ai-client-intake – Law Firm Brief

A 30-minute intake call produces a structured matter file in under five minutes of editing — if you wire up the right three tools before the call starts.

This workflow is built for solo lawyers and firms of two to five attorneys who are personally running their own intake. You take the call, you open the matter, you chase the conflict check. Every step is manual and each one costs time you don’t have. The workflow below connects a structured intake form, a call transcription tool, and a Claude prompt to collapse that 30-minute process into about five minutes of cleanup. I’ve written it so you can implement it in an afternoon. The total recurring cost runs between $20 and $40 per month depending on which tools you already pay for.

What You’ll Need

Intake form tool: Typeform (free tier works; Paid starts at $25/month) or Jotform (free tier available). Either gives you a shareable link you send before the call.
Transcription tool: Otter.ai (Pro plan, $16.99/month) or Fireflies.ai (Pro plan, $18/month). Both join video calls automatically and produce a searchable transcript within minutes of the call ending.
Claude: Claude.ai Pro ($20/month) or API access via Anthropic. Claude 3.5 Sonnet handles long transcripts without truncating the way shorter-context models do.
Practice management software: Clio Manage or MyCase. You’ll paste the output of the Claude prompt into a new matter note. No native integration required — this is copy-paste, not automation.

Step 1: Build Your Pre-Call Intake Form

Send a form link 24 hours before the scheduled call. The form does two things: it primes the prospective client to think clearly before you talk, and it gives you structured data that the Claude prompt will pull from directly.

Fields to include

Full legal name
Date of birth
Phone and email
Adverse party name(s) — this is your conflict-check input
Matter type (dropdown: family, estate planning, business formation, real estate, employment, other)
Brief description of the situation (open text, 500-character limit)
Relevant dates (incident date, deadlines, filing dates they’re aware of)
Prior attorneys on this matter (yes/no + name field if yes)
How did you hear about us

Keep the form under ten fields. Longer forms get abandoned. The goal is names, adverse parties, and a rough description — everything else comes out in the call.

In Typeform, turn on email notifications so the completed response lands in your inbox before the call starts. In Jotform, the same setting lives under Settings → Emails. Export the response as a PDF and have it open during the call.

Step 2: Record and Transcribe the Call

If you’re on Zoom or Google Meet, Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai both join as a bot participant and record automatically once you connect your calendar. For phone calls, Otter’s mobile app records locally and transcribes after the fact. Fireflies handles phone recording through its dial-in number, which is slightly more friction.

Tell the prospective client at the start of the call that you’re recording for your notes. One sentence is enough: “I record intake calls so I can focus on listening — the recording is just for my internal file.” Most clients don’t object. Check your state bar’s rules on recording consent before you run this call the first time; a few states require two-party consent on recorded phone calls.

After the call ends, Otter delivers a transcript and summary to your inbox within five to ten minutes. Fireflies is slightly faster. Either one produces a searchable text file — that transcript is what you feed to Claude.

One thing to check: both tools include speaker labels, but they’re imperfect. Otter labels speakers as “Speaker 1” and “Speaker 2” unless you manually assign names. Fireflies does the same. The Claude prompt handles unlabeled speakers fine — just note in the prompt which speaker is the attorney.

Close-up detail shot of two hands resting near an open laptop keyboard, a leather portfolio and fountain pen in soft foc

Step 3: Run the Claude Prompt

Open Claude.ai Pro (or your API interface) and paste the following prompt, then paste the full transcript below it. Do not summarize the transcript yourself first — give Claude the raw text. The prompt is designed to pull structure out of unstructured conversation.

You are a legal intake assistant helping a solo attorney organize information from a new client intake call. You do not provide legal advice or legal analysis. Your job is to extract and organize factual information from the transcript below into a structured intake brief.

Using only the information in the transcript, produce the following sections:

1. CLIENT INFORMATION
   - Full name
   - Contact information (phone, email) if mentioned
   - Date of birth if mentioned

2. ADVERSE PARTIES
   - List every person, company, or entity the client mentioned as an opposing or adverse party
   - Include any names the attorney should check for conflicts

3. MATTER TYPE AND DESCRIPTION
   - Practice area (as stated or clearly implied)
   - Neutral factual summary of the client's situation in 3-5 sentences. Do not characterize fault, liability, or legal merit. Report what the client described.

4. KEY DATES AND DEADLINES
   - Any specific dates mentioned (incident dates, contract dates, filing dates, court dates)
   - Any deadlines the client is aware of

5. DOCUMENTS MENTIONED
   - Any documents the client referenced (contracts, court filings, notices, deeds, etc.)

6. PRIOR REPRESENTATION
   - Any prior attorneys the client mentioned in connection with this matter

7. OPEN QUESTIONS
   - Information that appears missing or unclear from this intake that the attorney will likely need before opening the matter (do not suggest legal strategy — list informational gaps only)

8. CONFLICT CHECK NAMES
   - A clean list of every proper name and entity name pulled from sections 1 and 2, formatted one per line, ready to copy into a conflict-check search

Format each section with a clear header. Use bullet points within sections. If a section has no information from the transcript, write "Not mentioned in call."

