For law firms
The firm that answers first is usually the firm that gets instructed.
A prospective client with a real matter contacts three firms in one afternoon. Two send an acknowledgement; one asks the right questions and offers a consultation. Valenza builds the intake layer that makes yours the third — without a fee earner spending the afternoon on it.
A 30-minute strategy call. We map how enquiries reach the firm, where they stop, and what the system would change.
Worked example — case enquiry → qualification → consultation.
The journey
How an enquiry travels through your business today
01 · The enquiry
Someone with a live problem contacts you — often outside office hours, often having just contacted two competitors.
02 · The screen
Is it your practice area? Is there a conflict? Is it within time limits? Is the matter worth the firm's time? Every one of those questions must be asked before a fee earner is involved.
03 · The gap
Screening is nobody's billable hour, so it happens when someone is free. Meanwhile the client is deciding who to instruct.
04 · The consultation
Instruction is won in the first proper conversation. Everything before that is intake — and intake is where firms lose work they would have taken.
Where case enquiries stop
Intake competes with billable work
The people best placed to screen an enquiry are the people whose time is most expensive. So screening waits, and the enquiry cools.
Out-of-hours enquiries
Legal problems do not arrive between nine and five. An enquiry sent on Friday evening that is read on Monday has spent the weekend with your competitors.
Wrong-fit matters consume consultations
Without structured screening, matters outside your practice areas or below your threshold reach the diary and displace work you actually want.
The prospect who goes quiet
A prospective client who asked for a fee estimate and then went silent is not gone — they are comparing. In most firms nothing reaches them again.
Count it in your own numbers
- 1Take last month's enquiries from every route: website, phone, referral forms, email.
- 2Count how many were screened within two hours, and how many were screened at all.
- 3Count the consultations booked, then the matters actually opened.
- 4The gap between enquiries received and matters opened is the intake pipeline. We run it with your figures on the call.
The system
What we deploy for a law firm
Capture
Website enquiries, email, phone messages and referral routes consolidated into one intake pipeline with a single record per prospective client.
Engage
An immediate, professional acknowledgement that does actual work: confirms whether the matter is in your practice areas, explains what happens next, and sets expectations about time limits where relevant.
Qualify
Structured screening you define — practice area, jurisdiction, key dates, opposing party for conflict checking, and matter threshold — captured before a fee earner opens the file.
Book
Initial consultations booked into the right fee earner's diary from live availability, with confirmations and reminders.
Follow up
Prospects who received a fee estimate and went quiet are followed up on a defined schedule, and anyone who misses a consultation is offered a route back.
Measure
A weekly page: enquiries by source and practice area, screened, booked, instructed — against the baseline measured before go-live.
No legal advice is given and no assessment of a case's merits is made. The system establishes fit and gets the right prospect in front of the right fee earner, faster.
What changes once it is live
Today: Enquiries screened when someone has a gap
With the system: Acknowledged in minutes, screened the same hour
Today: Friday-evening enquiries read on Monday
With the system: Handled immediately, with next steps set
Today: Conflict details gathered at the consultation
With the system: Captured at intake, before the diary is committed
Today: Fee estimates sent and never revisited
With the system: Followed up once, on a defined schedule
Today: Enquiry-to-instruction rate unknown
With the system: One page a week, by practice area and source
The rules this system runs under
It never gives legal advice, never assesses the merits of a matter, and never comments on likely outcomes. It establishes whether the matter is one your firm handles and arranges the consultation where advice properly belongs.
It does not create a solicitor-client relationship, and the conversation says so plainly where that matters. Nothing it sends is a retainer, an engagement, or an acceptance of instructions.
Conflict-relevant details are collected at intake and surfaced to your team before a consultation is confirmed. The system never clears a conflict itself.
Confidentiality is treated as the default: one-to-one conversations, minimal collection, no marketing to anyone who did not ask, and immediate human handover on anything sensitive. If a person asks whether they are speaking to an assistant, it tells them.
Objections, answered straight
Agreed, and it does not. The system operates strictly at intake: practice area, jurisdiction, key dates, conflict details, and scheduling. Any question that requires judgment about a matter is handed to your team rather than answered. This boundary is enforced in the system's design, not left to discretion.
It collects the details your conflict process needs — parties, matter type, dates — and surfaces them to your team before a consultation is confirmed. The check itself stays with the people responsible for it. The system's contribution is that the information is complete and arrives before the diary is committed.
Every message is drafted in your firm's register and approved by you before anything goes live. Firms usually spend the most time here, and they should — the acknowledgement is the first impression the prospective client gets.
Partly. Referred clients still contact you at inconvenient hours and still notice how long the first reply takes. But if you receive very few direct enquiries, the honest answer is that the return is smaller, and we will say so on the call rather than after it.
Who this is for
This works if:
- You receive direct enquiries regularly, not only referrals
- An initial consultation is the step that converts
- Fee earners currently lose time to screening and scheduling
- You have practice-area boundaries and a matter threshold worth enforcing
This isn’t for you if:
- You are at capacity and want fewer enquiries, not more
- All work arrives through a panel or a single institutional client
- You are not willing to approve the messages sent in the firm's name
Case enquiry → qualification → consultation
See what your intake is actually converting.
A 30-minute call. We map how enquiries reach the firm, where screening stalls, and what the seven stages would look like against your practice areas — with the arithmetic run on your figures.
No pitch deck. Scope is set on the call and anything we would build is quoted in writing afterwards.