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Smith.ai
Smith.ai is an outsourced front office service combining AI receptionists with a network of live human agents, positioned as AI and people handling every call together. Its agents are trained on attorney style intake scripts, and it also serves medical, contracting and other professional service businesses. The AI Receptionist line is AI only, with an intake agent for complex, sensitive and conditional intake, and live agent help available per call on any plan.
The Virtual Receptionist line uses human agents, supported by AI for data entry, to answer calls in the firm's name, take messages, book appointments, transfer urgent calls, qualify leads against the firm's script and route inquiries into the CRM. Coverage runs 24/7 across calls, web chat and, on higher plans, outbound calling, in English and Spanish. The vendor states more than 7,000 integrations, with native connections to Clio, MyCase, LawPay, Salesforce and Calendly, and can send retainers automatically after intake.
Pricing is published, from a free AI tier for 25 calls and AI plans from $95 per month to hybrid plans from $292.50 per month. Named customers include Maria Jones Law Firm and SummitPoint LLC.
Smith.ai, head to head
Side by side on the same 15 capability axes and 12 legal signals: where the two part company, and what neither one publishes.
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Ordered by how closely the graded profiles match across the 15 capability axes, inside the same categories. See how each axis is graded in the methodology.
Capability grades
All 15 axes, graded from public sources on the date shown. Hover a grade to see what the letter means on that axis.
AI Centrality
How much of the product is actually AI. Whether the machine learning is the mechanism the buyer is paying for or a feature layered onto conventional software, and whether the vendor is specific about which is which.
Smith.ai is a human answering service that has added AI. It now sells a separate AI only line: an AI Receptionist with a free tier for 25 calls and paid plans from $95 per month, described as deeply context aware, with an intake agent for complex, sensitive and conditional intake. Annual Done-for-You AI plans are priced apart from the human service. That is a shipped AI product, not a roadmap. Agents are trained on attorney style intake scripts, and the platform connects natively to Clio, MyCase and LawPay.
Independent review describes Smith.ai receptionists as human agents backed by AI tools for data entry and CRM updates, and the hybrid service remains the main offer for legal intake. Removing the models would leave a working live agent answering service, which is the business the brand is built on.
Citation Accuracy and Hallucination Disclosure
Whether the vendor publishes measured accuracy on citations and assertions, grounds output to primary sources, and says plainly what its system does when it does not know. Legal has a documented public record of fabricated citations reaching filed briefs, so an untested claim of accuracy is not evidence.
Nothing is published. The product makes no legal citations and does no research, so the usual grounding question does not arise. An AI receptionist does answer callers' questions about a firm and their situation in real time, and handles what the vendor calls complex, sensitive and conditional intake, and the accuracy of what it says is not addressed. No accuracy figure, error rate on intake capture, evaluation, statement of grounding in firm supplied information or hallucination disclosure is published.
The risk is a caller told something wrong about a firm's practice areas, availability or their own matter, with no record of it.
Autonomy and Oversight Model
What the system decides on its own, what a lawyer must approve, and whether the vendor documents where the review point sits. A tool that drafts under review and a tool that files without one are different products and different risks.
The hybrid design puts a human within reach, and one automatic behavior goes undisclosed. Live agent help is available per call on any plan, the AI is described as integrated with the Live Agent Network, and on hybrid plans human agents answer every call. A person is therefore available at the point of contact by design, which suits distressed callers in emotionally charged practice areas. Independent review reports a consistent pattern of complaints, concentrated on one review platform, that the AI Receptionist escalates calls to live agents without the customer's approval, raising bills unexpectedly.
That is the AI making its own handoff decision with a direct cost to the customer, and vendor material does not describe it. The escalation path exists and works, but the rule for when the system uses it is not published and does not appear to be under the customer's control.
Operational and Outcome Evidence
Named, dated evidence that the product works in production at real firms or legal departments. Case studies with figures and identified customers count. Unattributed testimonials and launch announcements do not.
Named customers, named people and published case studies exist, along with substantial independent evidence. Paulina Quiñones of Maria Jones Law Firm is quoted on faster response and screening of prospective clients, and Valentin Reyes of SummitPoint LLC on a 60 percent year over year increase in sales profit, each with a linked case study. Independent evidence includes material unfavorable to the vendor: listings on G2, Trustpilot and Clutch, a directory listing in a named legal technology publication, and several independent comparisons.
A study of more than 500 billing patterns found invoices typically 20 to 30 percent above base plan price. The outcome figures carry no method, baseline or attribution, and the 60 percent profit increase is a company result rather than a shown product effect. No usage or volume figure for the vendor itself is published.