Do not add information not found in the transcript. Do not offer legal opinions. Do not speculate about outcomes.

TRANSCRIPT:
[paste full transcript here]

The prompt takes about 90 seconds to run on Claude 3.5 Sonnet with a standard 30-minute transcript. The output is typically 400 to 600 words of clean, structured text.

Tuning the prompt for your practice area

If you run a family law practice, add a line to Section 3: “Note any minor children mentioned, their ages, and current custody arrangements as described by the client.” If you do transactional work, add a section for “Entities and Ownership” to capture business names, EINs, or ownership structures the client mentions. The base prompt above is practice-area neutral by design — specialize it once and save the modified version as a text file you reuse.

Step 4: Merge Form Data With the AI Summary

Claude’s output covers what was said on the call. Your Typeform or Jotform response covers what the client submitted before the call. These two documents sometimes disagree — the client wrote one adverse party name on the form and mentioned two others on the call. That gap is worth catching before you open the matter.

Spend two to three minutes reading both documents side by side. Look specifically at: adverse party names (conflict-check section), dates (do the form dates match what was discussed), and matter type. Where they conflict, note it in the Open Questions section of the Claude output before you file it.

Then copy the combined, lightly edited intake brief into your practice management software. In Clio, open a new Matter, go to the Notes tab, and paste it as a pinned note titled “Initial Intake Brief — [Date].” In MyCase, the equivalent is a new Case Note marked Internal. Either way, the structured brief is now searchable and attached to the matter from day one.

Run your conflict check using the “Conflict Check Names” list from the Claude output. In Clio, that’s a global search across contacts. In MyCase, use the Conflicts search under the Contacts menu. Because the prompt formats each name on its own line, you can move through the list quickly without reformatting anything.

Where This Breaks

The prompt fails predictably in one category: emotionally complex matters where the most important facts are what the client didn’t say clearly. A caller describing a contentious divorce who is guarded, interrupted, or inconsistent will produce a transcript full of fragmentary sentences and topic shifts. Claude will dutifully summarize the fragments — and the summary will read as coherent when the underlying situation is not. You’ll get a clean-looking brief that papers over real ambiguity.

The fix is partial, not complete. Add this to the Section 7 (Open Questions) prompt instruction: “Note any topics where the client gave contradictory or incomplete information, even if you cannot resolve the contradiction.” That surfaces the gaps, but it doesn’t replace your own read of the transcript for anything emotionally charged — grief, trauma, estrangement, or financial desperation. Read the raw transcript for those matters. The brief is a starting point, not a substitute.

A second failure mode is proper noun recognition. Otter and Fireflies both mis-transcribe uncommon names — a client named “Dzhokhar” becomes “Joker” in the transcript, which flows through to the conflict-check list. Scan the names list before you run the conflict search. One missed name in a conflict check is a genuine problem; catching it takes 60 seconds.

Third: this workflow assumes the client completed the pre-call form. When they don’t — which happens with roughly one in four prospective clients in my observation — the merge step in Step 4 collapses to just the Claude output, which is still useful, but the conflict-check list is thinner. You can prompt the client for the form during the call or ask the adverse party names directly. Either way, note in the file that the pre-call form was not received.

What This Saves You

The honest estimate: 20 to 25 minutes per new matter. The manual version of this process — handwritten notes, typed summary, conflict-check name assembly — runs 25 to 35 minutes after a 30-minute call for most solo practitioners. The automated version runs five to seven minutes (three minutes reading and editing the Claude output, two minutes on the conflict-check list, two minutes pasting into Clio or MyCase).

If you take 10 new matters per month, that’s three to four hours returned to billable work or to leaving the office earlier. It also reduces the most common intake error: forgetting to run a conflict check on every name the client mentioned, not just the obvious adverse party. The structured output makes that step harder to skip.

The pre-call form adds a side benefit that doesn’t show up in time estimates: clients who complete it arrive at the call more organized. The call itself often runs shorter.

This workflow costs $55 to $75 per month in new tool spend if you don’t already pay for any of the components (Typeform free tier + Otter Pro + Claude Pro). If you already have a transcription tool through your video conferencing plan, or you’re already on Claude, the incremental cost is lower. At 10 new matters a month, the math on three reclaimed hours isn’t complicated.

Build it once on a slow afternoon. Run it on the next intake call. Adjust the prompt after the first three uses when you see what it misses for your specific practice area. The structure is there from day one; the tuning takes a week.

Tag: ai-client-intake

The AI-Powered Client Intake Workflow Every Solo Lawyer Should Steal