Law Firm Intake Audit Checklist: Eight Records, and What Each Blank Means

The eight records to pull, and the number from each

Each line below names the record, where it lives, and the one number to take from it. Counts, dates and stages are enough; names and matter descriptions are not needed for any of it.

• 1. The phone log. Every inbound call to the main line and to any tracking or ad numbers, with date, time, duration and outcome: answered, voicemail, or hung up. Set aside numbers already in the client list. The number: new-caller calls by hour and day, and the share unanswered inside and outside office hours.
• 2. The missed-call trail. The answering service’s message log, voicemail timestamps, and the time of the first callback to each missed caller. The number: time from missed call to first callback, for the typical call and for the slowest tenth.
• 3. The web form, chat and text inbox. Submission timestamps and the time of the first human reply. The number: first-reply time per channel, with nights and weekends counted separately.
• 4. The intake list. Every lead in the intake software or spreadsheet, with its source, its stage and the date it entered each stage. The number: leads by source, and the age of every lead still open.
• 5. The conflict-check log. When each check was requested and when it cleared. The number: hours from request to cleared, and how many consults waited on it.
• 6. The consult calendar. Booked, held, rescheduled and no-show, by attorney. The number: consults held per attorney and per practice area.
• 7. The fee agreements. Every envelope in the e-signature tool: sent, viewed, signed, declined or voided, with dates. The number: agreements still at “sent” and the age of each, plus days from consult to signature.
• 8. Matters opened and leads closed. New matters in the practice-management system for the period, and every lead closed as declined, referred or no response, with its reason and whether a non-engagement letter went out. The numbers: consults held against matters opened, and closed leads with no letter on record.

For contingency matters, the signed fee agreement is the finish line of intake. For hourly and flat-fee matters, the first payment or retainer deposit marks the matter as started — read from a balance report the firm produces, never from inside the trust account.

What each blank means

A record that cannot be produced is not a failed audit. It is the first finding, because it shows which step has nobody watching it. If nobody can produce the callback times, nothing records the first reply — that blank is the first finding.

• No call history, or nobody holds the login to export it: the firm cannot say how many new callers reached no one.
• Missed calls with no callback time: the first reply is unrecorded, so it cannot be owned or improved.
• Leads with no source: the argument with the marketing agency about lead quality cannot be settled, because signed cases cannot be traced back to where they came from.
• Conflict checks with no timestamps: the wait between call and consult has no visible cause.
• Fee agreements at “sent” with no follow-up date: the stage closest to a signed matter belongs to no one.
• Closed leads with no reason and no letter: the consult that went quiet never formally ends, so it never shows up in any report as lost.

What should a law firm intake form ask?

A law firm intake form should ask enough to run the conflict check, route the matter and book the consult, and hold back the detailed facts until the conflict check clears. ABA Model Rule 1.18 explains why the order matters: when a lawyer receives disqualifying information from a prospective client, one condition that can still let the firm take or keep a matter adverse to that person is that the lawyer took reasonable measures to avoid exposure to more disqualifying information than was reasonably necessary to decide whether to represent them. How the firm’s own state rules apply is a question for its ethics counsel.

Each field below also feeds one of the eight records above, which is what makes the audit possible later. The first five groups are questions for the caller; the last two are filled in by the intake team.

• Contact: name, phone, email, the best time to call, and how the person agrees to be contacted (call, text or email).
• Names for the conflict check: every other person or business involved, such as the other driver, the spouse, the employer or the company on the other side, with spelling and any former names. These go to the conflict check before anyone hears the story.
• Matter type and place: the practice area from a short fixed list, the state and county where the matter arises, and whether anything has already been filed.
• Dates that set urgency: the date of the event and any date the caller already knows about, such as a court date, a hearing or a notice with a response date. The form records what the caller says; whether a deadline applies is for the attorney.
• Source: how the person found the firm, from a fixed list (a referral with the referrer’s name, an ad, a search, a directory), so signed matters can be traced back to what produced them.
• Routing: who took the inquiry, the date and time of first contact and of the first reply, the next step and its date, and the attorney assigned.
• Outcome: consult booked, held, fee agreement sent, signed, declined in writing or referred out, each with a date, and a reason code whenever intake ends without a signature.

