Lewisville, TX
VoIP Phone System for Lewisville TX Law Firms
A good number of Lewisville firms do not have their own front door. They occupy a suite in a shared building, a floor with several other businesses, or an executive office arrangement where reception, conference rooms and a receptionist come with the lease.
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It is a sensible way to run a small firm and it works well. It also puts the firm's most client-facing function, the answering of its phone, partly in somebody else's hands, and firms tend to accept whatever arrangement the building offers without examining it.
Cleod9 provides cloud communication for Dallas-Fort Worth businesses. This page is about the phone side of a shared arrangement: what callers should hear, what the firm should keep entirely to itself, and what to settle before signing. It is operational guidance, not legal advice. How a shared arrangement interacts with the firm's professional responsibility obligations, including confidentiality and anything touching how the firm is held out to the public, is a question for the firm and its own counsel.
Three arrangements that get talked about as one
They are quite different and the differences matter:
An executive suite with a shared receptionist, where somebody at a front desk answers for several unrelated businesses.
Two or more firms sharing space and sometimes staff, which is a closer arrangement and carries considerations the first does not.
A virtual office or address arrangement, where the firm has a presence and answering but no permanent physical staff on site.
The operational advice below applies to all three. The professional responsibility questions differ considerably between them, particularly for the second, and that is exactly the conversation to have with the firm's own counsel rather than to work out from how the building describes the arrangement.
The firm should be answered by its own name
This is the point where shared arrangements most often fall short, and it is the one callers actually notice.
Somebody calling a law firm should hear that firm's name, not the name of the building, the suite, or a generic greeting. A caller who hears good afternoon, reception is not sure they reached the right place, and a prospective client with three firms on a list does not persist.
The way to guarantee it is that the firm's number rings the firm rather than the suite's main line. Cloud service makes this straightforward: the firm keeps its own number, its own greeting, and its own routing, and the shared receptionist becomes a fallback rather than the front line.
Where calls do route through a shared desk, get the exact wording agreed in writing and confirm it by calling in yourself, from outside, more than once. Scripts drift, and the person on duty changes.
The number belongs to the firm
A firm using a number supplied by the building is renting its own identity, and the consequences appear at exactly the wrong moment.
When the firm leaves, that number may not go with it. Everything printed, published, saved in clients' phones and recorded in referral sources' files points at a number the firm no longer controls. This is not a hypothetical; it is the most common way a small firm loses its accumulated reach in a single month.
Have the firm's own number, on the firm's own account, from the beginning. Cloud service does not care where the desk is, so a number the firm owns rings wherever the firm happens to be, this year and after the next move.
If the firm is currently on a building-supplied number, changing that is a project worth starting rather than deferring, and it gets more expensive the longer the number has been in circulation.
What must never be shared
A shared receptionist and a shared conference room are ordinary. Several other things are not, and they are worth stating explicitly because convenience pulls the other way.
Message threads with clients, which belong to the firm's own number and its own system. Voicemail and captured messages, which should reach the firm rather than a shared mailbox anybody at the desk can open. Access to the firm's phone system, which is the firm's alone. Any list of who is calling and about what, since even that is information about the firm's clients.
The shared printer, the shared fax if one exists, and the mail are the physical equivalents and they need the same thought. A document sitting in a communal output tray is available to everyone in the suite.
The script for a shared desk
Where a receptionist does answer for the firm, three things need to be written down and given to them, not explained once.
How to answer, in the firm's exact words. What to say when the firm's people are unavailable, which should be a specific commitment about when somebody will respond rather than a vague reassurance. And what to do with anything that sounds like a new inquiry, which should be routed rather than handled.
That third one deserves emphasis. A shared receptionist should take a name, a number, and the fact that somebody called, and nothing else. They should not be collecting details about a caller's situation, discussing the firm's services, or saying anything about fees or whether the firm handles a type of matter.
Give them the boundary as a sentence they can say. The firm will call you back shortly, may I take your name and best number, is the entire job.
Confidentiality in a space you do not control
Shared arrangements put the firm's conversations within earshot of people who have no relationship with it, and the practical mitigations are ordinary but need deciding.
Where can a call be taken privately, and is that room reliably available or does it require booking. What is audible from the firm's own office through the wall or the door. Whether the firm's staff can hear other tenants, which is a useful proxy for whether other tenants can hear them.
The headset point applies here more than anywhere. A call taken on a headset is audible in one direction rather than two, which in a shared corridor is a meaningful difference.
What the firm's obligations require in a shared space, and whether a particular arrangement is adequate, belongs with the firm's own counsel. What belongs to operations is knowing the answers to those three questions before somebody needs them.
Being clearly a separate firm
Where other law firms occupy the same suite, how the firm presents itself matters in a way it does not in an ordinary office building.
