The intake engine
This is the real thing — the same door every matter this firm has taken came through. Send whatever you have and watch what it does with it.
Court, cause number, parties and dates get read off the document — you don't need to type them. Same-day answer on anything that arrives before noon Central.
What happens next
The order is the product. A conflict screen that runs after a machine has read the other side's pleading has not screened anything — it has documented a problem.
The timestamp is taken the moment the request opens rather than when the database is reached, because a cold start is minutes and every one of them would otherwise be spent against my own promise to you rather than against the machine's.
measured at arrival, not at writeYou give me the other side. That runs against the conflict list first — ahead of extraction, ahead of analysis, ahead of me. If it matches, your document is quarantined unread and what gets written down is that a screen matched, never what your document said.
runs before the document is openedYou do not type them. They are already in the pleading you sent, and asking you to key them in again is nine fields of friction in front of the only thing that matters.
four fields you do not fill inA scan with no text layer is reported as a scan rather than as an empty document. The difference matters: one is a fact about the file and the other would be a false statement about its contents.
16 file types, magic-byte checkedPosture, parties, dates, causes of action, defects, the mechanisms that fit, and — the field that earns its place — what is still unknown. The memo has to fill in all ten or it is not returned.
10 required fields, none optionalNothing generated here is ever sent to you. There is no approve-and-send button in this system and there should not be one. Every reply you get is written by a lawyer.
no machine writes to you, everBefore noon Central, you hear back that day. After it, by midday the next working day. There is a clock on my dashboard counting down against that promise, and it turns colour before it runs out.
24 hours, and something is countingThe part worth reading twice
Most intake forms ask for everything, because information is free to collect. For a law firm it is not free. It is the opposite of free.
Every question this firm asks produces an answer this firm has received. Received information from a prospective client is what Rule 1.18(c) disqualifies on. So a matter that was always going to be declined should be declined before it is investigated — because investigating it first is how a firm conflicts itself out of the next matter, for one it never took.
That is why this form is short. Not to raise the conversion rate. Because the long version costs you a lawyer you might have needed later, and costs me the ability to act for the next person who walks in.
Two live submissions on the day this was built left it blank. One wrote “we” and turned out to be one of two judgment creditors. Guessing there is a conflicts problem and a Rule 1.18 problem at once, and it is the kind of mistake nobody notices until the other side does. So a person asks you.
If the conflict screen stops your submission, the record stays. You told this firm something; Rule 1.18 attached the moment you did. A firm that deletes that record has deleted the evidence of a disqualification it will hear about later — from the other side, in a motion.
A matter that lapses without an answer is recorded as lapsed and not as declined. They are different facts. Rule 1.18 confidentiality attached either way, and a later conflict check that read silence as a refusal would be reading the record wrong.
By the numbers
The screen at the door is a tripwire, not a full conflicts check. It is deliberately loose — a false positive costs one email; a false negative costs a disqualification motion. The real screen is run against the firm's register by a person, and it is recorded with who ran it and when.
An AI service under a commercial agreement extracts and summarises what you send so it can be reviewed the same day. It does not train on your material, and the provider deletes inputs and outputs within thirty days. Nothing it produces is sent to you.
Contracts, letters, a judgment, a mess in a folder — whatever you have. There is no charge for the read and no obligation after it.
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