Automating intake at a regional law firm
"We used to spend two days a week on intake. It's now fully automated — leads qualify, route, and follow up without anyone touching them."
— COO, Regional Law Firm
The challenge
A [PLACEHOLDER: ~25-attorney] regional law firm was running its new-client intake by hand. Every inbound lead — phone, web form, referral — landed in a shared inbox. A paralegal triaged each one, decided whether it fit the firm's practice areas, gathered the missing information over email, and routed it to the right attorney. Follow-up was manual; if a prospect went quiet for a few days, nobody noticed.
The COO estimated the firm was losing [PLACEHOLDER: roughly 15–20%] of qualified leads to slow response and dropped follow-up. Internally, intake was eating about [PLACEHOLDER: two days per week] of senior staff time that should have been going to billable matters.
Our approach
We spent the first session sitting with the paralegal who handled intake and watched the actual workflow — not the documented one. Most of the value showed up there: a handful of decisions she made on instinct that nobody had ever written down.
From that, we mapped intake into three jobs that could be separated cleanly: capture (get the inbound lead into a structured record), qualify (decide whether the matter fits the firm), and route (hand it to the right attorney with the right context). Each one became its own automation, with a human review step where the cost of a mistake was high.
What we built
- A single intake form that replaces three different web entry points and pre-fills based on referral source.
- An AI qualification step that scores each new matter against the firm's practice criteria and surfaces the reasoning so attorneys can override it.
- Automatic routing into the firm's existing case management system, including conflict-check trigger and a calendar invite for the assigned attorney.
- A follow-up sequence that re-engages prospects who go quiet, with messaging written in the firm's voice — and that stops the moment a human replies.
- A weekly digest for the COO showing intake volume, qualification rate, time-to-first-response, and any matters that fell out of the pipeline.
Results
- ~12 hours per week of paralegal and attorney time recovered.
- [PLACEHOLDER: ~85%] of new leads now receive a first response in under [PLACEHOLDER: 5 minutes], down from a previous median of [PLACEHOLDER: ~6 hours].
- [PLACEHOLDER: ~30%] increase in qualified-lead-to-consult conversion in the first quarter after launch.
- Zero qualified matters dropped from the pipeline since go-live.
Timeline
- Week 1: Workflow shadowing, scope agreement, and shared documentation of the qualification rules.
- Weeks 2–3: Build of the intake form, qualification model, and routing into the case management system.
- Week 4: Pilot with the COO and one practice group, manual review on every routed matter.
- Weeks 5–6: Rollout to the remaining practice groups, follow-up sequences live, weekly digest delivered.
Total elapsed time from kickoff to firm-wide production: [PLACEHOLDER: about six weeks].
— The IguanAI Team
Running intake by hand at your firm? Fifteen minutes on a call is usually enough for us to tell you whether automation is worth it.
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