A VoIP Phone System for Law Firms

It goes without saying that Law firms deal with sensitive issues, so client confidentiality and information security are of the utmost importance. A good VoIP phone system will be packed with features that help you keep your client communications and data secure, bolstering the trust your clients have in you and the work you do.

What’s more, business VoIP features will boost the productivity of your staff and, therefore, can have a direct impact on your bottom line. On its own, that would be a considerable trophy on VoIP’s mantlepiece, but that’s not all. By virtue of being digital, a VoIP phone system is actually cheaper and easier to maintain (and ‘install’) than a traditional analogue phone system.

Copper phone lines are in the process of being phased out, so soon you’ll be gently, quietly switched onto a VoIP plan by your current provider anyway. However, you can take control right now to take advantage of better prices and better features. Once analogue phone infrastructure reaches end-of-life, demand for every VoIP platform will increase. As you’re no doubt aware, price follows demand, which means there’s no better (or cheaper) time to come on board with VoIP than today.

We’ll leave that decision up to you, but below you can find a list of the features we offer with our VoIP phone system that are directly tailored to make your lives as Law professionals easier, more productive and more lucrative.

Security and Confidentiality

Call quality

The most immediately noticeable consequence to your clients of adopting VoIP will be the improvement in your call quality. To your customers and clients, you’ll be heard in crisp, clear audio. Unfortunately, you may have to wait for your clients to adopt VoIP to receive the same benefits in return, but in the meantime, you can happily rest assured that your customers can hear you loud and clear.

When dealing with sensitive issues and clients who are uneasy or unhappy, issues with quality and stability are the opposite of what you want. By switching to VoIP, the professional assurance and empathy you provide your clients will be heard clearly in your voice, just the way it’s intended to be.

Call queuing and Custom Audio

When clients need to contact you to discuss a matter urgently, it’s normal that they become agitated if they can’t get through to you right away. It’s therefore crucial to keep them informed and to make them feel valued while they’re waiting.

With a well-crafted call queue, you can do just that. Pre-recorded audio messages can be personalised by you with custom audio files uploaded to your Yay.com dashboard. A professional voiceover artist or even a member of your own staff can record these messages for an added personal touch to let your client know their position in the queue, or how much you appreciate them waiting patiently.

Call encryption

When you’re handling costly and sensitive client cases, information security needs to be treated with respect. To reflect this, you’ll be pleased to hear that call encryption is supported by default with best-in-class TLS (Transport Layer Security) and SRTP (Secure RTP) call encryption for VoIP audio on all of your devices.

These encryption measures act as an extra layer of security for your real-time audio data streams and are seamlessly integrated into the Yay.com platform, so you and your colleagues can make calls with the peace of mind that your clients’ privacy is protected. Advertise this as a perk of your own service and you may even win over some of the more security-aware clients who otherwise wouldn’t feel so comfortable.

Roles and permissions

In keeping with the security theme, when it comes to setting who within your business can access what (with regards to your phone system and its records), user roles and permissions can be configured from the Yay.com dashboard.

With roles and permissions, you have complete control over who has administrative privileges. You can even grant access to an external contractor or IT manager without having to hand over your own login credentials. You might choose for most members of staff to have access only to the desktop app, whilst granting special administrators access to global or specific control over the following features:

• Users
• Hunt groups
• Phone numbers
• Phone books
• Mailboxes
• Domains (if applicable)

On-Duty / Emergency Contact

VoIP Apps and Alternative Caller ID

Emergency and on-duty members of staff who are needed for out of hours work can handle this part of the role with features and services that come with the Yay.com platform.

Our VoIP apps allow you to make and receive business calls from a personal (or work) mobile or desktop device. No one need ever know that you’re not at the office, either; since your Yay.com user is linked with a particular number from your online account, your app will ring when your business number is called no matter where you are.

What’s more, our alternative caller ID feature allows you to present as any number you own when you call out from our apps so, when it’s time for business, your clients will know before they even hear your voice.

Time Diaries

For those who need to be on-call out-of-hours, admins can create new call routes to handle incoming calls. From there, you can configure new time diaries to handle auto-activation of call routes based on the date, day of the week, time of day or a combination of these set by you.

Therefore, whether you have staff performing out-of-hours duties on a rota or permanently, you’ll be able to configure your VolP phone system to automatically match your call routing to your shift patterns.

Administration and Productivity

Call recordings

Perhaps our greatest time-saving feature (speaking administratively), but also one that improves all team-to-client interactions by taking the onus off of you having to scribble notes; Yay.com Enterprise-plan customers benefit from unlimited call recording, whilst those on other plans receive thirty days of call recording history.

With call recording, rather than concertedly trying to take down the contents of a conversation, you can free this mental bandwidth and use it instead to ensure maximally effective communication with your customers and clients, improving relationships and increasing repeat and referral business.

Cloud-storage sync

On the Enterprise plan, not only do you get unlimited call recording history, but you can auto-backup your recordings to a Dropbox or Google Drive account. Simply connect your cloud storage account to Yay.com from your dashboard to benefit.

With this feature, you don’t even have to worry about manually downloading and backing up your call recordings. All recordings will exist on our own servers, accessible by you alone, and on your own cloud storage platform of choice.

IVR Call Menus

As busy Law professionals, all incoming contact needs to be routed efficiently to save time for you and your colleagues. IVR call menus are perfectly suited to solve this issue; callers can route themselves to the correct department with ‘press 1, press 2…’ options, saving staff members the time of having to deal with all incoming requests and enquiries manually.

Voicemail to email

Save time in administrative tasks with voicemail to email. With this feature, our purpose-built algorithms will digitally transcribe your voicemails and email these transcriptions directly to your inbox. This automatic process aids you in keeping your records of all modes of communication.

Collaboration and Training

Conference bridging

For team meetings without all workers in the same location, perhaps between different branches or sites across the country, a conference bridge literally bridges the gap between multiple call streams to bring you high-quality VoIP conference calling.

Especially lately, remote working has become closer to the norm than ever before and, even if you’re almost back to normal working conditions, you probably still have at least one or two members of staff working remotely.

Under these conditions, a meeting via conference bridge is one of the best ways to keep teams connected. Unlike many video calling options, this will even work if members of the team are on the move or otherwise unable to get in front of a camera.

Call monitoring

For both training new staff and facilitating collaboration, call listen, whisper and join functions are highly useful.

Members of staff will be able to listen in to the calls of others (when granted permission in your account, of course), as well as join calls for collaborative efforts when dealing with clients. Supervisors can ‘whisper’ messages to their colleagues that won’t be audible to the customer; highly useful for advising new members of staff or feeding crucial tidbits of information during an essential pitch.

Conclusion

By now it should be clear that the ways in which a feature-rich VoIP phone system like that offered by Yay.com can benefit a Law firm are many and varied. There’s even more that we offer, too, like our industry-leading mobile and desktop VoIP apps, which make it possible to make and take business calls from anywhere. Our soon-to-be-released enterprise chat (slated for release early Q4 2020) will soon be added to our apps, too, making it easier and more convenient than ever to share images and files and to collaborate and communicate with colleagues.

There has never been a better time to jump on board with VoIP and Yay.com are here to make the process as smooth and comfortable for you as possible. Tell us what you need and our customer support team will step in to bring your vision to life. We’ll even walk you through the number porting process, if necessary, and keep you informed every step of the way.

Don’t take our word for it, though. You can check out our customer reviews online, take a closer look at the phone system features we offer or compare voice plans by feature.