How Hargrove & Sullivan LLP Automated Client Intake Without Compromising Professionalism
Challenge
Hargrove & Sullivan LLP is a boutique litigation and employment law firm based in New York, with a team of nine attorneys and four administrative staff. The firm handled a steady stream of new client inquiries, existing client questions, document requests, court scheduling communications, and billing correspondence every day.
For a law firm, every email matters. Missing a client inquiry can mean losing a case. Slow responses to existing clients can damage the relationship. Administrative emails that don’t get routed to the right attorney cause delays that ripple through case timelines.
The problem was that the firm’s two legal secretaries were spending three to four hours per day on email management – reading, triaging, routing, drafting acknowledgements, and answering the same intake questions repeatedly. Prospective clients asking about the firm’s practice areas, fee structures, consultation availability, and case types received responses hour slater when they often had already moved on.
“People looking for a lawyer are usually under stress. If someone asks whether we handle employment discrimination cases and we don’t respond for six hours, they’ve already hired someone else,” said RachelHargrove.
Approach
The firm connected their general inquiries inbox and theirclient services inbox to InboxPilot. Given the professional and legallysensitive nature of their communications, they used a carefully structuredsetup with strict guidelines on what the AI was authorized to address.
The Knowledge Center was built from firm materials:
• A detailed FAQ covering the firm’s practice areas, feestructures, and consultation process
• Standard acknowledgement language for new matter inquiries
• Conflict check request procedures
• Document submission instructions
• Billing and retainer explanation documents
• Attorney bio summaries for matching inquiries to the rightpartner
The “Extra guidance” field was used to add critical instructions: “Do not provide legal advice. Do not confirm or deny the firm’s ability to represent any specific matter. Do not discuss specific case outcomes.”
Custom labels included: New Inquiry, Existing Client, Billing,Court/Scheduling, Document Request, Urgent, and Misc. Email actionsautomatically routed court scheduling emails to the relevant attorney’sassistant and flagged anything labeled Urgent for immediate attention.
The firm ran in draft mode throughout, with legal secretariesreviewing every reply before it was sent.
Solution
Within six weeks, Hargrove & Sullivan had transformed their email operations. New inquiries received professional, accurate acknowledgement responses within minutes of arrival – confirming receipt, describing the consultation process, and setting expectations for next steps.Existing clients received prompt, accurate responses to billing and document questions drawn from the firm’s own guidelines.
The legal secretaries’ email workload dropped dramatically.Instead of composing responses from scratch, they reviewed and approvedAI-drafted replies – a process that took a fraction of the time. Complexmatters, sensitive client situations, and anything requiring attorney judgmentwere flagged and handled by the relevant attorney directly.
The firm’s response time to new inquiries – a metric Racheltracked closely – dropped from an average of five hours to under 20 minutesduring business hours.
Results
What’s next
Hargrove & Sullivan is now exploring expanding their InboxPilot deployment to individual attorney inboxes, where routine client update requests and scheduling emails could be drafted automatically. They are also considering enabling auto-send for a narrow category of purely administrative responses – document receipt confirmations and consultation scheduling acknowledgements – where no legal judgment is involved.
Their next milestone: full draft automation across all fouradministrative staff inboxes by Q3 2026.
This casestudy is based on a composite of real customer experiences using InboxPilot’sAI email automation features.
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