The legal CRM playbook.

General CRM software is organised around a deal that moves through stages and closes. A law firm is organised around a matter, and a matter is not a deal. It has a client, sometimes several, an opposing party you have to check yourself against before you can even speak to anyone, a limitation period that does not care how busy you are, and a file that has to hold everything anyone said.

So the first test of legal CRM software is whether intake is a first-class thing or an afterthought bolted onto a sales pipeline. The moment that matters most in a law firm is the first conversation with someone who might become a client, and most CRMs treat that as a lead form.

The second is whether it can hold a conflict check in the flow rather than beside it. If the name of the other side is captured at intake as free text in a notes box, somebody is going to have to re-key it into whatever actually runs the check, and the whole point of the system was to stop that.

The third is dates. Personal injury has limitation periods. Immigration has filing windows. Estate matters have deadlines that arrive with a death. A system that can tell you a date is coming, and who has not been contacted about it, is doing something a generic pipeline view cannot.

None of that means a law firm needs bespoke software. It means the intake and the record have to be built for a matter, and the questions above are how you tell in a demo whether they were.

People do not decide they need a lawyer during office hours. An arrest happens at two in the morning. A crash happens on a Sunday. A family emergency happens when a family emergency happens. And the person on the other end is frightened, is calling more than one firm, and will retain whoever actually talks to them.

That is a brutal problem for a small firm. Your fee earners are in court or in depositions all day, and the person answering the phone is doing three other jobs. An answering service takes a message, which means the caller has told their story to somebody who cannot help and will have to tell it again tomorrow, if they call back at all.

The AI agent takes the call whenever it comes in and runs a real intake. It establishes what happened, when it happened, whether anyone has already been instructed, and the details your team would have had to ring back for. It books the consultation into the right diary. And it writes the whole thing down, so the attorney who picks it up in the morning reads a file rather than a callback slip.

The version of this that matters is not the middle of the night. It is Tuesday at eleven, when three people call while your intake person is on the phone to the court. Those calls do not leave a message. They call the next firm on the list.

An intake question set is not one thing. What you need from a personal injury caller is not what you need from a divorce caller, and asking the wrong questions in the wrong tone is worse than asking none.

On a personal injury call it establishes the date of the incident, because that is the fact that decides whether you can act at all. Then what happened, what injuries, whether there was medical treatment and when, whether there is a police or incident report, whether insurers have been in touch and whether anything has been signed.

On a criminal call the shape is different and shorter. What is the charge, when is the next court date, is there a date at all yet, is anyone in custody, and has anyone else been instructed. Court dates are the thing that make a criminal intake urgent and they are the thing a generic form never asks for.

On a family call the tone does most of the work. It is a person in the middle of the worst month of their life, and an agent that runs a checklist at them will lose the instruction no matter how complete the notes are. Fewer questions and more listening, with a consultation as the goal rather than a full picture.

You set those question sets yourself. Every call is recorded and transcribed, and a coach scores it, so when an intake goes badly you can read exactly where it went and change what is asked next time. That is the part to insist on with any vendor: you should be able to inspect the conversation, not just the outcome.

This is the chapter most software vendors selling to law firms leave out, and leaving it out is how a firm ends up in front of its bar association holding an invoice from a company that told them it was fine.

Responding to somebody who contacted you is not solicitation. If a person fills in your form, calls your office or asks for a call back, ringing them quickly is exactly what they asked for, and speed does more work than anything else in deciding whether they instruct you. Automate that as hard as you like.

Cold calling members of the public who did not contact you is a different thing entirely. Under the ABA Model Rules, live person-to-person contact, which includes telephone calls, to solicit professional employment from a prospective client is prohibited where a significant motive is money. Most states have adopted some version of that, several add a waiting period after an accident, and the details vary state by state. So an AI dialling homeowners about wills, or working through arrest records, is not a clever growth channel. It is the firm's licence.

There are real exceptions and they are worth knowing. Contact with other lawyers is treated differently. So is contact with someone who has an existing professional or close personal relationship with the firm, and with businesses that routinely buy the kind of legal work you do. That last one is why business-side practice areas, entity work, commercial contracts, employment advice, sit in a different position from consumer work.

We are not your lawyers and this is not advice on your jurisdiction. Check your own state rules, and any vendor who waves that question away is telling you something useful about themselves.

Law firms already have somewhere the matter lives. If it is Clio, MyCase, Filevine or something built in-house, a new system that keeps its own separate client list is not an upgrade. It is a second version of the truth, and inside a month nobody will know which one is right.

So ask a vendor the specific questions rather than the general one. When intake books a consultation, does it appear in the diary the attorney actually looks at. Does the new contact match the person already on file or create a duplicate. When intake captures the other side's name, does it get somewhere the conflict check can see it, or does it sit in a notes field nobody reads. When the matter opens, does the intake record follow it.

Ask about the phone number too. A firm's number is on every letterhead, every listing and every old file. It has to keep working exactly as it does now.

And ask what happens to the recordings and the transcripts. Intake calls contain the most sensitive thing a stranger will ever tell you, sometimes before they are a client at all. You want to know where that sits, who can reach it, how long it is kept and how it comes back to you if you leave.

The honest checklist, including the parts that do not flatter us.

Ask to hear a real intake call, not a demo. Any voice product sounds capable when the caller behaves. Ask for one where the person was upset, rambled or would not answer the question, because that is every third intake call in this business.

Ask what happens to confidentiality before somebody is a client. A prospective client's disclosures carry duties even if you never act for them. Get a straight answer about where recordings live and who at the vendor can listen to them.

Ask how it handles a caller it cannot help. A good intake says so early and does not book a consultation to pad a number. Booking rate is the easiest metric in this category to make look good by wasting your attorneys' time.

Ask how long until it is useful. Configuring intake question sets per practice area is real work, and most of this category quietly takes weeks. Get a date in writing.

Ask what it costs in a heavy month, not an average one. Per-minute pricing looks cheap until a marketing push lands.

And be honest about the problem. If you are losing instructions because your fee earners are at capacity, faster intake will fill the diary of a firm that cannot service it, and that is a worse position than the one you are in. Software is worth buying when work is arriving and falling through gaps. In most firms it is, but not in all of them.