Legal intake software for consumer law firms
This directory compares 15 client-intake products against one buyer: the intake director at a US consumer law firm with more inbound contacts than the firm can reliably work by hand. Every capability in the matrix is a statement the vendor makes on its own site, linked to the dated capture it came from. Nothing here was tested, benchmarked, or scored.
15 products·5 archetypes·7 pricing pages publish figures, 6 carry none, 2 were not found·nothing tested or scored·last verified 2026-08-18
What that buys you is narrow and specific. You can see which intake model each product represents, what its vendor currently documents, whether its pricing page publishes any figures at all, and where the evidence stops. What it does not buy you is a winner. No product on this page has been measured against another, no conversion or response figure is offered as a target, and where the research reached a boundary the boundary is printed rather than filled in.
Use it in that order: measure where your own intake breaks, decide which archetype answers that break, then take the matrix and the demo questions to three vendors. Shortlisting before measuring is how firms buy a product for a problem they do not have.
What every cell here is reliable about
Every capability line below is reliable about one thing: what the vendor published about its own product, on the date printed beside it. It is silent about whether that holds inside your firm, which is what the demo questions further down this page exist to test. The strongest evidence class present is therefore a dated official vendor statement, and once material outside this page's operations scope is set aside, no claim in this research set carries a high confidence rating.
Where does intake actually break?
Before shortlisting a product, locate your own break. The path below is a model assembled from captured evidence, not a measurement of your firm. Each step names the system it touches, the way it fails, and something you can measure yourself this month without buying anything.
| Step | Owner | Failure mode | Measure it yourself |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Inbound contact arrives | Whoever is nearest the phone | Nobody answers and the contact is never recovered. This happens before any software in the stack is involved | Count inbound calls that reached voicemail and were never returned within one business day |
| 2. First response | Intake coordinator, or the attorney by default | The reply never goes out at all. The common framing as a speed problem is misleading, because the measured failure is absence | Measure the share of contacts that received any human reply, before measuring how fast the replies arrived |
| 3. Qualification | Intake coordinator | Qualification depends on who picked up, so comparable prospects get different treatment and the firm cannot tell which sources produce viable matters | Have two team members qualify the same recorded inquiry independently and compare. The divergence is the measurement |
| 4. Conflict and duplicate search | Not established by this research | The search runs against an incomplete record, because the prospect exists only in the intake tool and not in the matter database | Confirm which data stores the search actually reads. If it reads one, its result is narrower than it looks |
| 5. Engagement and signature | Attorney for the decision, intake for the follow-through | The agreement is sent and never signed, and nothing in the stack notices | Age every unsigned engagement agreement against your own follow-up interval |
| 6. Matter handoff | Case manager, receiving from intake | Data does not arrive, arrives partially, or arrives duplicated, so the work restarts from the client | Sample recently opened matters, compare each field against the intake record, count the fields that had to be re-collected |
Step 4 is in this table because captured practitioner discussion puts it in the path. The owner field says "not established" because the captures do not settle it. How your firm handles that step is a question for your own counsel, and this page states nothing about it.
What the measured steps actually measured
Steps 1 and 2 carry the published mystery-shopping measurement in this map, and step 3 carries one measure of what callers were told, from the same study. Every one of those figures was published by a party with a commercial position in the answer, and both studies are named here so you can weigh that yourself.
Hennessey Digital, an agency that sells marketing services to law firms, submitted inquiries through law firms' own website lead forms and timed what came back. It reports that 26 percent of law firms do not respond to online leads. Read that with its rule: an inquiry counted as unanswered only if no personal outreach arrived within seven days, and every inquiry was a fictitious story submitted between 10 a.m. and 12 p.m. in the firm's own time zone. The sample was 1,333 US law firms contacted in the first quarter of 2025, including personal injury, criminal defense and other practice areas, and it deliberately re-contacts firms from earlier years, which makes it a panel rather than a fresh draw. It is the one measurement here not published by a company selling intake software, and even so the study page names an intake product that appears in this matrix, so it is not disinterested either.
