Law firms & professional services
Lightweight matter and intake CRM for a 15-person law firm
15-person law firm, BC
A 15-person law firm was running matter intake through a shared inbox, a conflict-check spreadsheet, and individual lawyer notebooks. We built a focused intake + matter tracker that gave them one source of truth without forcing them onto an enterprise platform.
Anonymized. Real project shape and outcome ranges, identifying details changed to protect client confidentiality.
Headline numbers
What changed
Intake-to-decision time
~5 days → ~36 hours
Conflict checks
Manual → automatic on every intake
Closed intakes/month
+22% in the first quarter
Build time
7 weeks to launch
The problem
Where they were stuck
New client inquiries arrived in a shared inbox. Whoever saw it first triaged it, sometimes not at all.
Conflict checks happened in a spreadsheet that wasn't always opened before the first consultation was booked.
Lawyers tracked their own matters in personal notes — a partner couldn't easily see what was in flight across the firm.
The firm had looked at large practice management platforms but every option was either expensive, US-priced, or required moving the books off the system they already trusted.
The approach
What we built and why
- 1
Built a focused intake form that captured the right info up front and triggered an automatic conflict check against the existing client list.
- 2
Each matter got a record with owner, status, deadlines, and a notes thread the whole firm could see.
- 3
Reminder rules surfaced 'no contact in 14 days' and 'deadline this week' on a partner dashboard.
- 4
Left their existing accounting and document storage alone — the app integrated where it helped and stayed out of the way where it didn't.
The result
What it actually did
Median time from inquiry to engagement decision dropped from about 5 days to roughly 36 hours.
Conflict checks now run automatically on every intake, not when someone remembers.
Partners can answer 'what's our pipeline look like?' in 10 seconds on a phone.
Closed intakes increased about 22% in the first quarter after launch — mostly from leads that previously went cold.
Under the hood
What it's built on
Stack & shape
- Web app with role-based access (intake staff, lawyers, partners, admin)
- Automated conflict-check against existing client list
- Reminder engine for stale matters and upcoming deadlines
- Optional client portal for document handoff (deferred to phase 2)