Resource Library / SOP 01 · Lead Management
Intake · Full guide
Lead Management
Most firms lose more revenue at intake than anywhere else in the practice, and they rarely notice, because a lead that goes cold makes no sound. This guide documents the whole path from first contact to signed engagement or documented declination.
Process owner
Intake staff
Reviewed by
Firm owner
Applies to
Every new inquiry, every channel
Review cycle
Every 12 months
Section one
Why this is the first process to document
If a firm documents only one process, it should be this one. Intake touches every client relationship the firm will ever have, and it is the process a busy attorney is least able to run from memory. Someone calls during a hearing. The message goes on a sticky note or into a voicemail box nobody owns. Two days pass. By then the caller has phoned three other firms and retained the one that answered.
That loss is invisible in a way that a lost case is not. There is no file, no complaint, no bar grievance, and no line in the ledger showing what did not arrive. A firm can lose a third of its potential matters this way and conclude that business is slow.
The cost is not only financial. A person calling a lawyer is usually calling on one of the worse days of their year. They have been served, injured, fired, or handed a deadline they do not understand. Whether anyone calls them back is the first thing they learn about the legal profession, and for a meaningful number of people it is also the last.
A documented intake process fixes this by making the first hour deliberate rather than dependent on who happens to be free. It is not sophisticated work. It is a written sequence, a named owner, and a rule that no inquiry closes without a recorded outcome.
Section two
Purpose and scope
Purpose
Ensure every inquiry receives a response inside the firm's stated standard, that enough information is captured on first contact to make a representation decision, that conflicts are screened before any substantive discussion, and that no lead is closed without a written outcome on the record.
In scope
All inbound inquiries regardless of channel: telephone, website form, email, walk-in, referral from another attorney, and referral from a former client. The process runs from first contact to either a signed engagement agreement or a documented, communicated declination.
Out of scope
Opening and structuring the matter file after engagement, which is covered by new case file setup. Fee structure and rate decisions, which belong to the firm's fee policy. Marketing that generates the inquiry in the first place. Conflicts analysis on the merits, which remains an attorney judgment.
Section three
Roles and responsibilities
Roles are named by function, not by person, so the document survives turnover. In a solo practice one person holds all of them, which is exactly why writing them down matters: it makes visible how many hats are being worn at once.
Intake staff
Owns the process end to end. Answers or returns the call, captures the record, runs the conflict search, schedules the consultation, sends confirmations, and issues the engagement letter or declination. Escalates anything with a deadline inside two weeks immediately.
Consulting attorney
Conducts the consultation, resolves any conflict flagged by the search, makes the decision to accept or decline, sets the fee arrangement, and records the reason for the decision on the file in one or two sentences.
Firm owner
Sets the response standard, approves the case types the firm accepts, reviews the intake log monthly for leads with no recorded outcome, and owns the annual review of this document.
Named backup
A second person who covers intake when the owner of the process is out, in trial, or on leave. The standard applies every business day; naming the backup in advance is what makes that true rather than aspirational.
Section four
The response standard
A standard is a number your team can be held to and a caller can rely on. Pick one you can actually meet on your busiest week, not your best one.
The standard most small firms can sustain is a live answer during business hours and a returned call within one business hour for anything that reaches voicemail or a web form. Some firms set four hours. Either works. What does not work is leaving it unstated, because an unstated standard is always interpreted generously by the person who is busy and harshly by the person who is waiting.
Write two numbers into your version of this document: the maximum time to first human contact, and the maximum time to a scheduled consultation. Then instrument it. Once a month, pull every inquiry from the log and count how many were contacted inside the standard. A standard nobody measures is a slogan.
After-hours and overflow
Decide in advance what happens to a call that arrives at 7pm or while everyone is in a deposition. An answering service that takes a structured message, a voicemail greeting that states when the caller will hear back, and a rule that the queue is cleared first thing each morning are all acceptable. Silence with no stated expectation is not.
Section five
The procedure, step by step
Nine steps. Each one names an owner and produces a record. If a step produces nothing you can point to later, it has not been performed.
