Intake: capabilities and limits

However they arrive

• Match the arrival without assuming the identity

  A signal from any channel lands on one row through three rungs: a recorded delivery, a matching email, a matching phone. A name is never an anchor, nicknames are not expanded; a matching anchor with an incompatible name returns a second record and a flag.

• Gather the story without giving legal advice

  The public intake runs a fixed nine-turn protocol, one question per reply. Each generated reply crosses a mechanical gate: fifteen phrasings of advice, the shared response gate, and three that end it early. An unsafe reply is discarded whole and the protocol question sent instead.

• Hold a request when the receiving firm is unknown

  A public arrival carries no tenant, so routing follows a ladder: a configured receiving firm, then the sole firm where one exists, then nothing. The row stays unrouted, and claiming it is owner-only: a staff seat may not decide which firm a stranger belongs to.

Before anyone has answered

• Give the request an owner and track its age

  An arrival lands on a named attorney at creation, by a derived rotation, so a departed member falls out on their own. Time in stage runs against four, twenty-four and seventy-two hours, raising one item per arrival and stage, and none without a resolvable owner.

Before you can take it

• Screen against the firm's recorded relationships

  Each party name runs against the firm's own book: other matters' parties, the rolodex, the declined register, members' prior affiliations and this matter's stated conflicts, thirteen sources distinguished on the finding. A name held only in attorney-confirmed non-adverse roles is reported found and set aside.

• Flag a possible namesake without declaring a conflict

  The index is keyed on a normalised name that strips honorifics, initials and corporate suffixes, casting wider than exact spelling: a missed conflict is the malpractice-shaped error. Two people sharing a name collapse onto one row, surfaced as a possible namesake, never as adversity.

• A failed screen cannot clear the engagement

  Shipped

  At the intake, invite and consult door the screen fails closed: a failed read throws rather than returning a short list, because fewer names compared reads as clear. A record is pending, clear, flagged, waived or acknowledged; only the last three release the engagement hold.

• Check the ethical wall when the file is opened

  Shipped

  A walled member is excluded at the access layer and again by row-level security, and the wall is checked when the file is opened rather than once at assignment. A lookup that cannot be read denies, because a failed query resolves to an empty result.

• Include a lateral attorney's prior affiliations

  Shipped

  Prior firms, prior clients and personally held conflicts are recorded on the member and consulted by every scan, so a lateral's history reaches the door before their first assignment. A hit is advisory: whether a screen or consent cures it is the firm's ethics call.

• Record admission for the actual forum

  Shipped

  Admission is recorded against a named forum, state, circuit, district or pro hac vice, because admitted here is a different fact from admitted somewhere.

Opening the engagement

• Keep a request separate from an accepted matter

  Opening a matter is refused unless the caller is a licensed attorney of that firm; the refusal is written to the lifecycle log with its reason. A formation-request stays a pre-engagement row, including the portal handoff, which writes the request row and stops.

• Carry the engagement hold into downstream work

  When the screen does not come back clear, one durable item keyed to the matter holds the client-portal invite, the intake pipeline, the research spend and the engagement-letter draft, and the retry path reads the same key first. A drafted letter waits for the attorney.

What carries forward

• Keep the source behind each extracted field

  Every field carries a warrant: document ids, a hash of the text the model was shown, and the verbatim span's offsets, located by the system, not reported by it. A span that cannot be found is recorded as not located, and matter type needs one.

• Retain the documents already provided

  A dropped file's bytes are stored the moment they arrive, before any row exists to hang them on: unfiled, handed back as an opaque signed capability rather than the document id, because the door is public. One submission redeems at most five within a day.

• Carry unanswered questions into the matter

  What the prospect answered becomes the matter's questionnaire, and the valuation model adds the records that would most move it, marked for review. The portal renders none until an attorney approves; approving messages the client. Both surfaces send only a delta into a locked merge.

Limits

• A conflicts check searches what the firm has recorded. It is not a search of the world, and a thin record produces a thin screen.
• Where part of the party record could not be read, the scan publishes that as an advisory and declines to persist a clearance off it.
• Failing closed belongs to the intake, invite and consult door. The firm-wide standing scan flags and nags rather than blocking.
• The public conversation gathers facts for attorney review. It is not legal advice, and no engagement exists until an attorney accepts.
• An inbound mail or call from a sender the firm does not know is held rather than promoted. Some channels have a transport and no promotion step yet, and one has neither.

What BRON refuses

• Merge two arrivals that share an anchor but not a name.

  The second arrival may carry the adverse party's name. Accepting the first would then screen a party list missing the very name that would have flagged, and report the file clear. The gate is not bypassed there; it is fed a truncated record, which is worse.

• Report a screen that errored as a screen that found nothing.

  The intake, invite and consult door fails closed by throwing. Handing back a zero would translate a database error into screened and clear, and the client-portal invite would go out over a party list nobody compared.

• Put a limitations date on a prospect's story.

  The consult brief emits no statute of limitations at all. Prospect text cannot select the governing claim law or establish an accrual event, and a date that looks computed is worse than a blank.

• Write the matter type from a reading it cannot locate in the source.

  Limitations rules are keyed on jurisdiction and matter type, so that field is a calendaring decision wearing the clothes of a label. An unwarranted write picks the statute quietly, and since nothing on this path leaves the firm, no send gate stands downstream of it. With no warrant the limitations suggestion withholds a date rather than computing one off the catch-all rung, which in Mississippi is the twelve-month intentional-tort statute.

• Open a matter to hold a request.

  A formation-request is pre-engagement and attorney-gated. The stage that says a matter exists can be entered only when a matter id is already on the row, so no path on the arrival side can mint a case to park an ask in.

• Raise a task nobody can act on.

  An arrival with no resolvable owner raises nothing. An owner-less item is unreadable on every board and unassignable at the assign route, so writing one would be the silent failure rather than the alarm.

• Contact a prospective client on its own.

  Every arrival is an internal record for an attorney to act on. The system drafts no outreach, sends nothing and solicits nobody, and the questionnaire items a model authors sit marked for review, invisible in the portal, until an attorney approves them.

• Answer a prospect's question about their own case.

  The public reply crosses fifteen advice phrasings and the shared response gate before it leaves the server. An unsafe reply is discarded whole rather than trimmed back, and the protocol question for that turn is sent in its place, because half of a piece of legal advice is still legal advice.

• Read an ethical-wall lookup it could not run as no wall.

  An unreadable screen lookup denies. A failed query here resolves to an empty result instead of throwing, which is how three separate copies of this check each carried a comment claiming they failed closed while none of them did.

• Count a QA fixture as a former client.

  The front door subtracts matters whose project provenance is marked QA and says on the panel how many it subtracted; demo, archived, paused and closed matters stay in. That is the screen's own disclosed rule, not the load-shedding switch that keeps background sweeps off a synthetic firm, and nothing that decides a conflict outcome may import that switch.

They filled in the web form on Monday and phoned on Tuesday. Is that one client or two?

Bring incoming requests together, screen the parties against the firm's records, and put the decision with a licensed attorney. What you learn at intake carries into the matter, with its sources attached.

Inputs

• The public intake conversation and the dispute-readiness check
• A consultation an attorney confirmed
• Inbound mail and phone, held until someone promotes them
• A client's own formation-request in the portal

Outputs

• The matter brain and its party spine
• The conflicts register and the firm's ethical walls
• Deadlines, through the matter type an attorney confirms
• The engagement letter and the signature chain
• The client portal and its first questionnaire
• Valuation, through the parties and the harm on the record