From first contact to signed engagement letter — governed, compliant, and without the bottleneck.
Legal intake is not an administrative function. It is a risk function. Missed conflict checks, incomplete AML/KYC screening, and engagement letters drafted from memory rather than matter scope create professional liability before a fee earner has billed a single hour.
The Legal Intake Agent is built for one function — getting a new matter from first contact to a signed engagement letter — with every compliance obligation checked and every decision routed to the right person before it proceeds. It works with your practice management system, your conflict database, and your firm's engagement templates. It does not replace the lawyer who signs the letter. It ensures the letter is ready to sign.
Phase 1 demo available: a working prototype on synthetic data, no production system access required, in 4 weeks.
"The intake process creates the most compliance exposure in the matter lifecycle — and it receives the least automation investment. The Legal Intake Agent closes that gap before the first invoice is raised." The pattern across law firms and in-house legal teams
A new client is referred to the firm on a Monday. The intake coordinator collects the information over email across two days. The conflicts team runs a manual check on Wednesday. The fee earner drafts the engagement letter on Thursday using a six-month-old template, adjusting scope from memory. The letter goes out Friday — assuming no corrections.
The Legal Intake Agent receives the referral, issues a structured intake form, captures the client information in one session, runs the conflict check automatically, screens against AML/KYC requirements, and delivers a draft engagement letter — populated from the matter scope — to the fee earner's queue within hours of the intake form being completed.
Outcome: The fee earner reviews and signs a complete draft within 24 hours of the referral arriving. The matter opens faster, and with less exposure than the manual alternative.
In firms without structured conflict detection, the check depends on who is in the room and what they remember. Related party relationships, associated entities, and adverse interests in open matters are missed not through negligence but through the limits of manual search across a large matter database.
The agent cross-references the new client and matter against your full client and matter history — including related parties and associated entities supplied at intake — flags every potential conflict with the evidence behind it, and routes the conflict matrix to the supervising principal before a single hour is billed against the matter.
Outcome: Conflicts are detected systematically, not through memory. The firm's exposure to professional misconduct risk is reduced at the point where it is still addressable.
Anti-money laundering and know-your-client obligations apply at the point of engagement, not after. For law firms with designated business service obligations — and for in-house teams onboarding third-party arrangements — manual PEP and sanctions screening is inconsistent, under-documented, and frequently skipped under time pressure.
The agent screens every new client against current PEP and sanctions lists as part of the intake cycle, flags matches and near-matches with a risk classification, attaches the screening record to the matter file, and requires explicit sign-off from the designated AML officer before the matter proceeds — with the full audit trail preserved for regulatory review.
Outcome: AML/KYC obligations are met at intake, with a documented audit trail. The compliance record exists before the first disbursement, not after a regulatory inquiry.
Most agent builds skip phase one (no mission alignment), compress phase two (assumed workflows, not observed ones), and have no equivalent of phases four and five (built and released without the people who will use it ever signing off).
The Mycelium build loop is slower than the market default. The slowness is the point.
Fixed fee, ex GST. Optional Sustained Alignment Retainer ($2,500–$6,500/month) available post-release for quarterly mission re-alignment, AML/KYC list updates, conflict logic drift monitoring, and governance review.
Every Legal Intake Agent is released to broader use only after three sign-offs.
This is what separates a managed build from a deployed tool. The agent is not finished when the code is written. It is finished when the people who will use it have confirmed that the conflict logic is sound, the AML/KYC flags behave correctly, and the engagement letters it drafts meet the firm's standards — before a single external letter goes out.
The fee earners, paralegals, and intake coordinators who will use the agent daily sign off that it works as expected, handles edge cases responsibly, and the conflict detection and AML/KYC flag logic aligns with the firm's compliance obligations.
The function owner signs off on scope, governance cadence, performance measures, compliance boundaries, and the explicit list of what the agent will and will not do — including the sign-off requirements before any engagement letter is sent.
The senior decision-maker receives the executive briefing, confirms the scope and risk envelope, reviews the AML/KYC compliance approach and conflict governance model, and authorises broader release.
60 minutes with you and your Practice Group Leader. We assess whether a Legal Intake Agent build — or a Phase 1 demo — is the right move for your situation. And we tell you if it is not.