Signage, the greeting, how the receptionist describes the arrangement, and what a caller concludes about whether the firms are connected are all part of that picture. It is a professional responsibility question rather than a marketing one, and the firm's own counsel is the source on what is required.
The operational contribution is narrow and useful: make sure the phone arrangement supports whatever the firm decides. A firm's own number, its own greeting, its own voicemail, and a receptionist script that names one firm rather than several are what make a decision about separateness real rather than stated.
The direct number that skips the desk
Even in a shared arrangement, existing clients and professional callers should not be going through a general reception.
Give them a route that reaches the firm directly, whether that is a direct number, an extension they can dial, or simply the firm's own main line configured to ring the firm's people rather than the suite. Court coordinators, opposing counsel and existing clients calling about a matter get no benefit from a receptionist taking a message.
Keep the shared desk for what it is genuinely good at, which is being a person when nobody at the firm can answer, and for visitors arriving in the lobby.
What happens when you leave
Shared arrangements end, usually because the firm has grown, and the exit is easier to plan while nothing is happening.
The firm's own number moves with it, which is the whole argument for having one. Everything else needs a short list: what the building supplied, what the firm supplied, what happens to any number the building provided, how long mail is forwarded, and what the receptionist is told to say to callers after the firm has gone.
That last item is worth asking about explicitly. A caller who reaches the suite a month after the firm left should be told where the firm is, not that nobody by that name is here.
When the firm outgrows the arrangement
There are signals, and they show up on the phones before they show up anywhere else.
Callers regularly reaching a receptionist instead of the firm. Staff unable to find a private place to take calls. The firm's own people spending time relaying messages that arrived at the wrong desk. Clients mentioning that they were not sure they had reached the right office.
None of those individually mean it is time to move. Together they mean the arrangement is now costing the firm something, and the calculation is different from the one made when the firm signed.
Common questions
Can we keep our number if we move out of the suite?
If it is the firm's own number on the firm's own account, yes, and this is the reason to arrange it that way from the start. If it belongs to the building, that is a conversation to have with them and the answer is frequently no.
Should the shared receptionist take messages for us at all?
As a fallback, yes, provided the script is narrow. As the primary way the firm's calls are answered, it is worth reconsidering, because the caller experience is the firm's and it is being delivered by somebody who does not work for the firm.
Is a shared conference room a problem for client meetings?
Operationally it works if it can be booked reliably and is private. Whether a particular arrangement is appropriate for confidential meetings is a question for the firm's own counsel.
What about a virtual office with no permanent staff?
The phone side is straightforward, since the firm's number can ring its people wherever they are. The considerations that need care are about how the firm is held out and what the address represents, and those belong with the firm's counsel.
The arrangement checklist
Worth settling before signing, and worth revisiting if the firm is already in one:
- The firm's own number, on the firm's own account, from the start.
- The exact greeting a caller hears, agreed in writing.
- Confirmation by calling in from outside, more than once, on different days.
- A narrow script for the shared desk, including what they must not discuss.
- Voicemail and captured messages reaching the firm, not a shared mailbox.
- A private place to take calls, and how it is reserved.
- A direct route for existing clients and professional callers.
- What happens to calls and mail after the firm leaves.
- The professional responsibility questions raised with the firm's own counsel before, not after.
The building's network is not the firm's network
Shared suites usually include internet access, and firms accept it the way they accept the water: as something that comes with the space.
Two questions are worth asking anyway. Who else is on it, and what happens when something goes wrong. In many suites the answer to the first is every tenant in the building, sharing one connection, which is why call quality in shared offices tends to be worst at the hours everybody is working. And the answer to the second is that the firm reports the problem to the landlord and waits, with no visibility and no leverage.
Find out which arrangement the firm is in before it matters. Whether the connection is shared or dedicated, who to call about it, and whether the firm may install its own if it chooses. Some buildings allow it and some do not, and it is a materially different situation to be in.
Where the connection is shared and cannot be changed, the mitigations are the usual ones: a wired connection at the positions where calls happen, and the knowledge that mobile devices running the firm's system work over cellular entirely independently of the building. That second point is what keeps a shared network from being a single point of failure for the firm's phones.
It is also worth knowing whose equipment sits between the firm's desks and the outside world. In a suite, the answer is frequently somebody else's, which changes who can diagnose a problem and how long that takes.
Talking to Cleod9
Cleod9 is a Dallas-Fort Worth provider supporting its own customers, so a Lewisville firm works with someone in the same metro rather than a distant queue. The platform is described on the Cleod9 services page.
The relevant point for a shared arrangement is that cloud service is independent of the building. The firm's number, greeting, routing and messages belong to the firm and follow it, which is what makes a shared space a practical arrangement rather than a dependency. The concrete items to settle are the firm's own number and account, how calls reach the firm's people wherever they are, and how a shared desk fits in as a fallback rather than as the front line.