An AI colleague for your firm: qualifying intake without partner hours
Nova conducts the first conversation: what is going on, which area of law, is there a deadline in play, and which documents already exist. That intake is structured and always the same, so a partner only sees files that are complete. What Nova does not do is judge whether someone has a case — that is legal judgement and it stays with the lawyer.
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The problem in this sector
Partners only want conversations with qualified leads. Each intake now costs 30 min of a secretary.
| Aspect | For this sector |
|---|---|
| Channels | |
| Own knowledge | Specializations, intake criteria, fee structure |
| Volume per day | 300 messages (50/hour) |
| Expected outcome | Partner intake time: 30 min → 0 min on unqualified leads. Conversion up. |
That table is an example configuration, not a measured average. We do not yet have clients in production, so there are no field figures to show — and invented figures are worse than none. What it shows is the setup we would propose for this type of business, with the volumes that go with it.
Where the limit sits
The line sits sharper here than in other sectors, for two reasons. An intake conversation almost always contains sensitive or confidential information, and it touches the professional secrecy lawyers are bound by. On top of that comes article 22 GDPR: turning someone down as a prospective client is a decision that directly affects them, and it may not be made solely by automated means. So Nova sorts and gathers; the decision whether to take a case remains a human one.
Concretely, these are the things Nova does not do on its own here:
- Judging whether someone has a case, how strong it is, or what it will cost.
- Turning down a prospective client — that is a decision that directly affects them.
- Sharing substantive documents or case information, not even with the person concerned.
That limit does not live in a setting someone can flip by accident; it is established up front. That is the difference between a system you know the behaviour of and one you find out about afterwards.
The general rules on automated decision-making and transparency are set out in AI and the GDPR for SMEs and the AI Act for SMEs.
How it starts
It starts with a fifteen-minute intake call where we look at which work recurs in your case and lends itself to being taken over. We then analyse your existing communication from the past 90 days, so Nova learns your tone rather than a generic one. A shadow week follows in which it prepares drafts for you to review — only once that is right does it start sending on its own.
That shadow week is not a formality. It is the moment where it becomes visible which work the AI genuinely handles and which work should stay with a human — and that differs more per business than per sector.