using the hours and appointment lengths you set. That suits a law firm well, because consultation types differ:

• a 30-minute fixed-fee employment consultation;
• a free 20-minute phone call for family enquiries;
• a 60-minute wills appointment, at the office or by video;
• a conveyancing "quote call" that isn't really an appointment at all.

Each can be a separate service, with its own length and the fee earners who offer it. If your partners live in Outlook, the assistant can also check Outlook busy times and add events after you've connected it (a Business plan feature, set up with a Microsoft sign-in). Google Calendar and Apple Calendar work the same way. These checks are tools the assistant uses, not a two-way sync, so keep Klugon's own diary as the place consultations are booked.

On the phone, the assistant can book and cancel. It can't move an existing appointment on a call, so a client who wants to reschedule by phone is flagged for your team. In chat and on WhatsApp it can reschedule. It gives the booking reference in the conversation itself. It doesn't send confirmation emails or text messages, so if your firm sends a client care letter or a confirmation email, that stays a human task.

Answering the questions that fill a reception desk

Upload or paste your firm's own information and the assistant answers from it:

• the areas of law you cover, and the ones you don't, with any firms you refer on to;
• your published fixed fees and price ranges;
• whether you take legal aid work, and for which matters;
• office hours, address, parking, step-free access and the nearest station;
• what to bring to a first meeting (photo ID, proof of address, any letters or documents from the other side);
• whether you offer video consultations;
• the languages your fee earners speak.

The assistant answers calls in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese and Arabic. If your firm has an Arabic-speaking immigration solicitor, a caller can be greeted and booked in Arabic.

Legal intake on chat and WhatsApp

AI legal intake works the same way in writing as on the phone. The website chat widget is a script tag you paste into your site, and WhatsApp connects through Meta's own WhatsApp Business setup. Written enquiries arrive late at night more often than calls do, especially for family work, and having the assistant gather the names for a conflict search before morning means your team starts the day with a list ready to check. All of it lands in one inbox, with phone calls alongside.

What it must hand to a fee earner

This is the section that matters most on a law firm page. The rule is short: the assistant never gives legal advice. Everything else in this section is about how you make that true in practice.

What counts as legal advice on a reception call

Callers rarely say "please give me legal advice". They ask small, reasonable-sounding questions that are advice in disguise:

• "Have I got a case?"
• "How long have I got to bring a claim?"
• "Can my landlord do this?"
• "If I move out, do I lose my right to the house?"
• "Is my ex allowed to take the kids to Spain?"
• "Should I sign the settlement agreement?"
• "Do I need to tell the police about this?"

Every one of these gets the same kind of answer: "That's a question for one of our solicitors. I can book you a consultation, or take your details so someone can call you back." Write that wording into the instructions, and add a list of these questions as examples. Then test them yourself, phrased in different ways, before a client gets near it.

Be stricter about deadlines than about anything else. Limitation periods and tribunal time limits are among the most consequential things a law firm says, and a wrong date given by a receptionist, human or AI, can lose someone a claim. The assistant should ask whether the caller has been told about a deadline, record what they say, and flag the conversation as urgent. It should never state, estimate or confirm a time limit.

Matters that need a person now

Some calls should be handed over immediately, with no attempt at booking:

• someone in police custody, or a family member calling about them;
• a client or caller describing domestic abuse, or saying they're in danger;
• an injunction, a hearing or a court deadline in the next day or two;
• an imminent eviction or a lockout;
• a completion-day problem on a conveyancing file;
• anyone threatening or describing harm to themselves or others.

For a caller in danger, the instruction should give the emergency number first: "If you're in danger now, please call 999." For police station work, give your out-of-hours number if you have one. If your firm doesn't do criminal work, say so and suggest the caller asks the custody officer about the duty solicitor scheme.

Complaints and anything about the firm's conduct

A client who says they want to complain should be taken seriously from the first sentence. The assistant takes their name, the matter and what the complaint is about, gives your complaints procedure from your knowledge base, and flags it to the complaints partner. It shouldn't argue, apologise for something on the firm's behalf or say what the outcome will be. If the client asks where they can go if they're unhappy with your response, the assistant can name the Legal Ombudsman, using the wording from your own client care letter.

