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The Intake Leak Audit
Seven places a firm loses a signed case between the first contact and the signed retainer. The test for each one, and what the fix costs in staff time.
Every firm that has ever looked at its own intake has found the same thing: the cases it lost were not lost in the consultation. They were lost in the hours around it, in a gap nobody owned.
This is not a benchmark and it does not contain an industry loss percentage, because no honest one exists for South Florida firms of your size in your practice area. What it contains is seven tests. Run them on your own firm this week and you will have seven numbers that are actually yours. That is worth more than a statistic you cannot verify, and it is the only kind of figure your firm can repeat in its own advertising.
Do them in order. The first three cost nothing but a phone and twenty minutes.
Written by Aday Interactive, Inc., Coral Gables, Florida. We build intake and marketing systems for law firms. We are not a law firm, we do not give legal advice, and nothing here forms an attorney-client relationship.
How to use this
- Block one hour. Do not delegate the tests to the person whose work they measure; ask a partner, a spouse, or anyone outside the intake chain to place the calls and submit the forms.
- Write the answer down before you discuss it. The interesting part is the gap between what a firm believes its intake does and what it actually did on a Tuesday night.
- Test in Spanish as well as English if any part of your market is Spanish-speaking. In Miami-Dade, the Census Bureau puts the share of residents speaking Spanish at home above sixty percent, and a leak that only appears in Spanish is still a leak.
The seven
- 1 The call that arrives after the office closes
- 2 The form that only exists in English
- 3 The first reply, and how long it took
- 4 The conflict check that happens too late
- 5 The consultation that was booked and never confirmed
- 6 The fee conversation nobody actually had
- 7 The retainer that went out and never came back
The first one, in full
The call that arrives after the office closes
A person who has just been in a crash, arrested, or served does not wait for business hours, and does not call one firm. The call that rings out is not a lost call, it is a retained client at another firm.
The test
Call your own published number at 9pm on a weekday, and again on Sunday afternoon. Do not announce yourself. Count what happens: a person, a human-sounding recording, a generic voicemail, or nothing. Then do it again in Spanish and note whether the language choice comes before or after the greeting.
What the fix costs
Routing an after-hours call to something that answers and takes a callback number is configuration, not headcount. Budget an afternoon once. If a live answering service is the answer instead, that is a recurring bill, and the comparison is on our site.
The rule: If an automated voice answers, it must not discuss the merits of the case. Scoped to taking the name, the callback number, and the reason for the call, it is scheduling. Asked "do I have a case", it would be practising law.
The other six are in the PDF, in the same shape: the loss, the test, what the fix costs, and the Bar rule that bears on it.
What to do with the seven numbers
Put them on one page and look at which is largest. In most firms it is number seven, because the cost of that leak is a case that was already won. In firms with a Spanish-speaking market it is often number two, and it is invisible from inside an English-speaking office.
Fix them in that order, and re-run the tests in thirty days. Two measurements of your own firm beat any number anybody publishes about firms in general.
Six of the seven fixes are configuration rather than hiring, which is why a firm can do this itself. Whether it is worth doing yourself depends on what an afternoon of a partner's attention is worth against a fixed monthly cost.
If you would rather not build it
LegalCRM.pro is the seven fixes already built, for a fixed monthly subscription: bilingual intake forms from one field set, a conflict field before the consult stage, an automatic first reply your attorney approves once, confirmations and reminders, a pipeline that shows every unsigned retainer and its age, and reporting that separates English from Spanish so leak two cannot hide.
It is a monthly software subscription, never a fee per case, per inquiry, or per referral, which is what Rule 4-7.17 requires of anyone a firm pays to help it advertise. Month to month, no lock-in.
Run the seven tests first. If the numbers are already good, you do not need us, and we would rather you found that out from your own audit than from a call.
Aday Interactive, Inc. builds marketing and intake systems. We do not practise law, we do not give legal advice, and we do not form an attorney-client relationship. Every template this document tells you to send is advertising under Chapter 4-7 of the Rules Regulating The Florida Bar, and your firm's attorney is responsible for approving it. Rule numbers are current as of September 2026; verify them against the Bar's published rules before relying on them.