For solicitors and law firms
AI for lawyers
Most people look for a solicitor at nine in the evening. Most firms find out about it at nine the next morning.
Book a CallLegal enquiries do not arrive during office hours, because the events that cause them do not. A relationship ends, a job is lost, an offer is accepted on a house, a relative dies. People search for representation immediately afterwards, and that is usually an evening or a weekend. The firm that responds first is very often the firm that gets instructed, and in most of the country that firm is whichever one had something answering at the time.
Alongside this sits a compliance reality that shapes what any automation is allowed to do. The Solicitors Regulation Authority requires published price and service information for several common work types, expects conflict checks before a retainer begins, and holds the firm responsible for everything communicated in its name. Our work with law firms lives in the space between those two facts: respond immediately, gather properly, and never let the machine say something a solicitor would not have said.
Where instructions get lost
The overnight gap
An enquiry submitted at 21:40 that receives its first human response at 09:30 has had eleven hours in which the enquirer contacted three other firms. Immediate acknowledgement, sensible initial questions, and a booked appointment for the following morning changes the outcome without anyone working an evening.
Conflict checks happen too late
Conflicts are frequently identified after a fee earner has already spent time on an initial call. Capturing the counterparty and matter details at first contact and screening them against your existing matters means the conflict surfaces before the time is spent, not after.
Transparency rules are met minimally, if at all
The SRA requires cost and service information to be published for specified areas of work. Many firms treat this as a compliance box rather than what it actually is — the page prospective clients read before deciding whether to call. Treated well it is one of the strongest conversion assets a firm has.
Unqualified enquiries consume fee-earner time
Legal aid eligibility, jurisdiction, limitation periods, and whether the matter is one the firm handles at all can be established before a solicitor is involved. Screening these earlier means initial appointments are spent on matters the firm can actually take.
What we put in place
Intake that runs whenever the enquiry arrives
Structured questions covering matter type, key dates, counterparties, and urgency, asked at the moment of enquiry rather than at the first appointment. The enquirer gets an immediate, human-sounding acknowledgement and a booked slot; the firm gets a complete intake record waiting in the morning.
Conflict data captured at first touch
Names of opposing parties and connected entities collected during intake and checked against your matter records before an appointment is confirmed. Where a potential conflict appears, the enquiry routes to a person rather than proceeding automatically.
Price and service pages built to convert
The transparency information the SRA requires, written as something a worried person can actually understand — what the work covers, what it costs, what affects that cost, and how long it typically takes. Clear scope reduces both hesitation and the fee disputes that come from mismatched expectations.
Client updates without the chasing calls
Much of the correspondence that consumes a legal secretary's day is status updates on matters that have not changed. Automated milestone updates, tied to your case management system, reduce inbound 'any news?' calls considerably — particularly on conveyancing, where the chain generates constant anxiety.
Works with your case management
We connect to the case management system the firm already uses rather than proposing a migration. Firms holding Lexcel or the Conveyancing Quality Scheme have documented processes that took real effort to accredit, and automation should follow those processes rather than quietly route around them.
The regulatory line
Everything published or sent in the firm's name remains the firm's responsibility under the SRA Standards and Regulations. That principle sets a hard boundary on what automation may do: it can gather information, explain process, quote published prices, and arrange appointments. It cannot advise on the merits of a matter, interpret a limitation period, or say anything a client could reasonably act on as legal advice.
We build intake systems that decline clearly and route to a solicitor when a question crosses that line — and we design them to over-escalate rather than to attempt an answer. A confident wrong answer about a deadline is a negligence exposure, not a conversion problem, and it should be treated as the more serious of the two.
Common questions
Could an automated intake system give legal advice by accident?
It is constrained to your published information and your own intake questions, and it is instructed to decline anything requiring judgement about a specific matter. We test that boundary explicitly before launch, including with deliberately borderline questions. When it is uncertain it says a solicitor will respond rather than attempting an answer, because the cost of a wrong answer is asymmetric.
How does this handle conflict checking when we act for both sides sometimes?
The system captures counterparty and connected-party details and flags matches against your records. It does not decide whether a conflict is capable of being waived or whether informed consent is appropriate — those are judgements for the firm under the SRA rules. What changes is that the flag appears before an appointment is offered instead of after a fee earner has spent an hour on it.
We do publicly funded work. Does that change anything?
It changes the intake questions substantially, because eligibility screening has to happen early and the scope of what the firm can take is defined differently. We build the eligibility questions into the initial flow so that enquirers who will not qualify are told promptly and directed elsewhere, rather than being booked into an appointment that cannot go anywhere.
Will clients realise they are talking to an automated system?
Yes, and it should be obvious. We do not build systems that pretend to be a named solicitor. Enquirers are told they are completing an initial intake and that a solicitor will review it, which is both the honest position and the one that avoids any suggestion the firm misled someone at first contact. Clarity here also reduces the frustration people feel when they eventually realise.
Does this suit a small high-street practice or only larger firms?
Smaller firms tend to feel the out-of-hours gap most sharply, because there is no team rota absorbing evening enquiries and the principal is already working. The build scales down sensibly — a single intake flow and a well-written costs page will move the needle for a two-partner firm without the infrastructure a larger practice would need.
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