Client
The State Bar of Nevada‘s Lawyer Referral and Information Service (LRIS) connects Nevadans with attorneys who can help them. Behind every call is a person with a legal problem: a custody dispute, a workplace injury, a landlord issue. Many callers do not know what kind of lawyer they need or how to describe their problem in legal terms.
- Client: State Bar of Nevada, Lawyer Referral & Information Service (LRIS)
- Location: Las Vegas, Nevada
- Industry: Legal, bar association (public referral service)
- Challenge: Two intake specialists handling about 120 calls a day; missed calls meant Nevadans never reached an attorney
- Solution: Abby Connect AI Receptionist, custom automation and a human receptionist safety net
- Time to launch: 21 days, ahead of the 30-day commitment
A bar association runs its referral line for the public, so every call that reaches voicemail is a Nevadan who went without help. That is the standard Abby’s legal answering service was measured against here.
The Challenge
The math did not work. Two dedicated intake specialists were handling roughly 120 calls per day. When both were on the line, or after 5 pm, or on weekends, callers reached voicemail. Each missed call meant a Nevadan who never got connected to an attorney.
The technical barrier seemed insurmountable. The Bar’s association management system (Euclid/ClearVantage) had no public API. When Abby Connect and the Bar met with the software vendor in November 2025, the finding was definitive: no open API existed to connect to. Most vendors would have stopped there.
The Solution
Abby Connect proposed a different path the very next day.
An AI Receptionist trained on the Bar’s own expertise. Abby’s AI Receptionist answers every call and conducts the intake conversation: capturing the caller’s name, contact details, city, and a plain-English description of their legal problem. The AI was trained on materials the Bar’s own experts provided, including referral categories, subcategories, keywords, and a full Referral Guide for mapping caller situations to the right area of law.
Custom automation, no API required. This is the custom work no other vendor offered. After each call, Abby Connect’s purpose-built automation does exactly what a human intake specialist would do:
- AI classification of the legal issue, matched to the Bar’s 24 main categories and about 198 subcategories.
- Notes cleanup transforming rambling descriptions into concise, legally relevant summaries.
- Geographic routing to the correct referral area.
- Marketing attribution preserved for the Bar’s reporting.
- Automated form completion through all five steps of the Bar’s live referral form.
The human safety net. No call ever dead-ends with a machine.
- If the AI cannot handle something, the call transfers to Abby Connect’s live receptionists.
- Human receptionists are trained to complete the Bar’s referral form themselves.
- If automation fails for any reason, referrals are flagged for human review and completed by hand.
Every Abby Connect receptionist works on site at our Las Vegas headquarters. No overseas call centers, no remote receptionists. When a call transfers from AI to human, it goes to a professional receptionist in the same office where Abby Connect’s leadership works every day.
“That safeguard is pretty huge, and not something we’ve seen other AI services doing. It ensures you truly don’t miss the call.”
Marianne Mlechick, VP of Operations, Abby Connect
Bilingual coverage. Spanish-speaking callers are handled by Abby Connect’s bilingual receptionist team. When the Bar requested a language selection menu, Abby Connect designed, built, tested, and launched it the same morning, about 2.5 hours from request to live.
The Results
The first 27 days live, by the numbers:
- Total calls handled: 1,487
- Peak week: 370+ calls
- Fully automated end to end: 83%
- Structured handoffs to Bar staff: 17%
- Caller abandonment: about 8%
- Call minutes absorbed per month: about 7,300
- Equivalent workload: 24 full workdays
- Staff equivalent: about 3 full-time receptionists
- Fully loaded cost equivalent: $118,000 to $136,000 per year
Coverage expansion. The Bar’s office operates 8:30 am to 5 pm, Monday through Friday. Abby Connect answers around the clock. The Bar’s message log now shows referral intakes completed at 1:00 am, 4:08 am, and 6:38 am. Nevadans were getting connected to attorneys at hours when the old service could only offer voicemail.
The Partnership
What retained this client was not just the technology. It was how Abby Connect ran the account.
- Proactive monitoring. Abby Connect’s team noticed the Bar’s own website going down intermittently and alerted the Bar before they knew. Every queued referral was held and resubmitted once the site recovered. Zero referrals lost.
- Fast response times. Script changes turned around in under an hour. Service issues acknowledged in 6 minutes, resolved in under an hour. Roadmap questions answered in 18 minutes.
- Genuine collaboration. The Bar sends Abby Connect its referral guide updates. Abby Connect’s learning team turned the Bar’s guide into a training quiz for the receptionists who answer its calls. When the Bar spotted a misclassified practice area, Abby Connect retrained the humans and updated the AI within a day.
