Safeguards
The second question, answered before you ask it.
Any competent automation shop can wire a form to a CRM. The question that actually decides this is where prospective client information goes, what the system says under your name, and what happens when a step fails. Here are our answers, in advance.
A pre-screen. Never a conflict check.
What the system runs is a pre-screen against your contact list. It searches the names you have in your practice-management platform and reports what it found.
It does not search matters, related parties, or opposing parties recorded in matter fields. It does not clear anything. There is no state in which it returns “no conflict.” When Tier 3 extends coverage to matters and relationships, the language still will not change to “check” — because the conflict determination is yours and the software's job is to put the right names in front of you sooner.
Why we are pedantic about one word
A vendor who lets “pre-screen” slide into “check” in a sales conversation will let other things slide during the build. The word is a reasonable proxy for how the rest of the engagement goes.
Two design decisions follow from it, and both were reversed during the reference build rather than shipped:
- A name match does not block the client. The first design held all client email on any name match. The firm's contact list had five Smiths. Now the match is weighed for whether the name is distinctive, your alert lists the actual matches by name, and only a genuine flag holds the letters.
- A search that cannot run is not a search that found nothing. Resuming past a failed lookup makes the count come back zero, and an email reading “0 matches” reads to an attorney as cleared. That handler was removed on purpose. The correct behaviour is to stop and say so.
Where a prospective client's narrative goes.
Intake narratives in criminal defence and PPO matters are among the most sensitive information your firm handles, and prospective client information is protected whether or not you take the case. The scoring step means that text transits a third-party model API. We are not going to bury that.
Every engagement therefore includes:
- Documented vendor terms confirming that submitted data is not used for model training
- A disclosure line on your intake form, so the person typing knows before they type
- A written data-handling addendum in the contract, naming the subprocessors and what each one receives
- A documented exit — what you keep, how you export it, how our access is revoked
Confidentiality and the supervision of non-lawyer assistance are your obligations, and an AI vendor now falls inside them. We would rather you raised that with us on the first call than discovered we had not thought about it on the third.
Ownership, stated once and plainly
Your number, your domain, your practice-management account, your data. We take delegated access and never ownership. That is the same rule we apply to a client's domain, and it is not negotiable in either direction — it protects you, and it keeps us from ever being able to hold anything hostage.
When it breaks, it breaks toward a human.
Most of what goes wrong is not a crash. It is a place the system stays quiet when it should speak: a blocked enquiry with no reply, a search that could not run reporting zero, a mistyped email landing in an inbox nobody owns.
- A scoring failure alerts you and sends the prospect nothing. It never produces an automated rejection.
- A conflict flag holds every client-facing message. Silence toward the client is the correct output for an unresolved conflict.
- Unverified is not fake. Typos and catch-all domains fail validation exactly like junk does. Those land with a named person at your firm.
- No error handler is allowed to turn a failure into a false negative. Blocking beats wrong-and-quiet, every time.
Things we will not build, at any price.
- Automated computation of deadlines. Not court dates, not filing dates, not limitations periods. A miscalculated limitations period is a malpractice claim with our workflow's name on it. We will build a reminder off a date a human entered. We will not build the calculation, and no amount of retainer changes that.
- Anything that advises a caller or states the merits of a matter. Every automated client message carries no-attorney-client-relationship language.
- Anything touching trust funds. No IOLTA, no client-funds movement, no payment processing against a trust account. The system's job ends at retainer-ready.
- Client-facing copy you have not read aloud. An automated decline goes out under your name and your bar number. Whether an automated decline is acceptable at all is a conduct call and it is yours. We will not go live without that sign-off.
- Work outside legal. No websites, no general business automation, no marketing. The specialisation is the whole business.
Bring the hard questions.
If your first instinct reading this page was to think of an objection we have not covered, that is the call worth having. Forty-five minutes.