Clio, which sells both practice management and the client intake product in this matrix, hired a research company to approach 500 law firms by email and phone with a client inquiry. It reports that 33 percent of the firms emailed responded at all, that 48 percent were unreachable by phone even after being given a chance to respond to messages, and that in phone conversations 41 percent offered rate information, 12 percent could estimate a total cost and 36 percent could explain the process and next steps. Two limits travel with those figures. The captured report does not state where those 500 firms were or what they practise, so this page does not describe them as US consumer firms. And the publisher sells the remedy the finding implies.
These two studies must not be blended. Different channels, different windows, different denominators, different years. No combined law firm response rate exists in this evidence, and no response-time target appears anywhere on this page, because the captured practitioner discussion disagrees coherently about what an acceptable window even is.
What firms record when nobody sold them a tool
The measurement you can act on is your own. A paralegal handling all intake for a firm tracks inquiries in a spreadsheet: date, source of case from a fixed list, specific source details, case name, case type, whether it was referred out, and whether it was accepted, rejected or pending, with a monthly summary sent to marketing. A small-firm owner running separated stages tracks total leads, qualified leads, schedule rate, show-up rate and close rate, and states that clearly defined stages make the gaps easier to find. Another advises documenting the existing process before hiring anyone: calls per day, time per call, and the sign-up rate for the cases the firm actually wants.
Each of those is one firm's practice, self-reported. They are worth reading as a starting schema, not as a standard. No source in this research publishes a normal close rate, show-up rate or sign-up rate, so your own baseline is the only defensible comparison a purchase can be judged against.
There is a reason to build the baseline before the shortlist. One firm reports that all intake knowledge and lead data sit with a single paralegal, that revenue stops when she is away, and that no metrics exist because she is the only person who would know them. Software bought into that situation inherits it.
What should an intake director compare?
Five product archetypes appear in this verified core. They are not tiers of quality. They are different answers to the question of which system owns the client before there is a matter.
| Archetype | The operating need it answers | Products in this verified core | First implementation question |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intake CRM | A pipeline that holds prospective clients as a distinct population, separate from open matters | Captorra, Clio Grow, Law Ruler, Lead Docket | What crosses into the matter system, and what stays behind? |
| Practice-management suite | One system of record from first contact through the life of the matter | CASEpeer, CloudLex, Filevine with Lead Docket, MyCase, PracticePanther, Smokeball | Which intake functions are native to the suite, and which depend on a marketplace partner or a higher plan? |
| Conversational intake | A front end that talks to the prospect instead of presenting a form | Intaker, Perspective AI | What happens when the conversation needs a person, and who is that person at 9 p.m.? |
| Workflow automation | Sequenced follow-up and internal routing driven by rules the firm defines | Lawmatics, SimplyConvert | Who writes and maintains the rules after the vendor's onboarding ends? |
| Form and document automation | Structured questionnaires that produce documents from the answers | Gavel | Where does the collected data go once the document is generated? |
The archetype question is upstream of the product question. A firm whose break is at step 1, an unanswered phone, is not helped by better conditional logic on a web form. A firm whose break is at step 6 is buying a data problem, not an intake problem, and the matrix column that matters to it is the handoff limit rather than the feature list.
Verified legal intake software decision matrix
Fifteen products, grouped by what they are for and alphabetical within each group, because there is no ranking here to express. Every capability is what the named vendor published on the dated capture. "Publishes figures" means the pricing page carried at least one price at capture time, never that the price covers intake. Where the entry-price line is absent, one of two things is true and the card says which: either the pricing page was captured and carries no figure, or no pricing page was found on the official domain at all. All seven such cards were re-read against their captures on 2026-08-19; five were confirmed and two were corrected from the first wording, which had described a missing page as a silent one.
15 productsgrouped by archetype, alphabetical within it, no ranking implied
No product matches that.
