Criminal defense answering service and answering services for criminal defense attorneys that take the arrest call at 2am

Because the person deciding who to hire is calling at the worst hour of the worst night of her life, and she will hire whoever picks up. Most arrests that lead to a defense retainer happen outside office hours: Friday and Saturday nights, holiday weekends, the early hours after a traffic stop. The caller is rarely the defendant. It is a parent, a spouse or a friend, standing outside a county jail with a phone, searching for a lawyer and calling the results in order.

Time is also short on the legal side. Under the Supreme Court's decision in County of Riverside v. McLaughlin (1991), a person arrested without a warrant is generally entitled to a probable cause determination within 48 hours, and in many counties the first appearance and the bail decision come with it. A firm that hears about the arrest on Monday morning can find that the first hearing has already happened. A firm that answers on Friday night can be on the phone with the family, and often at the hearing, before anyone else has called back.

An answering service closes that gap. It does not replace the attorney who decides whether to take the case. It makes sure the attorney hears about the case while there is still something to do.

Everything you need to decide whether to take the case and to act on it before you call back, in an order a frightened caller can follow. PhoneAgent.ai asks the questions in your script, in your words, and asks again politely when an answer is missing. A typical criminal defense setup collects the items below.

You write the script once, in plain English, and change it whenever you like. If you only take certain matters (DUI and misdemeanors but not federal cases, for example), the script says so, and the receptionist tells the caller kindly and points them to your referral list instead of booking a consultation you will cancel.

• The caller's name, relationship to the defendant and a callback number
• The defendant's full name and date of birth
• The charge as the caller understands it, and whether it is a felony, a misdemeanor or a DUI
• The arresting agency and the facility where the defendant is held
• The booking number, if the caller has it
• Whether bond has been set, and the amount
• The next court date, court and county
• The names of any co-defendants and alleged victims, so you can run a conflict check
• Whether the defendant has already spoken to police or has other open cases

At 60 intake calls a month, published pricing puts it between $89 and $1,725 a month, and the difference is almost entirely how a call is counted. Live services bill by the minute, so a five minute intake call costs five minutes, and a ten minute call from a parent outside the jail costs ten. LexHelper's pay as you go plan comes to about $257 at that volume, AnswerConnect to $395, PATLive to $479, Veza Reception to $515, Smith.ai's live receptionists to $645, Back Office Betties to $1,286 plus onboarding and Ruby to $1,725. Answering Legal and LEX Reception, the two best-known legal-only services, do not publish prices at all.

AI receptionists bill per call or flat. Smith.ai's AI plan is $150 for 75 calls. PhoneAgent.ai is a flat $89 a month for about 150 calls on Starter and $199 for about 500 on Professional, which adds warm transfer, so a long call costs nothing extra. Our lawyer answering service cost breakdown shows how to turn any minute quote into a cost per intake call, and the Answering Legal alternative page lays out what is public about the services that sell by quote.

Calls placed from inside a jail are different from calls about a jail, and you should set them up differently. Most jails route inmate calls through a contracted phone provider, and the person receiving the call has to accept it by pressing a key, or the call has to be paid from a prepaid account. PhoneAgent.ai does not accept those calls, and neither does any answering service that answers on a normal business line without a person pressing keys for it. If clients call you from custody, give them a number that rings a person or your cell, and register it with the facility as an attorney line where the jail allows it, because inmate calls are usually recorded unless they go to a registered attorney number.

The calls PhoneAgent.ai handles well are the ones that make up most criminal intake: family members, friends and employers calling about an arrest, defendants who have bonded out, and people with a court date who are shopping for representation. Those callers are on an ordinary phone, they are often in a hurry, and what they need is a calm answer, a few clear questions and a time to speak with a lawyer.

The ones where a lawyer's judgment is needed tonight rather than tomorrow, and you decide which those are. Typical rules for a criminal practice: an arraignment or bond hearing scheduled for the next morning, a current client who has just been arrested again, a client who says police want to question them now, and any caller who asks for a lawyer by name. On Professional and Practice those calls are warm transferred to the attorney on duty, with a one line summary before the caller is connected. On Starter you get an immediate text and email instead.

Everything else is booked. The receptionist never gives legal advice, never says whether someone will be released, never quotes a fee you have not written down and never promises an outcome. If a caller asks what they should do, it tells them a lawyer will speak with them at the booked time and, if your script includes it, that they should not discuss the case with anyone in the meantime. It also tells every caller in its first sentence that it is an AI assistant for your firm, which keeps your intake consistent with the ABA's Model Rule 5.3 expectation that you supervise whoever, or whatever, speaks for your office.

It depends on your volume and on what you need the call to end with. A live legal answering service is the better buy if you need new leads written into Clio or MyCase without anyone touching them, or if you want a person making judgment calls at 2am about whether to wake you. Answering Legal and LEX Reception both name those integrations, and LEX Reception has a dedicated criminal defense script. Expect to pay several hundred dollars a month and more in a heavy month.

An AI receptionist is the better buy for a solo criminal defense attorney or a small firm whose main loss is calls going to voicemail at night. It answers every caller at once, takes the same intake every time, books the consultation and costs the same whatever your volume does. PhoneAgent.ai does not write into Clio, MyCase or Lawmatics; it books into Google Calendar, Outlook, Calendly or Acuity, which those systems sync with, and sends every intake by text and email. Solo practitioners can compare the field on best answering service for solo attorneys, and the full legal setup, including civil practice areas, is on legal answering service.

Yes on both. A large share of criminal intake in many US counties comes from Spanish speaking families, and PhoneAgent.ai answers them in Spanish on every plan, asks the same intake questions and sends you the summary in English. The bilingual legal answering service comparison prices the services that charge extra for it.

Call recording is consent-aware. PhoneAgent.ai plays a recording notice where state law requires the consent of everyone on the call, and you can switch recording off entirely if your firm prefers that intake calls about a pending case are not recorded. The rules by state are summarized in our call recording consent laws guide.