By the Templateez Team · Licensed Attorney · July 2026

Setting Up a New Law Firm? Here's the Intake Paperwork You Need

I remember the exact moment. It was a Tuesday morning, maybe three weeks after I hung my own shingle. The phone rang. A woman had been rear-ended on Route 17 and her friend had given her my card. She was upset, she was in pain, and she wanted to know if I could help.

I said yes. Then I grabbed a yellow legal pad.

I wrote down her name, her phone number, the date of the accident, and the name of her insurance company. I asked a few more questions. She thanked me and hung up. I stared at the pad and realized I had no idea whether I had asked everything I needed. Did I get the police report number? The other driver's information? Whether she had been to the ER? I could not remember, and I had no form to check against.

That afternoon I spent three hours building an intake form in Word. It was ugly. It missed half the fields I would later realize matter. But it was something. If you are starting a firm right now, you can skip that scramble entirely. Here is every piece of intake paperwork you should have ready before your first client walks through the door -- or calls you from the side of a highway.

The Essential Document Stack

A new law firm needs exactly four categories of client-facing paperwork from day one. Not eventually. Not "when things pick up." Day one.

1. The Intake Form

This is your internal document. The client never sees it. You or your staff fill it out during or after the initial call. It captures the administrative skeleton of the matter: client contact information, opposing party details, case type, court jurisdiction if known, key dates, and referral source.

Think of the intake form as the front page of every file you will ever open. It tells anyone in your office -- you, a paralegal, a covering attorney -- exactly what this case is and where it stands, without reading a single pleading.

A good personal injury intake form, for example, captures the accident date, location, responding officers, insurance carriers for both parties, medical providers, and the client's employment status at the time of injury. That is 15 to 20 fields that you will need within the first 48 hours of representation, and if you do not collect them on the first call, you are chasing the client down later.

2. The Client Questionnaire

This is the document the client fills out. It goes deeper than the intake form. Where the intake captures administrative details, the questionnaire captures the client's own narrative: what happened, what they want, what they are worried about, what other attorneys they have spoken to.

The questionnaire also carries your authorization language, your acknowledgments, and the client's signature. It is the document that says "I consent to representation" and "I understand the fee arrangement." The intake form has none of that -- it is an internal tracking sheet.

If you are unclear on why these need to be two separate documents, I wrote about this in detail: intake form vs. questionnaire -- why you need both. The short version is that combining them creates a form that is either too long for you to fill out during a call or too administrative for the client to complete on their own. Neither works well.

3. The Engagement / Retainer Letter

This is not optional. In New Jersey, RPC 1.5(b) requires that the basis of the fee be communicated to the client, preferably in writing, before or within a reasonable time after commencing representation. New York has a similar rule. Most states do.

Your engagement letter should state the scope of representation, the fee arrangement (hourly, flat, contingency, hybrid), what costs will be advanced, what the retainer amount is and how it will be held, and -- critically -- what the letter does not cover. If you are taking a personal injury case on contingency, that letter should spell out the percentage, whether it changes if the case goes to trial, and who pays for expert depositions if you lose.

Draft a template for each fee type you use. One for contingency. One for hourly. One for flat fee. You can modify them per client, but start with a solid base.

4. The Conflict Check Form

I will talk about this one more below, because it trips up more new firms than any other piece of paperwork. For now: you need a form or a system for running conflicts before you agree to represent anyone. Period.

Which Practice Area Forms to Start With

This depends entirely on what you practice, but most new firms touch at least two or three areas before they settle into a niche. Here is what I would prioritize.

If you are a general practitioner taking whatever comes through the door -- and most solo attorneys start this way, whether they plan to or not -- you need intake sets for the five areas that generate the most walk-in and referral calls:

• Personal injury. Fender benders, slip-and-falls, dog bites. These come in by phone and need fast intake. A personal injury intake set with fields for accident details, medical treatment, and insurance information is non-negotiable.
• Family law. Divorce, custody, child support modifications. These are emotionally complex matters where you need thorough documentation from the start. A family law intake set captures household composition, financial information, custody arrangements, and domestic violence history -- all of which affect your initial strategy.
• Criminal defense. Arraignments do not wait. When someone calls from the county jail at 9 PM, you need to be able to capture the charge, the court date, the bail status, and the arresting agency in under five minutes. See our criminal defense intake form.
• Estate planning. Wills, trusts, powers of attorney. These clients are organized and expect you to be, too. An estate planning intake set needs to cover family structure, asset inventory, beneficiary designations, and existing estate documents.
• Real estate. Closings, title issues, contract review. A real estate intake form captures the property address, transaction type, financing details, and key dates -- closing date, mortgage commitment deadline, inspection period.

If you know your niche, start there. An immigration practice needs entirely different intake fields than a construction law firm. The point is to have the right forms ready before the first client in that practice area calls, not after.

For a deeper look at what separates a good intake template from a generic one, see what makes a good client intake form template.

The Conflict Check Problem No One Warns You About

At a big firm, you type a name into a database and wait for the system to tell you whether anyone in the firm has ever represented or opposed that person. At a solo or small firm, you are the database.

