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Glossary

Legal intake

For any firm turning prospective clients into matters.

Legal intake is the process of gathering the facts, documents, and conflict-check information needed to decide whether to take a matter and, if so, to open it correctly, before any substantive work begins.

Why it matters for a solo or small firm

Weak intake is where bad matters get taken and good matters get opened with missing facts. For a solo without staff to do this systematically, intake quality caps how much of the practice can scale without quality dropping.

Example

A 45-minute consult produces two pages of handwritten notes. Legal intake turns that into a structured summary — parties, key dates, damages claimed, open questions — the version you can actually act on.