Using Chatbots for Your Legal Website

What are Chatbots and How Do They Work?

A chatbot is a computer program or an artificial intelligence which conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods.   It basically is a personal assistant that works 24/7 and has all the answers related to your business.

Do you remember when it wasn’t necessary to have a website for your legal practice? When most online boards would scoff at the value of running a Facebook page for your legal practice? Now Gartner is telling us that customers will manage 85% of their relationship with brands without interacting with a human by 2020 and publications like Forbes are saying that chat bots are the cause.    SO it makes sense that you should start using chatbots sooner then later.

I’m sure most of you must’ve interacted with a chatbot by now on Facebook Messenger. It is adopted by thousands of companies and becoming more and more popular.

A chatbot publishing platform is a medium through which the chatbot can be accessed and used by the users. This is where your chatbot that you create with software like Chatfuel or Manychat, is then accessed on something like facebook messenger.

A chat bot development platform, on the other hand is a tool/ application through which one can create a chatbot. Chatbot platform helps you by letting you add more functionality to your bot by creating a flow, machine learning capabilities, API integration etc.     (This is where you would TEACH Your Robot! You would program the robot to have answers to a variety of different questions a potential client might have for you)

Chatbots for Lawyers

There are a number of reasons people will use chatbots but the main reason might be to provide assistance to anyone looking for help on your site or facebook page.    You can have the chatbot setup so that its the first thing someone sees when visiting your site or facebook page, and then you can have it be helpful and even entertaining.    So the chatbot has to be built or programmed so that it has the answers to any question a potential client might ask.    SO if your a criminal lawyer and someone is looking for help after an arrest, they probably want to get some answers QUICK.  So with the chat feature, you can have it setup so they can easily call you or visit the key pages of your site. Yet you can also provide some easy answers to basic questions.     So this person might have a question about being arrested and what happens next.   The bot can provide the answers and list content about the arrest process.   Then the client might ask about DUI and the bot could respond to specific questions about what is DUI, the penalties, etc.

You could also have the bot be a Legal Dictionary and have answers to questions about legal definitions.

You could also have the bot answer a number of questions clients might have related to your legal practice.  Like questions about directions, reviews of the lawyers, social accounts of the firm, latest blog posts and info related to the lawyers on the case.

I will be testing out all of the different chat platforms and the first one Ive used is Chatfuel.   This is a Free product with a pro version, but it has most of the things you would need for free.  Its easy to use for the most part but takes a little setup.    Manychat is the next and most popular chat program on the market.   Either way you just want something that will allow you to easily create a Chatbot for your law firm and program it to use with Facebook Messenger.

Chatfuel – www.chatfuel.com

Any person without any knowledge of coding can create his/her own bot on Facebook Messenger using Chatfuel. It provides features like adding content cards and sharing it to your followers automatically, gathering information inside Messenger chats with forms and let users request info and interact with your bot with buttons. Since people are more comfortable with chatting than selecting options from a chatbot. It also provides Artificial Intelligence technology for scripting interactive conversations. And using AI to recognize user answers to provide the appropriate response.

It is completely free for anyone to make a bot on its chatbot platform. Although after your bot reaches 100K conversations/month you will have to contact their team to subscribe as a premium customer. Many multinational companies like Adidas, MTV, British Airways, Volkswagen etc are using Chatfuel for their Facebook Messenger chatbots.

Help with Lawyer Chatbots

Contact us today for assistance with setting up a chatbot for your legal practice today.