Practicing law is tough as is without having to worry about office management. Using intake sheets can make life simpler for divorce lawyers.
Many a divorce lawyer will include in their legal services agreements that they can store their client’s file electronically. While this is certainly advancement in the practice of law,
it has a number of drawbacks that can be cured by having a simple intake sheet that can effectively serve as a backup in the event that your electronically stored documents are wiped out.
Perhaps the greatest benefit of having a client intake sheet is that it requires almost no work for you to do, yet provides an extraordinarily useful backup in the event a client’s information is ever misplace or lost. Just as when a patient goes to a doctor for the first time and expects to be given a form to fill out of routine information, so, too, do clients going to their lawyer.
Some divorce attorneys seeking to limit the amount of paper generated by the nature of their business being based in volume have sought to enter client data directly into their practice management software. While there is nothing wrong with this, per se, it is far better to have your client fill out the intake sheet as you are entering the data. While having the information within your practice management software is very helpful to generate bills, check for conflicts of interest, and not have to pull the clients file every time you wish to call the client, it does not provide a way of having the client’s in the file nor is it necessarily as reliable as a paper copy.
The information that should be sufficient for an intake sheet for any divorce lawyer is: the date the case opened, the client’s name, address, city, state, zip code, home phone number, work number, cell number, fax number, email address, the type of fee agreement (i.e. flat or hourly), and a very quick description of the work to be done.
After it is filled out, it can be fastened to the client’s folder so that any lawyer handling the case can quickly get any contact data. Also, every time that the client pays the firm money, this should be noted under fee agreement which will allow for the law firm to track easily all payments made. This is important because, even with checks, it can become enormously difficult to remember who paid how much. (While practice management software may also track this, this is usually not an effective method of quickly understanding the total amount that a client has paid and owes).
For new divorce lawyers, it is important to have a good grasp of law office management. One of the most important elements of this is having the proper forms to run your firm. Besides your legal services agreement, a basic list of your client’s contact information should help you enormously as you navigate the fast-paced and chaotic first years in practice.
This article was written to be information and not legal advice. If you think that you may be in need of legal advice or a lawyer, talk to one that practices in your local area. Will Beaumont’s license lets him practice law in Louisiana, and nowhere else. He currently has two offices, one in New Orleans and the other in Metairie.
