Google LSA Missed Calls: What a Law Firm Is Charged For Since October 1, 2026

The rules that decide whether a missed LSA call is charged

The detail matters, because each of these rules points to a decision the firm controls:

• Business hours are the hours set in the firm’s Google Business Profile. If the ad schedule differs, an unanswered call is charged only when it falls inside both the active ad schedule and those business hours.
• The 20-second rule covers unanswered calls only. If someone at the firm picks up, even after 20 seconds of ringing, the call is judged as an answered call on the conversation, not on the ring time.
• A phone menu changes the clock. If the caller must press a key to be routed and hangs up without pressing one, there is no charge, even if the menu played for more than 20 seconds. Once the caller presses a key, the 20-second timer restarts from that first press; later key presses in a multi-level menu do not reset it again.
• Voicemail counts as a connected call. A business-hours call that goes to voicemail or an automated greeting without a key press is charged if the caller stays on the line for more than 20 seconds, whether or not a message is left. Separately, Google lists a voicemail from the customer as a valid lead in its own right.
• Repeat contact is charged once. After a lead is charged, follow-up calls or messages with that customer are not charged again if there is interaction within 15 days and the contact comes from the same phone number or email address. After 15 days with no activity, a new contact is a new lead.
• Credits are automatic, and the status is visible. Google says it assesses lead quality over a 30-day period and credits leads it finds poor-quality, duplicate or invalid; each lead’s Charge Status on the Leads page reads Charged, Not charged, In review or Credited. A firm can also flag a poor lead through the feedback survey on that lead.

What a missed LSA call costs a law firm now

Before the change, a missed call during business hours was a lost caller: someone with a car accident, a custody question or a visa deadline who reached no one and could tap the next ad on the same screen. That cost was real but invisible, because it never appeared on any bill. Now the same call can also carry the lead price the firm bid for it.

Illustrative example: a hypothetical firm receives 40 charged call leads in a month at a hypothetical $150 each. If 8 of those were business-hours calls nobody answered, $1,200 of that month’s spend paid for callers nobody spoke to — before counting what any of those matters would have been worth. The firm’s own lead prices, which Google says vary with location, job type, lead type and bidding mode, replace every number here.

After-hours calls are a separate line. An unanswered call outside the firm’s business hours is not charged under the 20-second missed-call rule, but it is still a caller who reached no one, and a voicemail that caller leaves is a valid lead on its own. The new rule moves part of the problem onto the invoice; it does not move all of it.

How to check the firm’s charged leads against its phone log

The useful number is not how many leads the firm paid for. It is how many of them nobody at the firm spoke to. Getting it takes the LSA Leads page, the phone system’s call history for the same days, and an hour. Google’s Reports page also shows total lead spend and charged leads, and both can be filtered by category.

• List last month’s charged call leads with date and time, from the Leads page.
• Match each one to its row in the phone log: answered, voicemail or abandoned, and the line it rang on.
• Mark which unanswered ones fell inside the profile’s business hours, and which hour of the day.
• For every missed one, find the time of the first callback, if there was one, and who made it.
• Set the profile’s business hours against the hours someone actually picks up: lunch, the receptionist’s last hour, the morning before the office opens.
• Review every lead marked In review or Charged that the firm believes is invalid, and use the lead’s feedback survey for the poor ones.

The result is four numbers: charged leads nobody spoke to, the hours of the day they cluster in, the time from missed call to callback, and the gap between published hours and staffed hours. Each one has a different owner. If the phone log cannot be exported or nobody records callback times, that blank is the first finding.

Four decisions that bring the count down

None of these needs new software, and each one is a choice with a trade-off the partners should make on purpose rather than discover on the invoice.

• Make the hours true. The hours in the Google Business Profile are the hours Google bills against. If nobody reliably answers between 12 and 1, or after 5, the profile and the staffing should agree — by changing one or the other. The profile’s hours are also public, so this is a decision about what callers see, not only about billing.
• Decide about the phone menu deliberately. Under Google’s rules, a caller who hangs up without pressing a key is not charged. A menu is also one more step between a distressed caller and a person. Some firms will want one, some will not; the trade-off belongs to the managing partner, not to whoever set up the phone system.
• Name a pickup rota for business hours. One named person per hour, and a named second when the first is at lunch, on another line or in a meeting. Coverage that depends on whoever happens to be near the phone has no owner.
• Set a callback rule for every missed LSA call. The lead is already paid for, and follow-up contact within 15 days is not charged again, so the only remaining question is speed. A named person, a stated time limit, and the callback time written down where the weekly review can see it.

An answering service or an outsourced intake team is one way to cover the hours, and for some firms it will be the right one. Compare its monthly cost with the count from the worksheet above — charged leads nobody spoke to, plus the after-hours voicemails — rather than with anyone’s estimate of what missed calls cost law firms in general.

What the change does not settle

The billing rule answers only what Google charges. It does not say whether a caller who reached voicemail ever became a consult, whether the consult signed, or which practice area the LSA spend actually paid for. Those answers sit in the firm’s own records: the intake list, the consult calendar, the fee agreements and the matter list. A law firm intake audit sets the LSA leads against those records and follows each one to signed, declined or silent.

Some questions here are not operational at all. How a state’s advertising rules apply to a paid lead program, what can be said on an LSA profile, and how prospective-client information from those calls must be handled are questions for the firm’s bar ethics counsel or its own attorney. We are not a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice.

When to fix it in-house, and when the Review fits

For a firm whose only question is the LSA count, the worksheet and the four decisions above are the whole job; nothing needs to be bought. The same is true for a solo attorney who answers the phone and calls back every voicemail the same hour.

An outside reading makes sense when the missed calls are one of several leaks — consults that do not sign, time worked and never billed, final invoices nobody chases — or when the phone log, the intake list and the matter list have never been matched. The Revenue Review takes two weeks: read-only exports of counts, dates and stages under an NDA signed before anything opens, ending in a written report the firm keeps, with a monthly dollar figure wherever the records support one, a ranked list of what to fix and a 90-day plan. It staffs no phones, manages no ads, never opens the trust account and gives no legal advice. Implementation is scoped and priced separately.

The free 20-minute call says honestly whether the Review fits.