What "hand over" means with Klugon

Klugon can't put a call through to a solicitor. There's no live transfer. When the assistant hands over, it marks the conversation "Needs a person" in your inbox and posts a notification to Slack or Zapier if you've connected them. From Zapier you can route it wherever your team already looks, such as a Teams channel or a ticket in your helpdesk. On the call itself, the assistant tells the caller someone will get back to them and, for urgent matters, gives any number you've provided.

Two consequences follow. First, someone has to watch the channel. An urgent handover posted to a Slack channel nobody reads at 8pm is no better than voicemail. Second, the assistant isn't paused after a handover. On WhatsApp, a solicitor can reply from the Klugon inbox within Meta's 24-hour window. Phone and website chat conversations can't be replied to from the inbox, so you ring the client back.

Sample conversations

These are samples written for this page. The firms and people are made up, and on a real line the AI's voice is AI-generated.

Sample phone call: an employment enquiry after hours

A sample call. Halden & Pryce Solicitors, a two-partner firm in Leeds, is made up.

What happened here is the whole point. The assistant took the employer, the group company and the manager's name before the story. It declined twice to answer legal questions, once about lawfulness and once about the time limit, and it didn't hint at an answer. It flagged the enquiry because a date was mentioned. And it said, in the firm's own words, that the consultation depends on checks. It made no promise to email anything. The reference was given on the call.

Sample WhatsApp: a family enquiry late at night

A sample WhatsApp conversation. Brennock Family Law, a sole-practitioner firm in Exeter, is made up.

The safety line is a choice the firm made and wrote into the instructions for every family enquiry. Some firms prefer it only when a message mentions fear or violence. Decide which you want, and test both kinds of message.

Sample website chat: a conveyancing quote

A sample website chat. Tolland Bridge Law, a high-street firm in Shrewsbury, is made up.

Two things to notice. The fee quoted is the firm's published figure, word for word, with the same caveats as its website. And the assistant didn't calculate the Stamp Duty. It's a tax question, and getting it wrong is easy.

Setting up a solicitor AI receptionist

You'll need a free afternoon, your website's price pages and someone who knows how intake really works at the firm.

A setup checklist for law firms

1. Write your areas of law, and the ones you don't cover. Add who you refer on to, if you have a referral list.
2. Paste in your published prices word for word. Copy them from the same pages your website uses for the SRA Transparency Rules, including what's included, what isn't and the VAT position.
3. Write the intake order. Names and other parties first, matter type in a few words, then stop. Add the sentence that tells callers not to go into detail yet.
4. Write the no-advice instruction, with a list of example questions that must be declined.
5. List the urgent handovers and what the assistant says for each: police station, danger, court tomorrow, lockout, completion-day problem.
6. Set up consultation types as services, with lengths, fees and the fee earners who offer each.
7. Set your hours and buffers. Leave a buffer after consultations for file notes, and set a minimum notice so nobody is booked into a slot the conflict search can't clear in time.
8. Write a greeting that says it's an AI. Klugon's default greeting doesn't, and clients telling a law firm about their lives deserve to know.
9. Connect Slack or Zapier, and decide who watches handovers out of hours.
10. Test it. Ring it from a mobile, pretend to be the difficult callers, and read every conversation in the inbox.

Keeping your firm's number

You can keep the number on your letterhead. Klugon gives you a dedicated number, and you set your phone system or carrier to forward calls to it: all calls, only unanswered calls, or only out of hours. The guide to call forwarding explains the options. If your firm runs a SIP-based phone system, you can point a SIP trunk at Klugon on the Business plan instead. Numbers can't be ported. Phone numbers become available when your trial ends. During the 7-day trial you test the assistant in the browser.

Working alongside your case management system

Klugon doesn't replace Clio, LEAP, Actionstep, Osprey or Proclaim, and doesn't connect to them. Think of it as the front door. The enquiry and the conflict-check names arrive as a lead in Klugon, and your team opens the matter in your own system. If you use HubSpot, Zoho, Salesforce or Pipedrive for business development, the assistant can send leads there, but it isn't automatic on every lead. Many firms simply use Zapier to post each new lead into the channel where the person doing conflict searches already works.

What it costs

Klugon's prices are in US dollars. The voice product is $99 a month on Starter with 1,000 minutes, $299 on Business with 3,600 minutes and $499 on Scale with 6,000 minutes, and yearly billing is 20% cheaper. Each phone number is $9 a month, and minutes over the allowance cost $15 per started 100. Website chat is a separate product from $49 a month, and WhatsApp is part of the social product from $79 a month. All the detail is on the pricing page.

