Never miss a call with the top legal answering service
Capture new leads and answer common questions from your clients 24/7 with Sona, OpenPhone’s AI agent. Eliminate missed calls and collaborate better with your team using the best phone system for growing businesses.
Trusted by over 60,000 businesses
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Smarter than voicemail, more effective than traditional attorney answering services
Sona greets callers, answers questions, and captures messages within the same system you use to call and text with existing and prospective clients.
Why Sona is a better virtual receptionist for your law firm
Here’s how Sona outperforms traditional phone answering services:
1. 100% integrated in your business phone
OpenPhone is an intuitive business phone system built for team collaboration. Make calls, send texts, and build stronger customer relationships with our platform.
Sona’s call recordings, summaries, and transcripts, appear in your OpenPhone workspace minutes after a call ends. You can see calls Sona handled within your existing conversation history.
In contrast, third-party answering services force you to toggle between different tools and put together customer context by yourself because their conversations happen outside your business phone. It adds more work for your team and leads to a fragmented client experience.
2. More cost-effective
Save thousands of dollars a month with Sona. Many law firm answering services charge 5x-7x the cost of Sona. They have expensive plans based on a limited number of call minutes. And on top of that, additional per-minute charges apply if you exceed that limit.
Sona charges a flat fee for the first 50 calls it handles on behalf of your business. After that, it charges a fixed fee for every call, not for every minute. It’s designed to give you the most value from your answering service.
3. Consistent service
Offer a consistent client experience with Sona. Train Sona to your business’s needs, no learning curve required. Test it before you go live, and make adjustments based on its ongoing performance.
With live answering services, you never have full control over how their teams represent your business. Even after weeks of onboarding and training, there is always room for error with live call answering services. Staff turnover can also affect your call quality; an AI answering service always shows up for work and delivers the same level of service.
4. Save time handling client intake and other common conversations
Sona helps you automate administrative phone calls so you can focus on specific client conversations.
Speed up your client intake process with Sona. If a new client calls to schedule a consultation, Sona can ask your default set of legal intake questions. You and your team can have a more productive initial consultation instead of asking those questions during your call with a client.
Elevate your client experience
Train Sona in seconds. Assign Sona to your calls in minutes.
Add Sona to after-hours call flows
Don't lose potential clients. Simply drag and drop Sona into your existing call flows, both during and after business hours. Sona works alongside call routing features in OpenPhone, like ring order, phone menus, and call forwarding.
Train Sona to handle common queries
Sona can answer FAQs regarding your law practice in minutes. Upload your key policies and FAQ answers so that Sona can give the right information to your clients. You can also train it to avoid answering questions that require legal expertise and direct clients to schedule a consultation.
Ask follow-ups for legal intake
Make your intake process smoother with Sona. Give instructions to Sona to ask follow-up questions based on specific keywords in a conversation. For example, if a caller is not an existing client and wants to schedule a consultation, Sona can ask about the specifics of their case to pass along to your team.
View Sona’s call logs instantly
See Sona’s call summaries, transcripts, and messages in your OpenPhone inbox right after calls end. With automatic call recording and instant transcription, you can maintain a clear audit trail of all your phone communication.
Feature comparison
See how Sona compares to traditional call answering services.
Features
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Sona
Traditional answering services
Starting price per month
$49 for 50 calls, $0.99 per call for additional calls
~5x-7x the cost of Sona
Setup time
Instant
2-4 weeks
Brand voice and tone
Consistent
Highly variable
Monitoring
100% in OpenPhone
Custom solution or daily email summary
Integrations
HubSpot, Salesforce, Zapier, Make, Jobber, and more
Limited integration options
How to set up Sona in four steps
It only takes four steps to get started with Sona:
- Start with a free trial.
- Try our free trial features, including calls and recordings.
- Configure your Sona settings and test Sona in OpenPhone’s call flow builder.
- Once you’ve confirmed it’s a good fit, activate your OpenPhone account and get the Sona add-on.
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“With Sona, I never worry about missing a call again. It’s like having a smart, reliable assistant who always picks up. It’s professional, friendly, and on it 24/7.”
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“Sona has my back. Even when I miss a call, I know it’s handled—and handled well. Total game changer.”
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“Sona has transformed the way I handle my calls. It’s like having a trusted partner who ensures I never miss an opportunity, no matter how busy I get.”
“With Sona, I never worry about missing a call again. It’s like having a smart, reliable assistant who always picks up. It’s professional, friendly, and on it 24/7.”
Why legal professionals choose OpenPhone
See why OpenPhone is the #1 business phone provider by customer satisfaction on G2.
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Local and toll-free numbers for your team
Add as many numbers as you need with OpenPhone. Choose between local US and Canadian phone numbers and North American toll-free numbers. If you operate multiple legal practices or provide legal services in multiple regions, local numbers are a great option to build trust with clients. Toll-free numbers let you offer a dedicated customer support number that stands out from your competitors.
All OpenPhone plans include a phone number for every user who joins your workspace. Your team members can have individual numbers, or you can share numbers for specific departments. With an OpenPhone number, you can make outbound calls and send text messages to US and Canadian numbers with no limits.