Fifteen products is a small register, so a narrow search finds nothing quickly. Clear the box, or choose All.
Intake CRM (4)
Built for the lead rather than the matter. These sit in front of, or beside, a case system.
Consumer-law and high-volume intake teams
- Verified intake evidence, vendor-attributed
- Markets lead and case management specifically to consumer law firms
- Pricing page state
- No public pricing result found in the dated official-domain search
- Intake at the entry price
- Not assessable, and for a different reason from the products whose pricing page was captured: no public pricing page was found on the official domain in the dated search, so there is no page here that publishes or withholds a figure
- Integration evidence
- Partners page captured; live chat described as a direct integration
- Material limitation
- Positioning is verified, feature completeness is not. The same page carries an unevidenced conversion assertion that is not repeated here
- Last verified
- 2026-08-16
Firms wanting intake-to-matter continuity in one vendor's stack
- Verified intake evidence, vendor-attributed
- Intake forms can be shared on a website or sent by email or text, with submitted contact and matter information captured in the product
- Pricing page state
- Publishes figures: plans start at 49 US dollars per user per month across four plans
- Intake at the entry price
- Intake gated above entry tier. The intake product is included in the top plans and sold as an add-on for the two middle plans, at a price the page does not publish. The plan table's own intake-forms row agrees, listing the forms as unavailable on the entry plan and included on the highest, though that row carries three values against four plan columns, so it is read against the packaging statement rather than on its own
- Integration evidence
- Integrations page captured; email and attachment filing to a matter is described there
- Material limitation
- The add-on price for the two middle plans is not published, so the cost of an intake-capable configuration cannot be read off the page
- Last verified
- 2026-08-16
Firms converting inquiries through a dedicated CRM pipeline
- Verified intake evidence, vendor-attributed
- Intake forms adapt questions to a lead's earlier answers; collected details are imported into CRM and practice-management systems
- Pricing page state
- Captured, no published figures. The page states subscription pricing is billed monthly on an annual term, with a discount for annual prepayment
- Intake at the entry price
- Not assessable: the pricing page publishes no figures, so this axis has nothing to read
- Integration evidence
- States it integrates with dozens of legal vendor tools, without an enumerated list
- Material limitation
- The annual term sets your minimum exposure before the product can be abandoned. "Dozens" is not a countable figure and the supported systems are unverified
- Last verified
- 2026-08-16
High-volume intake teams wanting a lead pipeline separate from matters
- Verified intake evidence, vendor-attributed
- Immediately captures lead information submitted through a firm's web form
- Pricing page state
- Captured, no published figures. The captured page carries testimonials and a demo request rather than rates
- Intake at the entry price
- Not assessable: the pricing page publishes no figures, so this axis has nothing to read
- Integration evidence
- Integrations page captured
- Material limitation
- Owned by Filevine. Its documented handoff and custom field mapping both describe the path into Filevine, so they say nothing about a third-party case system
- Last verified
- 2026-08-16
Practice-management suite (6)
Intake is a module inside a larger system the firm already runs, so the question is not whether intake exists but which tier carries it. Read each entry-price line below rather than generalising across the group: of the six suites here, three list intake in a named tier above the entry tier on their captured pricing page, one lists it as a paid add-on rather than in a tier, and two publish no figures at all.
