The case isn’t lost at the consultation. It’s lost in the seventy-two hours before it.
Enquiries arrive at midnight, in two languages. Someone has to call back, screen the matter, confirm an attorney will even take it, hold the consultation, and get a retainer signed. Every handoff in that chain is a place where files go quiet. The Case Signed Enginerebuilds the chain so they don’t.
A working session with the person who builds this, not a sales call.
Rated Excellent on TrustpilotThe average law firm converts 14% of enquiries into signed clients. Top-performing firms convert 40–50%.
Across the immigration firms we've worked with over the last 12 months, roughly 63% of new enquiries never reached a consultation at all.
A lead contacted within five minutes is around 21 times more likely to qualify than one contacted after thirty.
Just over a quarter of law firms never respond to an online lead form at all.
35% of calls to small and mid-sized firms go unanswered during business hours.
Firms using client intake technology see 51% more leads and 52% higher revenue on average.
Firms measure what they spend on marketing. Almost nobody measures what happens next.
Immigration matters are urgent, frightening, and frequently arrive outside business hours. The person calling is calling more than one firm. Whoever answers first, in the language they speak, usually keeps the case.
What follows isn’t a marketing problem — it’s an operations problem, and it is measurable. None of the numbers above describe bad lawyers. They describe a firm where the work of chasing people is being done by humans who are already busy doing legal work.
“We’ll get back to them when we can.”
- Four inboxes, no single owner
- Callbacks that depend on someone noticing
- Outcomes recorded as notes, if at all
- Files that go quiet and are never closed
“Nothing waits on someone remembering.”
- One record, one owner, within minutes
- Viability confirmed before attorney time is spent
- Three outcomes, all reportable
- Every file ends in a defined state
Score your own intake in four minutes.
Twelve questions. Answer honestly and you’ll get a score out of 24 and a read on which stage is leaking. No email needed to see your result.
Immigration Intake Scorecard
Never / manual = 0 · Sometimes = 1 · Always & measured = 2
01When an enquiry arrives at 9pm on a Saturday, does that person get any response before Monday morning?
02Do you know your average time-to-first-contact, as a number, for last month?
03Does every enquiry route to a named owner automatically, or does someone have to notice it first?
04Is there a defined screening conversation before any attorney time is committed?
05Does an attorney confirm the matter has a viable path before the consultation, or find out during it?
06Is case type recorded as a controlled value on every record, or typed in as free text?
07Once a consultation is booked, does the confirmation go out without anyone sending it?
08When someone books and then goes quiet before the appointment, does anything happen automatically?
09Do reminders go out in the client's preferred language without a person choosing which template to use?
10When someone no-shows, are the follow-up touches scheduled, or remembered?
11When someone declines to retain you, is the reason recorded in a form you can actually report on?
12Can you tell me right now how many enquiries from ninety days ago are sitting in no defined state at all?
Answer all twelve to see your score and which stage is leaking.
Eight stages between an enquiry and a retained case. Here’s what has to happen in each one.
This is the reference architecture we build against. It is tool-agnostic. Each stage sets out what should happen, where it typically breaks, and what we automate.
Capture
Every channel lands in one place: the website form, inbound SMS, the main line, the number on your ads, and paid social. One record is created, deduplicated against existing contacts, tagged with its source, and dropped into a single triage queue.
Four channels means four inboxes and four people each assuming someone else has it. A call to the ad line at 7pm dies in a voicemail box nobody checks. Records get created carrying nothing but a phone number, so nobody can act on them.
No record is created without a usable identifier. A phone number with no name and no association isn't a lead — it's noise that makes the pipeline look healthy while producing nothing.
Claim and first contact
The enquiry is announced to the intake team the moment it lands. An agent claims it, becomes the named owner, and calls back. If the call isn't answered, a booking link goes out by SMS immediately, and a second attempt is scheduled rather than hoped for.
The callback depends on someone noticing. Ownership is ambiguous, so either everyone calls or nobody does. The unanswered call becomes a dead end instead of the first rung of a sequence.
Time to first contact is the highest-leverage number in the entire system. It belongs on a dashboard, named, with a target next to it.
Screening
A trained intake specialist runs a structured screening conversation: case type, timeline, any immediate deadline or detention risk, prior filings, prior representation, preferred language. No attorney time is spent. The output is a record complete enough for an attorney to make a decision from.
Screening either doesn't exist, or it happens inside the consultation itself — which means an attorney spends the first twenty minutes gathering facts a coordinator could have gathered for free. Case type gets typed as free text and becomes useless for routing.
Case type must be a controlled value from a fixed list, never free text. Everything downstream — which sequence fires, which reminder sends, which document checklist goes out — depends on it being exact.
Attorney review
Before the consultation is held, a duty attorney reviews the screened record and answers one question: is there a viable path here? If yes, the strategy is noted and carried into the consultation. If no, the appointment is cancelled by a phone call — not an email — and the file is closed cleanly with a reason recorded.
Most firms skip this entirely. They discover a matter is unwinnable during the consultation, having already committed an attorney hour to it, and having set an expectation with a frightened person that now has to be walked back.