01
Intake staff
Answer or acknowledge, immediately
Answer live if you can. If you cannot, the caller gets a human response inside the firm's standard. An acknowledgment counts even when the substantive answer will take longer: a caller who is told "we have your message, someone will call you before five" behaves entirely differently from one who hears nothing. Web form submissions get an automatic receipt confirming arrival and stating when a person will make contact.
02
Intake staff
Create the lead record before the call ends
Every inquiry becomes a record in one place — your practice management system, a CRM, or a single shared spreadsheet if that is what you have. One place, not three. The record is created during or immediately after the first contact, never later from memory. The full capture list is in section six.
03
Intake staff
Screen for urgency and deadlines
Ask directly whether there is a court date, a filing deadline, a response deadline on a served document, or a limitations concern. Anything falling inside the next two weeks goes to an attorney the same day, ahead of the normal queue. This single question prevents the worst outcome in intake, which is a matter declined too late for the caller to find anyone else.
04
Intake staff
Run the conflict check before substantive discussion
Search the caller, every adverse party, and any other named participant against current and former matters. Do this before the conversation moves into the facts, because information received from a prospective client can create obligations even where no representation follows. A hit does not automatically end the inquiry; it routes the decision to an attorney, who resolves it and records the resolution on the file.
05
Intake staff
Apply the firm's acceptance criteria
Your firm has case types it takes and case types it does not, jurisdictions it practices in, and a rough floor below which a matter costs more to administer than it returns. Write those criteria down so intake can screen against them without guessing. A clear no at this stage, delivered promptly with a referral, serves the caller better than a consultation that was never going to lead anywhere.
06
Intake staff
Schedule the consultation and confirm it in writing
Offer a specific time while you have the person on the phone rather than promising to call back with options. Send a written confirmation the same day stating the date, time, format, duration, who they will meet, what to bring, what the consultation costs if anything, and a direct number to reach if something changes. Send one reminder the day before. This is the cheapest no-show prevention available to any firm.
07
Consulting attorney
Conduct the consultation to a decision
A consultation has a job: understand the matter well enough to decide, and leave the prospective client understanding their options and what representation would involve. Cover the facts and timeline, what the person wants to achieve, the realistic range of outcomes, the fee arrangement and what it does and does not include, and what happens next. End with a decision or a stated date by which the decision will come.
08
Attorney + intake
Engage, or decline, in writing
On acceptance, the engagement agreement goes out the same day or the next business day, stating the scope of representation, the fee arrangement, what the client is responsible for, and what falls outside the engagement. Representation begins when it is signed and any required retainer is received, not when the conversation felt positive. On declination, see section seven.
09
Intake staff
Close the record with a stated outcome
Every lead ends in one of four states: engaged, declined by the firm, declined by the client, or unreachable after a defined number of documented attempts. No record is closed as "no answer" without those attempts logged. This rule is the whole point of the procedure, because it is what makes lost leads visible instead of silent.
Section six
What to capture on the first call
Ten fields. Capture them all, on every inquiry, before the call ends. A partial record is the thing that forces a second call to ask what should already be known.
Full name and contact
Phone, email, and their preferred method and time of day
How they found you
The only reliable way to learn which referral sources actually work
Nature of the matter
Two or three sentences in the caller's own words, not a category code
Key dates
Incident date, service date, hearing dates, any deadline they know of
Opposing and related parties
Full names for the conflict search, including insurers and employers
Jurisdiction and venue
Where the matter sits, and whether the firm is admitted there
Prior or current counsel
Whether anyone else is or was on the matter, and whether they were discharged
What they want to achieve
Often different from what they first asked for, and it changes the advice
Documents in hand
What they already have, so the consultation is not spent describing paper
Date, time, and who took it
Without this you cannot measure against your response standard
Section seven
Declining well
This is the part most firms skip, and it is the part that generates the most goodwill per minute spent.
Most inquiries a firm receives will be declined. Wrong practice area, wrong jurisdiction, a conflict, a matter too small to serve economically, or a case the firm simply cannot take on this month. None of that is a failure of the process; the failure is letting those callers drift into silence.