Personal injury firms wanting lead conversion inside the case system
- Verified intake evidence, vendor-attributed
- Presents CRM software for personal injury firms connecting lead conversion and case management
- Pricing page state
- Publishes figures: three per-user tiers at 79, 119 and 149 dollars a month, with no long-term contract or setup fee stated
- Intake at the entry price
- Intake gated above entry tier. The CasePeer Intake Portal is listed in Advanced, the highest of three tiers
- Integration evidence
- Integrations page captured
- Material limitation
- The evidence supports personal injury positioning and workflow connection, never conversion performance
- Last verified
- 2026-08-16
Personal injury firms
- Verified intake evidence, vendor-attributed
- Intake Manager captures lead and intake details, organizes documents, tracks follow-ups and moves accepted intakes into active matters
- Pricing page state
- Captured, no published figures
- Intake at the entry price
- Not assessable: the pricing page publishes no figures, so this axis has nothing to read
- Integration evidence
- Legal app integrator captured; the vendor positions the product as Microsoft 365 native
- Material limitation
- The vendor states it is built exclusively for personal injury firms, so a mixed consumer practice is outside the stated design target. A firm on a different office suite cannot infer equivalent behaviour
- Last verified
- 2026-08-16
Firms evaluating a connected intake and case stack from one company
- Verified intake evidence, vendor-attributed
- Lead Docket sends automated SMS and email follow-ups for leads arriving by web form, live chat or after-hours call
- Pricing page state
- Captured, no published figures. Buyers are directed to the sales team for a tailored plan
- Intake at the entry price
- Not assessable: the pricing page publishes no figures, so this axis has nothing to read
- Integration evidence
- Integrations directory captured, grouped into named categories
- Material limitation
- This row overlaps the Lead Docket row: Lead Docket is owned by Filevine, and standalone versus bundled packaging needs confirmation. No budget can be formed without a sales conversation
- Last verified
- 2026-08-16
Firms wanting intake inside general practice management
- Verified intake evidence, vendor-attributed
- Firms can build and customize intake form templates for each area of law they practise
- Pricing page state
- Publishes figures across three per-user plans. The figures are not restated here because the captured page renders monthly and annual rates as adjacent values, which is a transcription risk this page will not take
- Intake at the entry price
- Intake gated above entry tier. Client intake forms and legal CRM are listed in the Pro plan and not in the entry Basic plan
- Integration evidence
- Integrations page states step-by-step documentation for connecting internal or third-party platforms
- Material limitation
- Conditional-logic depth is untested, and "easy setup" is vendor copy that does not distinguish native connectors from work a firm would build
- Last verified
- 2026-08-16
General-practice firms preferring one connected suite
- Verified intake evidence, vendor-attributed
- Intake forms support custom fields for capturing client information
- Pricing page state
- Publishes figures across four per-user plans, each showing a monthly rate and a lower annual rate
- Intake at the entry price
- Intake gated above entry tier. Intake forms are listed in the BUSINESS plan, the third of four, and not in the two lower plans
- Integration evidence
- Integrations page captured
- Material limitation
- Which listed applications are available on which plan is not stated, which matters here because intake itself sits above the entry plan
- Last verified
- 2026-08-16
Firms wanting intake continuity inside one suite
- Verified intake evidence, vendor-attributed
- Lead and client information is captured via online forms, within a workflow the vendor presents as spanning lead intake, case management and billing
- Pricing page state
- Publishes a starting monthly figure of 149 dollars marked with an asterisk, rather than a complete per-plan list
- Intake at the entry price
- Placed, but as an add-on rather than a tier. The captured page lists Intake under Add-ons on one plan and as Included on another, and lists Inquiry Intake and Advanced Matter Intake among the features of a higher tier
- Integration evidence
- Marketplace captured
- Material limitation
- Native suite functions have to be separated from marketplace dependencies, and the plan figures are "from" prices qualified by an asterisk
- Last verified
- 2026-08-16
Conversational intake (2)
The first exchange is a generated or scripted conversation rather than a form.
