Professional Services /Customer-service agent live field guide · 8 min

Engagement Intake & Routing Desk

Reads each inbound enquiry, extracts the client and matter details, classifies the request, runs a conflict check, drafts a holding reply, and routes it to the right team — for a person to review before anything is sent.

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theater/demos/profsvc_engagement-intake-routing-desk.html · sandbox · read-only

Open

FIG. 1

The live demo, running on fabricated data. Open it to step through the full flow — every output is shown for a person to approve before anything happens.

How it would work

Reads every new enquiry the moment it lands, classifies the matter, runs the conflict check, and drafts a holding reply — then holds the whole thing for a person to approve before anything is sent or a file is opened.

Input 01

The enquiry, as it arrives

Inbound enquiries from the shared intake inbox, web forms and attachments — the client name, the matter narrative, and whatever time signals are buried in the message.

Agent 02

Extracts, classifies, checks

Pulls out the client and matter detail, classifies intent and urgency, matches the new party against the conflict register, proposes a route, and drafts a holding reply grounded in your engagement terms.

Output 03

A triaged enquiry, held

A classified, routed enquiry with a drafted holding reply and any conflict flag — laid out for a coordinator or partner to review and approve before it is sent, routed or a file is opened.

Where it works well

It reads every enquiry the moment it lands and surfaces the urgent one to the top.

Best for a multi-partner advisory or legal practice with a shared intake inbox and several matter types — disputes, tax advisory, SMSF, valuation.
The intake coordinator or client services lead is who benefits: the repetitive reading, re-keying and first-pass triage moves off their desk.
At dozens of enquiries a week, the recaptured hours go back into client-facing intake conversations, not the sorting.

The slow, invisible cost is the gap between when an enquiry arrives and when the right person sees it — a dispute with mediation booked next Thursday sits in a shared inbox behind a postal-address change while it gets re-keyed across the CRM and the practice system.

Where it works badly

It is confidently wrong when the conflict register is out of date, not when it's missing.

Weak on genuinely novel enquiries that don't fit your matter taxonomy — it should classify low-confidence and route to a human, not guess a clean answer.
Poor value for a small practice where one person already sees every enquiry within the hour — the triage layer adds ceremony without recapturing time.

The honest test

Pick five recent matters: were the opposing parties and related entities in the conflict register on the day the enquiry landed? If the answer is "mostly, eventually," the register is the first job, not the AI.

A stale register comes back clean on a matter that is in fact conflicted — the opposing party agreed verbally last week and never recorded. The check is only ever as good as the register behind it, and a clean result looks the same whether the register is current or not.

What it doesn't do — and shouldn't

It drafts and flags. A partner decides whether the firm can act.

WHAT IT DOES

Surfaces the matter type, urgency, proposed route and a drafted holding reply

Flags when the new party matches an existing client in the conflict register

Cites the engagement-terms clause its holding reply is grounded in

WHAT IT WON’T

Send the reply or open the matter file

Clear a conflict or decide the firm can act

Discharge the firm's costs-disclosure obligation

Whether to act once a conflict is flagged is a judgement reserved to a person under Rule 11 of the Australian Solicitors' Conduct Rules (conflict of duties concerning current clients) — and for accounting practices, APES 110 §310. Getting it wrong (acting against an existing client, or mis-stating fees where written costs disclosure is required under the Legal Profession Uniform Law once costs are likely to exceed $750) lands on the firm and the named practitioner before the relevant Legal Services Commissioner — not on the software.

What your data has to look like

A current, structured conflict register and a real, owned routing map.

Typical readiness

across orgs we see, before the first job

Conflict register, current to the day

Usual weak point

Active-client list, structured

Needs shaping

Matter taxonomy with an owner each

Usual weak point

Engagement terms as referenceable text

Needs shaping

A shared intake channel to read from

Usually ready

The real first job

The conflict register is almost always the weak point — held as fields nobody updates the day a matter is agreed. Fixing how conflicts get captured at the point work comes in is usually the real first job — bigger and more valuable than the triage layer on top, and it pays off whether or not the AI ever goes live.

Right fit if…

You run a shared intake inbox across several matter types and partners

Mis-routing or a slow first response carries real cost in your practice

Your conflict register is structured and kept current to the day

An intake coordinator currently triages every enquiry by hand

Walk away if…

One person already sees every enquiry within the hour

Your conflict register is captured verbally and recorded "eventually"

Most enquiries are novel one-offs that don't fit a matter taxonomy

You want a tool that clears conflicts or signs off costs disclosure for you

Open questions

The worried-buyer questions, answered straight

It is built to stop, not to wave through. Before drafting anything beyond a holding reply it matches the new party against your conflict register and flags a hit — in the demo the opposing party, Brimbank Developments, is an active audit client (Matter #2024-118), so the reply is held and the matter escalated to the engagement partner. It never clears a conflict itself; a person makes that call under Rule 11 of the Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules. If the register is incomplete, the check is only as good as the register — which is why getting that data right is part of the work.

It classifies on what it can actually extract and shows its confidence, rather than guessing a clean answer — in the demo the classification reads at 91%. A low-confidence or unreadable enquiry is routed to a person to triage instead of being auto-routed to a team. You will get more “needs a human” outcomes early on; that is the honest behaviour, not a fault.

No. It does the repetitive first pass — reading, extracting, classifying, conflict-checking and drafting the holding reply — so your coordinator spends their time on judgement: confirming the route, handling the awkward cases, and deciding what the firm takes on. The capacity it frees goes back into client-facing intake work, not out of the team.

The conflict register and the active-client list must be current to the day — a stale register is the one failure that matters, because it can miss a live conflict and let the firm act against an existing client. The routing map and matter taxonomy can be reviewed monthly. If your client and matter records lag reality, fix that before switching anything on.

It runs inside your own environment — your Microsoft 365 tenancy, your CRM or practice system — not a public chatbot. Enquiry content, client identities and conflict-register data stay within the firm’s systems and existing access controls, which matters because intake content can attract client legal privilege from the first contact. We scope what the model can read and write back during setup, so privileged or commercially sensitive matter detail is not exposed beyond where it already sits.

No — it can prompt, but it cannot discharge that obligation. Under the Legal Profession Uniform Law, written costs disclosure is required once costs are likely to exceed $750 (excluding GST and disbursements). The holding reply acknowledges the enquiry and says a conflict check is underway; it does not quote fees or make the disclosure. A person owns the costs agreement and the disclosure, on the firm’s letterhead and the firm’s accountability.

What it takes to build

3–4 weeks · 4 phases

Reused from template~65%

Bespoke to this skin~35%

stack · Claude · Power Automate/n8n · Outlook/Forms · CRM/practice system · review UI

What it would cost

Fixed scope, fixed price, fixed dates.

Bite-sized first piece

One contained change, low risk

Pilot build

Most builds land here

Embedded support

Scale on proof

Considering this for your practice?

The honest place to start is a bite-sized first piece — often fixing how conflicts get captured at intake, before any triage layer goes on top. Tell us where it hurts; we'll play it back, scope it, and show you what's possible.

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