Here is what goes wrong. You take a call from a husband wanting a divorce. You agree to a consultation. He comes in, tells you everything about his marriage, his finances, his affair. Then you realize his wife was a client two years ago when you helped her with a contract dispute. You now have confidential information about both spouses. You cannot represent either of them. And you have already heard things you cannot unhear.

This is not a hypothetical. It happens to new solo attorneys with alarming regularity, and it is almost always because they had no conflict check procedure in place.

Your conflict check form does not need to be complicated. It needs to run before you hear substantive facts. Before the consultation. Before the client tells you anything beyond "I need a divorce lawyer." You need the names of all parties, adverse parties, related entities, and any known witnesses. Then you check those names against every client you have ever represented, every adverse party you have ever opposed, and every consultation you have ever taken -- even ones that did not result in retention.

Start a spreadsheet on day one. Every person you talk to goes in it. Every adverse party. Every entity name. If a name comes up twice on opposite sides, you have a conflict. It is that simple and that important.

File Organization from Day One

I have seen attorneys with 40 open files and no system for finding anything. The intake form is in a folder somewhere. The retainer letter is in the email. The questionnaire is on the desk under a coffee mug. The conflict check was done on the back of a business card.

Set up your file structure before your first client. Every new matter gets a folder with the same internal structure: intake form, questionnaire, engagement letter, conflict check, correspondence, pleadings, discovery, notes. Every time. No exceptions.

Whether you use paper files, a cloud drive, or practice management software, the structure should be identical. When you need the retainer letter for the Smith file, you should know exactly where it is without searching. When a grievance committee asks for your engagement letter for a matter from three years ago, you should be able to produce it in under two minutes.

I wrote a full breakdown of how to set this up in how to build a client file that actually works. Read it before you open your first file.

Cover Every Practice Area Without Starting from Scratch

Here is the practical problem. You are opening a firm. You have 50 things to do -- get malpractice insurance, set up your IOLTA account, order business cards, build a website, register with the court's e-filing system, figure out health insurance now that you do not have an employer. Designing intake forms for 6 different practice areas is probably number 47 on that list.

That is exactly why we built the Legal Intake Forms collection. It covers 38 practice areas, from bankruptcy to elder law and Medicaid planning to employment law. Each set includes a profession-specific intake form and a matching client questionnaire with the right fields, the right authorization language, and the right confidentiality footer.

The Legal Bundle gives you all 38 sets for $399 -- roughly $10.50 per complete set. Compare that to the 3 to 5 hours it takes to build a single proper intake form from scratch, multiply that by the number of practice areas you might touch in your first two years, and the math is obvious.

Every form is a fillable PDF. No subscription. No monthly fee. No software to learn. You download it, open it in Adobe Reader or any PDF viewer, and start filling it out. If you leave the firm and start another one in five years, the forms come with you.

Common Mistakes New Firms Make with Intake Paperwork

After watching dozens of new attorneys set up shop, these are the patterns I see over and over.

Using a generic intake form for every practice area. A personal injury intake form needs fields for accident date, police report number, insurance policy limits, and treating physicians. A family law intake form needs fields for date of marriage, names and ages of children, household income, and whether there is a restraining order in place. A one-size-fits-all form misses critical information for every case type. The cost of that missing information shows up weeks later when you are scrambling to get details you should have captured on day one. We wrote about this in detail: the real cost of bad client intake.

Combining the intake form and the questionnaire into one document. I covered this above, but it bears repeating. The intake form is for you. The questionnaire is for the client. They serve different purposes, they are filled out by different people, and they contain different information. Mashing them together creates a 6-page form that nobody wants to complete. Keep them separate.

Skipping the conflict check on "small" matters. There is no such thing as a small conflict. A $500 traffic ticket consultation can create a conflict that prevents you from taking a $50,000 personal injury case three months later. Run conflicts on everything.

Not collecting the retainer before the first meeting. If your fee structure requires a retainer, collect it before the consultation or at the consultation. Do not start work and send an invoice later. The number of new attorneys who do an hour of legal research for a "prospective client" who then never pays and never calls back is staggering.

Failing to document the scope of representation. Your engagement letter should be specific about what you are and are not handling. "I am representing you in connection with your divorce" is not sufficient. "I am representing you in the dissolution of your marriage, including equitable distribution, custody, and support, but not including any related bankruptcy proceedings or real estate transactions" is better. Scope creep kills profitability and creates malpractice exposure.

No system for follow-up. A client fills out half the questionnaire and says they will finish it later. Three weeks go by. You start working the case without complete information because the statute of limitations is approaching. A proper intake process includes a follow-up system: if the questionnaire is not returned within 72 hours, someone calls. If critical documents -- insurance cards, medical records authorizations, financial disclosures -- are not received within a week, someone calls again.

For a complete walkthrough of what a functional intake process looks like, see how to build a client intake process that actually works.

Start Right

Opening a law firm is one of the most rewarding things I have done in my career. It is also one of the most disorienting. There are a hundred decisions to make in the first month, and most of them feel urgent.

Intake paperwork is one of the few things you can get right on day one and never have to think about again. The forms exist. The templates exist. The systems are well understood. You do not need to reinvent anything. You just need to have it ready before the phone rings.

Because the phone will ring. And when it does, you want to be reaching for a proper intake form -- not a yellow legal pad.