What Happens When You Call Our New Jersey Employment Law Firm?

When You First Call Our Employment Law Firm

When you call our New Jersey employment law firm, you will likely be greeted by Alice. She is a real human answering the telephone, and she is lovely. If our intake coordinator, who is usually Gianna, is available, you will be routed to speak to her. She is also a real human and lovely. Our law firm does not use any Artificial Intelligence (AI) answering services.

The Intake Process

Gianna will ask you for basic information such as your name and contact information, how you found our firm, and some general information about the employer you are calling about – such as the employer’s name, location, your title, dates of employment, and salary. Some people get nervous giving us this information, but you should rest assured that the information you provide to any attorney or staff member of our firm is protected by the attorney-client privilege. That means that we cannot (and will not) disclose that information without your permission. The requested information is also important because it allows our law firm to avoid conflicts of interest and enables our attorneys to make determinations about legal claims such as the economic value of a particular claim, which is largely based on compensation. 

Once Gianna has gotten all the basics down, she will ask you to explain why you are calling and will listen carefully to your story. She may occasionally politely interrupt you to ask you to explain things a bit further to ensure that we understand all of the important facts, to provide dates, identify people you are discussing, and/or gather other necessary information. Again, this entire conversation is protected by the attorney-client privilege. Gianna is typing while you’re speaking to make sure that all of the significant facts are given to a New Jersey employment attorney at our firm so sometimes she may ask you to slow down a bit. Given that we are all from New Jersey, we know how fast we can sometimes talk!

You should know that the attorneys at our law firm have invested a significant amount of time in both creating procedures that enable our intake coordinator to ask appropriate questions based on the information being given to them by each caller and training our intake coordinators to ensure that they know how to spot employment issues and ask targeted questions based on each individual caller’s situation.  So while the call may seem like a friendly call with a sympathetic person, it is very detailed and targeted discussion intended to figure out if you have a New Jersey employment legal claim with which we can assist. 

The Attorney Review

After Gianna is comfortable that she has gotten all the necessary information, she will provide the typed information she gathered along with the summation of your workplace concerns to an attorney at our firm for her or his review. Either Claudia or Chris will then review the information to determine if there is something that we can help you with. Sometimes, our attorneys will have additional questions or request that you provide certain documentation to us so you may have a second conversation with Gianna. Otherwise, if Claudia and/or Chris determine that this is a matter that we can assist with, we will ask Gianna to schedule a consultation with you. Regardless of whether we request more information, schedule a consultation or tell you that this is not a matter that we can help you with, you should know that either Claudia or Chris have reviewed all of the information provided to us by you.  In fact, Claudia or Chris carefully review the information provided by every person who calls our office and completes the intake process at our firm.

The Consultation

Claudia or Chris conduct every single consultation. That means that when you schedule a consultation with our law firm, you will meet with an actual lawyer for the duration of that consultation. While you may meet Alice, Gianna or other staff members while here, your actual consultation will be with a lawyer – not a paralegal, salesperson or other staff member. In fact, we don’t even employ salespeople because our experience and results speak for themselves so we do not need people to convince you to hire us! You will want to hire us because we are excellent at what we do.

Our consultations can occur in person, on Zoom or even on the phone – we let our clients choose what is most comfortable for them.

During the consultation, one of our New Jersey employment attorneys (either Claudia or Chris) will carefully listen to you, analyze the workplace situation that you are discussing, and provide appropriate legal advice to you. What that means is different for each person as some people just want us to review an employment contract, non-compete or other agreement, other individuals want advice on how to handle a situation, some others want to understand the strength, merits, and value of their legal claim, and yet others may be seeking some other type of guidance. Whatever your employment law needs, you should know that Claudia and Chris are experienced and well-regarded New Jersey employment attorneys. If you want to learn more about Claudia, you can read about her here Claudia A. Reis | New Jersey Employment Discrimination Lawyer Lenzo & Reis, LLC, or to learn more about Chris, you can click here Christopher P. Lenzo | New Jersey Employment Discrimination Lawyer Lenzo & Reis, LLC

Why Can’t I Talk to an Attorney When I First Call the Firm?

Our intake process is rather detailed and designed to get as much information as possible to enable our attorneys to make a determination about whether each caller has an employment legal claim that we can help with. As a result, each intake generally takes at least 20 minutes and often longer. Because of that, it is important to allocate resources appropriately. Having our intake coordinator spend the time necessary to gather all of the relevant facts and details, frees up our attorneys’ time to participate in consultations and represent existing clients to the absolute best of our attorneys’ abilities. Our process also makes sure that every person who calls our law firm to do intake receives a follow-up call from our office. Truth be told, if our attorneys got on the phone with every person who called and needed to follow-up with each one, they would not have enough time to do the legal work necessary to properly represent our law firm clients. Because Claudia and Chris are committed to providing the best representation we possibly can to each of our clients, our attorneys generally do not talk to or meet with potential clients until the consultation stage.