Tera Bullion builds AI intake agents for law firms that qualify prospects, gather case details, and create CRM records around the clock — no paralegal required. Deployments have automated 80% of the client intake process and freed 30+ paralegal hours per week, with intake that used to take four hours completing in minutes.
Every prospective client who calls your firm starts a clock. If the call lands after hours, it reaches voicemail — and the prospect keeps dialing down their list until a competitor answers. If it lands during hours, a paralegal stops billable-adjacent work to run a qualification conversation, take notes, and retype them into the practice management system.
One firm we worked with measured the routine at four hours of paralegal time per intake before automation. After deployment, the same intake completed in minutes — and the firm reclaimed more than 30 paralegal hours every week. Reverse those numbers and the status quo's price is visible: your highest-leverage support staff spending the equivalent of a workweek, every week, on data entry and phone tag.
Hiring another paralegal buys capacity, not structure. The new hire runs the same manual routine into the same systems. Intake volume grows, the bottleneck stays, and the cost line grows with it.
An answering service catches the after-hours call but produces a message, not an intake. Someone still has to call back, qualify, and enter the record — usually the next business day, when the urgency that made the prospect call has faded or been captured by a faster firm.
A website contact form collects a name and a paragraph. It doesn't ask the qualifying questions for your practice areas, doesn't screen out the matters you don't take, and doesn't create a structured record. Your team still does the real intake by phone — the form just adds a step before it.
All three fail the same way: the bottleneck isn't answering the phone, it's completing a structured, qualified intake and getting it into your systems. That's the part worth automating.
An intake agent purpose-built for your firm:
Before: prospect calls → voicemail or a paralegal interrupt → handwritten or half-typed notes → retyped into the PM system → callback tag to fill the gaps → consultation scheduled days later, if the prospect hasn't hired elsewhere.
After: prospect reaches the agent on first contact, any hour → qualification completes in one conversation → a structured, accurate record lands in your systems instantly → the consultation is already booked → your paralegals spend their week on casework instead of copy-work.
The measured shift: 80% of the intake process automated, 30+ hours per week returned to the firm, four-hour intakes completing in minutes — with accuracy improving.
If intake volume is real and the after-hours phone is going to voicemail, this is among the highest-return automations a firm can deploy — measurable from the first week's reclaimed hours.
No — and it's built not to. The agent qualifies prospects, collects case details, and schedules consultations. Anything resembling legal judgment routes to your attorneys with the full intake context attached. The agent handles logistics; your lawyers practice law.
With the seriousness your bar requires. Access is role-scoped, data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and client information is never used to train shared AI models. Confidentiality is an architecture decision made at the start of the build, not a setting toggled after.
In almost every case, yes. We integrate through the APIs of the practice management and CRM platforms firms already run, so qualified intake lands as a structured record where your team already works — no new portal, no rip-and-replace.
They get answered — that's the point. The agent runs 24/7, so the Friday-evening inquiry that used to reach voicemail gets qualified, recorded, and scheduled while your competitors' phones ring out. The first responder usually wins the client.
An answering service takes a message; the agent completes intake. It asks the qualifying questions for your practice areas, captures case details in structured fields, creates the CRM record, and books the consultation — work that previously waited for a paralegal's morning.
Weeks, not quarters. One firm's deployment automated 80% of client intake and freed 30+ paralegal hours per week — with intake that took four hours completing in minutes, and accuracy improving because nothing gets retyped.
It's scoped to your intake volume and practice areas, which is why we start with a free build plan instead of a rate card. Tell us how intake works at your firm today and we'll map the build, the timeline, and the number it has to beat.
Tell us how this works in your operation today. We'll send back a build plan — no pitch deck, no fluff, just engineering.
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