Knowledge · phone

Telephone Service for Law Firms: Stay Reachable Without Risking Confidentiality

How an AI telephone assistant answers client calls while you're in an appointment, pre-qualifies initial inquiries and documents callbacks – and what § 203 StGB and § 43e BRAO require for this.

It's Wednesday, just before ten. The lawyer is in the oral hearing, the secretary's office is typing a deadline-bound brief and simultaneously answering the third call in ten minutes: a client asks about the status of proceedings, while the next initial inquiry is already waiting on the line – a termination notice, freshly arrived in the mailbox. Anyone who can't get through right now dials the next firm. It's often on the phone that it's decided whether an inquiry turns into a mandate.

What really falls by the wayside at the firm's telephone

Very few calls need a lawyer immediately – but almost all of them need an immediate response. Industry analyses show that law firms miss a considerable share of incoming calls and that a large proportion of callers fail to reach anyone on their first attempt. The damage is twofold here: initial inquiries migrate to the competition, because the first contact counts. And among existing clients, reachability suffers – the very thing by which clients measure their firm – precisely during court appointments, meetings and dictation phases, in other words exactly when no one can pick up.

Fixed telephone hours rarely solve this: they merely shift the problem into two or three peak hours. And the secretary's office, which is actually supposed to monitor deadlines and prepare briefs, jumps back and forth all day between the file and the receiver.

What the Phone Agent takes on in the firm

• Pre-qualify initial inquiries: area of law, brief description of the matter, parties involved, existing letters or deadlines
• Take callback requests from clients with file reference, callback number and availability
• Answer standard organizational questions from the stored Knowledge Base: documents needed for the first appointment, directions, availability
• Book first appointments directly into the calendar as an appointment agent (see online appointment booking)
• Put urgent cases through according to rules – such as expiring deadlines or detention matters
• Answer even several calls in parallel and log each one with an AI summary

Not: give legal advice, assess prospects of success or calculate deadlines. This boundary is not a side effect but is set as a design principle in the assistant's behavior – the assessment stays with the lawyer.

Confidentiality: the legal framework

Lawyers are subject to confidentiality that carries criminal sanctions (§ 43a para. 2 BRAO, § 2 BORA, § 203 para. 1 No. 3 StGB). Even the mere possibility that a service provider could gain insight into mandate data counts as disclosure. Nevertheless, involving external services is not prohibited – it has been expressly regulated since 2017.

§ 203 para. 3 StGB permits the involvement of external persons if they are effectively bound to confidentiality. § 43e BRAO specifies this for IT and other service providers: the use must be necessary for professional practice, the service provider must be carefully selected, and a contract in text form is required. Its minimum content under § 43e para. 3 BRAO comprises the confidentiality obligation including instruction about the criminal consequences, the restriction to what is necessary (need-to-know) as well as the conditions for subcontractors. Added to this is the data processing agreement (DPA) under Art. 28 GDPR with binding to instructions, technical and organizational measures and clear deletion rules. At webRichtung, processing takes place within the EU, following the principle of data minimization; a clause that excludes the training of models with mandate data is advisable. This is not legal advice – the specific arrangement should be clarified with the data protection officer before deployment and examined on a case-by-case basis.

The trick lies in data minimization

The less the assistant learns, the smaller the risk. For intake, what the caller wants to convey anyway in order to make contact is sufficient: who is calling, what it is roughly about, how they can be reached. Sensitive details of the matter belong in the protected client conversation, not in the pre-qualification. This keeps the initial intake lean – and the actual consultation takes place where it belongs.

Urgent cases remain a matter for the boss

Expiring deadlines, detention matters, searches: such constellations tolerate no callback on the next business day. Store urgent-case phrasings where the assistant immediately hands over to a defined number – different for each department, if necessary. Everything else runs, documented, into the callback stack, which the secretary's office works through in quiet blocks instead of jumping between file and receiver.

How to test it in your firm

Start narrow: the assistant takes initial inquiries and callback requests, answers organizational questions from the Knowledge Base and puts defined urgent cases through. Expressly stipulate that no legal assessments are given. After two weeks, the call log shows which matters actually come in – and where your own knowledge modules or forwarding rules are worthwhile.

With webRichtung phone you set this up without a new telephone system: your own phone number, redirection of the firm's number when busy or after business hours, call log with AI summary. Under the current model you can try it out with low risk – 7 days with 15 conversation minutes free, billed per usage. Involve the secretary's office from the start: it knows the caller types best. Further reading: What missed calls cost, automatic call answering and AI call answering. Coordinate the contract in advance with your data protection officer – or get in touch directly.

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