Mass Tort Intake Checklist: Launch and Quality Controls

A mass tort intake checklist should control the campaign before the first submission arrives. It assigns owners, freezes an approved criteria version, defines evidence and exception gates, tests every route, requires human review for legal and engagement decisions, and carries the approved intake record into case management without re-keying or losing source history.

Start with a campaign control record

A mass tort campaign needs its own operating definition. The mass tort intake program should not begin with a generic form and a shared inbox. It should begin with a controlled record that states what the firm is evaluating, which criteria version is active, which documents may support review, who can change the workflow, and who can decide whether a matter proceeds.

This record is not a legal conclusion. It is the operating agreement for the intake team. A lawyer or other authorized firm leader owns the legal criteria. An operations owner translates the approved criteria into questions, states, evidence requests, and queues. A technical owner implements those controls. A quality owner tests whether the configured workflow behaves as approved.

The same record and decision boundaries apply across legal intake, but mass tort work adds campaign-specific criteria, evidence patterns, version changes, and volume controls that must be tested together.

The boundary around early collection also needs written approval. The ABA comment on Model Rule 1.18 says a lawyer considering a new matter should limit the initial consultation to information that reasonably appears necessary for that purpose. The firm should decide what belongs at first contact, what belongs after initial screening, and what should wait until a later authorized stage.

Before configuration begins, confirm:

• A named legal owner approved the campaign scope and criteria.
• Every criteria set has a version ID, effective date, approver, and change note.
• The team defined yes, no, unknown, not asked, and conflicting evidence as separate states where they affect routing.
• Each stage has an owner, entry condition, exit condition, and exception destination.
• Engagement, conflict resolution, legal qualification, and legal advice remain with authorized firm staff.

Use one launch checklist across every stage

The table below is the minimum control map. Add case-specific fields and evidence rules, but do not remove the owner, version, exception, and exit checks.

Stage	Accountable owner	Release check	Exception test	Exit evidence
Campaign definition	Legal owner	Approved criteria version is active	Expired or unapproved version is rejected	Approval record and change note
First contact	Intake operations	Source, consent state, identity basics, and original submission are preserved	Duplicate and incomplete contact paths route correctly	Searchable lead record with source
Qualification interview	Intake lead	Conditional questions match the active criteria	Unknown, not asked, contradictory, and out-of-range answers do not collapse into one state	Completed answers plus open issues
Document collection	Evidence owner	Requested items match the campaign evidence plan	Unreadable, wrong-person, duplicate, and unsupported files enter exception queues	Classified files with provenance
Quality review	Quality owner	Required fields and evidence gates pass	Failed rules cannot be bypassed without a named review	Review result, reviewer, and timestamp
Legal review	Authorized firm reviewer	Review packet exposes facts, sources, gaps, and criteria version	Conflicts and unresolved exceptions block the configured next step	Recorded authorized outcome
Matter handoff	Case operations	Approved values and source files transfer forward	Re-keying, detached files, and lost corrections fail acceptance	Opened matter with intake lineage

Stage 1: Test entry, identity, and duplicate controls

Every permitted source should create or update one governed intake record. Test web submissions, calls, referrals, imports, and resumed sessions separately. Preserve the original payload or source note, then record later corrections as changes rather than overwriting the received information.

Identity controls should search for reasonable duplicate candidates without declaring two people identical solely because one field matches. Test common name variants, changed contact information, shared household details, mistyped dates, and a person who returns through a different channel. Define which staff member can merge records, what evidence supports the merge, and how the action can be reversed or audited.

The same first stage must support the firm's conflict procedure. The ABA's overview of the client intake and conflict-check process identifies prospective-client information, the area of law, and the general nature of the dispute as information commonly used for conflict analysis. The firm determines the exact names, parties, aliases, and related entities needed for its procedure and who clears a possible match.

Entry-stage release checks:

• Each channel records a source and received time.
• Consent language and status are stored with the applicable version.
• Duplicate candidates enter a review queue instead of being merged silently.
• Possible conflict matches reach the firm's designated reviewer.
• A failed upload or abandoned session creates the intended follow-up state without pretending the intake is complete.