Firms wanting multichannel conversational capture
- Verified intake evidence, vendor-attributed
- Captures prospects across chat, text, LSA, WhatsApp, Meta and phone from one platform
- Pricing page state
- No public pricing page appeared in the dated official-domain search
- Intake at the entry price
- Not assessable, and for a different reason from the products whose pricing page was captured: no public pricing page appeared in the dated official-domain search, so there is no page here that publishes or withholds a figure
- Integration evidence
- Help-centre article documents connecting CRMs and other external applications
- Material limitation
- The vendor separately asserts that the firm replying first usually wins the case. That assertion is unevidenced, is contradicted in part by captured practitioner experience, and is not carried anywhere on this page
- Last verified
- 2026-08-16
Firms wanting a qualification conversation in front of the intake queue
- Verified intake evidence, vendor-attributed
- States that the product qualifies personal injury, family law, estate planning and immigration inquiries against the facts that determine fit, before a paralegal takes the call, replacing static forms with adaptive conversations that structure information and trigger a next step
- Pricing page state
- Publishes figures: a starting monthly price that includes a monthly credit allowance rather than a per-user rate
- Intake at the entry price
- No tier gate to read: the pricing page publishes a starting monthly price but sells conversation credits rather than tiering intake, so intake is not placed behind a tier here
- Integration evidence
- Completed conversations arrive as a structured summary routed to the customer's inbox, CRM or Slack, and routing rules send strong fits to the calendar, decline weak fits and redirect referrals
- Material limitation
- A multi-vertical product. The same official page sells patient intake and therapy intake alongside legal intake, so treating it as legal-first would overstate the positioning even though the legal positioning is officially evidenced
- Last verified
- 2026-08-18
Workflow automation (2)
Sold on what happens after capture: sequences, triggers and follow-up.
Marketing-led firms automating the path from inquiry to consultation
- Verified intake evidence, vendor-attributed
- Presents software for law firms spanning client intake and marketing automation
- Pricing page state
- Captured, no published figures. Plans are quoted after a qualification step
- Intake at the entry price
- Included, and metered. Client intake, lead management, custom forms and e-signature appear in the lowest shown plan's own included list, and that same plan caps automations at 10 against unlimited above it, contacts at 500 against 10,000, conflict checking at Basic against Advanced, and e-signatures at 50. What an intake-capable configuration costs is still unreadable, because no plan carries a price
- Integration evidence
- Integration marketplace for legal technology applications
- Material limitation
- The pricing page also references credit-based pricing for an AI lead-routing capability, so a quote may combine a subscription and a usage component, neither quantified
- Last verified
- 2026-08-19
Consumer-law and personal injury intake teams
- Verified intake evidence, vendor-attributed
- Presents a platform with intake-process features and a CRM tailored to law firms, with real-time reporting and customizable dashboards
- Pricing page state
- Captured, no published figures. The pricing page is framed around firm workflow rather than rates
- Intake at the entry price
- Not assessable: the pricing page publishes no figures, so this axis has nothing to read
- Integration evidence
- Integrations page captured
- Material limitation
- Which metrics the reporting exposes, and whether intake funnel stages are measurable in it, is not established. Module boundaries between intake, referral and litigation need confirmation
- Last verified
- 2026-08-16
Form and document automation (1)
Intake treated as a document-production problem, where the intake form and the resulting document are one system.
Firms whose intake is a structured questionnaire that produces documents
- Verified intake evidence, vendor-attributed
- Workflow questionnaires can use conditional logic so clients only see relevant questions; responses are reusable for later matters or documents
- Pricing page state
- Publishes figures, and states that annual plans billed upfront get two months free
- Intake at the entry price
- Not stated on the captured page as a tier gate. A different constraint is published: each plan carries a monthly session allowance, the lowest of them 100 sessions a month, rising with the plan, and entry-plan subscribers must upgrade to add seats, while higher plans bill seats above the allowance at 50 or 35 dollars a month
- Integration evidence
- Names Docusign, Zapier and a practice-management product among connected systems
- Material limitation
- A session is not defined on the pricing page, so the cost of a given monthly lead volume cannot be derived. The page does not distinguish native connections from ones mediated by an automation platform
- Last verified
- 2026-08-16
Three of the seven products that publish figures do not state a tier gate for intake, and only one of those three publishes no placement constraint at all. That is in the table on purpose. It is what stops the four gated products below from being read as a pattern. The two reviewers who checked this page disagreed about the count, and re-reading the seven cards settles it: four place intake above the entry tier, Smokeball places it as an add-on rather than a tier, Gavel attaches a session allowance instead, and Perspective states no placement constraint. Four plus three is the seven the sentence starts from.
