Law firm client intake forms and the fields that leak

Every field on an intake form is a chance to lose the inquiry that a $73.14 click paid for. We build first-contact forms with 4 fields rather than 14, because the rest belongs in the conversation. What happens after submission decides the result, and it sits inside the firm.

Last updated: 5 August 2026

What does each extra field cost?

Attention that was bought at a price, from somebody who has not decided to instruct anybody yet.

A New York personal injury click cost $73.14 when we measured 20 US cities on 3 August 2026. Philadelphia was $151.31, the highest in the dataset. Houston was $114.87. The arithmetic is easy and the rate is the firm's own to measure: ten of a hundred Philadelphia injury clicks, at $151.31 each, is $1,513.10 of purchased attention arriving at a form and leaving again.

We hold no measurement of how many people abandon a legal intake form, at which field, or how that varies by practice area, and we will not publish one. Nobody has measured it for this market. What follows is about what each field is for, which is a design question rather than a statistical one.

Every row in the bottom half is a real question a firm has to answer eventually. None of them has to be answered by a stranger, unassisted, in a browser, before anybody has spoken to them.

Which questions does a form ask that a phone call would not?

The ones nobody would put to a stranger in the first minute, and one that creates a problem for the firm.

A receptionist taking the same inquiry by telephone does not open with a date of birth or the name of the other side. They take a name, a number and a sentence, and everything else follows a decision to act. A form asks all of it at once because a form has no sense of sequence.

The one that matters most is the opposing party. A long form invites a detailed unsolicited account from somebody the firm has not yet checked it can act for, and it arrives in an inbox before anyone has run a conflict check. The telephone version of that problem is handled by a person who stops the caller. A form has no such person in it.

That is a reason to ask less, not a reason to add a warning nobody reads. What a first-contact form is for is establishing that a real person wants a call back and roughly about what. The matter details belong to the conversation that follows, which is also where the firm can decide whether it wants them.

What should a first-contact form actually contain?

Four fields and one sentence of expectation-setting.

1. Name.
2. One way to reply — telephone or email, the person's choice rather than both compelled.
3. One line describing the situation, in a box big enough to invite a sentence rather than an essay.
4. How urgent it is, as three options rather than free text.

Then a single line above the button saying what happens next and when, in the firm's own words. Not a promise the firm cannot keep at six on a Friday. A stated window that the firm actually meets is worth more than a shorter one it does not, and it is the only part of the form that manages the wait.

Anything the firm genuinely needs before it can act — file-opening details, identity documents, the conflict check — belongs on a second form sent to a person who has already spoken to somebody. That form can be as long as it needs to be, because by then there is a relationship carrying it.

What happens after the reader presses send?

The part that decides everything, and the part we do not build.

Four things have to be true, and none of them is a design decision:

• The submission reaches a person, not only an inbox. A shared mailbox nobody owns is where inquiries go to age.
• Somebody owns the response, by name, including on Friday evening and across a holiday weekend.
• The automatic reply says something true. A message promising contact within an hour, sent at 11pm by a firm that opens at nine, has made a worse first impression than silence.
• The submission is recorded where it can be counted, with the source attached. A firm that cannot say where last month's matters came from cannot judge anything it spends.

We build the form and we do not fix what happens next. Intake is operational, it sits with the people who answer the telephone, and any marketing supplier claiming to solve it is describing software or a call center. We say so before the invoice rather than after it, because it is the difference between a form that works and a form that merely submits.

What does this cost, and what will it not do?

$1,450 for the Practice Sprint, $2,900 for the build. Fixed, published, no minimum term. The form is part of the build rather than an add-on with its own line.

Never per inquiry, per matter or per client. We charge for the work, by scope and time. Referral fees are restricted in prescribed legal business, which includes personal injury, and the restriction binds the firm paying as well as the party being paid. Lawyer advertising in the United States runs through ABA Model Rule 7.2(b), adopted differently by state, and how it applies to a particular firm is for that firm and its own advisers.

Of the 40 legal-marketing suppliers we read in full on 3 August 2026, twelve published a price, five showed only a "from" range, eight claimed a guarantee, and one offered work with no minimum term. We do not manage ad spend, we do not supply the case-management system the submission ought to land in, and we do not answer the telephone.

What this is worth where you are

In New York, 14,800 people a month search for personal injury, and Google charges around $73.14 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.

Get the report →

Where should I read next?

On choosing what to spend the attention on in the first place: marketing a law firm strategies.

On the impression the form sits inside: law firm branding.

On what can be sent to the people who did fill it in, and what they agreed to: lawyer email marketing.

Two practice areas where the first message is unusually sensitive and the form should ask least: employment lawyer marketing and divorce lawyer marketing.

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