It is the difference between an attorney's calendar full of consultations and an attorney's calendar full of cases. Outside high-volume firms almost nobody runs it — and it is the single change that most reliably lifts hire rate without touching marketing spend.
Confirmation and reminders
The consultation is confirmed the moment it's booked, in the client's language, with the location or video link attached. Reminders follow on a fixed cadence. If the person goes quiet before the appointment, a re-confirmation runs rather than everyone finding out at the appointment time.
Confirmations get sent by hand, from whichever template someone finds. Reminders don't go at all, or go in the wrong language. A booking made eleven days out is treated the same as one made tomorrow.
Some firms gate the appointment behind a consultation fee. It raises show rates and filters people who were never going to retain — and it turns away clients who cannot put money down before speaking to anyone, which is why many firms serving immigrant communities deliberately don’t charge. If you don’t charge, this stage is confirmation and reminders only, and the rest of the engine is identical. We build it either way.
Consultation outcome
The consultation is held and the outcome is recorded as exactly one of three states: retained, not retained with a reason, or did not attend. Each state starts a different sequence, immediately.
The outcome gets written as a note, or nothing at all. “They're thinking about it” is not a state, and a file left in that condition will sit untouched until someone happens to scroll past it. Nobody can report on a note.
Every consultation ends in one recorded outcome, from a fixed list, before the attorney's next appointment starts. Decline reasons are a controlled field — that is what turns “we lose a lot on price” from a feeling into a number.
The follow-up ladder
Nobody is dropped after one attempt, and nobody is chased forever. A defined ladder runs across SMS, email and phone, in the client's language, with escalating specificity — and then it ends.
Every intake board we have reviewed has an unresolved branch: someone who booked, or half-completed intake, and then went quiet, with no defined end state. Those records accumulate, inflate the pipeline, and mean staff can never tell what is genuinely live.
A follow-up sequence without an exit isn't nurture — it's a leak with better manners. Six touches, thirty days, then dormant. The file is never deleted and is always reactivable, but it stops pretending to be active.
Reactivation matters more here than in most industries. An immigration matter that wasn't viable in March can become viable in September — a priority date moves, a status changes, a relationship qualifies. Dormant is a holding state, not a bin.
Retained: onboarding to an active case
The engagement agreement goes out for e-signature the same day. Fee or payment plan is collected. The matter is opened with an attorney and paralegal assigned. A case-type-specific document checklist is issued through a portal and chased automatically. Filing begins.
This is the most expensive leak in the firm, because the client has already said yes. Agreements sit unsigned for a week. Documents arrive over email with no audit trail. The case doesn't start because nobody is chasing a passport scan, and the client's confidence drains away during the silence.
An unsigned agreement is not a won case. It should be as visible on a dashboard as an unclaimed lead, with an alert when it stalls — not a state a file can rest in indefinitely.
The trigger decides when a message fires. The case type decides what it says.
Someone waiting on a naturalisation interview and someone facing removal proceedings are not in the same emotional state and should not receive the same follow-up. Every trigger resolves against the case type on the record, then against language, then selects the matching sequence.
120 variants, maintained once
Six triggers across ten case types in two languages. Unmanageable by hand — which is why most firms send one generic message to everyone and accept the response rate it produces. Built as a routing layer, it maintains itself.
On language
Sends resolve against the preferred language captured at screening. For firms serving Spanish-speaking communities this isn’t a nicety — it is frequently the reason one firm gets retained and another doesn’t.
We don’t sell you software. We build the system on whatever you already run.
Every firm we work with has a different stack and most of it already works fine. The architecture doesn’t depend on any particular product. If you already have three of these, we build around them. If you have none, we’ll tell you what to buy and why — and we don’t take referral fees for it.
CRM & marketing automation
Holds the record, runs the pipeline, fires every sequence.
HubSpot · GoHighLevel · Salesforce · Zoho · Law Ruler · Lawmatics
Practice / case management
Opens the matter and holds the file once the client is retained.
Clio · MyCase · Filevine · PracticePanther · Smokeball · Docketwise · LollyLaw
Calling & SMS
Inbound routing, missed-call capture, two-way SMS, call recording.
RingCentral · Twilio · Sakari · CallRail · Aircall · OpenPhone
Scheduling
Screening and consultation calendars, reminders, rescheduling.
HubSpot Meetings · Calendly · Acuity · native PM calendars
E-signature
Engagement agreements, consents, anything that needs a signature to start.
DocuSign · PandaDoc · Dropbox Sign · Adobe Sign
Payments
Retainers, payment plans, and trust-aware handling.
LawPay · Stripe · Gravity Legal · QuickBooks
Document collection
Client-facing checklists, upload, and automatic chasing.
Client portals in Clio / MyCase · Superdocu · Dropbox · Google Drive
Workflow & integration
The connective layer that makes the rest behave as one system.
Make · n8n · Zapier · native APIs
AI layer
After-hours response, call summarisation, routing, drafting assistance.
