Free tool
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.
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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.
A missed conflict rarely announces itself. It shows up as an uncomfortable phone call from opposing counsel, a motion to disqualify, or a client who reads a name in a pleading and recognizes their own business partner. By then the matter has been worked, the fee has been partly earned, and none of that is safe.
This calculator adds the three costs that follow. First, the fees on the matter you have to withdraw from, which you may be refunding rather than collecting. Second, the unbilled hours spent on the withdrawal letter, the file transfer, the referral to new counsel, and the fee argument. Third, your out of pocket cost if the client reports a claim, which is normally the deductible plus what a reported claim does at the next renewal.
Your result
Matters carrying a missed conflict
1.4
How many matters a year start with a conflict nobody caught.
Fees at risk
$5,472
Fees you may refund or never collect once you have to withdraw.
Total yearly exposure
$15,638
Fees at risk plus the unbilled hours and insurance cost of cleaning it up.
Hidden cost per matter opened
$217.20
Spread over every file you open, this is what weak screening costs each one.
These figures exclude the value of your time defending a disqualification motion, which is the largest cost when one is actually filed.
Why fees at risk is the smallest number here
Lawyers tend to think about the fee first, because it is the visible loss. If you have to withdraw at month three of a family law matter, the earned fee may be arguable and the unearned portion is going back. That is painful but it is bounded and you can usually estimate it within a few hundred dollars.
The unbounded parts sit around it. A withdrawal in litigation may need court permission and a hearing. The client is angry, the file has to be organized and transferred, new counsel calls you with questions, and a fee dispute may follow to the bar's fee arbitration program. None of those hours are billable to anyone, which is why the hours input in this calculator usually matters more than the fee input.
Estimating your own miss rate honestly
Most solo firms have no idea what their miss rate is, because a missed conflict that never surfaced looks exactly like a clean matter. A better way to estimate it is to look backward at your process rather than your outcomes. If your searches historically covered only the client's own name, every matter with a corporate adverse party or a related entity was screened incompletely.
Try a sample. Take twenty matters you opened in the last two years and search every party name in them against your closed file list, including spouses, guarantors, insurers, and parent entities. Count how many produce a hit you did not know about at the time. That fraction, applied to your annual matter count, is a far more grounded input than a guess.
Questions about this calculator
Should I include matters I declined in the matter count?
No. Use only the matters you opened, since those are the ones that can generate a refund or a withdrawal. Declined callers create a different kind of exposure under Rule 1.18, which the screening time calculator covers instead.
What miss rate should a careful solo firm expect?
There is no published figure we would rely on, and we will not invent one. What we can say is that the rate depends almost entirely on how many names you search per inquiry. A firm that searches only the client name has a structurally higher rate than one that searches every adverse party and entity.
Does the insurance figure assume every missed conflict becomes a claim?
The calculator applies your per incident cost to each missed conflict, so treat the total as an upper bound on that component. If you would rather model a fraction of incidents turning into claims, reduce the out of pocket input accordingly. The fee and unbilled hours components are the parts that occur nearly every time.
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.