A worked example for a two-partner employment firm

Assumptions, which you should replace with your own:

• The firm forwards calls the receptionist doesn't answer within a few rings, plus everything after 17:30 and at weekends.
• About 6 calls a day reach the assistant, at an average of 5 minutes each, because intake with conflict details takes longer than a simple booking.
• Calls spread over about 25 days a month.

Minutes: 6 × 5 × 25 = 750 a month, inside Starter's 1,000. On Starter, the cost is $99 + $9 for the number = $108 a month.

Most firms will want urgent handovers posted to Slack, and Slack, Zapier and the Outlook calendar connection need the Business tier. With those, it's $299 + $9 = $308 a month, or $248 a month on yearly billing.

Against a human receptionist

At the National Living Wage of £12.71 an hour from April 2026, a receptionist covering only the extra hours an assistant covers (say 17:30 to 20:00 on weekdays and four hours on Saturday, about 16.5 hours a week) costs around £210 a week in pay alone, before employer's National Insurance, pension and holiday pay. That's over £900 a month, and most firms wouldn't staff those hours at all. A good legal receptionist during the day is worth far more than an AI, because they know your clients. The honest comparison is the hours nobody is covering now.

Against a legal answering service

Answering services that specialise in law firms will take a message and often run a short intake script, usually priced per call or per minute. Compared with that, an AI receptionist can book directly into your consultation diary and answer fee questions from your own price list, and its cost doesn't rise with each extra call inside the allowance. A human service is better at reading a distressed caller and at judgement calls. Our Smith.ai comparison looks at that trade-off in detail.

What one instruction is worth

Say the firm currently loses 4 enquiries a week to voicemail, 1 in 4 would have instructed, and the average first piece of work is worth £1,500 in fees. That's one new instruction a week, roughly £6,000 a month. If your real numbers are a fifth of that, the assistant still covers its cost several times over. If your phones are already answered whenever you're open and evening enquiries are rare, the case is weaker, and you should say so to yourself before you subscribe.

SRA rules, confidentiality and client data

None of this is legal or compliance advice. It's a list of things to check with your COLP and your data protection lead before an AI talks to your clients.

Price information under the SRA Transparency Rules

If you offer certain services to the public, such as residential conveyancing, uncontested probate or employment tribunal claims for unfair or wrongful dismissal, the SRA Transparency Rules require you to publish cost information on your website. That means a total or an average or range, what the price includes, likely disbursements, and the VAT position. The SRA's guidance on transparency in price and service explains what it expects.

The practical rule for your assistant follows directly. It quotes what you've published, in the same words, and nothing else. If a caller's matter doesn't fit a published price, the assistant says that a fee earner will give a quote. It never offers a discount, estimates a figure or says "it's usually around...". The same rules also expect you to publish your complaints procedure and display the SRA's digital badge, and the assistant can direct callers to those pages when asked.

Confidentiality and disclosure

The SRA Code of Conduct for Solicitors requires you to keep the affairs of current and former clients confidential unless disclosure is required or permitted by law or the client consents. Your receptionist already follows that rule, and the assistant must too. In practice:

• It never confirms to a caller whether someone is a client of the firm.
• It never discusses a matter with a third party, including a family member, the other side or an estate agent.
• It takes messages about existing matters without adding anything from the file, which it can't see anyway.
• It never repeats one caller's details to another.

The conflict-check order protects confidentiality from the other direction. If the person you already act for is the caller's opponent, you haven't been told anything you can't un-hear, because the assistant stopped before the story.

Special category and criminal offence data

People tell law firms about their health, their sex lives, their religion and their criminal records, often in the first minute. Under the UK GDPR, health and similar information is special category data, and information about offences and convictions is criminal offence data, which has its own stricter conditions. The simplest safeguard is not collecting it at first contact. That's another reason the intake script asks for names and matter type and then stops.

Here's what you need to know about Klugon for your data protection impact assessment:

• Klugon is run by Softaar Technologies UG, a German company, under the GDPR.
• Its sub-processors include Google Firebase, OpenAI and Telnyx. The privacy policy lists them as US-based, with transfers covered by Standard Contractual Clauses. We don't claim client data stays in the UK or EU.
• Klugon is not certified for SOC 2 or ISO 27001.
• Calls are not recorded. Each call appears in your inbox with its duration and a message log, which may show only the assistant's side.
• Each firm's data is kept separate, and knowledge search is filtered to your firm only.
• You can export records as CSV and delete individual records. Full erasure is by email request.

