Can AI help us decide whether to take on a new matter?

Yes, for part of the decision. An AI assistant can work through the papers a prospective client sends, tell you what they actually contain, pull out the dates and the names, and say plainly what is not there. What it cannot do is decide whether to act: that turns on conflicts, competence, capacity, funding and your own judgement about the client, and none of those are questions for a machine.

What the intake decision is really made of

When an enquiry arrives with forty pages attached, the firm has to answer several different questions at once, and they are not equally hard.

Some are mechanical: what happened and when, who the parties are, whether anything looks close to a deadline, whether the documents referred to in the letters are actually enclosed.

Some are professional: do we have the expertise, do we have the time this month, is there a conflict, can this client fund it, do we want this client.

The mechanical questions are where the hour goes. The professional questions are where the risk sits. Using AI on the first set buys you time and a better base of facts for the second set. Using it on the second set is a mistake.

What AI can usefully do before you accept

There are four jobs worth handing over at this stage.

1. Summarise what the papers say. Not what the client says happened, which you already have from the enquiry form or the phone call, but what the documents themselves show, with a page reference for each point so you can turn straight to it.
2. Extract dates and figures. Dates of contracts, letters, incidents, decisions, notices, invoices and payments, set out in order. Any date that might start a clock running is worth surfacing early, even if you only glance at it.
3. List the parties and entities named. Companies, individuals, insurers, agents, previous solicitors. This gives you a clean list to run through your own conflict search, which is a separate exercise.
4. Say what is missing. A prospective client almost never sends everything. A list of documents referred to but not enclosed is one of the most useful outputs at intake, because it tells you what to ask for in the first letter and whether the matter is even assessable yet.

None of that is a view on the merits. It is a faster, more reliable version of the reading you would do anyway.

What it cannot do for you

It cannot run your conflict check. A conflict search runs against your practice management system, your archive and your people's knowledge of who the firm has acted for. An assistant that only sees the papers in front of it knows nothing about the file you closed three years ago. Treat any list of names as an input to the search, never as the result of one.

It cannot tell you whether the claim is good. Assessing prospects is legal advice, and it is the part of intake that most needs a qualified person who has seen matters like this fail. Keep that assessment yours.

It cannot judge the client. Whether someone will be straight with you, pay your bills, take advice and stay reasonable when the case turns is a human read on a human. It also cannot tell you whether the enquiry raises money laundering concerns, or whether the story is internally odd in the way an experienced fee earner notices.

It cannot tell you whether you have the capacity. That is a diary and team question, and it is the reason a lot of matters should be declined that are not.

A workable order for a new enquiry

• Take the enquiry and the papers, and open a matter record even if you may decline. You need somewhere to record the decision either way.
• Run the AI reading: summary, dates, parties, missing documents.
• Run your conflict search and anti-money laundering checks properly, using the names as a starting list rather than a finished one.
• Read the summary yourself, then read the two or three source pages that matter most. If the summary points at a deadline, verify it against the document and the rule, and put it in the firm's diary immediately, before you have decided whether to act.
• Form your own view on merits, scope and funding.
• Decide, and write down why. If you decline, say what you told the prospective client about urgency and about taking advice elsewhere, and keep a copy.

That last point matters. Declined enquiries are a quiet source of complaints, particularly where a limitation period was close and nobody said so. A short, dated note of what was read, what was said and when is worth the two minutes.

Keep the papers where they belong

A prospective client's documents are confidential from the moment they arrive, whether or not you are instructed. They should go into the same system as everything else, with the same access controls, and not into a personal account or a general purpose chat tool. If you decline the matter, the retention and deletion question applies to those papers too, so decide how long you keep them and apply it consistently.

Where Alesis fits

Alesis is an AI assistant for UK law firms, made by L25 Limited, used through the web browser, with one conversation for a matter. It answers questions about a matter from the matter's own papers and names the page each answer came from, and if the papers do not say, it says so; where a document could not be read, it flags the page rather than skipping it. It counts key dates with the working shown, each step carrying the rule that allows it, and says the firm's diary system still governs. It assists qualified professionals and does not replace them, and it does not provide legal advice.