Automate Client Intake for Your Small Law Practice

Many small firms rely on their Practice Management System (PMS), like Clio or MyCase, for client intake. These tools are excellent for capturing structured data from a web form, but they fail the moment unstructured data arrives. A potential client emails a disorganized mix of scanned letters, photos, and prior legal filings. The intake features of the PMS are useless, forcing a paralegal to manually download, open, and interpret every file.

Consider a 15-attorney firm receiving 25 new inquiries a week. A paralegal spends their first 90 minutes each day monitoring the intake inbox. An email arrives with a scanned demand letter and a prior settlement offer. The paralegal must open each PDF, identify it, manually create a new matter in Clio, type in the client's name, opposing counsel's name, and key dates, then upload the documents. This is 25 minutes of low-value work per inquiry, multiplied across dozens of inquiries per week.

Even with tools like Adobe Acrobat for OCR, the output is just a wall of text. The tool cannot distinguish a plaintiff's name from a defendant's. The structural problem is that a PMS is fundamentally a database with a user interface, not a language processing engine. Its architecture is built for structured forms. It cannot read the content of a document to classify a matter type or extract key entities, which is the core of the legal intake bottleneck.

The engagement would start with a thorough audit of your firm's current intake workflow. Syntora would map every document you receive for each matter type, from initial inquiry emails to signed engagement letters. We would work with your team to define the specific data points that need to be extracted from each document. This discovery phase results in a detailed data schema and workflow map that you approve before any code is written.

The technical approach would use a FastAPI service as the core of the system, deployed on your firm's AWS account. When a new email arrives, the service uses AWS Textract for OCR on any attachments. The extracted text is then passed to the Claude API with carefully engineered prompts designed to classify the matter type and extract key entities into a structured JSON format. This structured data is then used to create a draft matter in your PMS via its API, with Supabase providing a complete audit trail for every action.

The final deliverable is a headless automation system that integrates directly with your email and existing practice management software. For each new inquiry, the system creates a draft matter, attaches the original documents, and posts a summary for the responsible attorney's review. This human-in-the-loop design ensures an attorney always has the final say, blending AI efficiency with professional oversight. The entire system runs on your infrastructure, ensuring client data remains secure.