Law firm client intake: the complete guide.

Intake is the taking of the statement. A person has a problem, they reach a firm, and someone has to find out what happened, what they want, when it happened, who else is involved, and whether the firm can act at all. That work has to happen before a lawyer can give a minute of advice, and it has to happen every time.

Most firms do this work inside the consultation. The lawyer sells an hour of advice and spends the first forty minutes of it doing discovery: listening to the whole story to find out whether the matter is one the firm handles. The problem is not the consultation. It is that discovery is being done in a slot that was sold as advice.

It helps to say what intake is not, because the market sells four other things under the same word.

• It is not an intake form. A form collects fields. It does not ask the follow-up question, and it does not notice that the person named their brother-in-law as the other party.
• It is not a client relationship manager. A pipeline tool organizes the queue of leads. The lawyer still does the discovery.
• It is not an answering service. A person takes a message and asks a handful of questions. A message is not a statement, and it carries no names for the conflict check.
• It is not a chatbot. A chatbot answers the person in the firm's name. Intake should take the story and hand it to a lawyer, not talk back.
• It is not case analysis. Assessing the strength of a claim, putting a value on it, or predicting an outcome is the practice of law. Intake ends where advice begins.

One name for the thing that remains: the intake of record. One job, done properly, between the person's first contact and the lawyer's first minute.

The numbers below come from Clio's Legal Trends research, which is vendor-published. The phone and email figures come from a secret-shopper study run by a third-party research agency across 500 firms. Each figure links to its source at the end of this page.

In 2024, only 40% of law firms answered the phone when a prospective client called, down from 56% in 2019. Counting the firms that called back, 48% were unreachable by phone. Only 33% responded to an email inquiry.

The people on the other end do not wait. 79% of people looking for a lawyer expect a response within 24 hours. Among people who contacted a lawyer they did not end up hiring, 64% say the firm never responded at all. The matter did not go to the better lawyer. It went to whoever answered.

Then there is the hour itself. In an average 8-hour day a lawyer captures 3.0 billable hours, a 38% utilization rate, and invoices 2.6 of them. At the US average rate of $349 an hour, every hour spent finding out what a matter is, rather than advising on it, has a price the firm can calculate for itself.

The arithmetic that matters is the firm's own. How many consultations a month. What the firm charges. How much of each consultation goes to working out what the situation is. How many inquiries arrive when nobody can answer: in court, in the evening, on the weekend. That last number currently converts at zero. Whatever it is, the firm competes for every one of those matters only if someone takes the story.

A complete intake produces a document a lawyer can read in two minutes and act on. The test of the document is simple: could the lawyer walk into the first meeting already knowing the case? These are the parts that make that true.

• The need, in one line. What the person is actually asking for, stated first.
• What happened, in order. The facts as the person tells them, dated where they can be.
• What they want. The outcome they are hoping for, in their words, so the lawyer can hear the gap between hope and law before the meeting.
• When. The dates that matter: the event, the notice, the hearing, the deadline the person believes they face. Recorded as facts, never judged.
• Who is involved. Every person and company on both sides, including the ones the person mentions in passing. This is the seed of the conflict check, and a conflict discovered at minute forty of a paid consultation is a wasted hour for two people.
• Ask them this. The questions the intake could not resolve, listed rather than guessed. This block is the lawyer's question list for the meeting, written in advance.
• The person's own words, underneath. The full statement or transcript, one click below the summary, so anything in the memorandum can be checked in seconds.

Two things a complete intake does not contain: a grade the client can see, and a guess. What is unknown is marked unknown. A memorandum that fills gaps confidently is worse than no memorandum, because the lawyer will trust it.

People arrive late and reluctantly. Long-standing government research found Canadians seek legal assistance for only 9.2% of the justiciable problems they experience, and nearly half of Canadian adults, 48.4%, face at least one serious civil or family justice problem in any three-year period. By the time a person contacts a firm, they have usually already tried searching, asking friends, and waiting for it to go away. First contact is a late, anxious event, not a casual inquiry.

Each door a firm leaves open loses something specific.

