From After-Hours Voicemail to 329 Leads in 12 Weeks

The firm

BRE Law (Bolen, Robinson & Ellis, LLP) is headquartered in Decatur, Illinois, with offices in Sullivan, Lincoln, Taylorville, Bloomington, and Monticello. It runs two brands on two phone lines: BRE Law for family, criminal, estate, business, and employment matters, and BRE Injury for personal injury.

The front desk is staffed 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM on weekdays and closes at 4:00 PM on Fridays. New leads are managed in Clio Grow, the CRM and lead management tool the intake team already works in. BRE Law brought in Pulse to answer the calls and web inquiries that arrive when nobody is at the front desk, and to get each one to the right practice area without adding work for the intake team.

The problem

The goal was simple to say and hard to do: answer every caller after hours without hurting the client experience.

1. After 5:00 PM, callers reached voicemail. Calls to either line outside office hours went to voicemail, and the intake team worked through the messages the next business day.
2. Web inquiries competed with the phones. Contact-form inquiries arrived as emails, and a busy intake team answered them alongside the phones. Personal injury inquiries got answered first.
3. Every practice area asks different questions. A personal injury consult is free and handled on contingency. A family law consult is paid and needs the other party's name for a conflict check. A criminal matter needs the county, the charges, and a date of birth. Bankruptcy and Social Security disability callers are referred to other firms.
4. The human touch had to stay. During business hours, callers still reach a person at the front desk. The agent picks up only when the office is closed, so daytime callers keep the personal service they expect from the firm.

What Pulse built

A voice agent and a chat agent run on one shared set of intake rules, and every qualified conversation lands in Clio Grow for the intake team to work the next business day. Pulse built it around the way BRE Law's intake team already works, so staff didn't have to learn a new tool.

1. A voice agent on both phone lines. When the office closes, a carrier schedule forwards calls to the agent, with its own number for each brand. It opens by saying it is an AI assistant on a recorded line, asks whether the caller has worked with the firm before, and runs the intake questions for their practice area.
2. Chat on brelaw.com. The website chat opens with buttons for the type of legal matter, so visitors pick a path before they start typing. They can type or talk, and it follows the same qualification rules as the phones.
3. One set of instructions for both channels. The prompts and 18 knowledge documents live in one database and are pushed to both agents. A wording fix the intake team asks for goes out to phone and web together.
4. Leads posted straight to Clio Grow. When a call ends, the system saves the transcript, pulls out the intake answers, and posts a lead to the Clio Grow Lead Inbox, usually about a second after the call record is saved. Each lead carries the practice area, a summary, the answers for that practice area, a suggested attorney, and the caller's contact details.
5. Existing clients get a message, not an intake. Callers who are already clients are asked for their attorney and a message, and skip new-client intake entirely. In 12 weeks, 75 existing clients were handled this way.
6. It knows what BRE Law doesn't handle. When a caller describes a case outside the firm's practice areas, the agent says so and points them to a referral partner instead.

1. 01
   A caller or visitor reaches out

   After-hours phone callA carrier schedule forwards both lines to the agent

   Website chatVisitors pick their legal matter on brelaw.com
2. 02
   AI intake agent Pulse

   Voice and chat agents, one rule setDiscloses it is AI, asks new or existing client, then runs the questions for that practice area. Prompts and 18 knowledge documents live in one database.
3. 03
   The right path for each caller Pulse

   New clientFull intake for the practice area

   Existing clientA message for their attorney

   Outside the firm's practicePointed to a referral partner; no lead created
4. 04
   Lead pipeline Pulse

   Transcript saved, answers extracted, lead postedUsually about a second after the call record is saved

   • Signed webhooks from the live line only
   • Named callers only
   • One post per call
   • No caller details in logs
5. 05
   BRE Law's CRM

   Clio Grow Lead InboxPractice area, summary, intake answers, suggested attorney, and contact details
6. 06
   Next business day

   The intake team takes it from thereA person assigns the attorney, schedules the consult, and collects payment

Built and run by PulseBRE Law's existing tools and team

How one after-hours call works

Take a personal injury call at 7:00 PM on a weekday. The carrier forwards it to the agent, which says it is an AI assistant on a recorded line, confirms the caller is new to the firm, and asks what happened. For an accident, it asks for the date, the location, the injury, and any treatment so far, then how the caller would like to meet.

When the call ends, the system saves the transcript and posts a Clio Grow lead labeled "BRE AI Intake: Personal Injury (Call)" with those answers and a summary. The next business day, the intake team reviews the lead and calls the person back to schedule.

"Before this, a call after 5pm went to voicemail. Now every call gets answered, nights and weekends included, and the details are waiting in Clio Grow when our intake team comes in the next morning. We're catching people we used to miss."

Guardrails

The agent collects information and hands it to people. It doesn't give legal advice, book consults, or quote final fees.

• Every call opens with an AI disclosure and a recorded-line notice. Legal questions are redirected to a consult with an attorney.
• Every Clio Grow lead ends with the same line: "Routed by AI intake. Human review required: assign attorney, schedule, collect payment."
• Only signed webhooks from BRE Law's own agent, on its live line, can create a lead. Test calls on other versions of the agent are ignored.
• The CRM can't delete a lead, so each call is posted at most once. A unique session key and a claim taken before posting have blocked 14 duplicate attempts.
• Only named callers become leads. Hang-ups of 5 seconds or less and callers who never give a name are still recorded but kept out of Clio Grow, which has kept 200 empty calls out of the intake team's inbox.
• System logs carry record IDs and step names only, never a caller's name, phone number, or email.

Tuned with the intake team after launch

Pulse treats the first weeks after launch as part of the build. The intake team flags what they see in Clio Grow, Pulse listens to the calls behind it, and each fix goes out to phone and chat together.

• Cleaner leads. Early leads included hang-ups and callers who never gave a name, so at BRE Law's request those now stay out of Clio Grow.
• Accurate expectations. The agent tells callers the intake team will follow up, which matches how BRE Law works.
• The right inbox. New leads go to Clio Grow, where the intake team already works, instead of Clio Manage.
• Safe testing. Changes are tested on a separate version of the agent, so test calls never create real leads.

How the rollout was staged

Pulse rolled the system out in steps, so the intake team could try every path before callers did.

1. The intake team tested the chat on a staging copy of brelaw.com and called a test number before anything went live.
2. Chat went live on the website first.
3. After-hours phone forwarding came next, on a carrier schedule that runs on its own.
4. Lead rules were tightened using real calls and the intake team's input.

The results

From July 7 to September 29, the agent handled 522 calls and 38 web chats from 376 people, including 13.6 hours of phone conversation. 93 of those calls came in on weekends. Chat ran the other way: 26 of the 38 chats happened during office hours, while visitors were on the website.

1. Calls routed to the agent162
2. Caller spoke137 85% of step above
3. Matter described107 78% of step above
4. Contact details captured69 64% of step above
5. Qualified lead calls50 36% of callers who spoke
6. Distinct new matters47 94% of step above

Qualified means a practice area, a written summary, and a way to reach the caller. Repeat calls on one matter count once.

In that same 30-day window, qualified calls averaged 3 minutes 42 seconds, against a median of just over a minute for all calls. Family law (17), criminal defense (13), and personal injury (9) made up 39 of the 50 qualified lead calls, right in the firm's core practices.

Figures cover July 7 to September 29, 2026 unless noted. Internal test calls are excluded.