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Matthew Daniel runs a boutique Dallas practice across seven matter types and promises a same or next day answer. We built a concept intake agent that does the qualifying work before he picks up the phone, and that refuses outright to take a matter it cannot ethically accept.
We encode your matter types, your conflict rules and your limitation periods with your responsible attorney first, then build the agent around them.
The Daniel Law Firm is a boutique Dallas practice handling personal injury, truck wrecks, mass torts, family law, immigration and estate planning. It describes itself as keeping a small caseload on purpose, with direct attorney access and a same or next day answer to enquiries.
That promise is a real differentiator, and it is also a constraint. Every enquiry still needs matter type, jurisdiction, incident date, parties and a conflict position established before anyone can say yes. Doing that properly, by phone, for every caller, is what quietly breaks the same-day promise as volume grows. Across the profession, intake is now reported as the single largest operational bottleneck, ahead of billing and document management.
Two of the questions in that first conversation are unforgiving. Texas gives two years from accrual to bring a personal injury claim under Civil Practice and Remedies Code section 16.003(a), and missing it usually ends the case regardless of its merits. Separately, taking on a matter adverse to a current client is an ethics problem that can disqualify the firm. Both are decided by information available in the first two minutes, and both are the kind of thing a busy practice discovers late.
The interesting design work was not the conversation. It was deciding where the agent has to stop. Three gates sit above the conversational layer as deterministic code: conflict of interest, limitation period, and the advice boundary. Any one of them ends the intake, and the language model cannot argue with any of them.
The interface makes that visible rather than describing it. The intake runs as a pipeline, and when a gate closes the rail stops dead at that node and everything downstream greys out. You can see exactly how far an enquiry got and what stopped it.
Party names are captured first, deliberately, before the agent asks what happened. If the opposing party is a current client, the intake halts there. That ordering matters: the firm has not received confidential information from someone adverse to an existing client, which is the situation that causes real problems later.
Surname collisions are surfaced but never treated as conflicts on their own. Only direct adversity escalates, and the agent is not permitted to weigh it, deem it immaterial, or accept a waiver. That decision belongs to the attorney.
Every matter carries a visible runway: months elapsed against the applicable period, with the deadline marked. Across the docket those runways line up, so an expired claim and one with three weeks left are obvious at a glance rather than buried in a date field.
Where the period appears to have expired the agent declines and says so plainly rather than booking a consultation to soften the news, and it directs the person to seek independent advice immediately, because another firm may identify a tolling argument it cannot see. Claims against governmental defendants are treated separately, since those notice deadlines can be far shorter than the general period.
Callers ask what their case is worth. The agent does not deflect and it does not answer. It says directly that it cannot tell them what a claim is worth or whether they have a case, that those are judgements only the attorney can make, and that it will make sure he has everything he needs first. The intake then continues. Holding a boundary and being useful are not in conflict.
The agent runs the same sequence on every enquiry, and each step writes to a single matter file that the attorney reads.
Routes the enquiry to one of seven matter sets, each with its own qualifying questions and its own limitation rules. Jurisdiction is captured because it changes both.
Names of everyone involved, including the other side and any businesses, taken before the facts of the matter. This ordering is deliberate.
Every party is checked against firm matter history. Direct adversity against a current or former client halts the intake and escalates to the attorney. The agent cannot clear its own finding.
Accrual date drives a shown calculation against the applicable period. Expired means declined. Governmental defendants with short notice deadlines are flagged urgent.
Requests for case valuation or merits assessment are refused explicitly, logged, and the intake continues without them.
Produces a single screen with parties, jurisdiction, conflict position, limitation arithmetic, facts as given, and a named owner with a next action. Nothing reaches the attorney without one.
They are software assistants built around a specific firm’s matters and rules rather than bought off the shelf. In an intake context an agent gathers the facts a lawyer needs, screens parties for conflicts, calculates limitation positions, and prepares a structured matter file with a routing decision. It supports the attorney’s judgement and never substitutes for it.
No, and that is enforced in code rather than requested in a prompt. The agent does not say whether someone has a case, does not assess liability, and does not estimate what a claim is worth. When a caller asks, it says plainly that it cannot answer and that only the attorney can, then continues gathering information. It also states at the outset that no attorney-client relationship is created.
Party names are captured before the facts of the matter, deliberately, so that the firm does not receive confidential information from someone adverse to an existing client. Every name is checked against firm matter history. Surname collisions are surfaced but never treated as conflicts on their own. Direct adversity against a current or former client halts the intake and escalates to the attorney, who is the only person who can decide whether it is waivable.
The agent declines rather than booking a consultation. It explains that on the dates given a deadline appears to have passed, and it urges the person to seek independent advice immediately, since another firm may identify a tolling argument. The calculation is displayed rather than asserted, so a human can check it. Where a date cannot be computed confidently it is marked unknown and escalated rather than guessed.
This concept is scoped at six weeks across four phases: encoding the matter types, limitation rules and permitted language with the responsible attorney, connecting the conflict source of truth and agreeing matching rules, building the agent with an adversarial test suite that tries to extract advice and conceal conflicting parties, then a supervised pilot on the highest-exposure practice area with every matter file attorney-reviewed before widening.
Practical systems that reduce manual work, lower costs, and help teams scale.
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