Intake became its own role before firms wrote the criteria

Mondaq reported in late August that law firms are pulling client intake out of the general staff pool and handing it to dedicated remote specialists. For years the first call went to whoever was free: the receptionist, an assistant, a paralegal, then an attorney if it got that far.

Mondaq draws the line between the two jobs clearly. Reception answers and routes. Intake gathers structured facts, applies screening criteria the firm has approved, runs a first conflict check, and books the right consultation with the right person. Those are not the same job at different volumes, and pretending otherwise is how firms ended up with a phone system instead of a process.

The split is overdue. What makes it work, though, is not the person hired into it.

Mondaq notes that inquiries now arrive across half a dozen channels and that prospects routinely start on one and continue on another. So the role is coordination and written communication, with a CRM underneath it, rather than a telephone task with a headset attached. Firms hiring for a warm phone manner are hiring for the smallest part of it.

None of this is news to anyone who has watched where the day goes. Clio's Legal Trends Report has spent years documenting how much of a firm's working time is consumed by administrative work nobody bills for, and intake sits right at the front of that pile, absorbing attorney attention before a matter even exists.

On the ethics, Mondaq points to ABA Formal Opinion 506, which permits a trained and supervised nonlawyer to take the first contact, collect information and start the conflict check, with the prospective client still getting the lawyer on fees and scope. Permission was never the hard part. The screening criteria the specialist applies belong to the lawyer, and at most firms those criteria live in a partner's head, applied slightly differently on a Tuesday than on a Friday.

A specialist applying criteria nobody has written is a receptionist with a CRM license.

Mondaq proposes four measures of intake performance and argues conversion rate should not be the one used to judge the individual, because marketing quality, attorney availability and conflicts all move it. That is the right call, and it points at the same thing: intake is only measurable once the firm has decided what a good inquiry looks like.

The argument for readiness as a property of the firm rather than the candidate finds its cleanest expression in intake. Hiring the specialist is the easy half. Somebody at the firm still has to sit down and write which cases they want, which they refuse, and who gets the call when the answer is neither. That decision is not new, and it is still sitting where it always was.