Cutting Intake Screening Time and Giving Associates a Searchable Firm Memory
A mid-sized specialty litigation firm (roughly 35 attorneys and staff)
Representative engagement based on ScaleHardened's standard implementation pattern for firms with this profile. Client identity, exact figures, and quotes are not disclosed or fabricated.
Problem
The firm's intake coordinator manually screened every inbound call before a matter could be opened, creating a bottleneck during high call volume. Separately, associates routinely interrupted senior partners to ask questions already answered in prior case memos and firm precedent files — memos that were technically searchable, but only if you already knew which folder to look in.
Solution
We built two connected systems: a voice-based intake screener that captures the essential facts of an inbound matter (nature of claim, timeline, prior counsel, conflict-check basics) before routing to a human attorney, and an internal knowledge assistant retrieval-grounded on the firm's precedent memos, prior briefs, and internal process documentation.
Architecture
The voice agent runs on a telephony integration with a structured decision tree for common matter types, escalating immediately to a live attorney for anything outside its defined scope. The knowledge assistant uses a document-chunking and retrieval pipeline over the firm's document management system, with access scoped by matter confidentiality level, and every answer includes a citation back to the source memo.
Workflow
Inbound call reaches the voice agent, which asks structured intake questions and checks basic conflict indicators.
Captured intake summary routes to the appropriate attorney or the intake coordinator for review, with the call transcript attached.
Internally, any associate can query the knowledge assistant for precedent language or process questions, receiving a sourced answer with a link to the original memo.
The intake coordinator retains full override authority — the system assists triage, it does not make matter-acceptance decisions.
Implementation notes
The firm's biggest early concern was confidentiality — access control by matter sensitivity was scoped and tested before any document ingestion began, and the firm retained the ability to exclude specific matters from the retrieval index entirely.
Results
- — Engagements of this shape typically see manual pre-screening time on straightforward inbound calls drop 30-50%, based on the mechanism (structured intake questions handled before a human touches the call), not audited client figures — freeing that time for higher-judgment intake work
- — Associates querying the knowledge assistant get a sourced answer in seconds instead of waiting on a partner's availability — typically a 1-2 day reduction in how long a newer associate waits on precedent questions during ramp-up, based on the mechanism, not audited client figures
- — These are engineering estimates of the mechanism's typical effect based on the workflow structure, not audited client-reported figures