Privilege and Confidentiality Posture
How client confidences are handled: attorney client privilege and work product treatment, segregation of one client matter from another, whether client data trains any model, and what the vendor commits to in writing rather than in marketing.
Nothing is published: no confidentiality statement, encryption reference, data handling description, or treatment of privilege or prospective client confidences. The exposure is broader because humans are involved. Live receptionists hear callers describe legal problems in real time, including in personal injury, family law and criminal defense, which independent review names as this vendor's strengths. Nothing addresses agents' confidentiality duties, training, screening or what an agent may record and keep. Web chat is also answered by live agents, so a human third party receives prospective client confidences.
UPL and Professional Responsibility Posture
Whether the vendor is clear that it supplies a tool rather than legal advice, who its audience is, and how it addresses unauthorized practice of law, competence and supervision duties, and jurisdiction limits. ABA Formal Opinion 512 is the reference point. Where the advice line is not the duty a product raises, the axis is read through the nearest professional duty it does raise: judicial conduct rules and the reviewing duty for products sold only to courts, and the duty to bill for time actually spent for products that draft time entries.
No position is published. Agents who are not lawyers and an AI hold intake conversations with prospective clients, qualifying them against a firm's criteria and, in the AI version, handling what the vendor calls complex, sensitive and conditional intake. Nothing says agents or the AI do not give legal advice, or describes what they may say when a caller asks a substantive question. Nothing addresses the professional rules a firm works under when it outsources first contact with prospective clients.
The vendor trains agents on attorney style intake scripts, which shows it understands the legal context, without engaging the professional rules.
AI Governance and Bias Disclosure
Published governance over model behavior: who owns it inside the vendor, what is tested before release, and what is disclosed about disparate output across matter types, parties, or populations.
Nothing is published about how the models are governed, evaluated or monitored. No AI policy, model card, bias or fairness testing, evaluation method, accuracy monitoring, drift statement, named governance body, ISO 42001 or EU AI Act position is published. Two risks are untested. The AI qualifies leads against firm criteria, so it decides which callers deserve the firm's attention, and the people assessed are consumers seeking help who are never told a machine assessed them.
The service is also bilingual in English and Spanish, and speech systems are known to perform unevenly across accents and languages. Nothing indicates that recognition or qualification has been examined across the callers the product serves.
AI Safety and Data Stewardship
Retention, deletion, access control, and what happens to prompts and documents after they are processed. Whether the vendor states its subprocessors and its incident practice, or leaves the buyer to assume.
No stewardship position is published. Nothing says whether call recordings, transcripts, chat conversations or captured intake data train or improve models, no retention period is published, and no deletion right is described. Voice makes this weightier. A call must be recorded or transcribed to be acted on, and the vendor's home page offers playable real call recordings by industry as a demonstration, which shows recordings are kept and reused for marketing.
Nothing says on what basis, with whose consent, or whether customer calls could be used the same way, and recording consent rules differ across states.
AI Liability and Recourse
What the vendor stands behind contractually when its output is wrong. Indemnities, caps, carve outs, insurance, and whether any of it is published or only reachable through a negotiated agreement.
No published position located on liability for AI output, warranty, service levels or remedy, and this is the record where a concrete financial consequence is documented by third parties rather than hypothesized. Independent review reports consistent complaints that the AI auto escalates calls to live agents without authorization, and a separate analysis of more than 500 billing patterns concludes that real invoices run 20 to 30 percent above base plan price.
Together those describe a system whose autonomous decisions increase what the customer pays, with no published rule governing the decision and no stated recourse. Beyond billing, the ordinary exposures apply and are unaddressed: a missed or mishandled call from a prospective client, or a wrongly disqualified caller. A 14 day money back period is published for the virtual receptionist service, which is a return policy rather than a liability position.
Practice Systems Integration Depth
How deeply the product reaches into the systems legal work already lives in: document management such as iManage and NetDocuments, Word and Outlook, contract lifecycle management, matter management, e-billing, and court filing systems.
Integrations are named and carry a complete intake workflow. Legal integrations include Clio, MyCase and LawPay for practice management, case management and payments, plus Salesforce and Calendly, with Zapier extending further. The vendor states more than 7,000 integrations, and an independent legal technology directory puts the figure above 1,000. Conversations are said to sync to customer systems in real time. Retainers can be sent automatically once a receptionist completes intake, carrying a prospective client from first contact through qualification to engagement paperwork without a human handoff.
Independent review describes the Clio integration as plug and play with no technical setup, and a competitor's comparison cites Clio workflows as a reason to choose this vendor. No API documentation is published, and the 7,000 figure is not itemized.
