Streamline Law Firm Intake with Custom AI

Many 20-person law firms rely on tools like Clio Grow or the intake features within MyCase or PracticePanther. These systems are excellent for creating web forms and managing structured data. The problem arises when clients send unstructured documents like scanned police reports, prior court filings, or medical records via email. These systems cannot read or interpret the contents of a PDF attachment.

Consider a personal injury firm's intake process. A potential client fills out a Clio Grow form, which creates a contact. They then email 15 pages of medical records and a scanned police report. A paralegal must open each PDF, read through it, identify key information like dates, doctor names, and incident descriptions, then manually type a summary into a note field in Clio. This takes 25 minutes of non-billable time per client and is highly susceptible to transcription errors.

This workflow persists because case management software is architected as a database with a user interface, not an intelligence layer. Its automation is based on triggers and rules, for example, creating a task when a form is submitted. The software has no native capability to perform optical character recognition (OCR) on a scanned document or use an LLM to understand the text. You are forced into manual work because your primary tool is fundamentally not built for unstructured data interpretation.

The first step is a discovery process to audit your firm's current intake workflow. We would review at least 50 sample intake documents across your primary matter types to understand the specific data points you need to extract. This audit defines the prompts for the AI and maps the data to the fields in your existing case management system. You would receive a scope document detailing the exact data flow before any code is written.

The technical approach involves creating a dedicated intake pipeline. Client emails with attachments would be routed to a secure AWS S3 bucket you control. An AWS Lambda function would trigger, performing OCR on scanned PDFs and then passing the text to the Claude API. The Claude API, guided by a carefully engineered prompt, would extract key entities and generate a concise summary. A FastAPI service would present this extracted data in a simple web interface for a paralegal to review and approve with a single click.

Once approved, the system would use your case management software's API to populate the relevant matter fields, attach the source documents, and create the initial summary note. This entire process would take less than 90 seconds from email receipt to final entry. The delivered system runs entirely on your firm's cloud infrastructure, includes a complete audit trail of every action in a Supabase database, and gives you full ownership of the source code.