Measuring Missed and After-Hours Calls at a Defense Firm

Criminal defense clients call at bad hours. Arrests happen at night and on weekends, and the person on the phone is often a parent or partner who just got a call from a jail. If your marketing produces those calls and nobody answers, the money spent bringing them in is wasted, and the caller usually moves on to the next lawyer in the search results.

Most firm owners have a rough sense that they miss some calls. Far fewer measure it. This guide covers how to pull missed and after-hours call data together, what to look at once you have it, and how to use it to make decisions about staffing, answering services and where your marketing budget goes.

Where the data lives

Call data usually sits in two or three places. Your phone system or VoIP provider logs every inbound call with a time and an outcome. If you use call tracking numbers on your website, Google Business Profile or ads, the tracking platform records the source of each call. Your intake or case management software records which callers became consultations and which of those signed.

The first job is getting these into one view. A monthly export to a spreadsheet is enough for a small firm. Match calls by phone number and date so you can follow a single caller from the first ring to a signed engagement or a dead end. If your systems can’t be matched cleanly, start with the phone system log alone. Imperfect data you look at every month beats perfect data you never pull.

Defining a missed call

Agree on definitions before you count anything. A call that rang out to voicemail is clearly missed. A call that reached an answering service which took a message was answered in one sense, but the caller still didn’t speak with someone who could help them. A call abandoned after twenty seconds on hold belongs in its own bucket.

Write your definitions down and use them every month. Changing how you count halfway through the year makes trend lines meaningless, and it invites arguments about whose numbers are right.

Reading calls by hour and day

Build a simple grid with hours of the day across the top and days of the week down the side. Fill each cell with total calls and missed calls. Patterns usually jump out within a month or two. Pay close attention to evenings, early mornings and weekends, since those are times when arrests and jail releases often happen and when many offices are closed.

Your own grid is what counts here. It reflects your market, your practice areas and the way your marketing is set up. A firm that runs most of its visibility through the map pack may see a very different pattern from one that gets most of its calls from referrals.

Speed to call back

For missed calls, the callback time matters as much as the miss itself. Measure the gap between the missed call and the first return attempt. Then look at how often a returned call actually reaches the person. Someone released from jail at 2 a.m. who called three firms may have hired one of them before your office opens.

Set a target that fits your staffing, such as returning every missed call within an hour during business days, and track how often you hit it. If your phone system supports texting, a short text alongside the callback can help, since some people won’t pick up an unknown number.

Tying misses to marketing sources

Call tracking lets you split missed calls by source, and this is where the analysis starts paying for itself. If a large portion of your Google Business Profile calls arrive after hours, your map listing is doing its job at times when nobody is there to answer. That is an argument for an answering service or an on-call rotation before it is an argument for spending more on visibility.

The reverse can also show up. A source that sends calls mostly during office hours, when they’re answered, may deserve more budget than its raw call count suggests. If you are also trying to separate people who already know your name from people finding you for the first time, the method in this guide to separating branded from unbranded searches in Search Console pairs well with call source data.

Deciding what to change

Use the data to price your options. Compare the cost of an answering service, an attorney on-call schedule or extended intake hours against the number of after-hours calls you are currently missing and your typical fee for the matters those calls represent. You don’t need perfect numbers to see whether the gap is large or small.

Whatever you change, keep measuring. Track the same grid for at least three months after the change so you can see whether answered calls and signed cases actually moved. Broader questions about turning those findings into a growth plan are covered on a site about growing a criminal defense firm.

Questions about call data at a defense firm

Is it legal to record intake calls?

Recording laws vary by state, and some states require consent from everyone on the call. Check your state’s rules and your bar’s guidance before recording, and think about confidentiality for anything a caller tells you.

How many months of data do I need?

Three months gives a usable picture for most firms. A full year shows seasonal patterns, such as holiday weekends and the start of the school year.

Should missed calls count against marketing performance?

Report them separately. Marketing’s job is to make the phone ring, and intake’s job is to answer it. Keeping both numbers visible stops each side from blaming the other and shows where the real gap is.

---

This guide is part of SBD Marketing’s coverage of legal marketing analytics. SBD Marketing works only with criminal defense law firms.

SBD Marketing · info@sbdmarketing.agency · Book a call: sbdmarketing.agency/scheduling · Serving criminal defense law firms across the USA · sbdmarketing.agency