Legal Intake
what is legal intakeFrom First Inquiry to an Attorney-Reviewable Record
A practical definition of legal intake, from first inquiry and conflict screening through evidence collection, attorney review, and matter opening.
Legal intake is the process a law firm uses to turn a new inquiry into an organized record that an authorized person can review and act on. It starts when a prospective client contacts the firm and covers identity, contact details, consent, the person's account, parties, dates, supporting records, open questions, conflict procedures, follow-up, and the firm's recorded outcome. If the firm accepts the matter, that same intake record should become the starting point for the case file.
Legal intake begins before there is a client matter
A prospective client rarely arrives with a clean chronology and a complete evidence set. A caller may remember an event but not its date. A form submission may name one defendant while an uploaded document names a related entity. A referral email may contain useful context that never reaches the person who conducts the interview.
Intake gives those fragments a governed place to land. The record should show what the prospect said, which documents were received, who entered a correction, what remains unknown, and who owns the next action. It should not imply that the firm has accepted a representation before an authorized person makes that decision.
That boundary matters because a person who consults a lawyer about a possible relationship can be a prospective client even when no attorney-client relationship follows. The American Bar Association's comment on Model Rule 1.18 explains that duties can attach to information learned during those discussions. The firm's intake design should therefore collect and expose information according to firm policy, access controls, and the rules that apply in its jurisdiction.
What belongs in a legal intake record
The exact questions depend on the case type. A mass tort inquiry and an employment claim should not share one generic questionnaire. Their common structure, however, is recognizable.
| Record area | What it should establish | What reviewers need to see |
|---|---|---|
| Identity and contact | Who contacted the firm and how to reach them | Aliases, preferred channel, duplicate candidates, and source |
| Parties | People and organizations connected to the proposed matter | Roles, name variants, and information used in the firm's conflict procedure |
| Matter facts | What allegedly happened, where, and when | The prospect's account, dates, amounts, events, and stated uncertainty |
| Documents | Which records were received or requested | File source, received date, classification, and connection to a stated fact |
| Permissions | What the person agreed to receive or submit | Consent text, timestamp, channel, and any later change |
| Work state | What must happen next | Owner, due date, exception, and permitted next state |
| Outcome | What the firm decided | Engage, decline, refer, or hold, recorded by an authorized person |
An unanswered question and an unknown fact are not the same. An unanswered field may mean the interview never reached the question. An explicit "unknown" means the prospect was asked and could not provide the answer. Preserving that distinction tells staff whether to conduct the interview, request a record, or send the issue to a reviewer.
The work follows a repeatable sequence
Log the first contact once
Calls, forms, referrals, emails, imports, and portal messages should create or update a lead in one controlled system. Staff need enough information to search for an existing record before creating another. The source and original submission should remain attached so later reviewers can distinguish the received information from subsequent edits.
Begin the firm's opening controls
Identity and party information supports the firm's conflict procedures. The ABA's practical overview of the client intake and conflict-check process describes intake as a way to gather the information needed to identify prospective clients, adverse parties, witnesses, and other relevant people. The firm determines when checks run, which names are searched, who resolves uncertain results, and which state changes are blocked.
Ask case-specific questions
Questions should match the claim the firm is prepared to evaluate. Conditional questions reduce irrelevant work. Validation can catch malformed dates or incomplete phone numbers, but it should allow a prospect to say that an answer is unknown or that a record is not currently available.
Gather and preserve supporting material
Each upload, email attachment, call note, and imported record needs a source. A proposed fact extracted from a document should point back to that document and, when possible, the relevant page. NIST's Data Governance and Management Profile concept paper identifies provenance, metadata, lineage, quality, and accountability as connected parts of data governance. In intake, those ideas translate into a simple operational question: can the reviewer tell where an important value came from and who changed it?
Assign missing work
A promised medical record, return call, translation, identity clarification, or attorney review should have an owner and due date. It should not live only in an inbox or in one staff member's memory. Exception queues give supervisors a place to find overdue work and uncertain records without reopening every lead.
Record the authorized outcome
Firm-approved staff decide whether to engage, decline, refer, or hold the inquiry. Software may prepare the record, flag a missing item, or route a task. It should not silently make conflict, legal merit, engagement, filing, or legal-advice decisions reserved for lawyers or other authorized firm staff.
Intake and case management should share one record
The administrative boundary between a lead and an opened matter should not force a second round of data entry. If the firm accepts the matter, names, answers, documents, notes, permissions, corrections, tasks, and review history should travel forward.
The record may gain new phases, deadlines, permissions, and work areas after opening. Its lineage should remain intact. Re-keying creates opportunities for date changes, name variants, detached documents, duplicate claimant records, and conflicting amounts. It also weakens reporting because intake and case teams may be measuring two versions of the same person.
A clean handoff does not mean every fact is final. It means the reviewer can see what is known, what is unknown, what was not answered, and which source supports each proposed fact.
Software should support judgment, not hide it
Intake software can receive submissions, transcribe calls, classify documents, extract candidate values, send reminders, and route work. Those features are useful only when the system preserves review state and source context.
A reviewer should be able to distinguish among:
- a statement made by the prospect
- text extracted from a source document
- a staff correction
- a calculated value
- an approved value used by the firm
When two dates disagree, the system should surface the disagreement instead of selecting one without review. When extraction confidence is low, it should route the item to a person. When a rule changes, the audit history should show which version governed the earlier work.
How to tell whether legal intake is working
Form completion is only one signal. Firms should also watch the time from submission to first review, the age of missing documents, correction and re-keying rates, duplicate records, staff touches, overdue follow-up, and the share of submissions that reach attorney review without remediation.
These measures point to different problems. A fast first response with a long wait for evidence may indicate a weak document request. Frequent attorney corrections may indicate unclear questions or a poor review step. Duplicate rates may show that call, referral, and web channels are creating separate leads for the same person.
The objective is not to remove human judgment. It is to give that judgment a record that is complete enough to review, clear about uncertainty, and traceable to its sources.
Frequently asked questions
Why do law firms need a legal intake process?
Legal intake gives the firm organized information for deciding what should happen to a prospective matter. It also keeps follow-up, records, permissions, and review work from disappearing between people, systems, or inboxes.
Who handles legal intake?
Intake specialists, paralegals, case managers, lawyers, and authorized service providers may handle different steps. The firm defines access, responsibilities, escalation routes, and the people allowed to make legal or engagement decisions.
Where does intake end and case management begin?
Intake covers the work around a prospective matter. Formal case management begins when the firm opens the matter. The data lifecycle begins earlier, so the intake record and its history should transfer into the opened case without being rebuilt.
Which parts can software automate?
Software can collect answers, receive documents, transcribe calls, send reminders, classify records, propose extracted values, and route work. Authorized people retain conflict resolution, qualification judgment, engagement, legal conclusions, filing decisions, and client advice.
Bring one matter type