Law firm: client intake and routing

A law firm ran cases across several practice areas at once and received requests by email, WhatsApp and Telegram. Everything flowed into one shared inbox with no tagging by topic. A duty staffer sorted the stream, manually forwarding letters to colleagues. As a result a client facing a deadline could wait a full day just for the question to reach a lawyer of the right specialization, and often walked to another firm in that time.

We went through a month of incoming messages and saw that the problem was not volume but the lack of structure. Requests arrived without key details, so the duty staffer kept re-asking the same things: which practice area, are there deadlines, what exactly happened. Some letters were forwarded to the wrong lawyer and came back in circles, and some simply sat unread in the inbox. Every lost request is not only a missed fee but a reputational risk.

The task was delicate: capture the essence of the case without making the client feel like a cold questionnaire. A legal request is often personal and anxious, and a dry ten-field form scares people off more than it helps. The assistant should clarify the practice area, the nature of the question and any deadlines in a human way, separate target requests from clearly-not-ours, and hand the lawyer a ready card rather than a raw stream of text. And it may give no legal assessment at all.

We built an assistant that meets the client on WhatsApp and Telegram as a single reception desk. In a calm dialog it clarifies the practice area, the substance of the question and any deadlines, and along the way hints at which documents are worth preparing. It then determines the case profile, flags urgency and hands the lawyer a structured card with all the details. The conversation keeps the firm's restrained tone, the assistant gives no legal advice and promises no outcome, but honestly says a real lawyer will give the assessment.

The project took about four weeks. First, together with the firm, we laid out the practice by area and described the routing rules: which signals lead to which lawyer. Then we connected the assistant to the CRM so every card lands in a shared log and does not get lost. Separately we agreed the boundaries: the assistant collects facts but does not consult. We ran the scenario on one channel, tuned the wording from real dialogs so the tone sounded caring, and only then opened intake on all channels.

After launch the assistant handles the first pass of almost all requests itself. The time to a first substantive reply dropped from a day to a few hours, because the case goes straight to the right lawyer with a ready card instead of wandering the shared inbox. Off-target questions are filtered at the entrance and no longer take the specialists' expensive time. Instead of sorting mail, the lawyers work on cases themselves, and from the very first message the client feels heard.