• The phone. It rings while the lawyer is in court or with a client. A missed call leaves no record and, most of the time, no call back.
• The contact form. It asks for a name, an email and a message box. It cannot ask a second question, so the story arrives as a paragraph and the discovery still happens in the room.
• Email. It gets a reply from one firm in three. The person who writes at 11pm on a Sunday is deciding by Monday morning who answered.
• Voice. Some people cannot type their story, or will not. Given a way to say it out loud and have it written down, they tell it fully.
• Language. A person in trouble tells their story in the language they think in. A firm that takes intake only in English, only in business hours, only by phone, has quietly decided who it will hear from.

A firm does not need to answer every door itself. It needs every door to lead to the same place: one statement, taken in full, written up the same way regardless of how it arrived.

Carefully, and in one direction only. Urgency is flagged to the lawyer. It is never stated to the person.

The distinction matters because a statement about a limitation period is legal advice. Whether a deadline has passed, whether it can be extended, whether the clock has even started, are questions a lawyer answers after reading the file. An intake that tells a person their time is up, or that they still have time, has practised law without a licence and may be wrong.

What an intake should do is record every date the person gives, notice the words that signal urgency, and raise a flag on the lawyer's side of the desk. Some situations should stop the intake altogether and tell the person to call the firm now, or emergency services: an arrest, a hearing within days, a threat to someone's safety. A good intake knows the difference between a matter that is urgent and a person who is in danger.

It should not, and the way to make sure is to say so in writing at every step. Submitting an intake does not create an attorney-client relationship. The person should read that sentence before they tell the story, in every lane, and again on the page that confirms the firm received it.

Confidentiality is the other half. Privilege attaches to confidential communications between a person and their lawyer. A story typed into a general-purpose chatbot, with no confidentiality protections around it, has no such shelter. Intake has to be built so that what the person shares is held the way a note from the front desk is held: inside the firm's own system, for the firm's eyes, and nowhere else.

For a firm choosing intake software, that turns into a short list of questions. Where does the data live, and is it separate from every other firm's data? Who at the vendor can read it, and for what purpose? Is any of it used to train a model? What happens to it when the firm leaves? A vendor that answers those in plain writing, including the parts that are still being built, is telling the truth. One that does not is asking to be trusted on faith.

Most software is sold on what it can do. Intake software for a regulated profession should be judged on what it refuses to do, because every refusal below protects a licence.

• It does not give legal advice. Not a hint, not a hedge, not a helpful suggestion.
• It does not assess the strength of a claim, put a value on it, or predict an outcome.
• It does not tell the person whether a deadline has or has not passed.
• It does not answer the person in the firm's name. Nothing reaches a client unless a lawyer decides to send it.
• It does not guess. Anything unresolved is listed as an open question, and the person's own words stay one click beneath the summary.
• It does not train on client data, share it across firms, or keep it once the firm is gone.

The machine takes the statement. The lawyer takes the case. Every line above is that sentence, applied.

It is older than the profession. Roman litigation ran in two stages. In the first, before a magistrate, usually the praetor, the dispute was fixed in a short written document called the formula. The praetor did not draft it. Model formulae stood published in his album; the parties settled the wording, and the magistrate approved or refused it. In the second stage, a private citizen, the iudex, decided the facts, bound by the written framing he had been handed.

Rome separated the taking of the story from the giving of judgment, and put a document in between. That is what intake is for. The framing and the judgment were always two different jobs, done by two different people, and the one with authority was always the human.

Jurova is automated intake and discovery software for law firms. A person reaches the firm by chat, guided form or voice note, at any hour, in their own language, on the firm's own domain. They verify a code sent to their phone, read that no attorney-client relationship is created, and tell their story. The intake asks the follow-up questions and writes the memorandum described above: the need, what happened, what they want, when, who is involved, and what to ask them. Written intake works in 80+ languages; the firm reads every memorandum in English.

The lawyer reads it, then accepts, refers out, or declines in one click. Jurova notifies the person in the firm's name and books accepted matters onto the firm's calendar. Nothing reaches the person before that click. Each firm has its own database, hosted in its own country, and the safeguards page says in plain terms what is built and what is still being built.

Jurova runs one live demo deployment, at a demo firm, and does not publish client counts or results. The first firms are measured instead: every intake logged, hours returned and matters captured counted, on terms agreed in writing.