Industries
Automation for solicitors and law firms
A solicitor cannot answer first enquiries between hearings, and those enquiries decide whether anyone reaches a consultation at all. Intake gets separated from the work itself.
What can a law firm actually automate?
First contact and everything around it: an agent takes the enquiry, establishes the type of matter, the location and the urgency, books a consultation and reminds the person of it. It gives no legal advice and does not assess the merits of a case — that is a deliberate boundary rather than a limit of the technology.
First contact
Type of matter, location, timing, whether anything has already been filed or exchanged, whether there are documents. A solicitor opens the record and sees at once whether it is theirs.
Consultations booked
The agent offers free slots, books one and sends a reminder the day before. A paid consultation is confirmed before the meeting rather than after it.
Deadline reminders
Hearings, procedural deadlines, dates under contracts. A notice in advance, somewhere you will see it, rather than in a calendar nobody opened.
A boundary stated out loud
The agent says plainly that it is not a solicitor and gives no advice. That removes the expectation which makes bots like this irritating in the first place.
Where to start
With qualifying enquiries. Solicitors lose a great deal of time to conversations that end in “that is not my area” or “you are out of time”. Those conversations can be finished before they start.
What is needed is a list of the matter types you take and the signs that an enquiry is not for you. The rest is built around that.
On confidentiality
The first question in this field is not technical, it is about the data. Intake carries the circumstances of a matter and sometimes documents, and before any work starts there has to be an answer to: where this is stored, who can reach it, what leaves for an outside service and for how long.
I design intake so the agent collects the minimum needed to book a consultation: matter type, location, urgency, a contact. The detail and the documents are brought to the consultation itself rather than sent into a chat. Less passes through the conversation that way, and nobody has to put into a chat what they have not yet put to a solicitor.
If you need the conversations held inside your own estate, that is a separate conversation and worth having before the build.
How it is built
The chat agent on Watbot. Answering the phone while you are in a hearing is the voice agent. How a reliable intake from a website works, and what happens when delivery fails, is in a separate article.