Chat agents · voice agents · custom-built to your intake script
Reporting
The six numbers a managing partner should see weekly, on one screen.
Native CRM dashboards · Looker Studio · Google Sheets
One partner across the whole path, not a tool and a login.
Intake architecture
The pipeline, stages, properties and routing rules — mapped and agreed before anything is built.
Multi-channel capture
Form, phone, SMS and paid channels unified, with deduplication and source attribution on every record.
Sequence library
Every trigger × case type × language, built as one maintained set rather than a folder of one-offs.
Attorney review workflow
The viability gate: the queue, the decision capture, the cancellation path and the reasons behind it.
Retainer onboarding
E-signature, fee collection, matter creation, and document chasing that runs without anyone remembering to.
Reporting
Speed to first contact, conversion by stage, hire rate by case type, and how much is sitting dormant.
We start with the process. Automation bolted onto a broken workflow just makes the mess move faster.
Order matters more than speed. The mapping phase is what stops you automating a process nobody has examined — and it is the phase firms are most tempted to skip.
Map
We sit with your intake coordinators and duty attorneys and watch how the work really flows.
Design
Before any tooling, we design how each stage should run, then architect the system around it.
Build & deploy
We connect the stack, automate the chasing, deploy the AI, and train your team so it sticks.
Refine
We tighten the workflows and standardise it so it scales with volume.
Trusted by founders and leaders at 185+ growing companies.
“Our whole appointment system was a mess. Growlyze came in and actually fixed it. Now everything's in one place, documents get collected automatically, and we're not manually doing all those reminders anymore.”
“A full AI voice agent handling inbound and outbound calls, pushing lead notifications in real time, and automatically updating lead statuses in the client's CRM. Built end to end and works seamlessly.”
The Immigration Intake Playbook
The full reference behind this page, written so your intake lead can run a team through it without us in the room.
- All eight stages, with the failure mode and the fix for each
- Every process diagram at full size, print-ready
- The follow-up ladder with its cadence and exit conditions
- The case-type routing matrix
- The scorecard as a worksheet to run with your team
The questions we hear most.
We already have a CRM and it isn't working. Are you going to tell us to replace it?
Usually not. Most of the CRMs we find in immigration firms are capable and underconfigured — the problem is that nobody defined the stages, the properties or the rules before the tool was switched on. We'd rather fix the architecture inside what you own. If we do recommend moving, we'll show you the specific thing your current system can't do, and we don't earn anything on the switch.
Our intake coordinators aren't attorneys. How do we automate screening without straying into advice?
The line we build to is the difference between collecting information and applying law to facts. Screening gathers facts against a fixed script and never assesses a case — that's precisely why Stage 04 exists, so an attorney makes the viability call on a complete record. Your firm sets the script and the boundaries; we build the system that keeps everyone inside them and logs that it happened.
What actually happens in the first thirty days?
Weeks one and two we map: sitting with your intake team, listening to calls, and following real enquiries through your current process to find where they stop. By the end of week four you have the designed architecture — stages, properties, rules, sequences — agreed before anything is built. Build starts in week five. You'll see working pieces before the engagement ends, not at the end of it.
How much of our team's time does this take?
Roughly four to six hours from your intake lead in the mapping phase, an hour or two from a duty attorney to define the viability criteria, and a short review at each design checkpoint. Build phase is on us. The heaviest ask is honesty in week one about what actually happens versus what's supposed to happen.
We charge for consultations. We don't charge for consultations. Does the same system work either way?
Yes. The fee step is one configurable stage and everything around it is unchanged. Firms that charge get a payment step, a reminder sequence and a slot-release rule. Firms that don't get straight to confirmation and reminders. We've built both and we don't have an opinion about which is right for your practice — that's a decision about who you serve.
We operate in two languages. How is that handled without doubling the maintenance?
Language is captured once at screening as a controlled value, and every send resolves against it automatically. You maintain a message set per case type per language, not per campaign — so adding a new sequence means writing it twice, not rebuilding a parallel system. Nobody on your team ever picks a template based on which language they think the client speaks.
What happens when an automation fails at 2am?
Every critical path has error handling and an alert, and failures surface to a named person rather than sitting silently. More importantly, we design so failure degrades to a human task rather than to nothing: if an automated send fails, someone gets a task, and the record doesn't quietly stall. We monitor the builds we maintain.
If we stop working with you, what do we keep and who maintains it?
You keep all of it. It's built in your accounts, on your licences, documented as you go, and your team is trained on it during deployment rather than after. No lock-in and no proprietary layer you'd have to keep paying us for. If you want us to keep maintaining and improving it, that's a separate month-to-month arrangement.
Find out where your enquiries are actually going.
Thirty minutes, screen shared, walking your real pipeline. You’ll leave knowing the three stages leaking most and what it would take to close them — whether or not you work with us.
Book a call
Book your intake audit
Thirty minutes on your real pipeline — we'll name the three stages leaking most, whether or not you work with us.
OFFICIAL PARTNERSHIPS
OUR PLATFORM PARTNERS
Every platform we build in has vetted us. None of this is self-declared.
