A partner at a six-person firm looks at the numbers. The receptionist is excellent: warm with clients, organised, trusted. But the desk is staffed 9 to 5, and a growing share of enquiries arrive by website in the evening. Meanwhile, fee earners spend hours each week on first calls with people the firm cannot help.
The question is not whether to have a receptionist. It is what first contact really costs, and where the gaps are.
What a receptionist does well
A good receptionist greets clients, manages diaries, looks after the switchboard, handles post and documents, and makes the firm feel human. None of that should be automated. The question is only about the website enquiries that arrive when nobody is at the desk, and the routine questions that take time away from everything else.
A worked example
The figures below are illustrative. Use your own.
Imagine a receptionist whose total annual cost, including salary, employer costs and holiday cover, is a sum the firm considers significant. They cover around 40 office hours a week.
A week has 168 hours. Website enquiries arrive across many of them, especially evenings and weekends. Suppose a third of the firm's website enquiries arrive outside office hours.
Now add fee earner time. If each fee earner spends an hour a week on first calls with people whose matters the firm does not handle, across four fee earners that is four hours a week, around 200 hours a year of unbilled time.
Then add the enquiries lost because nobody replied until the next day. The value of those is explored in what a missed legal enquiry costs a small firm.
You can run your own figures through the chatbot ROI calculator.
Hidden costs people forget
The salary is the visible part. Less visible is the time spent covering lunch breaks, sickness and holidays, often by a paralegal or fee earner whose time is billed at a far higher rate. There is also the cost of training a replacement when a receptionist leaves, and the dip in service while a new person learns the firm's practice areas and clients. None of these are reasons to do without a receptionist, but they are part of what first contact really costs.
Where the gaps are
The receptionist is not the problem. The gaps are:
- Website enquiries outside office hours
- Routine questions that take the receptionist away from clients in front of them
- Unsuitable enquiries that reach fee earners without being screened
Where a website assistant fits
SpideyChat for law firms handles website enquiries at all hours. It answers questions about services, fees and process from the firm's own pages, captures enquiries with the practice area, summary, deadlines and other party's name, and passes them to the right team. It does not answer phones, give legal advice or replace the receptionist. More on how it fits is in AI receptionist for law firms.
The receptionist starts each day with captured enquiries already sorted, rather than a pile of messages to decode.
Comparing the costs
A website assistant costs a fraction of any staff cost. SpideyChat plans start free, with Starter at $9.99 a month and Pro at $29.99 a month, listed on the pricing page. The comparison is not assistant versus receptionist. It is assistant plus receptionist versus receptionist plus the enquiries and hours currently lost.
Lessons from estate agencies
Estate agencies went through the same calculation, as covered in the real cost of an estate agency receptionist. Their conclusion was similar: keep the people, cover the gaps.
Fixing the website too
A receptionist and an assistant both work better when the website answers the common questions. Gaps in legal websites are covered in law firm website mistakes that lose clients.
Working out your own numbers
Count how many website enquiries arrived outside office hours last month, and ask fee earners how much time they spent on first calls that went nowhere. Those two numbers usually make the case clearer than any general estimate.