Where enquiries get lost between reception and billing

Most enquiries a law firm loses are not lost by anybody. Reception took the message. The fee-earner meant to call back. Accounts sent the bill on time. The enquiry, or the client, fell into the space between two people, each of whom reasonably believed the next step belonged to somebody else. The fix is to treat each handover as a thing in its own right: with an owner, a standard for what gets passed on, and a time limit.

This post goes through the five handovers where that happens most, with a checklist for each. It is part of our series on revenue operations for law firms.

Why are handovers where things go wrong?

Because nobody is measured on them.

Reception is measured, formally or not, on answering the phone politely. Fee-earners are measured on chargeable hours. Accounts is measured on cash. Each of those is a reasonable thing to measure. None of them includes "the enquiry I passed on was actually picked up". So when a message sits unread in a fee-earner's inbox for three days, every individual metric looks fine.

In revenue operations work outside law, the same pattern has a name: the leak is always at the handoff. Marketing hands leads to sales, sales hands customers to onboarding, and each team optimises its own stage while the thing being handed over quietly goes cold. The firms and companies that fix it do not ask people to try harder. They make the handover visible.

Handover one: the line to the first person

The first handover happens before any person is involved. A call arrives. Does it reach somebody?

In business hours, the risks are lunchtimes, sickness, holidays and the moment every line is busy. Out of hours, most firms send callers to voicemail, and a large share of callers with an urgent problem will not leave one. The US evidence on this is stark: Clio's 2024 Legal Trends Report sent secret shoppers to 500 US firms and found that 48 per cent could not be reached by phone at all, either on the first attempt or by a call back. We know of no equivalent published UK study, but the mechanics are the same.

Checklist:

• Know your missed-call count, split by hour of day. The phone system has it.
• Name who covers lunch, sickness and holidays, in writing.
• Decide what happens after five and at weekends, and test it by calling yourself. The options are in who answers your law firm's phone after five.
• Check the web form and enquiry inbox are covered to the same standard as the phone. A form submitted on Friday evening should not wait until Monday afternoon.

Handover two: reception to fee-earner

This is the most common place for an enquiry to die.

The receptionist takes a name and a number, writes "wants to speak to someone about a divorce", and emails it to the family team. The family team is in court. The message is read at six, when it is too late to call. Next morning it is fourth in the pile. By the afternoon the caller has instructed a firm that rang back within the hour.

Two things go wrong here. The message is too thin for the fee-earner to act on without a full call back, and nobody owns the time limit.

What a good enquiry handover contains:

• Who: name, phone, email, and how they prefer to be contacted.
• What: the type of matter in the caller's own words, plus the firm's category for it.
• When: any deadline or hearing date the caller mentions. This is the single most important field, because it decides urgency.
• Who else: the other party's name, so a conflict check can start before the call back.
• How they found you: the source, asked once, now.
• What they were told: for example, "a solicitor will call you before 4pm today".

Checklist:

• One named owner for every enquiry, assigned at the moment it is passed on, not "the family team".
• A time limit, written down. Same working day is a reasonable default. If the owner cannot meet it, the enquiry goes to somebody who can.
• A back-up route for when the owner is in court or on leave.
• A promise to the caller that the firm keeps. Telling someone they will hear back by four, then ringing at five, costs more than telling them five in the first place.

Handover three: enquiry to instruction

The fee-earner has spoken to the client, the client wants to go ahead, and now there is paperwork: client care letter, identity checks, terms, perhaps money on account. In many firms this is handed to a secretary or an assistant, and the client hears nothing for several days while it happens.

This is the handover where a client who had decided changes their mind. They were ready on Tuesday. On Friday they have heard nothing and a friend has recommended somebody else.

Checklist:

• Tell the client what happens next and when, on the call, and confirm it in writing the same day.
• Send the engagement documents within an agreed time, and track that as a number.
• Name the person who will chase if the documents are not returned, and when.
• Record the source of the instruction on the file when it is opened. It will never be easier to find out.

Handover four: the file to the client, during the matter

Once a matter is open, the handover is between the fee-earner's work and the client's understanding of it. This one is less obvious because it is continuous.

Clients experience silence as inactivity, even when the file is moving. A fortnight of waiting for the other side is invisible to them. They ring for an update. The fee-earner is in a meeting. The client leaves a message. By the third unreturned message, the relationship has changed, and the client is less likely to come back or to recommend the firm, whatever the outcome.

