Blog September 2026
Most of your calls are the same three questions.
If you run a law firm, you already know which three.
"When is my lawyer going to call me back."
"Am I eligible for [visa / claim / status]."
"Have you received my documents."
Some version of those three questions makes up most of the inbound calls a firm handles in a week. Not urgent, not billable, not the highest and best use of any of your fee earners. But someone has to pick up, because buried in the queue is the one call that actually is urgent: the client about to miss a hearing, the one stuck at the border, the one whose case status changed overnight.
The trouble is you can't tell from a ringing phone which is which.
What that costs you
Firms we speak to feel the cost in three places, roughly in this order of visibility.
Your reception is under-optimised for the work. They're either senior enough to handle the emergency call properly, in which case spending their day on "when will my lawyer call" is a bad use of them, or junior enough to handle the routine calls efficiently, in which case they freeze when the Heathrow call comes in. There's no single hire that solves both ends.
Your fee earners get interrupted. Every routine call that escapes reception ends up on a paralegal's desk or, worse, a solicitor's mobile. Six minutes to answer, twenty minutes to get back to what you were doing. Multiplied across a team, it's the reason your associates are billing less than the plan said they would.
Your clients feel it. The routine callers are fine. They get answered. It's the emergency callers who suffer, because their call sits in a queue behind fifteen "when will my lawyer call me" check-ins, and by the time it reaches someone, the window has moved.
What our intake does
We built Paravo Intake to draw a clean line between the routine and the urgent, so that neither loses.
The routine calls (status updates, eligibility questions, document-receipt confirmations) get answered on the spot, in your firm's voice, using your firm's actual data. Not a script. Not a generic chatbot. Something trained on your calls, your terminology, your workflow.
The emergency calls route straight to whoever should take them, with the context already summarised. No hold queue. No "let me take a message and someone will get back to you." When a client at Heathrow needs an answer in four minutes, they get someone in four minutes.
Everything is logged, timestamped, and searchable, so when a client asks in a follow-up whether they told you X three weeks ago, you can find the answer in under a minute.
Why we built it, in one paragraph
We started out answering calls ourselves. Founders always do. Then we did the maths one weekend and realised somewhere north of 35% of our team's time was going to intake and the tail of intake, and every hour of that was an hour not spent building the things our customers were actually paying us for. We built intake because we needed it. We turned it into a product because every firm we spoke to had the same problem in a slightly different shape. The longer version of that story is here if you want it.
What happens next
If any of this sounds like the week you just had at your firm, the easiest next step is a twenty-minute demo. We show you the routine calls answered live, the urgent-call routing, and how we plug into whatever case management system you're already using.