Client intake process at a law firm: a coverage plan
A law firm's client intake process is a coverage plan before it is anything else. A firm open nine to five on weekdays is present for 40 of the 168 hours in a week. The other 128 are covered by something, and that something is a decision.
Last updated: 17 August 2026
What does the intake process mean at firm scale?
Coverage, escalation and a record. Everything else described as a process is one of those three wearing a different word.
This paragraph is arithmetic on plainly stated opening hours, not a measurement of any firm. A week contains 168 hours. A firm open nine to five, Monday to Friday, is present for 40 of them, which leaves 128 hours in which a contact can arrive and no member of staff is there. Those 128 hours are covered by a voicemail, an automatic reply, an answering service, a person on a rota, or silence. Every firm has picked one. Most have picked it by default.
The reason it matters is that contacts arriving outside office hours are disproportionately the ones that could not wait. A person searching for a criminal defense lawyer at eleven on a Saturday night is not comparing suppliers.
Who answers, and in which band?
Four bands, and each one fails differently.
| Band | Roughly | Common coverage | What has to be true |
|---|---|---|---|
| Office hours | 40 hours a week | A person at a desk | Somebody owns the channel, by name, and is not also doing three other things |
| Shoulder hours, early and late | Weekday mornings and evenings | Voicemail or an automatic reply | The reply states a real window and does not promise the impossible |
| Weekend | Two days | Usually nothing | A named person checks, or the reply says nobody will until Monday |
| Holiday closure | Days at a time | An out-of-office nobody updated | The dates are correct and somebody is named |
The shoulder and holiday rows are where the damage is quietest. An automatic reply sent at eleven at night promising contact within the hour, by a firm that opens at nine, has made a worse impression than no reply at all — it has told a reader something untrue about the firm at the first moment of contact. An out-of-office naming a colleague who left is worse.
Seattle criminal defense ran at 1,000 searches a month and $68.23 a click when we measured 20 US cities on 3 August 2026, and Tampa at 2,900 and $71.28. This is arithmetic on those figures and not a forecast: ten Tampa clicks cost $712.80 at Google's listed price. That is the sum an uncovered weekend exposes, not the sum it loses, because we hold no measurement of how many weekend contacts go cold.
What has to be true for an escalation to be real?
Three things, and a rule about what happens when it fires.
A named recipient, not a role. "The duty lawyer" is not a recipient. A person is, and a rota naming a different person each week is the only version that survives a holiday.
A route that reaches them on something they have with them. An escalation landing in the same mailbox as everything else is not an escalation. It is a label.
A written threshold. Somebody has to have decided in advance, in writing, what escalates. Left undefined, the person taking the contact is asked to judge the merits of a matter, which is not their judgement to make.
The rule: an escalation that fires and produces nothing is worse than no escalation, because it teaches everybody to ignore the next one. A firm that cannot answer at midnight should say so in the automatic reply rather than build a route nobody walks.
What gets recorded, and can anybody read it back?
Five fields. A firm that keeps them can answer questions no supplier can answer for it.
- When it arrived, to the minute, from the system rather than memory.
- Which channel it came through — the site form, the telephone, a referral, a directory, a walk-in.
- Which practice area it concerns, as recorded at the time and not corrected later.
- Who replied, and when. The gap between fields 1 and 4 is the only intake number a firm can measure without buying anything.
- What happened — opened, referred out, declined, or no response.
Fields 2 and 5 read together are the only honest answer to which channel produced which matter. No analytics tool recovers it: a person who searched three weeks ago, mentioned it to a colleague, and then telephoned is not attributable by any measurement outside the firm. It exists only because somebody asked and wrote it down.
Miami immigration work ran at 1,600 searches a month and $13.07 a click on 3 August 2026, against Los Angeles personal injury at $81.10. A firm running both has two channels whose clicks differ by roughly six times, and the five-field record is what tells it which is producing.
What can we not staff, and why say so now?
We cannot staff any of it, and every option above costs money a firm may rationally decline to spend.
That is the admission, and it comes before the invoice rather than after. A rota is payroll. An answering service is a monthly bill and a third party speaking in the firm's name. A weekend checker is somebody's weekend. We have no view on which of those a particular firm should buy, because the trade is between money, staff goodwill and the hours in the table above, and only the firm can price two of those three.
What we do is narrower. We build the page and the form that produce the contact, we set the form to route to a named person and to record when it arrived, and we can ask that fields 2 and 5 exist. Of the 40 legal-marketing suppliers we read in full on 3 August 2026, twelve published a price, eight claimed a guarantee, and one offered work with no minimum term. None of them describes what it does after a contact arrives, because none of them does anything.
What does this cost, and what is outside it?
$1,450 for the Practice Sprint and $2,900 for the build. Fixed, published, no minimum term.
No part of any fee is calculated per inquiry, per matter or per client. Referral fees are restricted in prescribed legal business, which includes personal injury, and the restriction binds the firm paying as well as the party paid. Lawyer advertising in the United States runs through ABA Model Rule 7.2(b), adopted differently by state, and how it bears on a particular firm is for that firm and its own advisers.
Outside it: ad spend and campaign management, the case-management system the record ought to live in, answering the telephone at any hour, and any judgement about whether a given contact is one the firm should take.
What this is worth where you are
In Los Angeles, 18,100 people a month search for personal injury, and Google charges around $81.10 for one of those clicks. We hold the same figures for 52 cities.
The free report gives you yours, plus which of the pages a prospective client looks for are missing from your site, and which of 40 suppliers publish a price.
Where should I read next?
On the decisions inside the span and the seams between them: law firm client intake process flow chart.
On the person who usually ends up owning fields 2 and 5: marketing coordinator law firm.
On judging the supplier who will offer to rebuild the site around all this: lawyer marketing expert, on what the record is supposed to inform: lawyer marketing strategies, and on publishing in a practice area with hard external deadlines: what an immigration firm's blog should do.
Frequently asked questions
What is the client intake process at a law firm?
Coverage, escalation and a record: which hours somebody is available, what happens when a contact cannot wait, and what gets written down so the firm can read back later which channel produced which matter.
How many hours a week is a firm actually covered?
A firm open nine to five on weekdays is present for 40 of the 168 hours in a week, which leaves 128 covered by voicemail, an automatic reply, an answering service, a rota, or nothing at all.
What should the out-of-hours automatic reply say?
A window the firm actually meets, in the firm's own words. A message sent at eleven at night promising contact within the hour, from a firm that opens at nine, has told the reader something untrue at the first moment of contact.
What makes an escalation real rather than a label?
A named recipient rather than a role, a route that reaches them on something they carry, and a written threshold decided in advance so the person taking the contact is not judging the merits of a matter.
What should a firm record about every contact?
Five fields: when it arrived, which channel it came through, which practice area, who replied and when, and what happened. Fields two and five read together are the only honest answer to which channel produces matters.
Can you staff any of this for us?
No. A rota is payroll, an answering service is a monthly bill and a third party speaking in the firm's name, and we have no view on which a particular firm should buy.