Intake is the process every firm has and almost no firm has written down. An enquiry arrives by phone, web form or email. Someone decides whether it is the kind of work the firm does. Someone checks for conflicts. Someone sends a client care letter, asks for ID, chases the ID, chases the signature, opens the file. Each step is small. Together they take a week, and in that week the prospective client has heard back from two other firms.
The whole thing can run as a sequence, with the fee earner stepping in exactly twice: once to say yes to the matter, once to sign off the engagement. Everything else is drafting, chasing and filing, which is what systems are for.
Step 1: Respond in minutes, around the clock
A web-form enquiry gets an acknowledgement within a minute that says what happens next and offers a time to talk. A phone enquiry out of hours gets a message taken and the same acknowledgement. The acknowledgement is drafted from the firm's wording, names the practice area it looks like, and asks the two or three questions the fee earner would ask first (which side are you, is there a deadline, roughly what is at stake). It does not give advice and it says so.
That first reply is the single most valuable automation in a law firm because it is the one that changes whether the client instructs you. It is also the easiest to get wrong by over-reaching: the message should sound like the firm, promise only a conversation, and never characterise the merits.
Step 2: Qualify and route
The answers to those questions, plus the form fields, let the system route the enquiry: the right practice area, the right fee earner, and a flag for the ones the firm does not take. A matter in an area the firm does not practise gets a polite decline with a referral suggestion, sent after a person glances at it. Everything else lands in the fee earner's queue with a one-paragraph brief and a proposed call time already held in the diary.
Step 3: Conflict check prompt
The system cannot run the conflict check for you, and should not pretend to, but it can do the lookup: search the case management system for the names given and present the matches to the fee earner alongside the brief, so the check happens before the call rather than after it. The decision stays with a person and gets recorded against the enquiry.
Step 4: The yes
The fee earner has the call, decides to act, and presses one button. That button is the first of the two human gates. From it, the system generates the client care letter and terms from the firm's precedent, with the practice area, the fee basis, the named supervisor and the complaints information filled in, and sends it for the fee earner to approve before it goes out. The SRA Transparency Rules expect the price and service information to be clear at this point; building it into the template means it is never missed.
Step 5: ID, AML and the signature, chased until done
Electronic ID verification is requested with the care letter, not after it. The client gets one link, completes it on their phone, and signs the terms with the same link. If they have not done so in two working days, the system chases; after the second chase it tells the fee earner rather than chasing a third time. The chaser stops the moment the documents arrive, which sounds obvious and is the step most hand-run processes get wrong.
Client due diligence has to be completed before the firm acts, so the file is not opened in the case management system until ID and signature are both in. That ordering is enforced by the sequence, not remembered by a person.
Step 6: Open the file, brief the team
With everything in, the matter is opened in Clio, LEAP or Actionstep with the client, the contacts, the practice area, the fee earner and the key dates already populated, the engagement documents attached, and the initial task list applied from the firm's template for that work type. The fee earner gets a summary; the supervising partner gets a line in the daily brief. The second human gate was the sign-off on the care letter; nothing after it needed one.
What stays with the solicitor, always
- The decision to act, and the conflict judgement.
- Approval of the client care letter before it is sent.
- Anything that looks like advice, including in the first reply.
- Any exception the system flags: an unusual fee basis, a name match on the conflict search, a client who has not responded to two chasers.
Built this way, intake is faster for the client, consistent for the regulator, and quieter for the fee earner. It is usually the first thing we build for a firm, for the reasons above. The AI and automation for law firms page has the pricing, the systems we build inside, and how the SRA's guidance shapes every step.
Founder, Anco AI. Builds the systems this site talks about, and runs his own business on them.
