Triage and Onboarding at an Employment Law Boutique
Rivergate Employment is a nine-lawyer boutique. It receives about 110 enquiries a month through a web form, a phone line and two partners' direct email addresses. Every enquiry is read by a partner, who forwards promising ones to a fee earner. Conflict checks are performed by whoever takes the call, usually by typing the client name into the Outlook search bar. Three weeks into one matter last year, a fee earner discovered the firm already acted for the opposing party's parent company. Roughly 35% of enquiries fall outside the firm's practice areas, and another 12% come from prospective clients who cannot afford the firm's rates. Engagement letters are signed for only 61% of opened matters, and the gap is usually discovered when a bill is queried. Mean time from enquiry to signed engagement is nine days against a target of three. Two fee earners say they lose half a day a week reading enquiries that go nowhere. The managing partner wants a redesigned intake and onboarding process that does not require new hires.
1. Design the triage decision rules and say who should make the decision. Be specific about the criteria, the possible outcomes and the exceptions.
Read the worked answer
Define qualification criteria before anyone looks at an enquiry. At minimum: practice area fit (and which side of the dispute the firm acts for), jurisdiction, matter type and estimated value against a stated minimum, the client's ability and willingness to pay, urgency including any limitation or tribunal deadline, strategic value, and whether any conflict indicator appears on the face of the enquiry.
Use three outcomes, not two:
- Accept and route to a named fee earner within one working day, when the enquiry meets all criteria.
- Decline with signposting to an appropriate referral source, when it clearly fails a criterion. Do this quickly and politely; a fast, clear no is better client service than a slow, vague yes.
- Escalate to a partner for strategic, high-value or genuinely ambiguous enquiries only. Set a target that escalations stay below 10% of enquiries, otherwise the triage role has no authority.
Assign the decision to a trained intake coordinator - a senior paralegal or legal secretary, not a partner. Partners reviewing everything is the current bottleneck and consumes the firm's most expensive time. Give the coordinator written criteria, a decision script and a data capture form. Name a partner as backup for same-day escalation.
Handle two exceptions explicitly. Any enquiry mentioning a deadline, dismissal date or hearing date goes to a fee earner the same day regardless of fit, because the risk of a missed limitation date outweighs triage efficiency; if declined, record the referral given. Second, the coordinator must not give legal advice beyond signposting - the boundary is qualification, not opinion.
Record every enquiry, including declines, with reason code. That dataset tells the firm whether the 35% out-of-scope volume is a marketing problem, a website problem or a referral-source problem, and gives you the baseline for measuring the redesign.
2. Redesign the conflict screening control. What is checked, when, by whom, and what is recorded?
Read the worked answer
Search a structured index, not a mailbox. The current control fails because Outlook only contains people someone emailed, it is not searched consistently, and it produces no evidence. Build one firm-wide index covering current and former clients, adverse parties, parent and group companies, insurers, trading names, aliases, key individuals and the opposing representatives where known.
Check at a defined trigger point. Run the check after basic qualification but before the prospective client shares substantive confidential information. This limits the firm's exposure if a conflict later emerges, because the firm has not yet received information it cannot unlearn.
Separate the searcher from the beneficiary. The person who will act on the matter should not be the sole person performing the check, since they have an incentive to clear it. The intake coordinator runs the search; a partner resolves near-matches and records the decision.
Capture mandatory fields at enquiry: full legal name of the prospective client and any related entities, all adverse parties including parents and insurers, matter type, jurisdiction, and the source of the enquiry. Use fuzzy matching for spelling variants and run each adverse party separately, not just the client.
Record an audit trail for every check: date and time, searcher, exact search terms, index version, result, and the decision plus who made it. For a potential match, document the analysis and, where a matter proceeds with informed consent or an effective waiver, the basis on which that was obtained.
Feed the results back. Log every conflict hit by type so you can see which referral sources or practice areas generate them. Review the index monthly against new client and adverse-party data. Where the firm or a fee earner has moved from another practice, add a specific check on the fee earner's prior-firm exposure, since that risk is invisible to a client-name search.
3. How would you redesign onboarding so that engagement letters are signed before substantive work, and which metrics would show whether it is working?
Read the worked answer
Build one onboarding checklist with a named owner and a due date for each item: engagement letter and terms, identity and anti-money-laundering verification, scope and fee basis, conflict confirmation reference, matter opened in the practice management system with correct client and matter numbers, billing arrangements, key dates, and the client's named contact. Keep it on one page; a long checklist gets ignored.
Make the sequence enforceable rather than aspirational. The system rule should be that a matter can be opened and time recorded, but time is held as non-billable, and no substantive advice is issued, until the engagement letter is recorded as signed. Provide one documented exception route - a partner may authorise urgent work with a written reason and a 48-hour deadline to obtain the letter - and review exceptions weekly. A rule with no exception route will simply be bypassed.
Reduce the nine days by attacking the two waits: decision-to-letter (use a standard template generated from matter data, sent the same day as acceptance) and client-to-signature (use e-signature and a one-page covering note explaining scope and fees; chase at day two and day five automatically).
Metrics to report monthly:
- Enquiry-to-decision time and decision-to-signed-letter time, with the percentage inside three days.
- Percentage of matters with a signed letter before the first billable time entry - this is the compliance outcome that matters.
- Exception-route usage and the proportion closed within 48 hours.
- Out-of-scope enquiry rate and decline reason mix.
- Conversion rate by enquiry source, which also tests whether triage is turning away good work.
- Duplicate client and matter record count.
Report alongside realisation on those matters, so that no one can claim speed was bought by dropping commercial checks.