What a legal answering service may not say to a caller

This is a guide, not legal advice; check anything that matters to your firm with your compliance officer.

Is a legal answering service allowed to give legal advice?

Yes, in England and Wales. Giving legal advice is not one of the six reserved legal activities under the Legal Services Act 2007, so whoever answers the phone does not need to be authorised to do it. The constraint is not statutory. It is that the call was answered in your firm's name, and your firm owns what was said.

The Act reserves six things: exercising a right of audience, conducting litigation, reserved instrument activities, probate activities, notarial activities and the administration of oaths. Advice is not on the list. The Legal Services Board says it plainly: a person does not need to be authorised to carry on activities which are not reserved legal activities.

What does bind you is the Solicitors Regulation Authority, and it attaches to the firm rather than to the supplier. The regulator's position on outsourced client-facing technology has been published since November 2023 and is unambiguous: 'if you use a third party chatbot to provide initial legal advice, you remain responsible for any errors in that advice'. It was written about chatbots. It applies without modification to a voice agent, or to a call centre in Manchester.

So 'are we allowed' is the wrong question. You are allowed. The question is whether you are willing to own the sentence.

What does a legal answering service actually do with the call?

It answers your line in your firm's name, usually around the clock, takes the caller's name, number and the nature of the matter, and passes it to you by text or email. Better plans triage urgency, transfer live calls and book into your diary. Almost none of them tell you what they will not say.

alldayPA's legal page describes the job as 'we'll take a name, a number and a message so you can call them back', with triage on the urgency and nature of the call. Moneypenny's legal page lists 'gathering detailed enquiry information, providing tailored quotes, booking appointments, taking payments' among what its receptionists do.

We read both pages on 17 September 2026. Neither mentions legal advice, conflict checks or client due diligence anywhere on it. That is not a criticism of either company; both are long established and good at the thing they sell. It is a description of the category. It sells the pick-up, and leaves the line for you to draw.

The five questions a caller asks that nobody on that line should answer

People do not ring a solicitor to leave a message. They ring because something has gone wrong and they want to know where they stand. Inside two minutes they will ask some version of five things: do I have a case, how long have I got, how much will this cost, will I win, and should I sign this.

Every one of them is the regulated thing. 'How long have I got' is a limitation question, and a wrong answer given on the phone is the sort of wrong answer that becomes a negligence claim rather than a complaint. 'How much will this cost', answered with a figure before anyone has seen the file, becomes a costs complaint when the bill arrives. 'Should I sign this' is advice on a document nobody has read.

The rule we build to is narrow and easy to state: the assistant may describe the firm and the process, and may never characterise the caller's position. It can say the firm does employment work and that a first call takes thirty minutes. It cannot say the caller is probably still in time.

What may it do, then?

It says what it is in the first sentence, every call. It takes the matter type, the other side's name and the date things happened, which is exactly what a conflict check needs and exactly what a message reading 'call Mrs Patel back' does not contain. It runs those names against your system and flags a hit for a person; it does not clear the conflict, because under the SRA Code that judgement belongs to the firm.

It says whether the firm does that kind of work, which ends a good share of calls honestly and in ninety seconds. It books the call into the real diary. And it logs every word, so 'what were they told?' has an answer. None of that is legal work. All of it is the administration around legal work, which is where the complaint data says the damage actually happens.

Why the unanswered phone is a regulatory problem, not just a sales one

The Legal Ombudsman received 14,259 complaints in the year to 31 March 2026, up 37% on the year before, and accepted 8,412 of them. Poor communication featured in 24%, delay and failure to progress in 22%, and failure to advise in 19%. A quarter of consumers said they never got a final response from their provider at all.

Read the top two again. They are not bad lawyering. They are not getting back to people. Residential conveyancing alone accounted for 36% of accepted complaints, and wills and probate showed the highest rate of poor service at 79%.

A firm that does not answer its phone is not only losing instructions. It is standing at the top of the funnel that the Ombudsman's two largest complaint categories drain into. That is the argument for answering every call, and it is a better argument than the one about conversion rates.

What about confidentiality and privilege?

Keep client information out of open tools and inside a contract. The SRA's warning notice on the misuse of AI, published 17 August 2026, states that putting client letters into an open-source tool such as ChatGPT 'is to place this information on the internet in the public domain'. An enquiry line handles exactly that material, often before anyone is a client.

The same notice makes the supervision point, which is the one firms miss when they buy rather than build: those who supervise or manage others providing legal services 'remain accountable for the work carried out through them'. Outsourcing the phone does not outsource that.

In buying terms it comes down to four things in writing. UK or EU storage. A data processing agreement, since you are the controller and they are the processor. 'Not used for training' in the contract rather than the sales deck. And a retention period the system enforces rather than someone remembering. The same list applies to any business phone, and we set it out in full in the UK rules for an AI answering your business phone.

Be fair to the human service

If what you need is the phone picked up politely while you are in court, and your diary lives in your head, a human answering service does that today and has done for twenty years. Nothing above is an argument for AI over people. It is an argument for writing the line down, because neither kind of service will write it for you.

A receptionist who has taken four hundred calls this week, and who knows the firm does personal injury, will eventually tell a caller they sound like they have a claim. It is a kind thing to say and it is the firm's problem. The difference with an agent is not that it is more careful by nature. It is that its limits are configuration rather than training, so they hold identically on call four hundred and on call one, and either way there is a log.

How that runs through a working day is on our law firms page, and what it did to one firm's response times is in the case study. Our result from one build, not an industry average. The wider version of the rule, across every sector, is in four things an agent should never do without asking.

What to do next

Take last month's new enquiries and mark which of them arrived by phone. Beside each one, write how many hours passed before a fee earner actually spoke to that person. That number tells you whether the phone is your problem, and it is a number nobody has to estimate.

Then find your answering script, whoever runs it today, and look for the sentence that says what the service may not say. If there is no such sentence, write it before you change provider. It is the part that transfers.