Automate Law Firm Client Intake and Case Setup

Most law firms rely on their practice management system (PMS) like Clio or MyCase for client intake. These tools offer web forms that populate client data, but they stop there. The automation is limited to structured data fields. The systems cannot read unstructured attachments like police reports, medical records, or prior correspondence that arrive as PDFs in an email.

Consider a 15-attorney personal injury firm. A new client fills out a form and attaches the initial incident report. A paralegal must open the PDF, manually locate the incident date, opposing party, and insurance details, then copy-paste each item into separate custom fields in Clio. After that, they manually create a standard task list for a new PI matter and assign it. This repetitive work consumes 25 minutes per matter, which for 70 matters a month is over 29 hours of non-billable time.

More advanced legal CRMs like Lawmatics improve the marketing and follow-up sequence, but they face the same core limitation. Their automation builders operate on pre-defined fields from their own forms. They cannot parse the content of an external document. This forces your staff to become a human bridge between unstructured information and the structured database of your PMS, introducing both delays and a high risk of data entry errors.

The structural problem is that off-the-shelf legal software is built for generalized workflows and structured data. These platforms cannot justify the engineering cost to build custom document parsing models for each firm's unique needs. To truly automate intake, a firm needs a system designed to read its specific documents and execute its specific case setup logic.

The engagement would begin with a full audit of your current intake workflow. We would map every step, from the moment a potential client submits a form or email to the point a case file is fully opened in your practice management system. This process identifies the exact documents, data points, and decision logic required, resulting in a detailed technical specification for your approval before any code is written.

The core of the system would be a FastAPI service hosted on AWS. When a new intake email arrives with PDF attachments, an AWS Lambda function triggers, sending the documents to the service. The Claude API performs OCR and extracts key entities like client name, incident date, and opposing party information. This structured data is then used to create a new matter in your PMS via its API. Supabase would store an audit trail for every processed document, providing a human-in-the-loop interface for paralegals to review and approve AI-extracted data before it's finalized.

The final system operates invisibly in the background. Your team continues using their email and practice management software as usual. The only change is that new case files, with all relevant data extracted from intake forms and PDFs, appear automatically within 5 minutes of receipt. You receive the full source code, a runbook for maintenance, and direct access to the engineer who built the system.