Checklist:

• Set an update standard for each type of matter, for example a short update every 14 days even if nothing has changed.
• Track open matters where the client has not been updated within that standard. Few firms do, which is why it belongs on the list in the KPIs a managing partner should actually watch.
• Make it easy to send an update. A two-line message saying "we are still waiting for the other side's response, which is due by the 20th" takes a minute, and saves a call.
• Cover the fee-earner's line during court and long meetings, so a client call is answered and the message is specific.

Handover five: the work to the bill, and the bill to the next instruction

Two handovers at the end of the matter, and both are routinely dropped.

Work to bill. Time is recorded late, or not at all, and billing waits for somebody to review a long list of entries. The work was done in March and billed in June. This is an operational problem before it is a financial one, because it depends on who owns the review and when. How you account for it is a matter for your accountant.

Bill to next instruction. The matter closes, the final bill is paid, and nobody speaks to the client again. The client does not remember the firm's name when they next need a solicitor, or when a friend asks them for a recommendation.

Checklist:

• Name who reviews unbilled time and how often, by team.
• Send a closing letter that says what was done, thanks the client, and names who to contact next time.
• Record which other services the client might need, so another department can offer them at the right moment. There is more on this in repeat instructions and referral sources.

How do you find out where your firm's handovers fail?

Follow five real enquiries from last month from first contact to today. Do not use a survey or a meeting; use the records.

For each one, write down every time it changed hands, who held it, how long it sat before the next person acted, and what information was passed on. It takes an afternoon.

What usually comes out:

• One or two handovers account for most of the delay. Often reception to fee-earner.
• The information passed on is too thin for the next person to act on without starting again.
• Nobody could say who owned the enquiry at one or more points.

Fix the worst handover first. Then do the exercise again in a month.

A worked example

This example is invented to show the exercise. It does not describe a real firm.

A mid-size firm traces five employment enquiries from the previous month. On average each enquiry changes hands three times before the first call back. The longest wait is between reception emailing the team inbox and a named fee-earner picking it up: in three of the five cases, over a working day. In two cases, the fee-earner's first call was spent re-asking questions reception had already asked but not written down.

The firm changes two things. Reception assigns each enquiry to a named fee-earner rather than a team inbox, with a same-day time limit and a named back-up. And the handover note gains three fields: deadline, other party, source. A month later, the same exercise shows one handover before the call back, and first calls that start from what the client already said.

Nothing about the fee-earners' legal work changed. The handover did.

What does a good handover note look like?

A handover note should let the next person act without ringing anybody first. Here is an invented example of the difference, for a caller who rang the main line about a dismissal.

A thin note: "Sarah rang re employment. Please call back. 07700 900000."

A useful note:

• Caller: Sarah, prefers mobile, available after 3pm, happy to receive email.
• Matter: says she was dismissed last Friday after eight years. Employment, possible unfair dismissal.
• Deadline: she mentioned a letter with an appeal date next Wednesday.
• Other party: her former employer, a named local care company.
• Source: recommended by a friend the firm acted for last year.
• Told: a solicitor will call her after 3pm today.
• Owner: assigned to a named fee-earner, back-up named.

The second note takes a minute longer to write. It saves the fee-earner a call spent re-asking questions, it lets the conflict check start at once, it puts the appeal deadline in front of the person who needs to see it, and it records the source while the caller still remembers it. Most of all, it lets the fee-earner open the call with "I understand you were dismissed on Friday and have an appeal date next week", which is the moment a caller decides they have found the right firm.

The details in the example are invented, and the number is from the range reserved for drama and fiction.

Where WasilX fits

We built WasilX around the first four of these handovers, because each one depends on something being written down at the moment it happens and passed to a named person.

Cam, our AI Engagement Coordinator, takes calls on the firm's line at any hour, says it is AI, asks the questions the firm has set (including deadlines and the other party's name), and sends a structured summary to the right fee-earner, so the call back starts from what the client already said. Each fee-earner has a personal assistant that covers their line in court, takes a specific message, and drafts matter updates for the fee-earner to approve. Cam never gives legal advice.

If you would like to trace your own five enquiries with us, we are glad to do that with you.

Frequently asked questions

Who should own the handover from reception to fee-earner? The fee-earner the enquiry is assigned to, from the moment it is assigned, with a named back-up. A team inbox is not an owner.

How quickly should a new enquiry be called back? Set your own standard and measure against it. Same working day is a reasonable default, and faster is better; see speed to lead for law firms.

Is this only a problem for large firms? No. Small firms have fewer handovers, but each person holds more of them at once, so the same gaps appear.