They answer, establish who is calling and about what, capture the dates that drive urgency, route or book, and write a structured note. They do not advise, do not open a retainer, and must not collect the caller’s story before the firm can run a conflicts check.
Key takeaways
Strip away the marketing and there are five jobs. Answer immediately, including at 9pm and on Saturday. Establish whether the caller is an existing client, a new enquiry, opposing counsel, or a process server. Capture the matter type and the dates that make it urgent. Route or book — to the right lawyer, to a consultation slot, or to a human callback. Then write a structured note into the practice management system rather than leaving a voicemail for somebody to transcribe on Monday.
That is a genuine improvement over a voicemail box, which does none of those five things. It is also considerably less than the marketing implies, because three professional duties constrain the script.
The moment a caller begins describing a problem, the firm is holding confidential information. Ontario’s Rules of Professional Conduct set the duty of confidentiality at rule 3.3, and it is not conditional on a retainer being signed. Practically, that means the vendor holding your call recordings and transcripts is holding your clients’ confidential information, and the contract with that vendor needs to say what happens to it, where it is stored, how long it is kept, and whether it is used to improve anybody’s model.
The same rules add a competence dimension: the commentary expects a lawyer to develop an understanding of, and ability to use, technology relevant to their practice, and to understand the benefits and risks associated with it, recognising the duty to protect confidential information. “I did not know what the vendor did with the recordings” is not a defence the rules contemplate.
Rule 6.1-1 of the same rules requires a lawyer to assume complete professional responsibility for their practice of law and to directly supervise non-lawyers to whom particular tasks and functions are assigned. A voice agent is not a non-lawyer employee, but the logic is unavoidable: work done in the firm’s name is the firm’s responsibility. Nothing the agent says should be capable of being read as advice, and everything it records should be reviewed by a person before it drives an action.
Those are Ontario rules. A firm elsewhere in Canada should read its own law society’s code before designing the script, because the wording differs even where the principle does not.
A conflicts check needs names — the caller, the other side, the related companies, the spouse, the estate. It does not need the story. A voice agent designed the natural way, inviting the caller to explain what happened, collects a detailed account of a matter the firm may be conflicted out of. That is a problem you cannot un-create.
The fix is sequencing, and it is free. Ask for the caller’s name, the names of everyone else involved, and the general area of law. Run the check. Only then take detail, and if the check fails, stop the call politely with nothing but names on the file. Firms already apply this discipline at the front desk; the point is that a voice agent will do exactly what the script says and nothing else, which is both the risk and the remedy.
Ask when it happened. In Ontario the basic limitation period for most civil claims is two years from the date the claim was discovered or reasonably should have been, with a fifteen-year ultimate limitation period running from the act or omission. Certain claims have their own periods.
A voicemail box cannot triage that. A voice agent that captures an event date, compares it against a threshold, and flags anything close for same-day human review is doing the one piece of intake work where a missed day is unrecoverable. It is not calculating a limitation period — it is refusing to let one sit in a mailbox over a long weekend.
Three things, in the script, every time. That they are speaking to an automated assistant. That no solicitor-client relationship is created by the call and nothing said on it is legal advice. And what happens next, with a timeframe.
Scope is set by a lawyer in writing, not implied by a phone menu. Firms increasingly work on defined slices of a matter, and a limited scope retainer in Ontario litigation is a legitimate and well-understood structure — but it is a document, agreed with a client. An intake script that leaves a caller believing the firm is now on the file has created a problem no disclaimer at the end of the call reliably solves.
Retention deserves a decision before go-live. Recordings and transcripts of intake calls are firm records that may touch privileged material, and solicitor-client privilege belongs to the client, not to the firm or its software vendor.
Answering is one thing. Dialling is another. Under the CRTC’s Unsolicited Telecommunications Rules, an automatic dialing-announcing device is equipment that stores or produces numbers in order to convey a pre-recorded or synthesised voice message, and a telemarketing call by ADAD requires express consent tied to the specific number. Those rules apply whether or not a call is exempt from the National Do Not Call List, and the National DNCL rules do not apply to calls made to a business consumer — a distinction that matters for firms with a business development function. The CRTC sets out the telemarketer obligations in full.
For follow-up by email or text, the anti-spam requirements are consent, identification information and an unsubscribe mechanism, with the sender bearing the onus of proving consent.
A two-lawyer plaintiff-side firm in Hamilton receives roughly 40 calls a week, about a quarter outside office hours. Before: voicemail, returned within a day or two, with a share of callers gone by then.
After: the agent answers, states that it is automated, and asks for the caller’s name, the other party’s name, and whether the matter is a motor vehicle accident, a slip and fall, a long-term disability denial or something else. It runs the names against the conflicts list. It asks the date of the incident and the date of any denial letter. It books a 20-minute consultation, or, where the incident date is more than 20 months old, marks the note urgent and pages the on-call lawyer.
It never says whether there is a case, never estimates a value, and never says the firm will take the matter. The output is a note with names, a matter type, two dates and a booked slot — which is exactly what the lawyer needed and could not get from a voicemail.
Run it after hours only for a month, with every transcript reviewed. Measure two things: how many callers reached a booked slot who would previously have hit voicemail, and how many times the agent was asked for advice. Fix the script against the second number before you extend the hours. The rollout question is cultural as much as technical, which is why partner buy-in is worth handling deliberately.
Can it tell a caller whether they have a case?
No, and it should be scripted to refuse. That is legal advice, it would be given without a retainer, without a conflicts clearance and without a file, and it would be given in the firm’s name under rules that make the lawyer responsible for the practice.
Does the firm have to disclose that it is AI?
Say it. The privacy commissioner’s generative AI principles ask for openness about collection and for significant-impact outputs to be identified as machine-generated. A caller deciding how much to disclose is entitled to know who is listening.
Is a recorded intake call privileged?
Privilege is the client’s and attaches to communications for the purpose of legal advice; how it holds up under scrutiny depends on the circumstances. Treat every recording as if it may be privileged, restrict access accordingly, and set a retention period before you switch the system on.
Can it handle existing clients asking for a status update?
Carefully. Confirming identity over the phone and disclosing anything about a live matter engages the confidentiality rule. Most firms are better served by having the agent take the request and route it than by letting it read from the file.
A 30-minute call is enough to tell you whether AI pays for itself here.
