Why is intake a problem in most firms?
Because enquiries arrive at all hours to a shared inbox, get acknowledged when someone notices, and are routed by whoever reads them first, with the important ones, the ones with a deadline, sometimes waiting behind the ones with a long story. A Customer Support Digital FTE on ftes.ai owns the queue: prompt acknowledgement from an approved template, qualification against the firm's criteria, a conflicts flag, and routing to the right professional with a summary, at any hour.
The line is absolute: the FTE handles the enquiry as a piece of administration and never as a matter. It does not know the answer to the client's problem and is designed not to try.
What does qualification look like for a firm?
The firm writes its criteria: practice areas served, jurisdictions, matter types the firm takes, minimum engagement size where relevant, and any exclusions. The FTE scores each enquiry against those criteria with the evidence from the enquiry itself, quoting the sentence that supports each score, and marks criteria the enquiry does not answer as unanswered rather than guessing. Enquiries the criteria capture poorly are flagged rather than scored. The professional who receives the routing challenges a criterion with a reason, which tunes the criteria over time.
A qualified enquiry reaches the right professional with the summary; an unqualified one receives an approved, courteous decline drafted for a person to send.
- Criteria: practice areas, jurisdictions, matter types, size, exclusions
- Evidence: the enquiry's own words behind each score
- Unanswered: marked, never guessed
How are conflicts handled?
The FTE extracts the names of people and organizations mentioned in the enquiry and flags them for a conflicts check by the person the firm designates, with the enquiry attached. It never runs the check against matter records, never clears a conflict, and never tells an enquirer whether the firm can act. The flag appears in the routing summary and the audit trail, so the firm can show that every enquiry carried a conflicts flag before a professional engaged with it.
This keeps the FTE outside the practice management system's matter data entirely, which is what the compliance lead will want to confirm.
What always reaches a professional immediately?
Any enquiry that mentions a deadline, a limitation period, a court date, or a regulator; any enquiry describing a dispute already under way; any enquiry from an existing client; any request for advice, however small; any enquiry that mentions a complaint about the firm; and any enquirer in evident distress. Each reaches the named professional or duty contact with a four-part summary: what was asked, what the FTE found in the enquiry, why it did not proceed on its own, and a suggested next step. The list is fixed in the remit at every autonomy level and grows after incidents.
Out of hours, the escalation still reaches the duty contact; the FTE never holds an urgent enquiry until morning.
What can the FTE never say?
Anything that could be read as advice, an opinion on the merits, a fee, a fee range, a timeline, an indication of whether the firm will act, or a comment on another professional. Its acknowledgement and decline templates are approved by the firm and say only what the firm decided they should say. The fact gate blocks any claim about the firm's services that is not in the approved sources, and the always-escalate list catches any enquiry that asks for more than administration.
Professional rules on who may give advice and how firms may communicate apply, and the compliance lead reads the templates before the first connection.
What does the firm measure, and how does the first month go?
Time from enquiry to acknowledgement including out of hours; time from enquiry to the right professional's first touch; the share of enquiries with a conflicts flag recorded before engagement, which should be all of them; the criteria approval rate with the professionals' send-back reasons; and hours recovered from the shared inbox. Week one: write the criteria, the templates, the conflicts routing, and the escalate list with the partners and the compliance lead, connect the inbox with a scoped account, and record the baseline. Weeks two to four: approve routing and drafts in minutes a day, send back with reasons, and read the reasons weekly. Day 30: read the FTE's own report and decide whether acknowledgements have earned autonomy within bounds; nothing else is on the table.
By day 30 every enquiry is acknowledged promptly, routed with a summary and a conflicts flag, and the ones that matter reach a professional first.