Last updated: September 12, 2026
What a legal intake scorecard measures
A legal intake scorecard grades a call from a prospective client against what the firm needed from it: the incident facts that decide viability, the dates and jurisdiction, a conflict check run before case details are taken, and a consultation booked with a named attorney. Four failures void the card, and each is a professional responsibility problem.
On the same Tuesday afternoon, two intake specialists take two car accident calls. Both forms come back complete. Every field is filled, the incident dates are there, the carriers are there, and the injury descriptions run about the same length. One of those callers signed a representation agreement that week, and the other called the next firm on their list.
The form cannot tell you which was which, because both forms are correct. Whatever separated them happened in the first ninety seconds of audio and there is no column for it. That gap is why this instrument sits next to the intake form the specialist works from instead of inside it.
The two documents do different jobs. A form is the questionnaire your staff fill in, and it records data. The scorecard grades how the call was handled, which is behavior. If you came here wanting the field list, the form page is the one you want and you can close this tab now.
The 100 point intake scorecard
Twenty criteria across seven sections, weighted by what a miss costs the firm. Section totals are in parentheses.
| Section | Criterion | Points |
|---|---|---|
| Live answer and disclosure (12) | Answered the new inquiry line inside the firm's target answer time | 6 |
| Live answer and disclosure | Gave the firm name, their own name, and said plainly they are not an attorney | 4 |
| Live answer and disclosure | Delivered the recording disclosure the firm's script requires | 2 |
| Empathy in the first ninety seconds (14) | Acknowledged what happened to the caller before starting the question list | 6 |
| Empathy in the first ninety seconds | Asked whether the caller is hurt or currently getting treatment before anything administrative | 4 |
| Empathy in the first ninety seconds | Let the caller finish their account of the incident without cutting in to fill a field | 4 |
| Incident facts captured (22) | Captured the date, time, and location of the incident | 8 |
| Incident facts captured | Captured what happened in the caller's own words in enough detail to identify who the firm would be pursuing | 7 |
| Incident facts captured | Captured injuries and treatment to date, including whether treatment is ongoing | 7 |
| Dates, jurisdiction, and insurance (14) | Captured the jurisdiction where the incident happened and where the caller lives | 5 |
| Dates, jurisdiction, and insurance | Flagged the matter for attorney review when the incident date falls inside the firm's review window | 5 |
| Dates, jurisdiction, and insurance | Captured every insurance policy the caller named, with carrier and claim number where the caller had one | 4 |
| Conflict and eligibility (16) | Captured the names of every party to the incident before taking case detail | 8 |
| Conflict and eligibility | Asked whether another firm is engaged or has been engaged on this matter | 5 |
| Conflict and eligibility | Ran the conflict check and recorded the result against the matter | 3 |
| Consultation booked (14) | Offered a specific day and time with a named attorney | 8 |
| Consultation booked | Confirmed the appointment back to the caller and said what to bring | 4 |
| Consultation booked | Took a second contact method and read the callback number back digit by digit | 2 |
| Expectations and follow through (8) | Told the caller who contacts them next and inside what window | 5 |
| Expectations and follow through | Logged the intake record and the referral source before taking the next call | 3 |
| Total | 20 criteria | 100 |
The rubric downloads as a CSV with no form in front of it.
Incident facts carry 22 points because a thin fact capture sends the matter to an attorney who then has to call the client back to ask the same questions, and that second call is where people start shopping. Empathy carries 14, which is our editorial judgment rather than a published standard, and it is the number partners argue with most. If you want to move it, how the weights were chosen covers the method before you start pushing points around.
Auto fail items
Four failures void the card no matter how well the rest of the call went. A critical fail goes to a supervising attorney the same day rather than into a monthly average.
| Auto fail | Why it is absolute |
|---|---|
| Took case detail before the conflict parties were captured | The firm now holds confidential information about a matter it may not be able to accept |
| Answered a legal question with an opinion instead of routing it to an attorney | An intake specialist who is not a lawyer has crossed the line the firm's policy draws |
| Predicted a case value, a settlement range, or an outcome | The firm is holding a promise nobody in it made |
| Gave the caller a filing deadline the firm had not verified | A caller acts on a date they were handed, and nobody checked this one |
Three of those four are about restraint rather than effort, which is why they behave badly as point deductions. A specialist who does everything else beautifully and then guesses at a number has not had a slightly worse call. They have created a problem for somebody with a bar card.
The statute of limitations line
The incident date is worth 8 points by itself, and the reason is arithmetic somebody else does later. A limitation period runs from a date, and that date only exists in the file if the specialist asked for it while the caller was still on the phone. Off by a month on the call means off by a month everywhere downstream.
Jurisdiction sits beside it. Where the incident happened and where the caller lives can point at different rules, and neither is obvious from an area code the caller has carried through three moves.
The flag is the third piece. Every firm sets a window where an incoming matter gets an attorney's eyes the same day instead of the same week, and the criterion checks whether the specialist raised it, not whether they were right. Nobody on the intake call states a deadline to the caller, which is the fourth auto fail, sitting there because a caller who hears a date on the phone will act on it. The specialist captures the date and flags the matter. Somebody qualified does the calculating.
