FAQ
Questions firms ask
What partners and practice managers ask before a pilot, answered straight.
What exactly does the No-Miss Guarantee cover?
During your pilot, every qualifying enquiry is captured, triaged, conflict-screened for review, logged, and acknowledged automatically, within minutes. If it ever isn’t, your one-time build fee is refunded in full and we keep working at no cost until it is. The guarantee covers what the system does on every enquiry, not your firm’s conversion rate, which depends on your team.
Is there a long contract or lock-in?
No. The pilot runs for a fixed 60 days, then month to month. Cancel any time. The founding rate is held for early firms as standard pricing rises.
What does a pilot cost?
A one-time build fee, refundable in full under the No-Miss Guarantee, and a flat monthly fee that is a fraction of an intake hire. Prices are published in full on the pricing page. The founding rate is 40% off the monthly fee, confirmed on the first call and held for early firms as standard pricing rises.
Does Lorne & Vale provide legal advice?
No. Lorne & Vale provides administrative intake automation. It does not provide legal advice, does not create a lawyer-client relationship, and does not replace a qualified lawyer’s review.
Does the AI see our prospects’ personal details?
No. The prospect’s name, email address, phone number, and company are replaced with neutral tokens before the AI call, along with any email or phone number in the message text. Real details are restored only afterwards, inside the workflow, and third-party names are kept so conflict screening still works.
How is intake data handled securely?
Each pilot uses firm-specific workflows, restricted access, HTTPS form submissions, separate lead storage, no document collection, and human review at all times. The Trust Centre sets it out in full.
Do you collect documents during the pilot?
No. No documents, IDs, evidence files, medical records, bank records, or court papers. Only the intake information needed to classify, route, and log the enquiry.
Do we need to learn new software?
No. Briefs arrive as emails to your team, acknowledgements go out from your address, and the tracker is a simple sheet. There is nothing to install, no new logins, and nothing for your team to learn.
What do you need from us to launch?
Your practice area, intake criteria, routing rules, confirmation email wording, booking link, internal recipients, and a few sample matters for testing.
How long until we are live?
7 days from the first call: scoping on day 1, build and tuning on your sample matters through the week, your firm approving every word, and real enquiries flowing on day 7 with a founder monitoring from the start.
How do we know if the pilot worked?
Faster intake routing, cleaner internal briefs, fewer missed follow-ups, better partner visibility, and a structured lead tracker your team actually uses.
Does Lorne & Vale replace our intake team?
No. Your team stays in control. They get faster structure, cleaner summaries, clearer routing, and better follow-up visibility.
What does it replace, then?
The scattered parts: unstructured emails, manual triage, unclear routing, missed follow-ups, and the lack of partner visibility. Not your lawyers, not your judgement.
Does it replace conflict checks?
No. It extracts potential conflict-check parties for human review. Your firm’s conflict process remains the source of truth.
What happens if the AI gets something wrong?
Human review stays in place. Outputs are administrative triage, not legal judgement. Your team verifies summaries, urgency, conflict parties, and next steps.
Will prospects know it’s AI?
Prospects receive an acknowledgement from your firm’s address, in wording your firm approved before go-live, confirming receipt and offering your booking link. It is administrative confirmation, not advice, and your firm decides every word of it. The AI-drafted brief is internal, for your team only.
Can we start with one practice area?
Yes, that’s the recommended approach. Employment, immigration, family, personal injury, or litigation are the strongest starting points. Prove the workflow, then expand.
Can it feed our CRM or case management system?
Yes. CRM and case-management integrations are available as custom add-ons once the core intake workflow is validated.
How is this different from Clio or LEAP?
Those systems store and track intake once it’s configured, but the triage, scoring, routing, and reporting are work your team has to design and maintain. Lorne & Vale is the layer that is already built, built and tuned for one practice area in 7 days, and it can feed your existing system rather than replace it.
Why not just use ChatGPT ourselves?
You could paste enquiries in one at a time, but that’s manual, inconsistent, leaves no audit trail, and stops the moment someone is busy. Lorne & Vale runs on every enquiry the second it arrives, with consistent structure your partners can rely on.
Why not just use an answering service?
An answering service takes a message. It does not classify the matter, score urgency, extract conflict parties, write a partner-ready brief, log the enquiry with an owner and next action, or flag a follow-up at 24 hours. It also does not seal anything: your file ends up in a third party’s system under their retention rules. If your problem is only that the phone rings out, an answering service is cheaper and you should use one. If the problem is what happens to the enquiry afterwards, an answering service solves none of it.
Which firms is this actually for?
Firms where enquiries arrive faster than a person can triage them, and where the matters are worth enough that losing one hurts. In practice that means firms with their own inbound flow rather than pure referral work, running one clearly defined practice area for the pilot. If your enquiries are handled within minutes today, you do not need us.
Who reviews the workflow output?
Your team does. Your firm verifies summaries, urgency, conflict parties, scores, and next steps before acting.
Who owns the final decision?
Your firm. Lorne & Vale does not accept clients, reject clients, provide advice, assess merits, or make engagement decisions.
What happens before launch?
Your firm reviews the intake fields, routing rules, internal lead brief, confirmation email, lead tracker, and weekly report format before anything goes live.
Is this compatible with our professional conduct obligations?
That is your firm’s call to make, and we have written it so you can make it quickly. The system performs administrative intake triage: it captures, classifies, scores, extracts names for your conflict process, drafts an internal brief, and sends an acknowledgement you approved in advance. It gives no legal advice, forms no view on merits, creates no lawyer-client relationship, and takes no step that reaches a client without a fee earner approving it. The sample client disclaimer in the pilot security pack shows the exact wording a prospect sees. We do not claim regulatory approval, and no supplier can give you one.
Does it screen conflicts for us?
No, and we are careful about this. It extracts the names and organisations from an enquiry and lists them so your existing conflict process can screen them. Your process stays the source of truth, and clearance is always a decision made by your firm.
Who is accountable during the pilot?
A named founder. Lorne & Vale is founder-led at the pilot stage, so the workflow is scoped, reviewed, and refined by the people whose names are on it.
What if our firm has security questions?
The Trust Centre answers the common ones, and a pilot security pack (DPA, sub-processor list, retention schedule, and data map) is prepared for your firm before go-live.