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Turn intake notes into a partner-ready matter summary

Today

A prospective client tells their story for most of an hour. Your paralegal ends up with three pages of notes, and the partner still reads all three pages before deciding whether the firm wants the matter.

With Claude

The same notes come back as a one page internal summary: parties, jurisdiction, chronology, the issues in play framed as questions, conflicts names to run, documents to request, and the facts nobody asked about yet. The partner reads one page and makes a call.

The prompt

Paste this into claude.ai and replace anything in brackets.

You are assisting a [practice area, e.g. plaintiff-side employment] law firm in [state]. I am going to give you raw intake notes from a call with a prospective client. Produce an internal matter summary for the reviewing attorney. Do not give legal advice, do not predict an outcome, and do not add any fact that is not in the notes.

Use these sections:
1. Parties and roles, plus every person or company name that should be run through a conflicts check
2. What happened, in chronological order, with dates only where the notes give them
3. Potential legal issues the facts raise, written as questions for the attorney rather than conclusions
4. Dates that may drive a deadline, quoted exactly as the notes state them, followed by the line "attorney must calculate any actual deadline"
5. Documents the client says exist, and which ones we should request
6. Gaps: the facts a reviewing attorney would need that the notes do not contain, written as questions to ask the client
7. Anything in the notes that is inconsistent, secondhand, or unclear

Keep it to one page. Plain sentences. No legal conclusions, no citations, no recommendations about whether to take the matter.

Intake notes:
[paste the intake notes here]

What to skip in law firms

  • Client confidential material in a personal consumer login. Privilege and Rule 1.6 do not bend because a tool is convenient. Anthropic's consumer plans (Free, Pro, Max) use your chats to improve their models only when the model improvement setting is turned on in Privacy Settings, and commercial plans such as Team, Enterprise, and Claude for Work exclude inputs from training by default. ABA Formal Opinion 512 puts the work on you: read the terms yourself, judge the risk of disclosure, and get informed client consent where it is required, and it says boilerplate engagement letter language does not count as informed consent. Settle the account, the setting, and the consent question before a real matter goes in, and practice on redacted or hypothetical facts until you have.
  • Legal authority and deadline math. A language model can produce case names, docket numbers, quotes, and holdings that read perfectly and do not exist. In Mata v. Avianca the Southern District of New York sanctioned the lawyers under Rule 11 after a brief cited cases that were never real. Treat every authority Claude gives you as unverified until you have pulled it in your own research service and read it. Same rule for dates: never let Claude calculate a statute of limitations, a response date, or a filing deadline. Have it quote the dates in your material, then calendar the deadline yourself.
  • Anything that leaves the firm without an attorney reading it. Claude does not practice law and does not give legal advice, and none of this changes who signs the document. No pleading, motion, demand, opinion, or client letter should go out because Claude drafted it and it looked fine. Do not put Claude in front of clients or the public to answer legal questions, and remember your state's advertising rules cover whatever you say about AI on your own website.

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Or answer four questions and Claude writes three workflows for your specific business rather than the industry generally.

Before you try it

More for law firms

Full guide for law firms