Deployment Model and Data Residency
Where the software runs and where the data sits. Multi tenant cloud, single tenant, private deployment, on premises, and whether region of residence is a published option or an enterprise conversation.
Nothing located. No hosting provider is named, no region or data residency commitment is published, and no deployment options are described. The question is sharper than for a software only vendor because this service holds voice recordings and transcripts of calls from members of the public, and because a live agent network implies human agents located somewhere, which is itself a data location question that nothing published addresses: a firm cannot determine from public material which jurisdiction its callers' conversations are heard and stored in.
Security Certifications and Trust Center
Independent attestation a buyer can pull without a sales call: SOC 2, ISO 27001, penetration test summaries, a trust center with current reports and named scope rather than a badge image.
No certification, attestation, trust center or security page is published. No SOC 2 of either type, ISO 27001, named auditor, penetration testing partner or encryption statement was found on the pages read, and nothing suggests a gated security page. The gap matters because the vendor holds call recordings and transcripts for law firms whose own obligations attach to that material. A service handling consumer voice data at this scale would usually be asked for an attestation in procurement.
Model Supply Chain Disclosure
Which models sit underneath, whose they are, where they run, and whether the vendor commits to telling customers when that changes. A legal buyer inherits every dependency it cannot see.
Nothing is published. No foundation model, speech recognition provider, model family or version is named, and no subprocessor list was found. A voice product needs speech to text, text to speech and language model components, each commonly supplied by a third party, and none is identified, so a firm cannot tell which parties process recordings of its prospective clients' calls. The vendor describes the AI as deeply context aware and connected to key systems, which describes capability, not provenance.
Commercial Transparency
Whether a buyer can learn what this costs without entering a sales process: published rates, the unit being charged, what sits behind an enterprise tier, and what implementation adds.
Pricing is published in detail across two product lines and several tiers, with the unit of charge stated throughout. The AI Receptionist free tier is $0 per month for 25 calls, then $3.00 per call, and paid AI plans start at $95 per month with per call rates and a stated overage rate. The hybrid Virtual Receptionist starts at $292.50 per month for 30 calls, with published per call pricing after that. Annual Done-for-You AI plans are fixed at $500, $1,000 and $2,000 per month with no overage charges.
Terms are published too: month to month with no contract on self serve plans, a 14 day money back period, and billing per call rather than per minute, which independent review says suits firms with longer intake calls. A buyer can model their own cost from published material. Independent analysis of more than 500 billing patterns finds invoices typically run 20 to 30 percent above the base plan price, driven by usage and automatic escalation to live agents rather than rates.
Firm and Practice Coverage
Who the product is actually built for. AmLaw, midlaw, small firm and solo, in house departments, government and courts, and which practice areas are supported rather than merely claimed.
Channel and market coverage are broad, and legal practice coverage is not described. Channels include 24/7 inbound calls, web chat answered by live agents, outbound calling on higher plans for sales follow up and appointment confirmation, and CRM intake routing, with emergency keyword routing and spam blocking, all in English and Spanish. The market reaches well beyond law into medical, contracting and other professional services.
The home page demonstrates a scenario outside legal, and one reviewer notes the product now prices itself for contractors rather than law firms. Independent review identifies strength in emotionally charged intake, including personal injury, family law and criminal defense, and suitability for firms with 30 to 150 calls a month. None of that legal detail comes from the vendor, which names no practice areas or jurisdictions.
1 public document
The public pages on file for Smith.ai, with the recorded signals each one supports and the date it was last read. Open any of them and check the reading against the record.
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smith.ai1 signal
Client Data in Training
Read Aug 29, 2026
From $95 per month; free tier for 25 calls
- The cheapest paid AI receptionist plan is $95 a month, and there is a free plan that handles 25 calls.
- You pay per call, not per minute, and each plan says what a call costs inside and above its allowance.
- A plan with a human receptionist mixed in starts at $292.50 a month for 30 calls.
- Done for you AI plans are $500, $1,000 or $2,000 a month with no overage charges.
- Month to month, no contract, and a 14 day money back window on self serve plans.
Published on the vendor's pricing pages across two product lines with the unit of charge stated throughout: an AI Receptionist free tier at $0 per month for 25 calls then $3.00 per call; AI Receptionist plans from $95 per month with per call rates within tier and a stated overage rate; a hybrid Virtual Receptionist from $292.50 per month for 30 calls with published per call pricing after the monthly minimum; and annual price locked Done for You AI plans at $500, $1,000 and $2,000 per month with no overage charges.
Month to month with no contract on self serve plans and a 14 day money back period. Recorded from the Commercial Transparency read; figures as published on the verification date of that row.
