Scoring built for legal intake: matter type and jurisdiction, deadline proximity, conflict check status, who is paying, documents shared, and whether the consultation was attended.
Quick answer
By who reaches a fee earner directly. An enquirer who happens to catch a partner on the phone gets an hour; one who fills in a website form gets a reply when somebody opens the shared inbox. Nothing about that order reflects urgency, fit or the likelihood of instruction, and in a practice where every hour is chargeable, the cost of the wrong order is unusually visible.
Legal enquiries are shaped by dates more than almost anything else: a hearing, a limitation period, a notice to answer, a filing window. An enquiry with a date attached will be instructed somewhere, and speed of response genuinely decides where.
An enquirer who sends papers has committed effort. One who books, pays for and attends a consultation has committed more. And knowing whether an individual, a company or an insurer is paying tells you how the fee conversation will go before it starts.
An introduction from an existing client or another professional outperforms every other source. Before any of this matters, though, the conflict check has to be complete: it belongs in the workflow as a gate, not as a weight in a score.
Enquiry attributes set the opening position. Milestones such as documents received and consultation attended step it up. Deadlines lift matters as they approach. Silence decays them. Conflict status sits outside the number entirely, as a hard stop rather than a factor.
| Signal on the enquiry | Why it predicts here | Effect on score |
|---|---|---|
| Paid consultation attended | Money and time committed | Strong lift |
| Deadline within thirty days | Must instruct someone soon | Strong lift |
| Referred by an existing client | Trust arrives pre-built | Strong lift |
| Documents or notice shared | Seeking representation | Moderate lift |
| Company or insurer paying | Budget process already exists | Moderate lift |
| Fee structure discussed | Past the price question | Moderate lift |
| Outside your jurisdiction or practice areas | Cannot be served | Drop |
| No reply for a month | Instructed elsewhere | Decay |
Build intake as a workflow with conflict check as a required step. Capture matter type, jurisdiction, payer and any deadline at first contact. Track consultations as booked, paid and attended separately. Record the referral chain properly rather than tagging everything as word of mouth, and agree what stays out of the CRM entirely before anyone begins typing.
Scoring orders intake follow-up. It does not assess merit, predict outcomes, or decide whether the firm should accept instructions, and it should never be described inside the practice as though it did. It needs history before it is useful, which in a small practice takes a couple of quarters. It sees only what is recorded. Partners override it whenever their judgement says otherwise, which will be often, and that is the intended behaviour.
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Enquiries arrive by phone, email and WhatsApp to whichever fee earner is reachable, and urgent matters are answered no faster than routine ones.
All enquiries land in one intake list with matter type, deadline and owner attached, so a matter with a hearing in three weeks is answered before a general contract question.Single intake list
Conflict checks are done informally and sometimes late, which is uncomfortable to discover halfway through a substantive conversation.
Conflict check is a recorded step on the intake workflow with a status and an owner, and enquiries cannot progress through the pipeline until it is completed and logged.Conflict check workflow
Consultations are booked and half of them are never attended, and nobody follows up to find out why.
Booked, paid and attended are separate states. A booked consultation that was not attended drops the score and raises a follow-up task rather than silently disappearing.Consultation tracking
Referrals from existing clients are treated like any other web enquiry and replied to two days later.
The referral chain is recorded and weighted, because in legal practice an introduction from a client or another professional is a far better predictor than any form field.Referral weighting
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