Not every new enquiry is a good enquiry.
For solicitors, accountants and other professional firms, the intake problem is familiar. A message arrives through the website or into a shared inbox. Someone reads it, asks a few follow-up questions, perhaps books a short call, and only then discovers that the work is outside the firm’s practice areas, below the minimum fee threshold, or in the wrong location.
That is frustrating for everyone. The prospect waits longer than necessary for a “no thank you”. Fee-earners lose time they could have spent on suitable work. Partners get a patchy view of how much unsuitable demand is coming into the firm and why.
An example workflow: a new enquiry fee-fit pre-screener
This is an example automation workflow, not a real client case study.
Imagine a small accountancy or legal practice with a website enquiry form and a shared intake email address. The firm has a clear list of services it wants to take on, a rough minimum fee level for each area, and a defined geographic reach. Those rules may already exist in a partner’s head, but they are not consistently applied at the first enquiry stage.
A pre-screener assistant can sit at the front of that workflow. When a new enquiry arrives, it extracts the basic facts: matter type, stated scope, rough value if provided, location, urgency and any obvious red flags. It then checks those details against a simple reference table controlled by the firm.
The assistant might classify the enquiry as:
- likely suitable and worth a scoping call;
- unclear and requiring a specific follow-up question;
- probably below threshold;
- outside the firm’s current practice areas;
- outside geographic coverage;
- requiring urgent human review.
It then drafts a suggested response. For a good-fit enquiry, that might be a polite invitation to book a scoping call, with a short note about what information to bring. For an unsuitable enquiry, it might be a courteous decline or referral-out draft, making clear that the firm is unable to assist.
The key word is “draft”. Nothing is sent automatically.
Why this matters commercially
Unsuitable enquiries are not just an admin inconvenience. They absorb billable attention in small slices: ten minutes reading the email, ten minutes checking details, twenty minutes on a call, another few minutes writing the decline. Across a month, that becomes a real cost.
A simple pre-screening workflow can save 15 to 30 minutes per unsuitable enquiry by helping the firm reach the right next step sooner. It can also improve the experience for prospects who are a good fit, because they receive a clearer and faster response.
There is a management benefit too. By logging enquiry types and reasons for decline, the firm can see patterns. Perhaps many enquiries are below threshold because the website is attracting the wrong audience. Perhaps a service line is generating demand the firm keeps turning away. Perhaps the minimum fee thresholds need clearer wording on the contact page.
Guardrails are essential
This is a medium-risk use case because it sits close to professional judgement and regulatory obligations. It should be designed conservatively.
The assistant should never give legal, tax, accounting or financial advice. It should not decide whether the firm accepts a client. It should not send a decline automatically. Every response should be reviewed and sent by a named fee-earner or partner.
The reference table should also remain under partner control. Practice areas, minimum fee thresholds and referral preferences change over time. If the assistant is checking against old rules, it will produce poor drafts. A quarterly review of the rules is a sensible starting point.
The draft language matters as well. A decline should be polite, careful and non-advisory. In some situations, the safest output may simply be: “This needs human review before any response is prepared.” That is still useful, because it stops the system pretending to know more than it does.
What you would need
The building blocks are straightforward: access to enquiry form submissions or forwarded emails, a short table of practice areas and fee thresholds, an AI model to extract and draft, and an approval queue inside the firm’s normal email workflow.
It is usually best to start with one enquiry route rather than every inbox at once. For example, run the assistant on website form submissions only for the first month. Review the classifications, compare them with human decisions, and improve the reference table before expanding.
A practical first step
Take the last twenty enquiries your firm declined and write down the real reason for each decline. If the same reasons appear again and again, you have the basis for a pre-screening workflow.
If your partners are spending too much time on enquiries they were always going to turn down, I can help you design a safe, human-approved AI intake process. Book a short call, or describe your current enquiry flow, and we can identify where automation would help without creating regulatory risk.