What does the advertised price actually buy?
Four products are individually documented as placing client intake above their advertised entry tier. These are four observations, each read off one vendor's own dated pricing page. They are not a rate, a proportion, or a statement about the category, and nothing here establishes that the pattern holds for any product not named.
- Clio. The published entry price is 49 US dollars per user per month, and the intake product is included in the top plans and sold as an add-on for the two middle plans, at a price the page does not publish. The plan table lists online client intake forms as unavailable on the entry plan and included on the highest. The head-to-head against the other intake CRM here is at Clio Grow vs Lawmatics.
- CASEpeer. The Intake Portal is listed in the Advanced package, the highest of three published tiers, which is 149 dollars per user per month against an entry tier of 79.
- MyCase. Client intake forms and legal CRM appear in the Pro plan's inclusion list and not in the entry Basic plan's.
- PracticePanther. Intake forms are listed in the BUSINESS plan, the third of four published plans.
Gating is not only about tiers. Gavel attaches a monthly session allowance to each published plan, the lowest of them 100 sessions a month, rising with the plan, and states that entry-plan subscribers must upgrade before they can add seats, while higher plans bill additional seats at 50 or 35 dollars a month. For a high-inbound firm, an allowance and a seat rule constrain intake volume independently of the headline price, and a session is not defined on the page.
Then the part that decides how much weight any of this can carry. Six of the core products captured a pricing page that publishes no price at all: Lawmatics, Law Ruler, Filevine, SimplyConvert, CloudLex, and Lead Docket. For two more, a dated search of the vendor's own domain surfaced no pricing page at all: Captorra and Intaker. That is an audited absence at capture time rather than proof that no pricing exists; either vendor may quote privately. Their packaging cannot be compared on this axis at all, so no share, ratio or proportion of the market is available from this evidence, and none is offered.
What each vendor's pricing page published at capture
15 verified products, counted from their own captured pricing surfaces
Table view
| Pricing page state | Products | Which |
|---|---|---|
| Publishes figures | 7 | Clio Grow, CASEpeer, MyCase, PracticePanther, Smokeball, Perspective AI, Gavel |
| Captured, no figures | 6 | Lawmatics, Law Ruler, Filevine with Lead Docket, SimplyConvert, CloudLex, Lead Docket |
| No pricing page found | 2 | Captorra, Intaker |
One buyer in the captured discussions noticed the packaging directly: a small firm already standardised on one vendor's practice-management product reports irritation at having to pay separately for intake, and notes that switching had become hard because the firm was already set up. That is one pseudonymous account in a materially old thread. It establishes that at least one buyer minded. It establishes nothing about how many do.
None of this says a vendor is behaving improperly, or that bundled intake is better than gated intake. It says that the number in the comparison article is not the number for a configuration that performs intake, and that you will not find the real one without a quote.
What happens after you sign
Four costs appear in this evidence that no captured pricing page attaches a figure to. Each is one account, and is written here as one account.
- Setup time and a setup fee. A firm beginning implementation reports being told by its assigned product manager that setup might take up to three months, with a setup fee on top of the base subscription cost. This is the firm relaying what it was told at the start of implementation, not a report of what happened. No captured pricing page in this research attaches an amount to setup or onboarding, and one states the opposite of a fee: CASEpeer's page says no long-term contract or setup fee is required.
- Your own process work. A practitioner states that a configurable intake automation product is worth what someone at the firm invests in decomposing every firm process into steps the vendor can automate, on the reasoning that the vendor cannot automate what it does not know can be automated. That is internal analyst time, before configuration begins, and it falls on you.
- Migration run by a third party. One described move from an on-premises practice-management system to a cloud product was managed by a separate consultant, neither the vendor nor the firm. A different provider in the same thread reports a firm that ran its on-premises system for over a decade before moving to a cloud product, which is the shape of the data a migration like that has to carry.