“Please thank your receptionist for catching this… we’re glad your staff is noticing these types of things.”
Mary Jorgensen, Member Services Director, State Bar of Nevada
“No other company could offer a custom build like this.”
State Bar of Nevada, internal documentation
Implementation Timeline
- October 2025: Met at ClioCon; consult booked
- November 2025: Custom demo built from a real test call
- November 19, 2025: Joint call with Euclid confirms no API
- November 20, 2025: Abby Connect proposes custom automation, the next day
- January 28, 2026: Board of Governors approves
- February 3, 2026: Contract signed; engineering begins
- February 24, 2026: Custom build complete, ready to launch, in 21 days
- Late March 2026: Go live
- April 2026: Bar confirms continuation; service expands
Why This Matters for Bar Associations
Eight things made this work, and all eight travel to any bar running a referral program.
- Works with existing software. No API, no IT project, and no changes to the bar’s systems. The automation uses the same public referral form staff already use, filling out the same web forms and following the same workflow a human intake specialist would.
- Bar keeps full control. The taxonomy, scripting, fee disclosures, geographic areas, and knowledge base are all the bar’s own. FAQs can be updated anytime, and the AI is trained on materials the bar’s own experts provide.
- Every referral is auditable. Screenshot documentation at every step, structured message logs, and human review of anything unusual. Built for organizations with board-level accountability, where a referral trail has to stand up to scrutiny.
- Revenue protection. Answered calls become completed referrals, which become panel attorney engagements and program revenue. After-hours coverage extends the program’s reach without extending staff hours.
- No new work for staff. Intake specialists stop doing routine data entry and move to the callers and casework that genuinely need human judgment. Structured handoffs arrive as clean, organized messages ready for follow-up.
- Humans stay in the loop. The most important design decision was ensuring technology failures never become caller failures. If automation stalls, a trained receptionist completes the referral by hand.
- Fast to launch, faster to adjust. The custom build shipped in 21 days, ahead of a 30-day commitment. Script changes turn around in under an hour, and a Spanish language menu went from request to live in about 2.5 hours.
- Bilingual from day one. Spanish-speaking callers are handled by bilingual receptionists, so access to the referral service is not limited to English speakers and no caller is asked to call back later.
A partner, not a vendor. When the Bar’s website went down intermittently, Abby Connect noticed first, held every queued referral, and resubmitted once it recovered. The Bar’s referral guide became a training quiz for the receptionists who answer its calls, and a misclassified practice area was retrained across humans and AI within a day. Service issues are acknowledged in 6 minutes and resolved in under an hour.
About Abby Connect
Abby Connect is a family-owned virtual receptionist company with over 20 years of experience. Human receptionists and the AI Receptionist work together in one service, so every call is handled the right way: human receptionists answer with care and manage conversations, while the AI answers on the first ring, takes messages, and transfers calls.
- One service, three ways. Start with human receptionists, AI, or both together, and change the mix anytime. You choose how each call is handled, and callers reach the right kind of help.
- Small, dedicated teams. A dedicated team of 10 to 20 receptionists per client, all U.S.-based and on site in our Las Vegas offices. Never outsourced, never working from home.
- Abby Intelligence. An in-house U.S. quality assurance team reviews real conversations and refines how calls are handled, so the service keeps improving long after onboarding.
- The Abby Proven Process. Onboard, Optimize, Support. A Client Success Team sets up the right mix; a dedicated Solutions Engineer handles technical and integration needs.
- 1,000+ integrations. Caller data syncs with Salesforce, Clio, HubSpot, Google Calendar and more than a thousand other tools. Anything missing is built during onboarding.
- Full call visibility. The AbbyGO app and web portal give you recordings, transcripts, summaries, sentiment scores, and usage tracking for every call.
24/7 answering is included, nights, weekends, and holidays, with caller language detected automatically for bilingual service. Abby is family owned and operated since day one, and legal-ready with Clio, Clio Grow, and Lawmatics integrations. Browse the integrations or see how Human + AI answering works on one plan.
“We believe technology should enhance human connection, not replace it. That’s why we launched our ‘Stop Firing Humans’ campaign and continue to invest in both our people and our technology.”
Nathan Strum, CEO, Abby Connect
In Their Words
“The human safety net was the deciding factor for us. We couldn’t risk a caller with a legal emergency getting stuck in an automated loop.”
Lisa McGrane, Deputy Executive Director, State Bar of Nevada
Ready to transform your bar association’s referral service? Every Abby plan starts with a free trial and no setup fee. Call 877-303-5757 or email [email protected].
This case study is published with permission from the State Bar of Nevada. Statistics reflect the first 27 days of live service. Results may vary.