Implementation: Not stated. No onboarding or setup charge is published for the self serve plans, which are month to month with no contract; the Done for You plans bundle setup into the monthly price.
Note: Independent analysis of more than 500 billing patterns finds invoices typically run 20 to 30 percent above the base plan price. The gap comes from usage and from the AI's automatic escalation to live agents, not from rates, so a buyer should model cost from the per call rates rather than the plan headline.
Legal Signals
What each signal meansA signal records what public sources say on the date shown. It is not a grade and it is not a recommendation. Where a signal reads Not addressed, it means the index did not locate the material in public sources on that date, which is a statement about disclosure rather than about the product.
Client Data in Training
Can material a lawyer puts into this product be used to train a model?
A published agreement or policy exists and none of it addresses the question either way, or the document that would answer it could not be read and the summary names the retrieval limit. The summary states which shape the silence takes: an improvement right granted that never names training, or no improvement right granted at all.
Silent. The quoted line is the vendor's central architectural claim and it describes who handles a call rather than what happens to the recording of it. No statement in either direction was located on whether call recordings, transcripts, chat conversations or captured intake data are used to train or improve models. One published fact makes the silence concrete rather than theoretical: the vendor's own home page offers playable real call recordings by industry as a product demonstration, which establishes that recordings are retained and repurposed beyond handling the call, and nothing states on what basis, with whose consent, or whether a law firm's own calls could be used the same way.
The people recorded are members of the public contacting a law firm, who are not the customer and cannot consent, object or ask. Recorded as silent, not as a negative commitment. Checked the home page, the AI Receptionist page, the pricing material, the directory listing and independent review on 29 Aug 2026.
Prompt and Output Retention
How long does the product keep what a lawyer typed, and can that be set to zero?
No located public material states how long prompts and outputs are retained.
Not addressed. No retention period is published for call recordings, transcripts, chat logs or captured intake data, and no deletion right is described. Retention is established as a fact by the product itself, since real call recordings are published on the vendor's home page as demonstrations, and conversations are stated to sync into customer systems in real time, which is transmission rather than a statement about what the vendor keeps.
Recording retention carries state law implications on consent and on how long voice data may be held, and nothing published engages any of it. Checked the home page, the AI Receptionist page, the pricing material and independent review on 29 Aug 2026.
Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation
Does retrieval respect the firm’s ethical walls, or can the model read across them?
No located public material addresses walls or matter level segregation.
Not addressed. No permission model, access restriction or segregation description was located. The vendor runs a Live Agent Network, so people employed by a third party hear prospective clients describe their legal problems. Nothing says whether an agent handles calls for competing firms, whether agents are screened or restricted across customers, or what stops an agent who took an intake call for one side of a dispute from taking one for the other.
Prospective client conflicts arise here as for any intake product, and the human agents add a conflict risk that no permission model can address, because it sits with people rather than data. Checked the home page, the AI Receptionist page, the directory listing and independent review on 29 Aug 2026.
Third Party Request and Subpoena Notice
If someone subpoenas the vendor for a firm’s data, does the firm hear about it first?
No located term or policy addresses third party requests for customer data.
Not addressed. No government or law enforcement request clause, commitment to notify a customer before producing its data, or transparency report was located. The material held is sensitive: recordings and transcripts of members of the public describing legal problems to what they think is a law firm, in practice areas that include criminal defense and family law, where a caller's own account could harm them if produced.
A request served on the vendor would reach voice recordings the firm itself may never have heard. Checked the home page, the AI Receptionist page, the pricing material and the site navigation on 29 Aug 2026.
Primary Law Corpus Provenance
Where does the law in this product come from, and does the vendor have the right to use it?
No located public material identifies the corpus behind the product’s answers.
Not addressed, and inapplicable in the usual sense with a live residue. The product has no primary law corpus: the AI operates on the firm's own intake script, call handling rules and connected systems, so the substantive content is customer supplied. The residue is what the underlying speech and language models were built on, which is entirely undisclosed, and it matters more for a voice product than for a text one because speech recognition performance is corpus dependent and the service is delivered bilingually in English and Spanish to callers of every accent and speech pattern.
Nothing published names a training corpus, a speech provider or any evaluation across caller populations. Checked the home page, the AI Receptionist page and independent review on 29 Aug 2026.
Good Law Verification
Does the product tell you when the authority it just cited has been overruled?
No located public material addresses whether authority is checked for subsequent history.
Not addressed, and not applicable. Smith.ai answers calls, qualifies callers against a firm's intake script, books appointments and routes inquiries into a CRM, and produces no legal research or citation to authority, so there is nothing for a citator to check. Checked the home page, the AI Receptionist page and the directory listing on 29 Aug 2026.
