Law Firm Intake & Conflict Checks

✔️ Managing partners and operations leaders at law firms (10–300 attorneys)

✔️ Innovation / knowledge management teams inside larger firms

✔️ Legal ops leaders in corporate legal departments who want to streamline outside counsel intake

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If your team is:

✔️ Missing high-value matters because you respond too slowly

✔️ Drowning in intake emails, voicemail, and webform submissions

✔️ Nervous that a missed conflict could create serious exposure

…this is for you.

Most firms still handle intake like this:

✔️ Prospective client calls or fills out a form.

✔️ A receptionist or intake team member tries to capture the facts.

✔️ Someone manually checks for conflicts against your case management system.

✔️ Someone decides whether this is a fit and emails or calls the client back.

✔️ The client waits 4–24 hours for a response—often longer on nights and weekends.

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Meanwhile:

✔️ Prospects are contacting 2–3 other firms.

✔️ Your attorneys are busy and slow to respond.

✔️ Conflicts are checked inconsistently under time pressure.

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An orchestrated AI agent system should:

✔️ Respond to new inquiries within 5 minutes, 24/7‍

✔️ Increase conversion from inquiry → signed retainer by 30–45%‍

✔️ Reduce manual intake hours by 70–90%‍

✔️ Standardize conflict checks with audit trails and clear escalations

✔️ Keep attorneys in control of final decisions

Here’s the end-to-end workflow we’ll design:‍

Intake Capture: AI agent responds to calls, webforms, and emails.‍

Qualification & Routing: Scores matter by type, urgency, and potential value.‍

Conflict Check: Runs names/entities against your conflict database.‍

Attorney Review & Decision: Packages all context into a concise “Intake Brief.”‍

Client Communication & Onboarding: Sends next-step communication (schedule consult, send retainer, or decline with referral).

The key: multiple agents working together—not one chatbot trying to do everything.

We typically design 4–5 coordinated agents for this workflow.

Intake Agent

Goal: Capture complete, structured matter information while feeling conversational and human.

Channels: web chat, embedded form, phone (via voice), email replies.

Responsibilities:

• Greet prospect and explain the process.
• Ask dynamic questions based on practice area.
• Normalize and structure data (names, dates, jurisdictions, opposing parties).
• Capture urgency and preferred contact method.

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Qualification Agent

Goal: Decide if this matter should move forward and where it should go.

Responsibilities:

• Classify practice area and sub-type.
• Score potential value and fit (based on criteria you define).
• Identify red flags (jurisdictions you don’t serve, clearly low-value matters).
• Determine routing (which attorney/team should see it).

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Conflict Check Agent

Goal: Run a first-pass conflict check and surface anything that needs human review.

Responsibilities:

• Extract all relevant parties (client, opposing parties, related entities).
• Query your case/matter management or conflicts database.
• Compare against current and past clients/matters.
• Return a structured conflict report with risk levels:

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Coordination Agent

Goal: Tie everything together and ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

Responsibilities:

• Build a concise “Intake Brief” for the attorney:
  
• Push data into your systems (CRM, DMS, practice management).
• Trigger notifications (email, Teams/Slack) to the right attorney/team.
• Track SLAs (e.g., “all new intakes get attorney review within 4 hours”).

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Communication Agent (Optional but powerful)

Goal: Handle client-facing communication after decisions.

Responsibilities:

• Send “we received your information” confirmation.
• Schedule consults on attorney calendars.
• Send digital retainers and collect signatures.
• Send polite, compliant declines (and optional referral language).

Below are simplified examples you can adapt. In production, you’d turn these into system prompts / instruction blocks for each agent.

Intake Agent – System Instructions

You are an Intake Agent for a law firm. Your job is to gather all information needed for an attorney to assess a new matter.

Requirements:

• Be professional, concise, and empathetic.
• Clearly state that you are assisting on behalf of the firm, not giving legal advice.
• Ask clarifying questions until you have: client name, contact info, practice area, brief description, key dates, jurisdiction, opposing parties, and urgency.
• Structure the collected data in a JSON-like summary at the end of the conversation.
• If the user asks for legal advice, respond that you cannot provide legal advice and that an attorney will review their information.
• If the user is abusive or clearly not serious, end the interaction politely and mark the lead as “Do Not Pursue.”

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Qualification Agent – System Instructions

You are a Qualification Agent for a law firm. You receive structured intake data about potential matters.

Your goals:

• Determine the practice area and sub-practice (e.g., employment–wrongful termination, commercial–contract dispute).
• Score the matter on a 1–5 scale for potential value and strategic fit using the firm’s criteria.
• Identify any obvious disqualifiers (jurisdiction not served, area of law not covered, clear statute of limitations issues if apparent).
• Recommend routing: which practice group or specific attorney should review.
• Output a structured summary including: practice_area, subtype, fit_score, routing_recommendation, and any notes_for_attorney.

