The enquiry was good. The engagement letter is still unsigned.

Intake by inbox. Unsigned letters. Clients who never come back.

Three stages, in your vocabulary. I use your terms on the first call; you shouldn’t have to translate your own business for me.

1. Enquiry

   Intake lives in an inbox.

   You call it: New enquiry · conflict check · “whoever picks up”

   Enquiries arrive by phone, form and referral, and land in whichever fee-earner’s inbox caught them. Conflict checks happen in somebody’s head, and as an informal step they quietly delay every engagement letter behind them. Nobody can say how many enquiries last month became matters. Clio’s shoppers found 48% of firms effectively unreachable by phone, and only a third answering email. The firms surveyed, meanwhile, rate their own client experience as good or excellent.

   The fixOne intake stage every enquiry lands in, whatever the channel, with the conflict check as its entry checklist and one name against it.

2. Letter out

   Chasing your own fee agreement.

   You call it: Engagement letter · client-care letter · trust deposit · WIP

   This is your offer stage. The letter goes out, the client goes quiet, and following up is not a billable hour, so it doesn’t happen. The work was won in the consult and lost in the week after it. Fifty-seven percent of people who shop for a lawyer contact more than one firm; 42% stop looking once they like the first one who actually talks to them. The SRA requires the client informed in writing at the time of engagement; the LPC expects fee implications explained up front; ABA Model Rule 1.5(b) wants the basis of the fee communicated, preferably in writing. Every regulator has made this a document. None of them has made it a stage. The trust deposit is the cleanest advance rule a firm can have: no deposit, no matter open.

   The fixAn engagement-letter stage with an owner, an age and a cadence (two touches and a close-out), and the deposit as the evidence that opens the matter.

3. Repeat

   The matter closes and so does the relationship.

   You call it: Repeat instruction · “most of our work is referrals” · matter vs client

   A satisfied client has a second matter within two years, for somebody. The firm with a review date gets it; the firm waiting for the phone to ring doesn’t. In the UK, “having used the firm before” is the single most common reason a consumer picks a firm. Firms that track only matters never see the client’s next instruction coming, and clients, in Thomson Reuters’ words, “do not tend to ask their law firms to change. Instead, they vote with their feet and their dollars.”

   The fixA review date on every closed matter, with the next-instruction ask written into it.

One intake. One owner per matter.

A single intake stage every enquiry lands in, whatever channel it arrived on, with the conflict check as its entry checklist and one name against it. An engagement-letter stage with an owner, an age and a follow-up cadence, because that is where the work is actually being lost. Trust deposit as the evidence that opens a matter, so nothing advances on optimism. Then a review date on every closed matter, with the next-instruction ask written into it.

Built in whatever the firm already runs beside the practice management system, with the practice manager trained directly rather than handed a manual. The matter side usually works; it is intake and the letter that live in email.

Three numbers you’d watch afterwards. Not a dashboard nobody opens.

Evidence. No legal case study yet, and I’d rather say so.

There is no law firm on my client list. What I have is the sales operation I built inside a US legal staffing firm, where the leak was an offer sitting out with nobody’s name against it. An unsigned engagement letter is the same object: the work is won, the document is with the other side, and following it up is nobody’s billable hour. The shape of the loss is identical, and so is the fix: an owner, an age, and a cadence. That makes it a well-founded expectation, not a legal case study, and the honest thing is to say which one you’re buying. I’ll show you the work on the first call and you can decide whether it transfers.

Billable hours, measured to the minute. The pipeline, not at all.

Asked by managing partners and by the practice manager who actually runs intake.

1. Fit

   Is a CRM even appropriate for a law firm?

   Your practice management system runs matters, and it should keep doing that. What is missing is everything before a matter exists: enquiries, conflict checks, consults and unsigned letters. That is a pipeline, and it is currently an inbox. I build the front half beside what you already have.

   → CRM problem, or process problem? The matter side usually works.

2. Ethics

   We can’t chase clients like a sales team.

   Agreed, and I wouldn’t. A follow-up on an engagement letter the client asked for is a service, not a pitch. The cadence is two touches and a close-out, and the close-out, told plainly, is often what gets the letter signed. The Ombudsman’s top two complaints are poor communication and delay. This is the cure for both.

   → What Chase the proposal builds: a follow-up on a letter they asked for is service.

3. Compliance

   Doesn’t our client-care letter already cover this?

   It covers the content. The SRA, the LPC and the ABA all tell you what the letter has to say. None of them says what happens on day nine if it hasn’t come back. A stage with an owner and an age is what turns a compliant document into a signed one.

   → What should sales pipeline stages actually measure? The regulator made it a document. Nobody made it a stage.

4. First look

   What would you look at first in our firm?

   Ninety days of enquiries and ninety days of engagement letters. From the first: how many arrived, through which channel, and how many became matters. From the second: how many went out, how many came back signed, and how long the unsigned ones have been sitting. Most firms can produce billable hours to the minute and neither of those two counts at all. That gap is the whole argument: the part of the firm that is measured improves, and the part that isn’t, doesn’t.

   → How do you audit a sales pipeline? Ninety days of letters. One honest number.