Stage 2: Verify questions against the criteria version

Turn each approved criterion into a testable question or reviewer instruction. Record the relationship between the question version and the criteria version. If a question changes, the system should show whether existing submissions need another answer, a staff review, or no action.

Use the mass tort intake qualification guide to separate operational routing from legal judgment. A rule may flag an answer for review, request another record, or prevent an incomplete packet from advancing. It should not conceal the underlying answer or present a legal conclusion as an automated fact.

Build test cases before release. Include the expected route for a clear answer, a boundary value, an explicit unknown, a skipped question, contradictory answers, a corrected answer, and an answer entered after the criteria version changes. Confirm that conditional questions appear only when their trigger state is met and that returning users see the correct next question.

Stage 3: Make evidence gates source-aware

An evidence gate should name the required item, accepted alternatives, current state, source, and reviewer. Requested, received, unreadable, wrong document, conflicting, verified, and not available are different operational states. Treating them all as missing hides the work that should happen next.

For each document class, test a valid file, an unsupported format, a password-protected file, an unreadable scan, a duplicate, a wrong-person file, and a document that conflicts with an interview answer. Keep the received file attached to its source event. Extracted or transcribed values remain proposed until the configured human review is complete.

NIST's Data Governance and Management Profile concept paper connects data governance with roles, responsibilities, quality, metadata, provenance, and lineage. For intake operations, that means an important value should carry enough context for a reviewer to determine where it came from, which version produced it, and who approved a correction.

Stage 4: Design the human review packet

The reviewer should not need to reconstruct the campaign history. Present the active criteria version, claimant answers, proposed facts, supporting sources, missing items, contradictions, possible duplicates, and earlier corrections in one review packet. Show why the record entered the queue and which decisions the reviewer is authorized to record.

Test reviewer permissions. An intake specialist may resolve a formatting issue while a lawyer retains legal qualification, conflict resolution, engagement, and advice. Configure the smallest useful set of outcomes, such as return for information, hold for named evidence, escalate, record an authorized decline, or approve the next firm-defined stage.

The NIST Privacy Framework treats privacy as an enterprise risk-management concern across data processing. Apply that idea by verifying access by role, documenting collection purposes, limiting early fields to the approved stage, and checking what information moves to vendors, exports, notifications, and analytics.

Stage 5: Roll out in controlled steps

Do not treat a working happy path as launch approval. Run a dry test with synthetic records, then a supervised pilot with the firm's approved scope. During the pilot, log every correction, bypass request, unowned exception, duplicate, failed document, and handoff defect. Review the log on a set cadence chosen by the firm.

Set release and rollback criteria before traffic enters the workflow. Thresholds should come from the firm's capacity, risk tolerance, and quality policy, not from an invented industry benchmark. A release may require zero unresolved blocking defects, named coverage for every queue, and sign-off from legal, operations, quality, and technical owners. A rollback should preserve received submissions and route them to a safe human-owned state.

Stage 6: Accept the intake-to-case handoff

The mass tort intake process ends its intake phase with a governed handoff, not a second round of typing. Test that identity, parties, answers, documents, consent records, criteria version, corrections, tasks, and review history transfer into the opened matter. The receiving team should see which facts are approved, proposed, disputed, unknown, or still awaiting evidence.

Handoff acceptance fails if staff must re-key core values, if documents lose their source, if a correction replaces history, or if the new matter cannot identify the intake record that created it. Assign the failed handoff to an exception queue with an owner and due state. Do not let an integration error become an invisible partial matter.

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Keep the checklist under change control

A launch checklist becomes stale when the campaign changes but the controls do not. Review it whenever legal criteria, questions, evidence requirements, vendors, permissions, integrations, or downstream case states change. Record the new version, approval, effective time, affected submissions, required remediation, and rollback path.

The goal is not to force every claimant through one rigid route. It is to make each route visible and reviewable. A sound mass tort intake program shows which criteria governed the work, which evidence supported the record, which exceptions remain open, which person made each controlled decision, and whether the case team received the same record the intake team reviewed.