A two-attorney firm answers every message after 6pm

In a two-attorney firm, the intake is whoever is closest. It changes by the hour, and after 6pm it is nobody. That was the shape of the problem: not that the firm didn't care, but that the desk answering the phone was empty more often than anyone admitted.

The problem, before

Most legal inquiries arrive outside business hours. A firm that stops answering at 6pm stops being reachable precisely when people finally decide to reach out: after work, after bedtime, with the weekend behind them.

The notes arrived in different shapes. Some were thorough, some were a first name and a number. The attorney who made the callback inherited whichever version landed on the desk, and re-asked whatever was missing. Nothing was declined on purpose. Some of it was misplaced by the gaps between people.

What changed

The firm added Iris to its site as a widget — no new phone line, no separate app for staff to check. Iris now answers the messages that arrive after the office closes. Not with a form, and not with a promise to call back. With a full intake conversation: the same questions the firm would ask, in the order the caller's story needs them, and Iris says plainly at the start that it's the firm's intake agent, not an attorney.

The conversation only turns into a lead once Iris has actually gathered enough of the case to write a real summary — not after a fixed number of questions. Every conversation ends the same way: one page, in the same order, with a name attached to it and a qualification call the attorneys' own threshold decided, reasoning included. If anything in the conversation signals a situation that can't wait until morning, it's flagged for a person immediately, separately from the qualification score.

The attorney making the callback isn't reconstructing a voicemail or re-asking what a colleague already asked. They're reading what the person actually said, with the full transcript sitting behind it in the dashboard if they need more than the summary.

The question of who follows up is answered before it's asked.

What it looks like now

The 6pm cutoff is gone, and nothing else had to change. The firm's process, its callback, and its decisions are exactly where they were. The front door just stays open.

This is the pattern the small-firms page describes, with the ownership table firms read instead of a cleanup week.