We checked 21 small law firms, then found our own tool had miscounted.
This is our own prospect list, audited and published whole — including the finding that argues against the thing we sell. Two firms out of the seventeen we could actually check already had a way to reach them outside office hours. Our first pass said six; the tool was counting website chat widgets, which do nothing for someone who dialled a phone number. The corrected number and the mistake are both below. Twenty-one firms is a small sample from five cities and it proves less than either side would like, so here is the method as well as the result.
What we did
On 8 August 2026 we fetched the public homepage of every firm on our own outreach list — 21 small personal injury and family law practices in Tucson, Boise, Des Moines, Chattanooga and Sacramento — and asked three questions of each. Does the site promise round-the-clock availability? Is there anything on it that could keep that promise? And is there already something that answers a caller the firm missed — an advertised text option, or one of the services that texts missed callers back?
One request per firm, a normal browser identity, and no attempt to get past anything that said no. A website chat widget is recorded but does not count as an answer: it is invisible to somebody who dialled a phone number and got voicemail, and conflating the two is the mistake that produced the wrong first number on this page. Four sites refused an automated request outright and refuse it consistently, so we know nothing about those four and they are counted on their own line below rather than folded into either result.
This is a website audit, not a phone audit. It tells you what a firm offers a stranger who lands on the site at nine in the evening. It does not tell you whether someone would have picked up if that stranger had called instead, and the two are different questions.
What we found
Two of the seventeen firms we could check already had a way for an after-hours visitor to get a response without waiting for the office to open — an advertised text option, or a service that texts missed callers back. Fifteen had a phone number, sometimes a contact form, and nothing else.
There are no percentages on this page. Seventeen is far too small a sample for a percentage to mean anything, and converting a count into one is how a number that should have stayed a note becomes a headline somebody quotes back at you.
| What we counted | Firms |
|---|---|
| On the list | 21 |
| Answered an automated request, so we could check them | 17 |
| Already had a text option, or missed-call text-back | 2 |
| Phone number and maybe a form, nothing else | 15 |
| Refused the request, so we do not know either way | 4 |
The same counts, split by practice
The list was built roughly two-thirds personal injury and one-third family law, because those are the two practices where a single missed enquiry is worth enough to pay for fixing it. The split matters here because the two groups came out differently, and with numbers this small that difference may be nothing at all.
| Practice | On the list | Could check | Already had a channel | Had nothing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Personal injury | 12 | 10 | 1 | 9 |
| Family law | 9 | 7 | 1 | 6 |
Four firms advertise round-the-clock and have nothing behind it
Four of the fifteen firms with no after-hours channel say on their own homepage that they are available around the clock. One of them puts it beside an offer of a free consultation. Behind the promise there is a contact form and a phone number, and outside office hours neither reaches a person.
Both are personal injury firms. We are not naming them: the point is not that two particular practices overstate their availability, it is that the promise is common enough to appear twice in a list of twenty-one and that nothing on the page is built to keep it.
This is the only part of the finding we could not locate anywhere else. Studies of law firm responsiveness measure whether firms answer. None that we found measures it against what the firm's own marketing says it does.
What this does not prove
Twenty-one firms in five cities is a sample, not a survey. It was assembled to find businesses worth contacting, which is a selection rule that has nothing to do with being representative, and it was checked once on one day.
Four of the twenty-one refused the request, so the honest denominator is seventeen and not twenty-one. If all four of those turn out to have chat or text, the count of firms already covered goes from two to six and the finding gets considerably worse for us.
A website audit also misses the firm that has no chat widget and a partner who answers a diverted mobile at nine at night. That firm looks identical to a firm with nothing, and it is not one.
Why publish the number that argues against us
We sell an automatic text back to callers a firm did not answer. Our first pass at this said six firms in seventeen had already solved it, and that number was wrong in our favour once corrected — the tool was treating a website chat widget as an after-hours channel, and a chat widget is invisible to somebody who picked up a phone. Two in seventeen is the real figure, and we are publishing the error next to it because a research page whose author quietly fixes his own numbers is worth less than one who shows the correction.
Publishing it costs nothing we were entitled to keep. We have no clients yet and no results to show, so the only thing we can offer that is worth reading is what we actually looked at and what it actually said. A page of research where the author wins every line is a brochure.
It also changed what we do. Firms that already have chat or text are marked as not worth contacting about this, automatically, before any email is written — sending a missed-call pitch to a firm that visibly solved it is the fastest way to prove nobody looked.