Some firms decide the right answer is to use the assistant for new enquiries and appointment admin only, and to keep anything about existing matters off it entirely. That's a reasonable choice, and easy to set up.

Telling clients they're talking to an AI

There's no SRA rule that says "announce the AI" in those words. But your duties of honesty and to act in clients' best interests point one way, and clients will reasonably expect it. Write a greeting that says it's the firm's AI assistant. Klugon's default greeting doesn't say so, so this is a setting you change, not one that's done for you.

How it compares with what law firms already use

Most firms already have some of the pieces. Here's how an AI receptionist fits next to them.

Firms that already use an answering service often run both for a month: the service keeps existing-client calls, and the assistant takes new enquiries and the website chat. Then they compare.

Measuring whether it's working

After a month, check four things in the dashboard.

New enquiries outside office hours. The analytics page shows calls, conversations and leads by hour and weekday. Count the evening and weekend leads that would have reached voicemail before.

Consultations booked and kept. Every booking the assistant made is in the bookings list. Mark leads as contacted, converted or lost, and you'll see how many assistant-captured enquiries became instructions.

Declined conflicts. Track how many intakes your team declined at the conflict search. It's a useful number on its own, and if it's high it tells you the assistant is reaching people you'd never have spoken to.

Questions it couldn't answer. The insights page lists questions without a good answer and the most asked questions of the last 30 days. If callers keep asking about legal aid or a service you don't list, add the answer.

Read a sample of handovers every week too. You're checking two things: that it handed over everything that sounded like advice, and that it didn't hand over routine questions it should have answered.

Frequently asked questions

Will the AI receptionist give legal advice?

No. It's instructed to decline every question about the law, the merits of a case or a time limit, and to offer a consultation or a callback instead. You write that instruction, test it with your own trick questions, and read the conversations it has. Treat it as you'd treat a new receptionist on their first week: trusted with the diary, not with advice.

Can it run our conflict checks?

No. It collects the names of the client, the other parties and any associated people or companies, in that order, before the caller explains the matter. Your staff run the conflict search in your own practice management system. Klugon doesn't connect to case management software.

What is AI legal intake?

It's using an AI assistant to take the first contact with a prospective client: their details, the area of law, the other parties and any urgent dates, then booking a consultation or a callback. It's the administrative part of intake only. Assessing the matter and deciding whether to act stays with your solicitors.

Can it put a caller through to a solicitor?

No. Klugon has no live call transfer. It marks the conversation "Needs a person" in your inbox and notifies Slack or Zapier, and the caller is told someone will get back to them. For urgent matters you can give it an out-of-hours number to read out.

Can it quote our fees?

Yes, if you give it your published prices. It should quote them word for word, with the same inclusions, exclusions and VAT position as your website, so what clients hear matches what the SRA Transparency Rules require you to publish. It shouldn't estimate fees for anything you haven't priced.

Does it record calls?

No. Klugon doesn't record calls. Each call appears in your inbox with its duration and a message log, which may contain only the assistant's side of the conversation.

Can it tell clients how their matter is progressing?

No. It can't see your files. It takes an accurate message with the client's name, the matter and what they need, and flags it for the fee earner.

Will it send a confirmation email or client care letter?

No. The booking reference is given in the conversation. Klugon doesn't send confirmation emails, texts or reminders, so your client care letter and any engagement paperwork stay with your team.

Is it suitable for criminal defence work?

For general enquiries and booking non-urgent appointments, yes. For anyone in custody or about to be interviewed, the assistant should hand over immediately and give your out-of-hours number. Many criminal firms keep their duty line separate and use the assistant only for the main office number.

Can we keep our existing number?

Yes. You forward your number to a Klugon number, either all the time or only when calls go unanswered. Porting isn't supported. Numbers become available after the 7-day trial, which needs a card and is charged when it ends unless you cancel.

Next steps

If you want to see the wider picture first, the professional services hub covers intake and advice boundaries across firm types, with separate pages for insurance brokers, financial advisers and event planners. Our page on Klugon's AI phone receptionist explains the call-handling side in more depth. And if you'd like to try an AI receptionist for small business on your own firm's questions, write your intake script first, then test it in the browser during the trial before a single client rings it.