Re: Lawyer magic word...
I suspect the actual situation is something like this:
It's not economically feasible to staff front line support with people skilled and/or empowered to deal with everything so for a lot of stuff they depend on escalation.
Weekend escalation teams are on weekend rates which makes them more expensive so that there are few of them. Consequently the first line are under orders to escalate to the weekday team if possible, otherwise more weekend teams have to be added at greater cost. Note that turning it over to the legal team counts as escalation and having legals on weekend rates is going to be very, very, vvvveeerrrryyyy expensive indeed.
At the point where the customer threatens to go legal the front line does a quick triage to find out what the possible costs are. If it's a domestic line or a small business, say a restaurant taking phone bookings it's probably well enough to say "see you in court". In this case the customer falls into a category potentially putting the company on the hook for loss of customer's business during the outage, compensation to the customer's customers and loss of reputation. Maybe also there's an SLA being breached. Maybe even the loss of the phone company's billable traffic is high enough. Whatever, it now becomes clear that it's cheaper to turn it over to the weekend escalation team than to fight it.
It's just money - whichever's the cheapest response.