WhatsApp CRM for Legal Practices: Intake, Consultations and Engagement Letters in One Place

An enquiry arrives on a Friday evening. It goes to whichever fee earner the caller found first. A consultation is offered before anyone runs a conflict check. The prospective client attends, says they will think about it, and is never called again. Nobody at the firm can say how many enquiries came in that month or what happened to them.

None of this is a competence problem. It is a record problem. Intake is the one part of a legal practice that behaves like sales, and it is usually the part with no system at all, which is why firms can describe their matters precisely and their enquiry pipeline not at all.

Enquiry and conflict check

The enquiry is recorded with matter type, jurisdiction, opposing party, urgency and source. The conflict check is a stage that must be completed before a consultation can be booked, which turns a step that depends on memory into part of the workflow.

Consultation and decision

The consultation is booked with the fee earner, the fee basis and the date. Afterwards, a dated follow-up task sits with the fee earner, and undecided matters appear in a list by value and age rather than fading from a diary.

Engagement letter and handover

Verbal agreement is not instruction. Matters awaiting a signed engagement letter sit in their own stage, and once signed the matter is opened in case management while the enquiry history and source stay on the record.

This is what arrives on a firm intake number in an ordinary week, and how each enquiry becomes a tracked item rather than a message on one person phone.

Build the intake stages including the conflict check gate and the engagement pending stage, because those two are the ones that change behaviour. Add matter type, jurisdiction, urgency, fee basis and source as fields. Route enquiries by practice area so a family matter does not sit with a corporate partner for two days.

Agree the governance rules before going live: what may be discussed over messaging, who can see intake threads, and how long declined enquiry records are kept. Then review one report each month, which is enquiries by matter type against instructions signed, split by source.

This is not case management, time recording, document management or a conflicts database. It should not hold privileged material or advice, and no messaging channel is the right place for substantive legal opinion. Draw the boundary explicitly and tell the team where it sits, because ambiguity here creates real risk.

The platform has its own constraints. Free-form replies work only inside the service window that opens when the client messages you, any proactive message outside that window needs an approved template and prior opt-in, and Meta charges for conversations. Most firms need very little templated messaging, so treat this as an intake and coordination tool rather than a marketing channel.

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