Client intake & onboarding
Qualify and onboard new matters without spending billable hours on admin
In a professional firm, intake is done by the people whose time is the product. Partners and senior staff spend hours on scoping calls, document chasing, and scheduling before a matter is even accepted — and prospects who do not get a same-day response go elsewhere. This blueprint runs responsive intake and onboarding admin, while conflicts, scope, and acceptance stay a partner decision.
- The team
- 3 AI worker roles escalating into 1 human decision owner.
- The process
- 6 orchestrated stages, each with a named decision owner.
- The channels
- Web chat, Voice, Email, WhatsApp on one shared context.
The shift
What breaks today, and what changes
The challenge
- Fee earners lose billable hours to scoping calls, document chasing, and scheduling.
- Prospects who are not answered same-day approach another firm.
- Intake quality varies, so partners triage from incomplete and inconsistent briefs.
What changes
- Every enquiry gets a same-hour, professional response that captures the essentials.
- Partners triage from a consistent, structured brief instead of a voicemail and a name.
- Onboarding documents and scheduling are chased automatically once a matter is accepted.
The team
Every seat has one job and a defined level of autonomy
This is what gets configured in Team Canvas: role-scoped AI workers, the humans they escalate into, and a trust level on each connection that sets what a worker may do on its own. Trust starts tight and widens on evidence.
AI workers
Intake worker
Captures the situation, objectives, urgency, and service area conversationally.
- Owns
- Discovery record
- Trust level
- Acts within policy — never gives professional advice
Screening worker
Checks the enquiry against basic service-area and threshold criteria.
- Owns
- Preliminary fit signal
- Trust level
- Suggest only — fit is a signal, acceptance is a partner call
Onboarding worker
Schedules the expert, requests documents, and chases what is outstanding.
- Owns
- Onboarding readiness
- Trust level
- Acts within policy — request and schedule only
Human decision owners
Engagement partner
Owns conflicts, scope, pricing, and the decision to accept.
Owns: Acceptance and terms
The process
The conversation starts the work. The workflow finishes it.
Each stage records the decision that was made and the role accountable for it — which is what makes the run reviewable afterwards rather than a black box. Where the platform executes a stage rather than a person or agent performing it, that is named too, and accountability still sits with the role.
- 1
Respond
Which service area, and how urgent is this actually?
Intake worker
- 2
Capture the brief
Is there enough context for a partner to triage without a call?
Intake worker
- 3
Screen
Does this meet basic service-area and threshold criteria?
Screening worker
- 4
Partner review
Accept, clarify, or decline — including conflicts and scope.
Engagement partner
- 5
Onboard
Which documents, engagement terms, and kickoff scheduling are outstanding?
Onboarding worker
- 6
Hand to the team
Is the matter ready for the fee earner to start work?
Onboarding worker
Run by workflow
Decision rules
The non-negotiables encoded in the workflow, not left to a prompt.
- No worker gives professional advice or implies an advisor-client relationship exists.
- Conflicts, scope, pricing, and acceptance are partner decisions, always.
- Only information needed for preliminary fit is collected before acceptance.
- Regulated advice requests route to a qualified professional immediately.
Controls & guardrails
What makes this safe to run in production, and provable afterwards.
- Explicit no-advice boundary with immediate routing of regulated questions.
- Conflict and acceptance gates before any engagement is implied.
- Data minimisation prior to acceptance.
- Full intake record retained for professional-standards review.
Platform capabilities
What this blueprint runs on
Nothing here is bespoke. Each blueprint is a configuration of the same platform, which is why the second one you launch reuses the governance you already reviewed.
Channels
- Web chat
- Voice
Systems it reads and writes
- Practice management system
- CRM
- Document management & e-signature
- Fee-earner calendars
Measurement
What we instrument from day one
These are the measurements the pilot puts in place, not benchmark results. You set the targets against your own baseline — and the same instrumentation is what decides whether a worker's trust level widens.
- Enquiry response time
- The interval that most directly predicts whether a prospect instructs your firm or the next one they call.
- Brief completeness
- Measures how much context a partner has at triage, which is what makes accept-or-decline a fast decision.
- Admin hours displaced
- Tracks intake and onboarding admin absorbed by the blueprint, expressed as fee-earner hours returned.
First substantive reply
Fields at partner review
Fee-earner time returned
Rollout
How this one goes live
A deliberately narrow start, supervised, with autonomy widened per role once the record supports it.
Weeks 1–2
After-hours and overflow intake
Capture enquiries outside working hours and during overflow, producing a structured brief for partner triage next morning.
Weeks 3–4
Screening and scheduling
Add preliminary fit signals and expert scheduling, keeping acceptance firmly with the engagement partner.
Week 5+
Onboarding automation
Extend into document collection, engagement terms, and kickoff coordination once a matter is accepted.
Questions we get asked
Client intake & onboarding, in practice
- Could it accidentally give legal or financial advice?
- The no-advice boundary is structural: advice content is outside the workers’ scope, and any regulated question routes to a qualified professional rather than being answered. The workers capture context and run admin — they do not opine.
- Who decides whether to take on a matter?
- The engagement partner, always. Screening produces a preliminary fit signal with the reasoning recorded; conflicts, scope, pricing, and acceptance remain human decisions with no automation path around them.
- How does this protect against conflicts of interest?
- Only the information needed for preliminary fit is collected before acceptance, and the workflow will not imply an engagement exists. Conflict review sits as an explicit gate before any matter proceeds to onboarding.
What changes in Professional services
Intake and onboarding admin stop consuming billable hours, and engagement acceptance stays a partner decision.
Read the full Professional services analysisRelated blueprints
Teams that run next to this one
Next step
Build this team around one measurable win.
We map your version of this process, compose the worker roles, connect your systems, and agree the escalation points with the people who own them — then run it supervised.