How fast do solicitors reply to new enquiries?
More than a third of the 27 firms we tested never replied at all. Of those that did, the typical reply arrived inside two working hours, with Hull and York performing similarly during the working day. A useful benchmark for any firm wondering where it sits.
The two towns side by side, in working hours
| Hull | York | Both | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enquiries sent | 16 | 11 | 27 |
| Firms that replied | 10 | 7 | 17 |
| Reply rate | 63% | 64% | 63% |
| Typical wait (median) | 4 h 0 min | 1 h 47 min | 1 h 54 min |
| Fastest human reply | 20 min | 21 min | 20 min |
| Slowest reply | 17 h 2 min | 8 h 30 min | 17 h 2 min |
| Firms that never replied | 6 | 4 | 10 |
What it means for partners and operations directors at law firms
Of the 27 firms approached, ten never replied at all. For a prospective client, those firms simply didn't exist. Two observations stand out.
The first is the scale of that silence. Well over a third of legitimate enquiries hit a wall.
The second is speed. Among the firms that did reply, the typical wait was under two working hours and the average around four, often slow enough for a quicker competitor to have already won the work. And because so few firms acknowledge enquiries automatically, even prospects who eventually got a reply spent the entire wait wondering whether their message had landed.
The two most useful starting questions for any firm reading this are simple. Would we have been one of the silent ten? And if not, would our reply have arrived quickly enough to matter?
Harvard Business Review research found that replying within five minutes makes a business 21 times more likely to qualify a new prospect than waiting ten minutes, and 60 times more likely than waiting 24 hours.
By that standard, no firm in this cohort sent a detailed reply inside the window. The only two replies inside five minutes were the automated acknowledgements above, which makes that gap so striking. In the age of AI, a system can interpret an enquiry and draft a reply instantly, leaving the person only to check it and hit send.