Refusal and Uncertainty Behavior
What does the product do when the answer is not in the corpus?
No located public material addresses what the product does when it cannot ground an answer.
Not addressed by the vendor, and third party reporting describes the behavior that fills the gap. Nothing published states what the AI does when it cannot understand a caller, when a question falls outside the firm's script, or when an intake condition is ambiguous. What independent review reports is that the AI Receptionist auto escalates calls to live agents without user authorization, which is in substance an uncertainty behavior: the system hands off when it cannot proceed.
That is a reasonable design and arguably the right one for a distressed caller, and it is undisclosed, ungoverned by any published rule, and carries a per call cost the customer did not authorize. A behavior a customer only discovers through their invoice is not a disclosed behavior. Checked the home page, the AI Receptionist page, the pricing material and independent review on 29 Aug 2026.
Fabricated Citation Record
Does a public court record exist addressing fabricated or hallucinated legal citations in output from this product?
No court order, opinion or disciplinary record addressing fabricated or hallucinated legal citations produced by this product has been located as of the date shown. This is a statement about the public record on that one subject, not a finding about the product, and this signal is not a litigation history.
None located, with the instrument named. General web searches combining the vendor name with court, order, sanction, complaint and consumer protection terms returned nothing on 29 Aug 2026, and no named docket database, court record tracker or state consumer protection register was searched. This is a statement about what this search found, not a clearance. The exposure shape is not fabricated citations, since no legal authority is generated.
The analogous adverse findings would be call recording consent under state wiretapping statutes, or a billing dispute arising from the auto escalation pattern independent review reports, and neither would surface through the search terms a citation focused instrument uses.
Bar Guidance Alignment
Has the vendor engaged in public with the ethics opinions its buyers are bound by?
No located public material engages with bar or ethics guidance.
Not addressed. No ethics opinion, ABA Formal Opinion 512, state bar guidance or engagement with professional conduct rules was located. Bar guidance on outsourced legal intake by people who are not lawyers has existed for years, covering supervision of nonlawyer assistants, confidentiality of prospective client communications and fee sharing. This vendor has built its business on legal intake, with agents trained on attorney style intake scripts, and engages none of those rules. Checked the home page, the AI Receptionist page, the directory listing and the site navigation on 29 Aug 2026.
Billing and Fee Posture
Does the vendor address what happens to the bill when the work takes an hour instead of six?
The product does not touch a fee between a lawyer and a client. It operates before an engagement exists, or it is bought by a team that bills no client for the work. Savings claims aimed at the buyer’s own cost are recorded in the summary and do not make the row a savings claim, because no client bill is in the loop.
The product works before an engagement exists, so it sits outside the fee relationship. Its savings claim is a concrete cost comparison. The vendor says an in house weekday receptionist costs $4,000 or more a month, takes months to ramp up, turns over constantly and covers limited hours, against published plans far below that with 24/7 coverage. Naming the alternative's cost makes the claim checkable. Customer outcome claims are attributed to named people at named firms without method, including a 60 percent year over year increase in sales profit.
Nothing addresses whether outsourced intake cost is passed to clients, whether a caller is told they are speaking to a third party service or an AI, or which part of an intake was handled by a machine.
Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness
Can a firm get this vendor through a client’s AI clause without a bespoke negotiation?
No located public material supports a client side disclosure obligation.
Not addressed. No trust center, security page, named certification, subprocessor list, named model or speech provider, data processing agreement or documentation request route was located, so a firm has nothing to forward to a client. The vendor is not only a processor but a service whose human agents handle the firm's client communications. A client asking who speaks to prospective clients for the firm, where they are, and how recordings are held cannot be answered from public material.
Checked the home page, the AI Receptionist page, the pricing material, the directory listing and the site navigation on 29 Aug 2026.
Court Disclosure Support
If a judge’s standing order requires an AI disclosure, can the product produce one?
Some elements of the record are available, short of a document level export.
A partial record exists, and it includes a real evidentiary artifact. Call recordings and transcripts exist because the product needs them, conversations sync into the firm's CRM in real time, and the vendor's home page shows recordings are kept and playable. A firm can in principle produce what a caller said and what was said back. In this setting the likely forum is a bar complaint, a fee dispute or a malpractice claim rather than a court filing, and a recording is the artifact those proceedings turn on.
Nothing indicates that a record marks which parts of a call were handled by AI and which by a live agent, the distinction that would matter if what a prospective client was told were disputed. No export or retention artifact is described as available to the customer on demand.