What legal intake means
Intake is everything between someone deciding to contact your firm and that person booking a consultation, or being told you cannot help. It covers calls, website forms, chat, email and walk-ins, and whoever answers each of them.
Where enquiries get lost
After hours
People often look for a lawyer in the evening, after the event that made them need one. If the only option at 9pm is a voicemail, many will try the next firm instead of waiting.
The unanswered phone
When you are in court and reception is on another line, a caller who reaches voicemail may not leave a message. A missed call with no follow-up is often a client you never hear from.
The form nobody owns
Website forms that land in a shared inbox can sit for days because everyone assumes someone else replied.
The unclear website
If a visitor cannot tell whether you handle their kind of matter, they will not get in touch at all. That loss never shows up in your inbox.
The language gap
If the person making the decision reads Spanish or another language more comfortably, an English-only site and voicemail can lose them before the first conversation.
A simple intake process for a small firm
- List every way people contact you. Phone, website form, chat, email, Google profile messages, directories.
- Give each channel an owner. A named person, not “the office”, with a backup for holidays.
- Set a response target. Decide how fast you want to reply during office hours, and what happens outside them.
- Cover the gaps. An answering service, an AI receptionist, website chat or missed-call text-back can each cover different gaps. Our comparison of intake options explains which fits where.
- Review weekly. Look at every enquiry from the past week and check that each one got a reply.
What a law firm intake form should ask
Keep the first form short. Every extra field loses people. Ask for:
- Name
- Phone or email, and the best time to reach them
- The type of matter, from a short list of your practice areas
- Preferred language
- How they heard about you
Tell visitors not to include confidential details in the form. Collect the facts of the matter after your conflict check, not before.
Keep intake on the right side of the line
Whoever handles first contact, whether a person or software, should collect details and book the next step. They should not assess the case or give legal advice. Make that clear in your scripts, on your forms and in any chat assistant.