Need more phone numbers than your current team size? Additional numbers cost just $5 per number per month.
Call handling made easy
Automatically route incoming calls to the right place with OpenPhone. Create custom call flows in seconds with our call flow builder. See how calls are routed during and after business hours and make adjustments in our drag-and-drop visual canvas.
Give your team the essential business phone features to handle any call volume. Choose how your team receives phone calls, simultaneously or in custom batches, with ring groups. Give your callers a self-serve navigation option with phone menus. Direct emergency phone calls to a secondary number with our call forwarding options.
Need to transfer client calls to a colleague? Warm transfers help you share the right amount of context with your team when you transfer calls.
Collaborate better as a team
Work more efficiently with OpenPhone. Split responsibility for incoming calls and texts with shared numbers. See what your team is working on with a complete history of all your client interactions with shared inboxes. If you manage a team, you can easily see who said what in specific conversations.
Collaborate on case management as a team. Tag team members and assign follow-up tasks next to a client text or call recording in real time with internal threads. Track which team members have viewed interactions with inbox viewers. Use our voicemail transcripts to save time catching up on client requests. Then message colleagues directly to discuss action items.
Automate repetitive admin work
Put your administrative tasks on autopilot. Deliver better client services and improve client satisfaction with OpenPhone.
Record client calls (with their consent, of course) with automatic call recording in OpenPhone. Use our AI call summaries and transcripts to capture every client detail. Recordings, summaries, and transcripts are stored in your OpenPhone account with no limits, so you have a clear record of what was shared with you.
Automatically log your calls and texts in your CRM with our third-party CRM integrations. Connect to HubSpot and Salesforce or use Zapier, Make, or the OpenPhone API to build a custom integration.
Plus, Sona is always available to handle AI phone calls for you. It’s your in-house legal receptionist that can answer questions and take messages on your behalf so you can give your clients all your attention, whether in the office or in court.
Build client relationships over text
Stay connected with clients between consultations with SMS and MMS messaging.
Automatically respond to clients when you’re unavailable with SMS auto-replies. Schedule texts to reach them in their time zone with scheduled messages. Your assistants can use your shared number to text clients and quickly answer frequently asked questions with pre-written text templates, also known as snippets.
Set up automatic text workflows with Zapier or Make for common client use cases, like appointment scheduling and case notifications.
Call and text from any device
Whether you’re in the office, in court, or on the go, OpenPhone travels with you. Download our desktop and mobile apps for your device and start making calls — all you need is an internet connection.
OpenPhone is available for Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and on the web, so your team can use their preferred devices to access our platform. No need for clunky desk phones to keep people at the office.
Find out how much you’re investing in your business phone solution upfront on our pricing page.
Frequently asked questions
Can’t find the answer here? Check out our Resource Center.
An answering service is a solution that handles incoming calls on behalf of a business or an individual. An answering service can function in-house in a company’s tools with an AI voice agent or be outsourced to a third-party provider, like a virtual receptionist service. Most answering services answer common questions from callers or take down messages they pass along to the rest of the team.
The benefits of an answering service for law firms are:
- Eliminate missed calls: Give your clients and your team peace of mind with a 24/7 answering service. For clients, you can set the right expectations and give them an idea of next steps. For teams, answering phone calls and taking messages from clients helps them understand what their clients need and how they can help without playing phone tag.
- Speed up legal intake: Legal answering services can double as legal intake services. Collect your standard legal intake responses from clients on the phone and follow up during your consultations to verify their information.
- Answer common questions: Help clients navigate the legal industry with the best AI answering service. Services like Sona can automatically answer client questions when they come up. Build trust with prospective clients and capture leads like a sales AI tool. If a question requires legal expertise, Sona can decline to answer and suggest scheduling an appointment instead.
Live legal answering services have a wide range of prices, from $245 to $775 per month plus additional per-minute calling fees, making them quite expensive for small businesses.
On the other hand, Sona costs $49 per month for 50 calls; additional calls are $0.99 each. It’s a more cost-effective option because we bill you based on your calls instead of by the minute. We also don’t bill you for calls that last less than 15 seconds, which means your spam calls or wrong numbers won’t be added to your Sona bill or go toward the monthly allotment of 50 calls.
A call center is a full-time customer support service that handles customer issues over the phone. It’s intended for high call volumes common among large businesses and enterprise companies. Call centers can vary in terms of call quality; outsourcing outside the US is common for call center teams because US-based teams are more expensive. They also require a lot of effort to set up because call center reps have to be trained and evaluated on the company’s documentation.
Phone answering services, on the other hand, aren’t designed to offer full-service customer support. They can answer common customer questions, take messages on behalf of businesses, and pass them along to teams. They’re intended for lower call volumes or to assist teams with managing spikes in call volumes, typically in small businesses or fast-growing companies.
We’re biased, but we believe that Sona is the best AI answering service for law firms. It’s easy to set up and use, communicates with callers just like a member of your team, and integrates directly in your OpenPhone workspace. Plus, it’s a fraction of the cost of traditional answering services.
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