Law Firm Client Intake
Conflict checks, engagement letters and matter setup as one sequence, so a new client is billable the same day
Intake was the bottleneck, not the work
A new commercial matter took between three and eleven days to open. None of that was legal work. It was a conflict check run by hand against three separate systems, an engagement letter assembled from a template nobody owned, and a matter record created by whoever was free.
- Partners routinely began work before the matter existed, which meant time was reconstructed from memory later.
- The conflict check was thorough but undocumented, so proving it had happened took an afternoon.
- Around a fifth of engagement letters went out with an error that needed a follow-up.
What we changed
- One intake form. Everything the process needs is captured once, with validation, rather than gathered over four emails.
- Conflict check as a search, not a task. The form queries all three systems and returns the matches with their sources attached. A person still reads them and decides — the automation gathers, it does not clear.
- Assembled engagement letters. Generated from the intake record against the firm’s approved clauses, with the variable terms flagged for review.
- Matter setup on acceptance. Signature triggers the matter record, the billing code, the folder structure and the team’s access, in one step.
The firm was clear from the outset that no automated step could conclude a conflict check. We designed to that constraint rather than around it, and it made the audit trail better than the manual process it replaced.
The part that took the longest
Not the automation — the clause library. Seven weeks of elapsed time included three of a partner and a paralegal agreeing what the approved wording actually was. That work had been deferred for years because nothing forced it.
Results
- Median time to open a matter fell from 6 days to under 4 hours
- Engagement letter error rate fell from about 20% to under 2%
- Every conflict check now produces a dated record of what was searched and who cleared it
What it did not do
It did not reduce headcount. The two people who ran intake now run client onboarding, which the firm had wanted to staff for two years and could not justify.
