What separates a record from a message
A message tells you someone called. A record tells you whether the matter is worth taking, and gives your team enough to act on it before anyone picks up the phone again.
The test is simple. If your paralegal has to call the person back to ask what they meant, the record failed. The record is only as good as the call behind it, which is how the call itself is run.
The fields that decide whether a matter is viable
Every practice is different, which is why the field list is built with your firm rather than handed to you. Most sets include what happened, when it happened, where, who was involved, whether anyone else has been contacted, and what the caller believes they need.
Dates matter more than almost anything else in the record, because they determine urgency and sometimes eligibility.
Adverse party details, captured as standard
The other side's name goes in the record unless you tell us otherwise. A matter your firm cannot take is worth identifying before anyone invests time in it, and your conflict process cannot run without it.
Recording what the caller actually said
Alongside the structured fields, the agent records the caller's own description in their own words.
Summaries lose the details that turn out to matter, and a paraphrase of a distressed caller is often less useful than the sentence they actually used. The structured fields are for sorting. The verbatim note is for judgement.
Flagging what did not fit
Intake scripts do not anticipate everything. Where something falls outside the script, the agent notes it rather than discarding it, and marks the record so your team can see there is something the form did not capture.
How urgency is marked
Urgency is set by your rules, not by the agent's impression. A deadline close to expiry, a caller in distress, or a matter type you have flagged is marked and routed immediately. Everything else arrives in the summary. Where the record goes next is a separate decision, covered in how intake reaches your case management system.
What we keep out of the record
No assessment of the case, no view on whether a claim is strong, and no answer to a legal question. Where a caller asks for advice, the question is recorded and passed to you unanswered.
Talk to us
If you want to see what a record for your practice would look like, we will build a sample against your matter types before you commit to anything. Talk to us about your matter types.
