Why Immigration Law Firms Need a Tailored Client Intake Process

As an immigration firm, you know the field of immigration law is ever-changing and complex. It involves intricate regulations that dictate the process of moving individuals from one country to another. Consequently, immigration law requires a unique approach to client intake that takes these intricate nuances into account and properly categorizes new clients, walking them through your sales funnel or intake process. 

What is the Client Intake Process?

Before looking deeper at why immigration law, in particular, benefits from a tailored client intake process, it’s helpful to consider the role the intake process plays overall. A client intake process is essential to growing your law firm. Traditionally, client intake has been an arduous process that can be time-consuming and result in wasted billing hours. Tailored solutions, like ours offered at Law Ruler, use customizable CRM software that includes the following elements to optimize the client intake process: 

• Built-in Softphone: This click-to-call feature automates the dialing process and completes a trail, recording all of your call activity. This can be valuable if you need to use this information to build a case or present an accurate representation of your legal help to a client. 
• Optimizes the Intake Pipeline: Client intake forms take care of automated data entry and allow your legal team to monitor each client’s status. This shows you exactly what stage each client’s case is in and when they are ready to close. It also gives you an overview, allowing you to properly quantify your current caseload. 
• Customized Online Forms: With CRM software, through Law Ruler, you can create intuitive, mobile-friendly intake forms that allow customization and unique fields. You can customize your forms to learn exactly what you need to know from potential or current clients who are seeking your legal assistance, advice, or representation. 
• Automate Redundancy & Data Entry: Again, entering data is an arduous and time-consuming task that requires the attention of valuable team members. With a client intake system, you can automate this redundancy and data entry process and free up your team to work on other tasks related to your client’s cases. It can also allow system-wide updates to data, meaning that you don’t have to reenter the same information over and over again at different team members’ stations. Instead, one update to information is adopted system-wide for the most accurate information and client records. 

Why Immigration Law Firms Need a Tailored Client Intake Process including Immigration Law Tools

While all law firms can benefit from a unique client intake process that guides new customers through the onboarding process, immigration law firms, especially, benefit from a tailored client intake process for the following reasons: 

Have Longer Cases with More Complications

Immigration law cases differ from other avenues of law simply because they are more complicated. For example, immigration law cases can include court orders abroad, green cards, visas, marriages, and more involving a client gaining legal status in this country. This can take a great deal of time and last much longer than other categories of law. Just in the year 2024, there have been 1,718,247 new immigration court cases, and there are currently 1,527,537 immigrants awaiting asylum hearings. This reveals the immense scope of need for quicker processing of immigration cases, which generally are more complicated and time-consuming. 

Allows Customization That Meets Immigration Requirements

Client intake processes through an immigration law firm CRM include the intake forms mentioned above. This allows you to customize these solutions to adhere to immigration law requirements. As a result, you can create forms that will get you the information and the permissions you need to work on behalf of your clients in a timely manner. This can make the process of onboarding a new immigration client much easier and more efficient overall. 

Helps You Qualify Leads

One of the first steps to processing new clients is determining if their case is a good fit for your firm. Thankfully, the logic-based intake forms can help you determine this in mere minutes. It also allows you to gather information on your new client, even giving you the option of creating customized questions that further qualify and categorize potential leads. You can make this as customizable as you desire to help you categorize your new clients in as many ways as you wish. This can save you a great deal of time, even when it reveals that a client’s case isn’t a good fit, as this keeps you from wasting your team’s efforts, as well as letting a client know immediately that their case doesn’t fit your firm’s specialty.  

Allows You to Separate Yourself from Other Immigration Firms

As you know, in the immigration law field, there are many legal firms competing for the same population of individuals and the cases they represent. A tailored client intake process can help you stand out above your competitors in many ways and perhaps give you a much-needed edge that can win you the client’s business. This includes immigration law tools that include automated responses to inquiries and personalized text messages and emails. In a legal study, 47.6% said that responsiveness on the part of the legal team was a critical factor they considered when choosing a law firm. Amazingly, potential clients actually desire a response to their initial inquiry in as little as five minutes. This is an impossible standard to meet with traditional intake and response processes in place, making innovative new strategies like immigration client intake, like ours from Law Ruler, a necessity for modern immigration law. 

Meets Clients Where They Are at The Time

In addition to all the other benefits of a tailored intake process, this innovative onboarding strategy also meets modern clients where they are today. Today’s consumers, whether they are citizens or migrants, use the internet to research many issues, including looking into a potential legal representative. In fact, studies have proven that researching online is now the top way that clients research a potential lawyer, with 38% saying this is their preferred method of doing research. This is a more popular option than even asking friends and families for their opinions. Using modern client intake like CRM software allows you to represent your firm well online and to respond in a timely manner to potential clients. This also means ensuring your firm has a well-equipped and easy-to-navigate website that is informative and accurate, featuring high-quality content.  

Contact us at Law Ruler for More Information

At Law Ruler, we specialize in immigration legal software for the legal industry. Our innovative and customizable approach allows you to build custom forms, respond automatically to inquiries, communicate with clients via email or text message, and keep up with the status of each client’s case at any given time, providing you with an accurate overview of your firm’s current workload.  

Contact us to learn more about our CRM software for immigration law firms, and schedule a free demo to see Law Ruler in action and learn what difference this type of software could have on your daily tasks.