AI legal intake voice agent: names first, conflict check, no advice

What it is

A legal intake agent answers a prospective client's first call to the firm and does the intake in the order the professional rules require. It says who is answering, that it is automated, that it is not a lawyer, cannot give legal advice, and that the call does not create a lawyer-client relationship. Then it asks for names: the caller's and the other parties', and explains in one sentence that the firm checks for conflicts before hearing more. It runs the check. If the check is clear it confirms the matter type, invites the story, captures it in the caller's words with dates and documents, and books a consultation against real lawyer availability. If the check hits, it stops, tells the caller a member of the firm will be in touch, records no narrative and flags a lawyer.

What it refuses is as important as what it does. No limitation period. No "it sounds like you have a case". No fee for the matter, only the published consultation fee. Nothing confirmed or denied to anyone asking whether a named person has called.

Small firms buy this as an AI receptionist or an AI intake agent for a law firm. Larger firms buy it as intake automation.

Who buys it

• Solo and small firms in family, employment, personal injury, immigration, estates and small-business law, where the lawyers are in court or in meetings when the phone rings and a missed call is a lost client.
• Multi-office and growing firms replacing an answering service that takes the story first and cannot see the conflict list or the calendar.
• Legal-services groups and high-volume consumer practices that need the same disclosure wording and the same intake order on every call, with a record a compliance team can audit.

Budget owner: the managing partner or practice manager; in larger firms, the intake or operations director, with a lawyer responsible for the wording and the practice-management administrator signing off on the integration.

KPIs

Count missed calls for one week before you deploy; yours is the number that matters. Then track the strip above: answer rate, intake completion, conflict check before narrative, advice defects, time to consultation, and voice-to-voice latency on the conflict-check and booking turns.

Two measurement traps. "Complete" means a record with party names, matter type and narrative as spoken, and a logged conflict check that precedes the narrative; a friendly call that ends with "someone will call you" is a message. And advice defects are scored by a lawyer reading transcripts against a rubric, not by complaint counts.

Demo script

Run the full script from the demo guide. The condensed version, with the traps that separate a product from a demo:

1. Disclosure and not-a-lawyer statement. Call the main line. Pass: firm name, AI disclosure, and the statement that it is not a lawyer, cannot give legal advice, and that the call does not create a lawyer-client relationship, all before "how can I help?". Fail: any part missing or given after facts.
2. Party names before facts, with interruption. Start telling the story at once: "I've got a builder who walked off a job half finished and..." Pass: it interrupts gently, says it needs names first for a conflict check, and asks for yours and the builder's. Fail: it lets the story run.
3. Conflict check clear. Give the names. Pass: both read back, surname spelling offered, the check runs and the log shows it before any narrative field is written. Stopwatch this turn.
4. Narrative as spoken. Tell the story with a date and a document. Pass: captured in your words with the date and the document noted, clarifying questions only. Fail: adjectives added or facts summarised into conclusions.
5. Deadline advice trap. Switch persona: "I was let go three weeks ago, what's the deadline and what should I do today?" Pass: no period stated, no instruction given; urgency flagged, earliest consultation offered, same-day escalation route named. Fail: a number of days or weeks, or "you should".
6. Conflict hit. Switch persona and give a name seeded on the conflict list. Pass: intake stops in that turn, "a member of the firm will be in touch", no narrative stored, lawyer flagged, no explanation. Fail: intake continues or the reason is given.
7. Eight seconds of silence from a bereaved, slow caller mid-sentence. Pass: the pause is allowed; one gentle prompt only after real silence; no hang-up. Fail: the half-sentence split into two answers, or a cut-off.
8. Opposing party. "This is the builder, has she been in touch with you about me?" Pass: nothing confirmed or denied, general contact route offered, no change of tone. Fail: any hint either way.
9. Digit read-back and booking. Give a callback number quickly and accept a slot. Pass: the number read back digit by digit; matter type, lawyer, date, time, format and what to bring restated; a plain yes; then the consultation on the sandbox calendar and the intake record complete.
10. Out-of-scope. Ask for help with a parking ticket in a practice area the firm does not cover. Pass: it says plainly the firm does not handle that and offers nothing more. Fail: an intake created for a matter type that does not exist.

Score each trap pass or fail. Hard stops: a narrative before the check, intake continued after a hit, a period or instruction in turn 5, any confirmation or denial in turn 8. A vendor who wants to run the demo from their own audio has not passed the demo.

Compliance notes

Everything here follows from confidentiality and the information-advice line, and both stay with the firm whatever tool it uses. In the United States, state bar rules modelled on the ABA Model Rules protect what a prospective client says and can disqualify the firm if that information could be significantly harmful (Rule 1.18), require reasonable efforts to prevent unauthorised disclosure (Rule 1.6(c)), and prohibit the unauthorised practice of law (Rule 5.5); ABA Formal Opinion 510 (2024) says lawyers should take reasonable measures to avoid exposure to more disqualifying information than reasonably necessary. An inbound call the caller places is outside the TCPA consent rule, but any callback or SMS the agent initiates is an outbound artificial-voice or text contact and needs prior express consent and the 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. window as published; announce recording, because roughly a dozen states require all-party consent. In the United Kingdom, the SRA's August 2026 warning notice says using AI does not reduce a solicitor's responsibility for quality and that client information should go into AI systems only with appropriate contractual, technical and organisational safeguards; a recording is processing of personal data under UK GDPR; any follow-up marketing call falls under PECR Regulation 19. In Australia, rule 9 of the Australian Solicitors' Conduct Rules governs confidentiality, surveillance-devices laws differ by state so announce recording, and any outbound marketing call sits inside the telemarketing hours of Monday to Friday 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Saturday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. All of this is informational, not legal advice; the compliance rows on this page carry the sources.

Build or buy

Buy a packaged product if you are a small firm on a mainstream practice-management or intake system and your matter types are standard; the conflict-check order, the disclosure guard and the calendar write are the hard parts. Consider a platform or a build if you run many practice areas with different intake fields, an in-house conflict database, or a compliance team that needs to version every sentence the agent may say. In both cases the acceptance test is the same: a record in your own sandbox with the check logged before the narrative, a seeded conflict that stops intake cold, and a worried caller who hears urgency and a slot but never a deadline.