Top 5 Tips for Attorneys Leaving Voicemail

Partners and potential clients delete tons of voicemail—here’s how to make sure yours won't be one of them.

“Hi, Ms. Stevens. It’s Robert. Just a few thoughts on this guy’s brief. It’s kind of like the problem we had back in March. Am I making myself clear? Well, I just think . . . “


How important is an effective voice mail? Put it this way: According to a study conducted by Pitney Bowes, the typical executive receives upward of 375 communiqués every day, including e-mails, phone calls, faxes, and letters. In this environment, any excuse that a caller gives an exec or potential client to delete a voice mail—even five slightly rambling seconds—is a valid one.

1.Start strong. The single worst thing to do is to clutter the beginning of a message with useless information (phone-tag jokes most certainly qualify). According to Jacqueline Whitmore, founder of the Protocol School of Palm Beach, Florida, the superfluous pleasantries so many people rely on to start their messages make a distinctly negative impression on busy executives. “Don’t say ‘I hope you’re having a good day,’” she explains. “That’s a cliché that doesn’t mean anything.” Instead, signal that you won’t waste the person’s time—state your name, reason for calling, and phone number up front. Keep your message to less than 30 seconds and you come off as someone who takes action rather than someone who talks about it.

2.Give ’em structure. If there are several items to address, announce them right away, and then take each in turn. “There’s a structure to all communications that linguists refer to as the frame, the context in which people expect to hear certain things,” says an associate professor emeritus of linguistics at San Diego State University. “Anything that breaks people out of the frame causes them to start missing the information.” Nail the structure of the message by taking 60 seconds before you call to scratch out four or five bullet points. Yes, it sounds simplistic, but it can mean the difference between a lucid message and a meandering mess. It also drastically reduces the “ums” and “ers” that signal nervousness and lack of professionalism.

3.Pace yourself.  In making snap judgments about which messages to attend to, people often unconsciously take linguistic cues from the caller’s delivery. Speaking too slowly could mean the beginning of a long, drawn-out voice mail. Speaking too fast forces the listener to replay the message, or, more likely, to move on to the next one. Subtle phrasing can also send unwanted signals. “Women in particular often lift their intonation at the end of a sentence, as you would for a question,” says an editor of an academic journal about language. “That can make you sound tentative and hesitant.”

4.Say it again. Repeat your phone number at the end of the message, and when you do, break it into groups of three or four digits. Linguistic studies have proven that people tend to remember information more accurately when it’s delivered in short chunks. That’s why they originally decided to group phone numbers into distinct clumps.

5.Get technical. Digital voice recording systems are designed not to capture silence. A soft, barely audible word can be mistaken for silence and not preserved in a message. Many systems also offer “flags” to mark a message as urgent and move it to the front of the line. (Less than one percent of callers take advantage of this function.) While doing so might make you look a bit pushy, it certainly demonstrates a facility with technology and a distinct by-any-means-necessary attitude.