The short answer
Before your firm can run a clean conflict check, an AI phone agent needs to gather the identities involved and the general nature of the matter, and nothing more. The goal at first contact is to capture enough to search your conflicts system and route the caller to the right person, while carefully avoiding two traps: giving anything that sounds like legal advice, and collecting so much confidential detail that you create duties before you have even decided whether you can act.
Why the intake script decides how clean your conflict check is
A conflict check is only as good as the names fed into it. If the person answering the phone writes down "John, car accident" and moves on, the conflicts clerk has almost nothing to search. If they instead capture the caller's full legal name, the other driver, the insurer, and any related business, the search is meaningful.
There is a second reason to be disciplined. In many jurisdictions, even a prospective client who shares confidential information can trigger duties for the firm, including the risk of being disqualified from acting for the other side. That means the first conversation should be narrow on purpose. You want the identifying facts a conflict check requires, not the merits of the case. A well-configured AI agent is actually good at this, because it follows the same script every time and does not get drawn into the story the way a sympathetic human sometimes does.
What to collect at first contact
Party identities
This is the core of a conflict check. Configure the agent to ask for:
- The caller's full legal name, and any former or alternate names (maiden name, business name, prior legal name).
- The name of the opposing or adverse party, spelled out.
- Other people or entities connected to the matter: a spouse, co-defendants, a company and its principals, an estate, an employer, an insurer.
- Whether the caller is asking on their own behalf or for someone else.
Spelling matters here. A good agent confirms name spellings back to the caller so the conflicts search is not defeated by a typo.
Matter type, not matter facts
The agent should capture the category of work (family, real estate, employment, personal injury, corporate) and a one-line description, so the right practice group or lawyer sees it. It should stop there. It does not need the settlement figure, the affair, the disputed clause, or the caller's theory of the case to run a conflict check, and collecting those details early is exactly what you want to avoid.
Contact and routing details
- Best callback number and email.
- Whether the matter is time-sensitive (a court date, a limitation period the caller mentions) so it can be flagged for urgency without the agent assessing whether a deadline actually applies.
- How the caller found the firm, if useful for your own tracking.
What the agent should never do at intake
Draw a hard line in the agent's instructions. It should not answer legal questions, estimate the strength of a case, quote a likely outcome, or say anything that implies the firm has agreed to act. It should not tell the caller they have "a strong claim" or "plenty of time." And it should be explicit that it is scheduling or taking information, not providing advice, and that a lawyer will follow up once the firm has reviewed the matter. The safest posture is a receptionist who books and routes, not a paralegal who screens.
Keeping intake from creating a duty
Two practical settings help. First, confidentiality of the recording itself: AlmaTalk lets you turn call recording and transcript storage off per agent, and you can enable a spoken "this call may be recorded" disclosure. For a first-contact intake line where you want minimal retained detail, that control matters. Second, the booking behaviour: rather than confirming a consultation on the spot for a brand-new caller, you can have the agent take the details and hand off, so a person clears conflicts before any appointment is committed. AlmaTalk can book live during a call and add it to Google Calendar, Outlook, or Cal.com, but for a conflicts-sensitive intake many firms prefer the agent to collect and route first, then book once cleared.
Setting this up in AlmaTalk
Three features map directly onto a clean intake-then-conflict-check flow.
Per-business matter taxonomy
You define your own service categories and urgency levels. After each call, AlmaTalk tags the conversation against that taxonomy from the transcript, so incoming matters are already sorted by type and flagged for urgency when your conflicts clerk picks them up. Routing matter types to a specific person is available and can be configured per firm.
Message to a named staff member
The agent can take a message to a specific person from your own staff directory, and only to addresses in that directory. For a firm, that means an intake can be sent straight to the conflicts clerk or the responsible lawyer, and a caller-requested callback is filed as a real task rather than a note that gets lost.
Escalation with context
The agent answers 24/7 and can escalate or transfer to a person, passing along what it has gathered. So a caller with a genuine emergency, or one the agent cannot handle within its narrow script, reaches a human with the identifying details already captured, not a blank slate.
It also runs bilingually in English and French, and can recognize a returning caller by number and greet them by name, which is useful when an existing client calls back before a new matter has been cleared.
A note on your own rules
Conflict rules and intake obligations differ by law society and by jurisdiction. Treat the script above as a starting template and confirm it against your regulator's professional conduct rules and your own risk policy before you put an AI agent on the front line. The technology can enforce a disciplined intake consistently; deciding what that discipline should be is still the firm's call.