AI intake for personal injury law firms, after hours.

After-hours personal injury intake answers the calls that would otherwise reach voicemail, and it runs a full intake instead of taking a message. Della answers in the firm's name and works through the questions an intake coordinator would ask: incident date and place, injuries, treatment so far, police involvement, the other party's insurer and any prior attorney.

Each call becomes a dossier in the Call Della dashboard with a summary, urgency score, recording and transcript. Voicemail is where many of these callers end up today. In an ABA Law Practice Division secret-shopper survey, 32% of calls to law firms went straight to voicemail, and 42% of the time the lawyer took three or more days to reply, Lawyers Mutual NC reported (2019). An injured caller who reaches voicemail at 11pm usually keeps dialing. Della keeps that caller on the line with your firm.

Della qualifies a personal injury caller by asking the questions that decide whether the case is worth a callback, in the order a good intake script uses. She starts with the incident type and date, because those start the statute of limitations clock, then the state where it happened. She asks about injuries and treatment: an ambulance ride, an ER visit, a hospital admission, ongoing care.

She asks about fault in the caller's own words, whether police came, and whether a citation was issued. She asks whether the caller has already signed with another firm. She does not tell the caller whether they have a case, because that is legal advice and Della never gives it. Your attorneys make that call in the morning, with the facts already in the file. For the field-by-field version, see what belongs on a personal injury intake form and how to write a personal injury intake script.

Trucking and catastrophic injury calls need a different intake because the stakes and the evidence are different from a standard auto claim. Federal rules set minimum liability coverage for a for-hire interstate carrier of general freight at $750,000, and at $5,000,000 for some bulk hazardous materials, under 49 CFR 387.9. A caller who says "truck" might mean a pickup or a tractor-trailer, so Della asks which, and asks for the carrier name or USDOT number on the cab.

When a caller describes a death, an ICU admission or a life-flight, Della scores the call as urgent and emails an alert to the attorney on call straight away, so the firm can decide that night whether to send a preservation letter. She also logs red flags such as prior counsel or an old incident date, which our guide to personal injury case evaluation covers in detail.

The statute of limitations and the fault rule are the two personal injury details that change most by state, and both affect how fast a caller needs a callback. Della records the state and the incident date on every call, so the dossier shows the deadline exposure at a glance, before anyone reads the transcript. Claims against a city, county or state agency can carry notice deadlines far shorter than the general limitations period, so Della asks whether a government vehicle or public property was involved.

Our personal injury rules by state reference covers deadlines, comparative and contributory fault, and no-fault insurance. The case-type checklists list what to capture on auto accident, trucking accident and slip and fall calls. To put a number on the calls your firm misses now, try the missed-call cost calculator.

The cost of a missed call is the fee from the injury case that caller would have signed. Work it out for your own firm: missed calls a month × share that are new matters × your sign rate × your average fee. The sliders start on example figures. Move them to your own numbers.

For the method and what to count as a missed call, see the full missed-call cost calculator.