Speed to lead, and what a scorecard can prove about it
Three numbers get quoted constantly around legal intake, and all three are third party. Leads contacted inside one minute are said to convert far better than leads contacted after five, and mentioning a free case evaluation early in the call is said to lift bookings. The third number is a target rather than a finding: firms are told to aim at 65 to 75 percent conversion on the agreements they send out.
None of the three survived a source check on 2026-09-08, so they are worth something as direction and nothing as a target. Set your own baseline from a month of scored calls instead.
The first figure has a second problem, which is that it measures something this rubric cannot see. Contact speed is about whether a human picked up at all. The scorecard grades what happened once somebody did. A firm that signs up an after hours service and never scores a single call will move the contact number and keep losing the same callers, which is a quieter kind of failure than a phone ringing out.
Scoring the call against the form the specialist filled in
Run the two together and you get a check neither one gives you alone. Pull the completed form, pull the recording, and walk them field by field. A form that says the collision happened Thursday against audio where the caller clearly says Friday is a capture error, and no amount of coaching would have surfaced it, because the specialist genuinely believes they heard Thursday.
That comparison is unbearable by hand at any real volume. Searching every intake call for the phrase the caller used about the incident date is the version that survives a busy month, and the scorecard criterion points at the timestamp where the date was actually said.
The two questions stay separate on purpose. A form field asks whether the data is in the system. The criterion asks whether the caller said it.
What this rubric will not tell you
A 94 tells you the call was handled well. It says nothing about whether the matter was worth taking, which is a judgment an attorney makes on facts the specialist only partly captured. A fair number of well handled calls should end in a decline, and this card will happily score those at 94 too.
Machine scoring has its own ceiling. Rule based criteria come back reliably and anything resting on tone gets shakier, which Aircall and StackAI both note about automated QA. Empathy is 14 points of this card, so that section stays the one a supervisor actually listens to.
Our model learned on answering service calls first, so a firm's own vocabulary takes some tuning before the flags land where you want them. Local hospital names and the exact phrasing your specialists use for the conflict question are usually the first pass.
What a low score usually means
A firm scores a quarter of its intake calls, the average comes back at 71, and the instinct is to sit down with whoever scored lowest. That is almost never where the damage is.
Look at the answer time criterion first, then at what time of day the low scores cluster. Calls landing at 7 p.m. and handled by whoever happens to be covering the phone tend to score worse than a daytime specialist manages on her worst call of the month. Script gaps account for most of the rest: when every specialist misses the same criterion, that criterion is describing something the script never told anyone to do. Coaching a person for a staffing problem changes nothing except how that person feels about coming in.
The same reading holds at a firm with no personal injury practice, which is why law firm intake keeps this structure with different facts hung on it, and QA for personal injury intake covers where the scoring sits inside the wider program.
A paid pilot scores last quarter's intake calls against this rubric and shows you where the low ones cluster by hour and by criterion, at a fixed pilot price.
Frequently asked questions
What should a law firm score on intake calls?
Answer time and disclosure, empathy in the opening, the incident facts, dates and jurisdiction, insurance, the conflict check, the booked consultation, and what the caller was told about next steps. Four behaviors carry auto fails instead of points, and the two that catch firms out are taking case detail before the conflict parties are captured and a non lawyer answering a legal question with an opinion. Both belong to professional responsibility, so a deduction is the wrong instrument for either.
How do you measure intake specialist performance?
Pair the rubric score with the booking outcome and read them together. Conversion alone rewards whoever gets the easy calls, and a rubric alone can produce a specialist who scores 96 and books nothing. Coverage matters too, so record what share of a specialist's calls the average was built on before anyone walks into a review with it.
What should an intake specialist never say?
Anything that answers a legal question with an opinion, any prediction about what a case is worth or how it will end, and any filing deadline the firm has not verified. Each of those is firm policy rather than a rule we are stating, and the wording belongs in your intake script where a new hire will read it in week one.
How fast should a law firm respond to a new lead?
Third party figures put contact inside one minute well ahead of contact after five minutes, and those figures are unverified as of our 2026-09-08 research pass. Treat them as direction. They also describe whether somebody picked up, which is a different question from how the call went once they did.
What is a good intake conversion rate?
Third party sources put the target at 65 to 75 percent of sent agreements, unverified, and the number moves a lot with case type and lead source. A firm buying accident leads and a firm running on referrals are not comparable on this figure. Take the median of your own scored month and hold each specialist to improvement against that.
Sources
- Trinsic feature sheet and call notes, 2026-08-27, 2026-09-03, and 2026-09-10. Verified internally.
- Contact speed and free case evaluation figures for legal intake. Third party, unverified. No primary source captured on 2026-09-08.
- Intake conversion target of 65 to 75 percent of sent agreements. Third party, unverified.
- Aircall and StackAI on rule based scoring holding up better than tone scoring. Third party, unverified.
- Unauthorized practice of law framing. State bar guidance, pending counsel review.
- The 100 point weighting and the 14 point empathy section. Editorial judgment for this template.