Missed-call text-back for law firms: what it is, what the text should say, and the rules

A person with a legal problem does not leave a voicemail and wait. They read your reviews, they call, they get the recording, and they call the firm listed under you. By the time you call back the next morning, they have had a consultation with someone else. Every small firm knows this. Most accept it, because the alternative seems to be answering every call personally or paying for a reception service.

Missed-call text-back is the third option. When a call to the firm’s number is not answered, a text goes to the caller within about a minute. It names the firm, says the call was seen, and asks what they need or offers a time to talk. The person is still holding the phone. The conversation continues by text, which for most people is easier than a second call anyway.

What the text should say

The message does four jobs in two sentences. Identify, acknowledge, ask, and give a way out.

Hi, this is [Firm name]. We saw your call and could not pick up. Reply here with what you need, or book a time to talk: [link]. Reply STOP to opt out.

Things it must not do:

• Promise a result, or describe the firm in terms you could not support in an ad. The text is a communication about the lawyer’s services and the advertising rules apply to it as much as to the website.
• Ask for the details of the matter. “Reply with what you need” invites a sentence. “Tell us about your case” invites a confession into an unencrypted channel. The details belong in the consultation.
• Pretend to be a person if it is not. “This is an automated message from [Firm]” is fine. A fake first name is not, and the caller will find out on the call.

If a person replies, the reply has to reach someone. A text-back that opens a conversation nobody at the firm is watching is worse than voicemail, because the caller now believes they have been heard.

The rules

Three sets, and they are not onerous, but they are real.

The federal statute. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act, 47 U.S.C. § 227, restricts automated calls and texts to cell phones without the recipient’s prior express consent. The caller initiated contact with your number, which is the strongest consent signal there is, but the safe practice is to treat the text as what it is, an automated message, and keep it to a direct response to their call: one message, about their call, with an opt-out. Do not add the caller to a marketing list or send follow-ups they did not ask for. Your state may have its own telemarketing statute on top of the federal one.

The carriers. Business texting runs on the carriers’ terms, set out in the CTIA’s Messaging Principles and Best Practices. The practical requirements: the number sending the texts is registered for business messaging, every message honors STOP, and the content is what the recipient would expect from the business they contacted. Unregistered numbers sending automated texts get filtered, which means your text-back silently stops working and nobody tells you.

The professional rule. ABA Model Rule 7.3 restricts solicitation, meaning a communication initiated by the lawyer to a specific person the lawyer knows needs legal services. A text in response to a call that person made to you is a response, not a solicitation, and the rule’s own commentary treats communications requested by the person differently from ones the lawyer initiates. Two cautions. First, keep it a response: about their call, once. Second, your state’s version of the rule governs, and some states are stricter about electronic contact than the model rule. Read yours before you turn it on.

How to set it up

You need three things: the firm’s number able to send texts, a trigger when a call is missed, and somewhere the replies land.

If the firm already has a business phone system, check whether it has the feature; most of the hosted systems sold to small firms do, under names like “missed call text” or “auto-reply”. Turn it on, set the message above, and send a test from a personal phone.

If the firm uses a personal cell or a plain landline, you need a business number in front of it. A tracking number that forwards to the existing phone, registered for messaging, with the text-back attached to it. The existing number keeps working; the listing and the website show the new one.

Either way, decide where replies go. A shared inbox someone checks, the lawyer’s own phone, or a booking link that takes the person straight to the calendar so nobody has to be watching. The booking link is the one that works when the firm is in court.

Then test it as a stranger. Call the firm from a phone it does not know, let it ring out, and time the text. If it is over two minutes, the caller is already on the next firm’s site. If it does not arrive at all, the number is probably unregistered; see the carriers section above.

What it does and does not fix

It keeps a caller who found you from leaving. It does not make more people find you, and it does not help a firm that has no website for the caller to have come from, which in a Houston sample we reviewed in September 2026 was more than a third of firms with reviews. The order is: be findable, have somewhere for the person to land, then make sure the call they make is not the end of it.

That is the sequence the seven-day site follows: the listing fixed, the site live on your own domain, and every missed call texted back within a minute, with replies landing on your calendar.