Client intake without burning fee-earner hours on it

Write down what you need to know before you need to know it

Every practice area has a short list of facts that determine whether a matter is worth a meeting: what happened, roughly when, who the other side is, whether a deadline is already running, what the person wants to achieve, whether anyone else is already acting. Most firms have never written that list down, which is why two different people take two different notes about the same enquiry. The list is useful on its own, before any software exists.

Collecting facts is not qualifying a matter

An intake channel can ask the questions on the list, in the enquirer's own language, patiently, at any hour, and without making anyone feel rushed. What it must not do is tell them whether their matter is good, whether a deadline has expired, or whether the firm will take it - all three are judgements, and the last one is also a commitment. The useful output is a complete note, not a verdict.

The deadline question is the one to get right

Some enquiries are time-critical and the enquirer does not know it. A channel that collects "roughly when did this happen" and flags the answer for human attention is doing something genuinely valuable; a channel that tells the enquirer whether they are in time has given advice and may have given it wrongly. Decide which of your practice areas need that flag and what it should trigger, and treat it as the highest-priority routing rule you have.

Measure intake by what arrives, not by how it feels

Take last month's enquiries and count how many arrived with the full fact list attached, how many needed a second contact to fill gaps, and how long that second contact took to happen. Second contacts are where firms lose prospective clients and where fee-earner time disappears without appearing on any timesheet as intake. If the count is hard to produce, that is the finding.