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Conflict Check Agent – System Instructions

You are a Conflict Check Agent for a law firm. You receive client and party names and have access to a conflict database via a tool.

Your tasks:

• Normalize names for search (handle capitalization, common variations).
• Search for all parties (client, opposing parties, key entities) in the conflict database.
• For each match, determine the confidence level (high/medium/low) and summarize the relationship (current client, former client, opposing party, related matter).
• Do not make final ethical judgments. Instead, flag potential conflicts with clear explanations.
• Output: a conflict_report with sections: no_matches, possible_conflicts, likely_conflicts, each with details and confidence scores.
• Never approve a matter yourself. Attorneys must review your report.

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Coordination Agent – System Instructions

You are a Coordination Agent for a law firm. You orchestrate intake, qualification, and conflict check results into a single “Intake Brief” and route it correctly.

Your responsibilities:

• Combine intake data, qualification output, and the conflict report into a concise brief (1–2 pages max).
• Highlight: practice area, urgency, fit score, potential conflicts, and recommended next step.
• Push data into integrated systems (CRM, case management) via tools.
• Trigger notifications to the assigned attorney/team including a link to the full brief.
• Track whether the attorney has responded within the SLA window; if not, send reminders.

You can implement this with different vendors; the pattern stays similar:

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Core LLM / Agent Platform

OpenAI, Azure AI Agents, or similar agent frameworks.

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Law Firm Systems

Case/matter management (Clio, Litify, PracticePanther, custom).

CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce, etc.).

Document management (NetDocuments, iManage, SharePoint).

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Integration Layer

Zapier, Make, n8n, or custom integrations.

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Communication Channels

Web chat widget, phone/IVR integration, email ingestion.

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The key isn’t the specific tool—it’s the orchestration pattern and how the agents coordinate and escalate.

Because this playbook touches conflicts and client intake, governance matters.

Clear Disclosures

Intake Agent must:

• Disclose that it’s an automated assistant.
• Clarify that no attorney-client relationship is formed until the firm accepts the matter.
• Avoid giving legal advice or making guarantees.

Mandatory Human Review Points

• All conflict reports → reviewed by attorney or conflicts team.
• All high-value / high-risk matters → require partner sign-off before engagement.
• All declines → attorney has final say on language (or uses pre-approved templates).

Logging and Audit Trails

Log:

• What the Intake Agent asked and what the prospect answered.
• How the Qualification Agent scored the matter.
• What the Conflict Check Agent found.
• When and to whom the Coordination Agent routed the brief.
• Who ultimately approved or declined the matter.

This supports:

• Ethical compliance.
• Malpractice defense.
• Continuous improvement of the agents.

When you implement this system, track:

Response Time

• Before: 4–24 hours (or longer on weekends)
• After: < 5 minutes acknowledgment, < 4 hours to attorney review

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Conversion Rate

• Before: % of inquiries that become signed retainers
• After: target +30–45% lift for qualifying matters

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Manual Hours

• Before: total intake + conflict check staff hours/week
• After: aim for 70–90% reduction in manual intake data entry and first-line screening

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Conflict Miss Rate / Near Misses

• Track incidents where conflicts were almost missed, and how often the agent flagged them correctly.

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SLA Compliance

• % of matters reviewed by an attorney within target time window (e.g., 4 hours in business hours, next morning for overnight).

✔️ Managing partners and operations leaders at law firms (10–300 attorneys)

✔️ Innovation / knowledge management teams inside larger firms

✔️ Legal ops leaders in corporate legal departments who want to streamline outside counsel intake

‍

If your team is:

✔️ Missing high-value matters because you respond too slowly

✔️ Drowning in intake emails, voicemail, and webform submissions

✔️ Nervous that a missed conflict could create serious exposure

…this is for you.

• Letting the agent “wing it” on legal advice. Use strict prompts and guardrails. Explicitly forbid legal advice and require escalation for anything beyond information-gathering.
• No one owning the workflow. Assign a clear owner—often legal ops or a designated partner—to review performance and tune rules.
• Too many exceptions hard-coded up front. Start with 70–80% of cases that follow predictable patterns. Handle edge cases with escalation, then iterate based on real data.
• Poor integration with existing systems. If your agents can’t write to your case management or CRM, humans will still have to re-enter data. Prioritize a clean integration path early.

You can use this playbook as a roadmap to build your own system. But if you:

• Don’t have internal engineering capacity
• Need to navigate complex privilege, conflict, and compliance issues
• Want to go from “idea” to production in 8–12 weeks

…then it often pays to bring in a team that has already done this before.

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This playbook is based on the patterns we use when deploying AI intake and conflict systems for law firms.

If you’d like:

• A tailored version of this workflow for your practice areas
• Integration with your specific case management / CRM stack
• A governed, production-ready deployment in 6–8 weeks

You can:

• Explore our Law Firm Solutions: /services/law-firms
• Schedule a Discovery Call: /contact or a Calendly booking link
• Or email us directly at: hello@dyntyx.com (example)

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