How long will it take?
What law firms need to publish
Clients are planning around it — a house move, a business decision, a family arrangement.
How customers actually ask it
The same intent arrives in wording your page probably does not use. All of these mean the same thing:
- “How long will it take?”
- “typical timescale”
- “how long does probate take”
- “when will it be resolved”
- “conveyancing timeline”
What a complete answer contains
For law firms specifically, an answer is only complete when it covers all 5:
- 1
Realistic ranges for your common matter types, not best cases
- 2
Which stages are within your control and which are not, such as court listing or third-party response
- 3
What most commonly causes delay
- 4
How often you will update them, proactively
- 5
An explicit statement that estimates are not guarantees
A worked example
Illustrative — not a real business
Uncontested probate typically takes six to nine months, of which the grant application alone is currently around 16 weeks with the Probate Registry — outside anyone's control. Conveyancing averages 10 to 14 weeks. The most common cause of delay is waiting on searches from the local authority. We update you fortnightly whether or not anything has moved.
Which page should own it
Service page for each matter type
What silence costs
Unmanaged timescale expectations are the leading source of client complaints in legal services, well ahead of outcome.
More questions law firms get
Related
term
What is AI customer service?
AI customer service means answering customer questions with a language model rather than a person. The useful implementations are grounded in a specific business's own content; the poor ones let a general model improvise, which produces confident answers that are wrong.
term
What is a knowledge base?
Traditionally a knowledge base is a help centre humans read. For AI support it is the source material a representative answers from — which means an ordinary website, well written, can serve as one without a separate help centre.
use case
Answer customer questions from your own content
Answering questions well means answering them from something true. RubyRep retrieves the relevant passages from your site before it writes anything, and cites the page it used, so an answer can always be checked.
Does your site answer this already?
Point RubyRep at your website and ask it this exact question. If it cannot answer, neither can your customers.