- The threshold itself. Practitioners writing for their peers state that a firm may operate without case-management software early on but cannot scale without it once the practice grows.
Two of these accounts come from an IT-provider forum where the speakers describe client environments rather than their own firms, and the firms discussed are very small. Nothing here establishes what a migration costs, how long one takes, or how many buyers are replacing rather than adopting.
The captured pricing pages do name this work. Clio's plan table carries a data migration row and a live onboarding training row, CASEpeer lists guided implementation and data migration, MyCase lists both with a scope caveat, and Law Ruler lists a one-time onboarding fee in two of its plans and states that turnkey implementation by certified consultants is available. What none of those pages states is a price for any of it. The absence is of a number, not of the topic, so the move is to make it a quote question rather than to estimate it here.
Which intake model fits your firm?
- Shortlist an intake CRM when prospective clients need to live as a managed population before they are matters: sourced, prioritised, worked and dispositioned, with rejection as a normal outcome rather than an exception. Then ask what crosses the boundary into the matter system, because that boundary is where this page's evidence is thinnest.
- Shortlist a practice-management suite when the firm's real problem is that intake and matters live in different places, and the cost is re-keying. Check where intake sits in the plan structure before comparing the suite's entry price with anything.
- Shortlist conversational intake when contacts arrive across channels at times when nobody is at a desk. The question that decides it is not the conversation quality but the escalation path: what happens the moment the prospect needs a person.
- Shortlist workflow automation when the break is between the first response and the consultation, and the firm can name who will own the rules after onboarding ends. The captured evidence is consistent that configurability and time to value trade against each other, and that account is several years old by the speaker's own admission.
- Shortlist form and document automation when intake is a structured questionnaire whose output is documents, and reuse of the collected data matters more than pipeline management.
No archetype wins. A firm that separates reception, screening and the consultation into distinct roles is buying for a different shape of problem than a firm where one person does all of it, and both firms exist in this evidence.
What should you verify in each demo?
Take these into the demo with your own step-1-to-6 measurements in hand.
Package boundaries. Which plan includes the intake functionality being demonstrated, and is that plan the one you were quoted? For any product whose pricing page publishes no figures, ask for the quote to separate subscription, usage or credit components, and one-time fees.
Post-purchase cost. What is the setup fee, who performs the implementation, and how many hours of your firm's own time does the vendor's plan assume? Ask what a migration from your current system costs, and who runs it.
Data ownership and export. If you leave in eighteen months, what comes with you, in what format, and who pays to extract it?
Integrations, precisely. Is each connection you need native, API-based, marketplace-delivered, partner-led, or documented only on a help page? An availability listing is all this research can confirm.
The handoff, tested rather than described. Ask the vendor to demonstrate a full intake moving into your actual case system with your fields, then compare the resulting matter against the intake record field by field. Some documented handoffs are same-vendor and at least one vendor documents the crossing to nine case systems made by other companies, so ask which kind yours is, and remember that a listed integration is a statement of availability rather than a measurement of what arrives.
Escalation and failure recovery. What happens when automation fails, when a prospect needs a person, when a duplicate record appears, or when data does not reach the matter system? Ask to see the failure path, not the happy path.
Reporting. Can the product produce source attribution and disposition, including referred out and rejected? Those are the two fields the practitioner spreadsheet schema treats as central, and this research does not establish whether any product in the matrix produces them. Ask to see the report, not the dashboard screenshot.
Conflict and duplicate search, asked in one form only. Does the product run a search? Does it present results for a person to decide on? Does it ever record a decision itself? One commenter drew that line precisely, separating running the query from taking the step of deciding whether a conflict exists, and it is a useful question to put to a vendor. This page states nothing about who should perform, approve or delegate anything, and how your firm handles this step is a question for your own counsel. Note also that one vendor describes a firm-wide search across its intake and matter products for conflicts of interest or duplicate contacts; the availability of that feature is not evidence that your firm's data is complete enough for it to return what you expect.