In our example market, Keyword Planner put the top spot for an injury search near $425 (Chapter 7). Fourteen chapters went into earning that click: which searches to buy, what to bid, which page to land on, what the ad should say.
Then the phone rings, and nobody picks up.
The person who taps the call button and hears voicemail cost the firm exactly what the person who booked a consultation did. Google doesn't refund the click. The person doesn't wait. And most firms never see the difference, because nobody counts the calls that rang out. This chapter is about counting them, closing the hours when nobody answers, and making sure the call that does connect turns into a case.
Clio's Shoppers Reached 52% of Law Firms by Phone. Only 40% Picked Up the First Time.
Clio, a company that sells practice management software to law firms, hired a research firm to pose as prospective clients and contact law firms. It published the results in its 2024 Legal Trends Report. Treat this as vendor research, since Clio has a product to sell, but the numbers are hard to ignore:
- 40% of firms picked up when called.
- 52% were reached at all, including firms that called back after a message.
- 48% were unreachable by phone, "even after giving them the chance to respond to messages."
- 33% of the 500 firms emailed responded.
And when the call did connect, the conversation often stopped short. Only 41% of firms offered rate information, 12% gave a cost estimate and 36% explained the legal process or the next steps.
Clio ran a version of this test in 2019 too. Then, 56% of calls were answered by a person, 39% went to voicemail, and more than half of the firms didn't return the voicemail within 72 hours. In a separate Clio survey that year, 79% of consumers said they expected a response within 24 hours.
Our own review sample from the example market points the same direction. Responsiveness came up in 116 of the 284 complaints we read, more than any other theme, as Chapter 8 showed. The complaints aren't only about the first call. They're about every call after it.
Google Already Logs Every Missed Call From Your Ads. Most Firms Never Open the Report.
Chapter 1 turned on call reporting, which puts a Google forwarding number in the call assets and routes calls from the ad through it to the firm. That forwarding number does more than count conversions. Google's call details report lists every call it handled, with:
- the start time and duration,
- the caller's area code, and for most calls longer than 15 seconds the caller's number,
- the call type and the campaign it came from,
- and a status: missed or received.
Pull that report every week, for every campaign that shows a phone number, and sort it by hour and day. In our experience the misses cluster at lunch, after 5 p.m., on Saturdays and in the first hour of the morning before the front desk is settled. Those clusters are where the firm is paying for clicks it can't answer.
If the firm uses a third-party call tracking service instead, the same report exists there, usually with recordings. Either way, someone should own the number every Monday: how many calls from the ads went unanswered last week, and when.
Forms and chat need the same scrutiny. Clio's shoppers emailed 500 firms and heard back from a third of them. A form submitted at 8 p.m. from an ad is the same paid click as a call, and the person who filled it in is often filling in two more. Have the form send an instant alert to whoever covers intake, not just an email to a shared inbox, and measure the minutes from submission to the first reply the same way as calls.
For Local Services Ads the stakes are higher still. As Chapter 12 explained, Google ranks firms in that block partly on responsiveness and says missed calls may hurt it, so an unanswered call there can cost the next call too.
Your Ads Run All Day by Default. Most Intake Desks Close at Five.
Google's ad schedule starts at "All day": every hour of every day the ads are eligible to show. A firm's phones usually don't work that way. There are two honest fixes, and the wrong one is doing nothing.
Fix 1: match the ads to the hours someone answers. Set the campaign's ad schedule, or schedule just the call asset, to the hours the intake desk is staffed. Google lets a call asset show only on the days and hours the business can take calls. The text ad can still run at 9 p.m. and send people to the page and its form, while the phone number disappears from the ad until morning.
Fix 2: cover the hours the desk doesn't. If the firm wants calls at 9 p.m., and injury and criminal firms usually do, because crashes and arrests don't keep office hours, someone has to answer them. That's the job of a law firm answering service.
Local Services Ads add a reason to get the hours right. Google won't credit a lead that arrives outside the hours listed on the profile, so a profile that says "open until 6" bills the firm for the 8 p.m. call whether or not anyone answers it.
A Law Firm Answering Service Should Take the Case Details, Not Just the Number.
A general answering service takes a name and a phone number and promises a callback. That's better than voicemail, but not by much, because the person on the other end is still deciding whether to call the next firm. A service built for law firms should do more:
- Intake by practice area, with the questions the firm's own intake team asks: what happened, when, where, who else is involved.
- Conflict-check details, the names of the other parties, so the firm doesn't spend time on a case it can't take.
- The qualified-consultation test from Chapter 1, so the service can tell a real case from a wrong number, a job seeker or a request for free advice.
- A callback within minutes, by a lawyer or a trained intake person, not the next business day.
- The fee and next-step answers Clio's shoppers so rarely got: how the firm charges, what the first meeting looks like and when it can happen.
Before signing with any service, and every month after, test it the way Clio did. Have someone the intake team doesn't know call the firm's number at 7:30 on a weekday evening and again on a Saturday, with a realistic story for the practice area. Don't tap your own ad to do it, as Chapter 5 warned; dial the number from the firm's website or Google Business Profile, which rings the same service. Then read what the service wrote down, how long the callback took, and whether the caller would have booked.
Some services can book the consultation straight onto the firm's calendar. That's the best outcome, because the call ends with an appointment instead of a promise.
Remember who the service is talking to. A prospective client's call is protected information under the rules on confidentiality and prospective clients, Model Rules 1.6 and 1.18 in most states, and the service is acting for the firm. Choose one with written confidentiality terms, train it on what it may and may not say, and review its call notes the way you'd review a new hire's. In our reading, the firm answers to its bar for what the service says on its behalf.
Whoever Answers the First Call Decides How Much the Firm Can Afford to Bid.
Chapter 3 built the bid ceiling from three numbers: what a case is worth, how many clicks become consultations, and how many consultations sign. The last one, the sign rate, is decided at the intake desk more than anywhere else. Signing one consultation in three instead of one in four raises the most a firm can afford per click by a third, without touching a bid.
That's why intake belongs in a Google Ads guide. Every improvement in this chapter shows up in the account: fewer missed calls means more consultations from the same clicks, faster callbacks mean more consultations that sign, and a higher sign rate means the firm can bid higher on the searches that matter and still make money.
Here's an illustration with round numbers. Say the injury ads produce 100 calls a month and the call details report shows 20 missed. A fifth of the money spent on calls bought nothing. If an answering service picks up 15 of those 20 and the firm's usual share of answered calls becomes qualified consultations, the firm gets more consultations from the same budget, which lowers the cost per qualified consultation that Chapter 7's bids and Exploration's Target CPA are built on. The ad account gets cheaper, and nobody touched a setting in it.
Measure it every week, alongside the ad numbers:
- Missed calls from the ads, by hour, from the call details report.
- Minutes from a missed call or a form to the callback.
- Qualified consultations per answered call.
- Signed cases per qualified consultation.
When those numbers improve, the ads look better without a single change to the campaigns. When they slip, no bid, keyword or headline in this guide can make up for it.
Spanish-Speaking Clients Search in Spanish. Most Firms Only Answer in English.
Intake has one more gap that most firms don't measure: language. Of the 984 law firm reviews we read in the example market, 116 were in Spanish. Since September, Google picks who sees a Search ad by the ad's own language. Chapter 16 covers how to build Spanish campaigns that answer in Spanish all the way to the signed case.
See every chapter on the guide home. Want your ads and your intake numbers read together every week? See our Google Ads management.
