Answer · Legal
Should a firm run intake in-house or use a service?
Both options are committed before anyone knows how many enquiries arrive outside cover, which is the number that decides it.
Neither until you have counted enquiries arriving outside current cover. A salaried hire is fixed cost against unknown volume; a per-call contract is variable cost against the same unknown. Count first, then the cheaper structure is obvious.
The two options look like opposites and share a defect. A salaried intake person is a fixed cost committed against enquiry volume the firm has not measured. A per-call answering contract is a variable cost committed against the same unmeasured volume. The comparison is normally run on price — a salary against a rate card — and it cannot be resolved that way, because which structure is cheaper depends entirely on the quantity neither side of the comparison knows.
That quantity is specifically the enquiries arriving outside current cover: at lunch, in the evening, during a trial, on the days the office is short-handed. Those are the enquiries that motivated the question, and they are the ones the firm has no record of, because nothing was there to write one. Everything the firm does know about its enquiry volume is a description of the hours when someone was already answering.
The measurement is not hard and takes a fortnight. Place enquiries through the firm's own public channels — the web form, the main number, the practice-area number if there is one — across the bands where cover is thin, and record what happens to each. Add to that the timestamps on enquiries the firm did receive, bucketed by hour. Together those give both the shape of arrival and the share of it currently being caught, which is the input both options were missing.
Once the volume is known the structures separate cleanly, and the crossing point is a property of the rate card rather than an opinion. Low volume concentrated in narrow bands favours a per-call contract, which costs nothing in the hours nothing arrives. Steady volume across the working day favours a salaried person, whose marginal cost per enquiry falls as volume rises and who can be given the work that a per-call service cannot do. High volume in narrow out-of-hours bands often favours both: a person for the day, a contract for the edges.
There is a difference in what the two can be authorised to do that matters more than the price gap, and it is frequently discovered after signing. A salaried person inside the firm can run a conflicts check, open a matter, and answer a routine procedural question. An external service can capture and commit to a callback, and cannot safely do the rest. If the reason for the decision was that enquiries go cold before anyone reaches them, an arrangement that only captures details has shortened the gap without closing it, and the firm will conclude the service does not work when in fact the scope was wrong.
The cost side needs the same discipline it needs anywhere: the salary is not the cost. Statutory employer contributions apply before any benefit, and they behave differently across earnings, so a comparison against a per-call rate card should be run against the loaded figure. That will not usually reverse the answer, but it moves the crossing point, and the crossing point is the whole decision.
The choice between a salary and a per-call contract is a choice between two ways of being wrong about a number nobody has measured.
Answer Production Engine, Context Theory
Related questions
Can a service do conflicts checking?
Not in any meaningful sense, and it should not be asked to. A conflicts check requires access to the firm's client and matter records and a judgement about relationships that is the firm's responsibility. What an external service can do is capture the parties named by the caller so the check can be run quickly by someone inside the firm, which is a real speed gain and a different thing.
Is a hybrid arrangement worth the complexity?
Usually yes, and the complexity is mostly in the handover rather than in the arrangement. The two failure points are enquiries captured by the service that nobody inside the firm picks up promptly, and callers who have to repeat themselves to a second person. Both are handover design problems, and both are cheaper to solve than either an unstaffed evening or a salaried person idle at nine in the evening.
METHOD
Every figure below carries its source and the date it was verified. Nothing on this page is asserted.
The numbers on this page.
| What | Value | Specific to |
|---|---|---|
| Social Security — the employer's rate, and the wage base it stops at | 6.2% up to $184,500 | Category-wide |
| Medicare — the employer's rate, on all covered wages, with no wage base limit | 1.45% | Category-wide |
| Firms that never responded to a web enquiry at all | 23% | Category-wide |
| Attorneys & legal cost per lead | $131.63 | Category-wide |
IRS Tax Topic no. 751 — Social Security and Medicare withholding rates · statutory rate for the 2026 tax year, published by the administering authority · the additional Medicare tax on high individual earnings has no employer match, so it is not an employer cost at all · verified
Oldroyd, McElheran & Elkington, "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads", Harvard Business Review (March 2011) · 1.25M inbound leads across 2,241 US firms · verified
LocaliQ / WordStream Search Advertising Benchmarks 2026 · Google + Microsoft Ads, 20 industries · Apr 2025–Mar 2026 · highest of all tracked industries · verified
What is specific to this page.
| Kind | Claim | Check it against |
|---|---|---|
| Procurement | A salaried intake hire and a per-call answering contract are both committed against enquiry volume outside current cover, so comparing a salary with a rate card cannot resolve which is cheaper without the quantity that neither party to the comparison holds. | The supplier's per-call rate card and the loaded annual cost of the proposed hire, plotted against a measured enquiry volume by hour band. |
| Workflow | Everything a firm knows about its own enquiry volume describes the hours when somebody was already answering, because enquiries arriving into uncovered hours produce no record in any system the firm reviews. | Enquiry timestamps from the firm's systems, bucketed by hour and compared with a fortnight of externally placed enquiries in the uncovered bands. |
| Constraint | An external answering service can capture caller details and commit to a callback but cannot run a conflicts check, open a matter or answer a procedural question, because those require access to the firm's records and a judgement that remains the firm's responsibility. | The engagement scope in the supplier's contract, read against the firm's conflicts procedure and matter-opening controls. |
| Workflow | Where the presenting problem is enquiries going cold before anyone reaches them, an arrangement that only captures details shortens the gap without closing it, so the firm attributes the failure to the service when the scope was the defect. | Elapsed time from enquiry to a substantive conversation with a lawyer, measured separately for enquiries captured by the service. |
Each row would be wrong on another industry's page. Where a sourced figure exists it is in the table above instead; these are the constraints that shape the work and do not happen to be numbers.
Start with the measurement.
Reading about a benchmark is not the same as knowing your own number. The audit produces yours, measured rather than estimated.
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