Keep the detailed account of what happened for the consult, or for a second form sent once the conflict check clears, and keep both inside the intake system rather than in someone’s email. The routing and outcome fields are the ones this audit reads; a form without them can be filled in perfectly and still leave the audit blank.

Matching the records: one worksheet, five numbers

Once the exports are in, the audit is matching, not analysis. Line up the period’s new contacts and follow them forward: first reply, consult booked, consult held, fee agreement sent, and then one of three endings — signed, declined in writing, or silent. Each step that loses people has a different fix and a different owner, which is the whole point of separating them.

Illustrative example: in one hypothetical quarter, a firm logs 400 calls from new callers. Sixty reach voicemail during office hours and fifty after hours. Of the 400, 160 become booked consults and 130 are held. One hundred fee agreements go out; 70 are signed, 10 are declined with a letter, and 20 sit at “sent” with no follow-up date. Those are four separate problems — daytime coverage, after-hours coverage, no-shows, and an unowned “sent” stage — and buying more leads fixes none of them.

Compare the firm with itself, not with a published average. Set each attorney’s consults held against matters opened, this quarter against last, and each lead source’s signed matters against what it cost. The spread between the best and the slowest step is the agenda.

Counting without exposing prospective-client information

Intake records hold information from people who never became clients, and the rules still reach them. ABA Model Rule 1.18 defines a prospective client as a person who consults with a lawyer about the possibility of forming a client-lawyer relationship, and says that even when no relationship follows, a lawyer who learned information from that person shall not use or reveal it except as the rules permit for former clients. Model Rule 1.6(c) asks a lawyer to make reasonable efforts to prevent unauthorized access to information relating to the representation of a client.

The practical answer for an audit is to count, not read. Every number above comes from timestamps, stages and reason codes. Strip names, phone numbers and matter descriptions from an export before anyone outside the intake team opens it, and nobody needs to listen to a recording to measure a callback time. What the firm’s own duties require — under its state’s version of these rules — is a question for its ethics counsel or its attorney. We are not a law firm.

The non-engagement letter belongs in the checklist for a second reason. The North Carolina Bar Association’s practice-management center wrote on August 3, 2026 that when a prospective client does not respond to a fee agreement, the firm should send a close-the-loop non-engagement letter after its chosen follow-up period, use a tickler, and put the letter on the intake checklist instead of relying on memory. The Oregon State Bar Professional Liability Fund adds that anyone sent such a letter should be on the conflicts list. Whether and how to send one is the firm’s call under its own bar’s guidance. For the audit, the letter is also the record that turns “silent” into “closed.” Not legal advice.

Turning the checklist into a weekly routine

An audit run once tells the firm where it stood last quarter. The same five numbers, read every week, keep it from drifting back. Give each one a named owner and a fixed time — fifteen minutes on a Monday morning is enough for a small intake team:

• Missed new-caller calls from the past week with no callback recorded.
• Leads open longer than the firm’s own limit, by stage.
• Fee agreements at “sent” past the follow-up date, each with the name of the person who will call.
• Consults held last week with no outcome entered.
• Leads closed last week with no reason and no non-engagement letter.

Software can carry part of this: e-signature reminders, a tickler for the letter, an alert when a lead ages past a limit. The part no tool does is the person whose job it is to act on the list, which is why each line above gets a name before it gets an automation.

When to run it in-house, and when the Review fits

For one practice area with records that export cleanly, this checklist is the whole job, and there is nothing to buy. The slow part is getting the exports, not the arithmetic. A solo attorney who answers the phone and sends every fee agreement the same day needs even less: the intake system is that attorney, and it works.

An outside reading starts to make sense when intake is only half the question — when consults that do not sign sit alongside unbilled time, late final invoices and retainers below their floor — or when the records live in four systems nobody has ever matched. That is what our law firm intake audit page describes. The Revenue Review takes two weeks: read-only exports of counts, dates and stages, de-identified wherever possible, under an NDA signed before anything opens. It ends in a written report the firm keeps, with a monthly dollar figure wherever the records support one, a ranked list of what to fix and a 90-day plan. It never opens the trust account and gives no legal or ethics advice. Implementation is scoped and priced separately.

The free 20-minute call says honestly whether the Review fits — including when it does not.