Rivas & Associates

About Rivas & Associates

Rivas & Associates is a national immigration law firm headquartered in Tulsa, with additional offices in Oklahoma City and Fort Smith. Its team helps clients across the United States with deportation defense, detained immigration cases, asylum, family petitions, visas, naturalization, waivers, consular processing, and other complex immigration matters.

The firm serves a large English and Spanish-speaking client base. Many inquiries are urgent, including calls from people in detention or family members trying to help someone who has been detained.

The Challenge

When Rivas & Associates first spoke with Lexidesk, calls were going unanswered and the team was not able to return them fast enough. Every missed call represented a potential client who might never call back, particularly after hours or while the intake team was already handling other inquiries.

The firm needed more than a legal answering service. Any solution had to communicate naturally in English and Spanish, ask the right immigration intake questions, identify urgent and detained matters, and fit into the CRM and workflow the team already used.

Owner Lorena Rivas was initially skeptical about AI legal intake. “It’s gonna sound very robotic,” she recalled thinking. She questioned whether it could pick up on the emotion behind a caller’s situation and give that person the proper attention.

The Solution

Rivas & Associates began with a controlled rollout. Lexidesk initially handled after-hours and overflow calls without scheduling consultations. The AI asked the firm’s existing intake questions, qualified each inquiry, and added a structured summary to its existing CRM.

Lexidesk worked with the Rivas team to understand how its intake operation worked in practice. Every call now captures the details an immigration case depends on, from prior immigration history and A-number to current immigration status, criminal history and more. Those details feed the case summary, qualification status and urgency flag the team receives.

Each lead also received a priority score. This helped staff identify detained cases and matters involving imminent court dates, so the inquiries needing urgent attention could be prioritized.

The aim was to make the system fit into the firm like a newly trained intake employee. It followed the firm’s process, used its qualification criteria, and passed information into its existing CRM without requiring the team to rebuild its workflow.

After reviewing the early calls, the Rivas team decided to expand Lexidesk’s role in inbound new-client phone intake and enable consultation scheduling. Lexidesk began answering calls around the clock in English and Spanish, qualifying leads, and scheduling suitable callers into the firm’s consultation process.

The Results

Results since the rollout:

• 11,000+ intake conversations handled by Lexidesk since May 2026.
• 13.3% more converted matters per month.
• 15.4% more completed consultations per month.
• 31.5% of October’s converted matters came from leads first handled by Lexidesk.

The team also got time back. Lexidesk now handles the first intake conversation and the qualification work, so staff spend more of their day with suitable prospects and urgent matters.

Lorena says her staff now have time for training, for listening to calls and for work they could not get to before. The firm can give more attention to the people it can help, and identify inquiries that other firms are better placed to handle.

How the Firm Operates Now

Lexidesk is now part of the firm’s day-to-day intake operation, with English and Spanish callers receiving consistent attention around the clock.

The firm now uses Lexidesk’s native CRM integration, so staff can pick up each inquiry with the intake context already in their existing workflow. They spend less time repeating basic questions and more time speaking with qualified prospects, following up on urgent matters, and converting consultations.

Rivas & Associates also actively uses Lexidesk’s bilingual website intake widget, giving website visitors another way to start the intake process.

For an immigration firm, the way that first conversation feels matters. Lorena described callers who were frightened about a detained family member finding reassurance in being heard:

Rivas & Associates also uses the Lexidesk Referral Network to help direct matters it cannot handle to other firms. Staff review suitable inquiries and arrange referrals using the intake information already collected, giving the next firm useful context.

What’s Next

Now that Lexidesk answers every new-client call and handles most of the phone sales qualification, the firm is evaluating Lexidesk’s AI receptionist for the rest of its phone line. The firm receives thousands of calls each month. Reception would answer them, transfer callers to the right staff member and track callback requests, so the reception team can improve the client experience even further. As with intake, the firm plans to start with a controlled trial on overflow and after-hours calls, review the results and expand from there.

Rivas is also evaluating Lexidesk Outbound Calling for faster follow-up with form submissions, callback requests, and existing leads. The aim is to continue the conversation with people who have already reached out to the firm.

The firm is exploring more of Lexidesk’s scheduling capabilities, including its native scheduler integrations, to make it easier for qualified prospects to book the right consultation.

Lexidesk will continue working closely with Rivas to improve consultation conversion and help the firm provide a responsive, around-the-clock experience to more immigration clients across the country.