A good declination is prompt, plain, and useful. Tell the person you are not able to take the matter. You do not owe them your reasons, but if the reason is practice area or jurisdiction, saying so helps them search better. Point them somewhere real: a specific attorney who does this work, the bar association referral service, or a legal aid organization if the matter fits their intake. Then put it in writing, briefly, and note the date it was sent.
Say clearly that you are not their lawyer and that no representation has been undertaken. Where a deadline is in play, urge them in writing to consult other counsel promptly, and say that deadlines may apply that could bar their claim if missed. That sentence protects the caller, and it protects the firm.
The compounding effect
People remember being treated seriously by a firm that turned them down. Referrals from declined callers are a real and consistent source of work for firms that handle this step properly, which is a strange thing to have to argue for and yet almost nobody does it.
Section eight
Records and where they live
Every step above produces something. Name the destination for each one in your version of the document, using the actual names of your actual systems.
The intake log
One row per inquiry with the ten capture fields, the contact timestamps, and the final outcome. This is the single most useful management document a small firm can keep.
The conflict search result
What was searched, when, by whom, and the outcome. Where a hit was cleared, the attorney's recorded reasoning goes with it.
Consultation notes
Facts, advice given at a high level, the fee arrangement discussed, and the decision with its reason. Kept whether or not the firm took the matter.
Correspondence sent
Confirmations, reminders, the engagement agreement or the declination letter, each with the date it went out and the address it went to.
Confidentiality of non-clients
Information from a prospective client is generally protected even where representation never begins. Store declined-inquiry records with the same care as client files, restrict access the same way, and include them in your retention schedule rather than leaving them in an inbox indefinitely.
Section nine
Where firms get this wrong
Six failure patterns we see repeatedly. Each one is a symptom of the same underlying problem: intake treated as an interruption rather than as a process someone owns.
Nobody owns the phone
When intake belongs to whoever is free, it belongs to nobody on the days when nobody is free. Those are precisely the days the most calls arrive. Name an owner and a backup.
Leads live in three places
Some in email, some on a legal pad, some in the practice management system. No one can answer how many inquiries came in last month, so no one can tell that half of them were never called back.
The record is built from memory
Notes written hours later lose the dates, the adverse party's full name, and the sentence the caller used to describe the problem. Capture during the call or accept a second call.
Deadlines surface too late
A matter sits in the queue for a week and then turns out to have had a response due in ten days. Ask the urgency question first, not last.
Declinations are never sent
The firm decides no and simply stops responding. The caller does not know they need to keep looking, and the firm has no record of when or why it declined.
Nobody reads the log
A perfect intake record that no one reviews monthly is filing, not management. The review is where you find the pattern: the source that never converts, the week you stopped answering.
Section ten
Adapting it to your firm
This document is an educational example, not a form to adopt unread. Six decisions are yours to make before it becomes your procedure.
Set your two numbers. Time to first human contact, and time to a scheduled consultation. Choose what you can meet in a bad week.
Write your acceptance criteria. Case types, jurisdictions, and any practical floor. Intake cannot screen against criteria that live only in the owner's head.
Name the systems. Replace every mention of "the log" or "the file" with the actual name of the actual place, so a new hire can follow the document without asking.
Decide your unreachable rule. How many attempts, over how many days, through which channels, before a lead is closed as unreachable. Three attempts over five days is a common answer.
Build your referral list. The declination step only works if there is somewhere to send people. Keep a current list by practice area, with the bar referral service and local legal aid on it.
Conform to your jurisdiction. Rules on prospective-client confidentiality, conflicts, fee agreements, and advertising vary by state. Your own authority governs, and this document does not substitute for it.
Then run it for thirty days before you change anything. Collect the friction, revise once, and put a review date on the calendar. The method for all of this is in the SOP development guide.
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This guide is educational material published free of charge by the Law Firm Innovation Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, EIN 42-2464496. It is not legal, ethical, tax, or accounting advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Professional conduct rules, limitations periods, and procedural requirements vary by jurisdiction; every reader is responsible for conforming their own practice to the authority that governs it. If you find an error or something incomplete for your jurisdiction, tell us and we will revise the page.