AI intake for a 40-person law practice

Harlow & Reyes is a two-office practice with eleven lawyers and a busy front desk. Most new matters start with a phone call. The call was answered well. What happened next was not.

Notes went into an inbox, a paralegal re-typed them into the practice system when they had a spare hour, a conflict check ran the next morning, and the prospective client heard back in two to three days. By then, a quarter of them had signed with someone else.

The managing partner wanted "AI for intake". The paralegals wanted the partner to stop saying that in meetings.

Both were right. The bottleneck was not the call. It was the re-typing, the conflict check, and the fact that nobody owned the two days in between. AI could help with the first two. The third was a decision.

1. Weeks 1–2

   Map the two days

   Shadowed the front desk and both paralegals. Timed every step from the first ring to the consult confirmation. Wrote the map on one page.

2. Week 3

   Structured intake

   Replaced the free-text notes with a short structured form. Turned out that solved half the re-typing without any AI at all.

3. Weeks 4–5

   Assisted summaries and conflicts

   Built an assistant inside the case system that drafts the matter summary from the form and pre-fills the conflict check for a paralegal to approve. Every draft is reviewed by a human before anything is filed.

4. Weeks 6–9

   Trust and ownership

   Ran it in parallel with the old process for four weeks. Paralegals scored every draft. Errors were fixed in the prompt and the form, not blamed on the tool.

5. Week 10

   Hand over

   One paralegal now owns intake end to end, with a dashboard showing call-to-consult time by day. Hiring plan adjusted: the practice needed a second intake owner, not another lawyer.

-71%

First call to consult booked

34%

Consult to signed client

26

Paralegal hours freed, per week

Call-to-consult went from two to three days to the same afternoon for most matters. The signed-client rate rose because fewer people wandered off, not because the lawyers got better at consults.

I would skip the parallel run after two weeks instead of four. By the end of week two the paralegals were correcting the tool less than they corrected each other, and the extra fortnight was reassurance, not evidence.

I would also push harder on the hiring conversation earlier. The practice spent three weeks debating whether the freed hours justified a second intake role. The dashboard answered it in a day.