Field report · South Florida
Bilingual intake. Twenty-four hours a day. For immigration law practices that can no longer afford to miss one.
Chapter one
Eight of those callers retained opposing counsel inside the same week. The firm did not learn this until the matter database flagged the names ninety days later, on the wrong side of a hearing.
The story is unremarkable. Every immigration practice between Doral and Hialeah will tell a version of it. The receptionist takes a Spanish call at the wrong moment. The voicemail box fills. The lead form on the website routes to an inbox no one watches after six. The retainer that would have come in goes somewhere else.
The math is harder to look at. A single immigration retainer averages between three and seven thousand dollars; the consultation fee that wins it averages two hundred. Lose ten consults a month to a missed call — conservative — and the firm is leaving thirty to seventy thousand dollars of pipeline on the floor before lunch.
The intake problem is the only problem in a law firm where the cost of solving it is smaller than the cost of letting it continue for one more month. Founding memo · Atendros, 2026
None of this is new. What is new is that the alternatives — off-shore answering services, generic answer-bots, the next hire — have not solved the problem. They have moved it.
Chapter two
Atendros is a service. We answer the firm’s phones in English and Spanish, twenty-four hours a day, qualify each caller against the firm’s script, and book consultations directly into the attorney’s calendar. The firm retains every client; we are the front desk that does not sleep.
What that looks like in practice:
We deliberately do not describe the underlying machinery on this page. The firms we work with care about the outcome and the supervision framework; the mechanism is a private matter between us and our clients.
By the numbers
≥90%
English answer rate
≥85%
Spanish answer rate
15s
Escalation SLA
10
Business days to go-live
If by day thirty of go-live the service has not achieved these rates — measured from call logs shared monthly with the firm — the first month’s subscription is refunded. The one-time setup fee is non-refundable.
Guardrails
The firm remains the lawyer of record. Atendros is used as a nonlawyer assistant consistent with the supervision principles of ABA Model Rule 5.3. The firm retains professional-responsibility oversight; Atendros is contractually responsible for day-to-day operational compliance.
Recording disclosure on every call before recording begins. Fla. Stat. §934.03.
Prior express written consent required for outbound contact. Cold AI voice never used. 47 CFR §64.1200.
The service does not answer “do I qualify?”, fee quotes, or strength-of-case questions. Each is redirected to a consult with the attorney.
Caller name, phone, and email matched against the firm’s matter records before a slot is offered. Any flag routes to firm staff.
Hostile, distressed, urgent, and minor calls handed to firm staff inside the firm’s coverage window.
Recordings stored per the firm’s retention policy. Internal encrypted copies purged on a defined schedule. PII scrubbed from analytics.
Script, disclosure language, conflict workflow, and contract reviewed by the firm’s designated outside counsel before the first live call.
A bilingual paralegal reviews a sample of calls plus all flagged calls during the first ninety days, with continuing review thereafter.
Engagement
Voice-minute overage above the included pool is billed at $0.18 per minute. Subscription is not discounted. Setup-fee discounts of up to thirty percent are considered case-by-case, never below a two-thousand-dollar floor.
Founding 5
$2,000 /mo
Growth
$3,500 /mo
Scale
$6,500 /mo
A twenty-minute conversation
Pick a time below. The call is twenty minutes, on Google Meet. We bring questions about the firm’s call volume, intake bottlenecks, and case-management setup; you leave with a one-page recommendation either way.