Cooper Law is a social security disability and family law firm in Minneapolis, Minnesota, owned by Emily Cooper. In family law matters, Cooper Law uses a sliding-fee scale to serve the gap between clients who qualify for free legal aid and those who can afford a typical lawyer’s rates. In Social Security Disability matters the firm can waive its fees or represent clients under a contingent-fee arrangement, but it must satisfy a complex set of requirements in order to take a case.
That complexity means intake can eat up a lot of staff time. Cooper Law already had some intake forms, but wanted to automate as much of their intake workflow as possible in order to reduce the burden on staff and enable a remote receptionist service to qualify potential clients.
Before I started building anything, we carefully outlined the intake decision trees for social security disability and family law. Then we repeatedly tested and refined the forms to make sure they worked as intended, including passing intakes to Clio Grow for follow-up workflows.
I chose to build the forms in Gravity Forms because it does a lot of the heavy lifting out of the box and it is developer-friendly for the rest. I developed a custom WordPress plugin to handle the more complex form logic and provide a settings page for form selections, API tokens, and customizable options and messages.
First we built the forms primarily for the receptionist service (and the firm’s own staff, when necessary). Based on that experience, we developed a 2.0 version of the forms, plus a variation on each form with instructions for regular folks and social workers.
Altogether, the forms have now processed thousands of intakes.
Most law firms could realize similar benefits by automating parts of their intake workflow. If you’d like to talk about automating your firm’s intake, let’s talk.