By the Templateez Team · Licensed Attorney · June 2026

Employment Law Intake Forms: What Every Plaintiff-Side Attorney Needs to Capture

The first thirty minutes with a new employment client will make or break your case evaluation. They walk in angry, hurt, sometimes crying — and you need to extract a coherent factual narrative while also hitting every element of every potential claim. Miss a key date, and you could blow a statute of limitations. Skip the right questions about protected class, and you might not realize until months later that your strongest claim was the one you never pled.

A structured intake form fixes this. Not because it replaces your judgment, but because it makes sure your judgment has everything it needs to work with.

Discrimination Claims: Get the Details That Actually Matter

Every employment discrimination intake needs to identify the protected class — race, sex, age, disability, national origin, religion, pregnancy, sexual orientation. That part is obvious. What most intake forms miss is the comparator information.

Ask your client: who was treated differently? A younger employee who kept their job during the RIF. A male colleague who got the promotion. A non-disabled coworker who wasn't written up for the same conduct. You need names, titles, and approximate dates — right now, while the client remembers. By the time you send your first discovery request, those details have faded.

Your form should also capture whether the client reported the discrimination internally, and what happened after. That feeds directly into your retaliation analysis.

Retaliation: Build the Timeline at Intake

Retaliation claims live and die on three things: protected activity, adverse action, and temporal proximity. Your intake form needs to capture all three with specific dates.

Protected activity — when did the client complain, file a charge, request an accommodation, take FMLA leave, or refuse to participate in something illegal? Get the date, the method (verbal, email, written complaint), and who they told.

Adverse action — termination, demotion, suspension, schedule change, exclusion from meetings, negative performance review. Pin down exactly when it happened.

If those two events are close together — especially within a few weeks — you have a temporal proximity argument that gets you past summary judgment in most circuits. But you can only make that argument if you captured both dates during intake.

Wage and Hour: The Claims Hiding in Plain Sight

Clients rarely walk in saying "I have a wage and hour claim." They say "I got fired." Then, ten minutes into the conversation, you find out they were working 55 hours a week as a salaried "manager" who supervised nobody and had no hiring or firing authority. That is a misclassification case worth more than the wrongful termination.

Your intake form should ask:

• Exempt or non-exempt? (Most clients will not know — ask about duties instead.)
• W-2 or 1099? If 1099, capture enough to run an ABC test or economic-reality analysis.
• Hours worked per week, including off-the-clock time.
• Whether overtime was paid, and at what rate.
• Meal and rest break practices — were breaks provided? Were they uninterrupted? Were they paid?

Independent contractor misclassification is especially valuable because it opens the door to tax liability, benefits recovery, and sometimes class or collective action. Capture the control factors early: who set the schedule, who provided the tools, could the worker take other clients?

Wrongful Termination and At-Will Nuances

Most of your clients are at-will employees, and they do not understand what that means. Your intake needs to determine whether any exception applies: an express employment contract, an implied contract from a handbook or course of dealing, a collective bargaining agreement, or a public-policy violation.

Ask whether the client signed an employment agreement. Ask whether they received a handbook and whether it contained a progressive discipline policy. Ask what reason, if any, the employer gave for termination — and whether that reason is pretextual.

FMLA: Interference vs. Retaliation

FMLA cases split into two theories, and your intake form needs to capture facts for both. Interference means the employer denied or discouraged leave the client was entitled to. Retaliation means the employer punished the client for taking or requesting leave.

Key fields: employer size (50+ employees within 75 miles), client's tenure (12+ months, 1,250+ hours), the medical condition triggering the leave, whether they gave proper notice, and what happened when they returned — or tried to return. (On the employer side, HR teams and staffing agencies have their own intake requirements around compliance and engagement scoping — see our HR & staffing intake guide for that perspective.)

Hostile Work Environment: Severe or Pervasive

Clients describing a hostile work environment often focus on a single incident. Your job at intake is to determine whether there is a pattern. The legal standard — conduct severe or pervasive enough to alter the conditions of employment — usually requires multiple incidents unless the single event is extreme.

What to Capture

Each incident: date, what was said or done, who did it, who witnessed it, and whether it was reported. You also need to know whether the conduct was unwelcome — did the client participate or push back? And whether the employer knew and failed to act.

Severance Review: The Clock Is Already Running

When a client brings in a severance agreement, time pressure is real. Standard consideration periods are 21 days for individual separations and 45 days for group layoffs (RIF) under the Older Workers Benefit Protection Act. If your client is 40 or older, the OWBPA requirements are mandatory for a valid waiver of age claims — and employers get this wrong constantly.

Your intake should flag: the client's age, whether others were included in the layoff, the consideration period offered, whether a 7-day revocation period is included, whether the decisional-unit disclosure was provided, and what consideration is being offered beyond what is already owed.

EEOC Status: The 90-Day Trap

This is the field that saves cases. Ask whether the client has filed an EEOC or state-agency charge, and if so, whether they have received a right-to-sue letter. If they have that letter, get the date — because the 90-day clock to file a federal lawsuit is jurisdictional in most circuits and cannot be extended.

If the client has not filed yet, note the charge-filing deadline: 180 days from the last discriminatory act (300 days in deferral states). These deadlines are not flexible. For cases that involve government-entity defendants or Section 1983 claims alongside the employment discrimination, a civil rights intake captures the qualified immunity and Monell liability analysis that a standard employment form does not.

Document Checklist: What to Request Before the Client Leaves

An intake form without a document checklist is half-finished. At minimum, ask your client to bring or send:

• The employment agreement or offer letter
• The employee handbook (or the most recent version they have)
• Recent pay stubs — at least the last 8 to 12 weeks
• The termination letter or separation notice
• Any severance agreement
• Performance reviews from the last two years
• Emails, texts, or other communications related to the claim
• The EEOC charge and right-to-sue letter, if applicable

The employment agreement tells you about arbitration clauses, non-competes, and choice-of-law provisions. The handbook tells you about internal complaint procedures and whether the employer followed its own policies. The pay stubs tell you about classification, overtime, and deductions. You need all three before you can properly evaluate the case.

If you also handle workers' compensation matters, a separate workers' comp intake set captures the injury-specific details that do not overlap with discrimination or wage cases.

Putting It All Together

Employment cases are fact-intensive and deadline-driven. A good intake form does not just collect information — it forces you to ask the questions that reveal whether you have a case, which claims are strongest, and what deadlines are already running. Build the form around the elements of the claims you litigate most, and update it when the law changes.

If you handle multiple practice areas, the Legal Bundle covers 38 legal intake sets across practice types — each one structured for the claims and deadlines specific to that area.