What a legal answering service covers for a small firm.

Ring round the market and "legal answering service" turns out to mean four different products. They reach different people and are priced in different ways, and a firm that buys the wrong one is paying to cover a channel its enquiries never arrive on.

Where the enquiry arrives decides the purchase, more than whether a person or software answers it. The person who rings the office and the person who reads a practice-area page at the weekend are two different enquirers, and a small firm can lose both in one evening.

Adoomi is the last of the four: a written assistant on the firm's own site, answering from pages the firm has published and approved — with a ready-made setup for law firms. Ask it what those pages cover and it answers, in the enquirer's language, at whatever hour they are reading. Ask it anything else and it hands the enquiry to a person.

What that buys is small enough to price on its own. The questions a stranger asks before instructing anybody — which matters the firm takes, how it charges, what a first appointment involves — are answered from the firm's published pages. The website chatbot does the routine half of intake. An enquiry that arrives after the office closes gets an answer then, instead of waiting for somebody to open the inbox in the morning.

One rule holds across all four, and it belongs in the brief before any contract is signed: whoever answers takes the enquiry down, and a solicitor advises. That applies to a person in a call centre exactly as it applies to software on the site. At that point nobody has seen a file and nobody has been instructed.

What gets taken down changes with the matter. Conveyancing wants which side of the transaction they are on and whether the chain has started to move. Employment wants the date printed on the letter. Probate wants whether there is a will and who is acting as executor. All of them want a name, a number and the enquirer's own account, word for word. Beyond that sits the part only a solicitor can do:

• Whether there is a case. This is what an enquirer most wants to know, and the one thing an intake step cannot answer. It goes to the fee-earner named for that matter, with the enquirer's own words attached.
• What a matter is worth, and how long. Both turn on the facts and on what the other side does. An assistant that offers a figure or a date has invented one.
• Whether the firm is free to act. Nothing said in a chat window commits a firm to anything. The name and the matter type are passed on; people at the firm decide what happens next.
• Who qualifies for legal aid or funding. Answers on funding come from the firm's published page and stop where that page stops. Whether one person qualifies is a human's call.

Confidentiality is the first question firms ask; where the data sits is the second. Conversation data stays in the EU, and export and deletion under GDPR are built in. Message content is kept out of the logs, and the chat window sets no tracking cookies. It takes no attachments either — papers reach the team only after a WhatsApp handoff, and only if the enquirer sends them there.

The wording of that first message is the firm's decision. Its job is routing: enough to get the matter to the right person, with the detail saved for the conversation that follows. An intake script that invites a stranger to set out a whole dispute in a web form is a bad script whichever product is behind it.

Use an intake step to get a matter in front of the right solicitor quickly. Do not use it to hold the details of the matter.

Regulatory questions get the same treatment. Who regulates the firm, and where the registration details sit, belong on the page the firm maintains for that. The assistant points at that page rather than reciting it. And nothing here is approved by, aligned with or supervised by the SRA or any other regulator — compliance stays with the firm, its people and its policies.

The two are priced in different ways. A person is charged by the call or by the minute, so a busy month costs more than a quiet one. Software is a flat monthly plan sized by the number of answers, so a busy month and a quiet one cost the same. What you get out of hours differs too: a staffed service takes a message for the morning, while the website assistant gives the published answer at the moment it is asked.

Adoomi's own prices are simple. Free costs £0 a month and includes 50 message credits, and one credit buys one answer. Local is £8 a month for 200 credits, Growth £20 for 500, and Scale £75 for 4,000. The pricing page lists them side by side. To compare that with a per-call rate, use the firm's own call numbers.

Pull a month of the phone log and a month of the website enquiries, and lay them side by side. The calls nobody answered after closing go in one column; the web enquiries that waited a working day or more go in the other. The longer column is where the firm is losing work.

• The phone column is longer. An older client base, word-of-mouth work and callers in distress reach you by phone, and a person on the line is what answers them. Adoomi leaves that line alone and takes the other column.
• The website column is longer. Buy the assistant. Someone who searched, read a practice-area page and typed at the weekend is already on the site; an answer there costs a flat monthly fee.
• Both columns are long. Run one of each. They reach different enquirers, and plenty of firms end up with one on the phone and another on the site.
• Hardly anyone reaches the site. Neither column fills itself; getting the firm found is what fills them. The Free plan is £0, so the website side can answer the few enquiries that do arrive while that work is going on.

Setup takes about ten minutes: point it at the firm's site, read what it proposes to say, then add one line to the website. Reading it is the real work — the firm decides, in writing, what it is willing to say to a stranger before anybody has taken instructions. An afternoon spent on that is cheaper than a complaint later.

Three answers are worth reading twice. What comes back when somebody asks whether they have a claim. The fees and funding wording, checked against the published page. And what happens to a message naming a deadline. The routing you set decides which fee-earner gets the email alert, and the enquirer can carry on over WhatsApp with their original message attached.