Automate Client Communication and Intake for Your Small Law Firm

Small law firms often rely on Clio Grow or built-in tools within a CMS like MyCase for client intake. These products handle basic web forms but fail at intelligent follow-up. They send generic, time-based reminders like "It's been 3 days since you received the form," not content-aware messages like "I see you uploaded your driver's license but not the police report yet." The logic is fixed and cannot adapt to case-specific document needs.

Consider a 10-attorney personal injury firm. A new client fills out an intake form. A paralegal manually reviews it, creates a new matter in Clio, then emails a checklist of required documents. As the client sends PDFs piecemeal over several days, the paralegal must open each email, identify the document, save it to the right folder, and manually update a checklist. This cycle of checking and re-checking for dozens of clients consumes hours of non-billable, error-prone time.

The structural problem is that these platforms separate the intake form from the case documents. The form tool knows what it asked for, but it has no idea what the client actually sent as an email attachment. There is no OCR or classification layer connecting the unstructured data (PDFs in an inbox) to the structured checklist in the CMS. This gap forces a human to act as the bridge, manually reading attachments and checking boxes.

The engagement would start with an audit of your firm's current client intake and communication process. Syntora would map every step, from the initial website contact to the "all documents received" milestone. This involves reviewing the fields in your case management system and the email templates you currently use for follow-ups. The goal is to define the exact triggers for each automated communication.

The core of the system would be a FastAPI service hosted on AWS. When a PDF arrives in a dedicated intake email inbox, an AWS S3 event triggers a Lambda function. The function would use an OCR tool to extract text, then send it to the Claude API to classify the document type (e.g., "Police Report," "Medical Bill") and pull key details. This data updates a client checklist in a Supabase database, which serves as the system's dedicated data store.

The delivered system is a private automation engine. Drafted emails appear in a "Review" folder in your paralegal's Outlook, requiring a human click to send. This provides a critical human-in-the-loop gate. A simple web dashboard built with Vercel shows the real-time status of all client intakes, flagging any that are stalled. The entire system runs on your firm's own AWS account, ensuring no client data is processed by third-party SaaS vendors. A typical build cycle for this is 4-6 weeks.