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What a Missed Conflict Costs Your Firm in a Year
Put a dollar figure on the matters that come in with a conflict nobody caught during the intake call.
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How Many Hours a Year Intake Screening Takes You
Estimate the real time cost of screening every inquiry by hand, in minutes per call and workdays per year.
Screening one name feels like nothing. Four minutes to check the closed file list, the email archive, and the billing history, then move on. The trouble is that a single divorce inquiry can carry five or six names, an insurance defense referral can carry ten, and the week has more inquiries in it than anyone remembers by Friday.
This calculator turns those small searches into a yearly figure. It also counts two costs that people leave out: the minutes spent re running a check when an amended complaint adds a defendant, and the minutes spent recording callers you declined, which is the record Rule 1.18 analysis will depend on later.
Your result
Screening minutes per week
220
Searching, re running checks, and logging declined callers combined.
Minutes per inquiry
24.4
What one prospective client call costs you in screening time alone.
Screening hours per year
176.0
The yearly total, before you count any conflict you had to research further.
Equivalent eight hour days
22.0
The same total expressed as full working days off your calendar.
If those hours were billable at your standard rate instead, the gap is usually larger than any software line on your firm budget.
The names people forget to count
Ask a solo attorney how many names a conflict check involves and the usual answer is one or two. Walk through an actual matter and the count climbs quickly. A landlord tenant case has the tenant, the guarantor, the property LLC, the management company, and sometimes a lender. A car accident has the driver, the registered owner, both carriers, and a passenger who may bring a claim of their own.
That undercount is why manual screening feels cheaper than it is and why it fails more often than lawyers expect. If you have been estimating two names per inquiry, run the calculator again at five or six and compare the annual figure. The second number is closer to what a defensible search actually requires.
Where the rework minutes come from
The first search is rarely the last one. An amended complaint adds a third party defendant. A corporate client discloses a subsidiary two weeks in. A family law client remembers that the business was in her brother's name. Each of those events reopens the conflict question, and doing it properly means searching the new names against your whole history again.
Firms that treat screening as a one time step at intake tend to skip these later checks entirely, which is where a real disqualification risk hides. Building the rework into your estimate makes the ongoing nature of the duty visible, and it makes calendaring a rescreen at each new party feel like normal practice rather than extra work.
Questions about this calculator
Should I count inquiries that never became clients?
Yes, and they are the most important ones to count. A caller who never hires you still creates duties under Rule 1.18 and still needs a search and a record. Firms that only screen matters they accept are leaving the riskiest conversations undocumented.
Four minutes per name seems high for my firm.
Time yourself on one real inquiry before you change it. Most lawyers underestimate because they only count the search itself, not the reading of the results, the second spelling attempt, or the trip to a closed file drawer. If your history is genuinely well indexed, one or two minutes is realistic.
How does this compare to screening inside a structured intake form?
The searching collapses into the form entry, because every name you type is searched at once against clients, closed matters, and declined callers. The realistic comparison is the total weekly figure here against the couple of minutes it takes to complete an intake form. Run both numbers before deciding what your current process costs.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The New Matter Conflict Screening Checklist
Four stages that take a prospective client call from the first hello to a dated screening record you would be comfortable showing a judge.
Test that figure against a real intake call
The result above is an estimate built from your own inputs, so the fastest way to check it is to time one screening done our way. In a short demo you enter a prospective client, a spouse, two adverse parties, and an LLC on one form and watch the dated screening record come out the other side. Then hold the stopwatch against the number on this page.