Can your intake team handle another acquisition channel?

Count the work your firm will actually do

Before adding a channel, have the intake director map the proposed handoff. A form inquiry can leave contact, qualification, follow-up and signing with your team. A signed-retainer delivery can still require document checks and the firm’s own review decision. The purchased unit is not a staffing unit.

List the stages your people will perform. Leave completed supplier work outside the firm-hours calculation. If your team must check that work, add the checking time as a separate stage. This avoids charging the same effort to both teams while making the remaining responsibility visible.

Start with hours that are available after existing work

Choose one planning period for every input. For each person, enter usable hours after existing matters, meetings and other committed work. A scheduled shift is not necessarily an available shift. Keep absences and coverage changes in the assumptions your team will verify before taking the order.

Count each person once in the shared pool, then allocate those hours to stages. If the same reviewer supports contact and documents, their hours cannot appear as a complete separate pool for each task. The workbook flags duplicate staff labels and an allocation that exceeds the pool.

Give each stage its own volume, time and owner

On the Stage plan sheet, enter forecast records and total firm minutes per record for each task. Follow-up time should include the work across attempts, not just one successful call. Use your team’s observations or an explicit planning assumption; the example minutes are not industry benchmarks.

Volumes can differ by stage. Some records may need contact without reaching document review during this period, while an older queue may add reviews without adding new inquiries. Forecast each task separately instead of forcing the same count into every row. Record an owner, backlog age and assumption beside it.

A fictional 40-record order needs 43 hours 20 minutes

In the workbook’s fictional example, every record needs 15 minutes of initial firm contact, 30 minutes of follow-up and 20 minutes of document review. That is 65 minutes per record. Forty records require 2,600 minutes, or 43 hours 20 minutes, of firm work.

Two fictional staff members each have 15 usable hours for the same period: 30 hours, or 1,800 minutes, in total. Required work exceeds available time by 800 minutes: 13 hours 20 minutes. An opening order of 40 therefore does not fit these inputs, even before considering arrival timing.

Check the bottleneck before using the 27-record ceiling

The pooled ceiling assumes all available hours can be reassigned and every new record needs all modeled stages. It is a theoretical planning limit. It does not establish a safe purchasing commitment, guaranteed throughput or how many matters the firm will accept.

The sample allocates seven hours to initial contact, fourteen to follow-up and nine to document review. At the sample time inputs, those stages can handle 28, 28 and 27 whole records respectively. Document review is the limiting stage. Named owners, skill restrictions or urgent work can lower practical capacity further.

Use the stage-specific limits when the same set of new records needs every stage. When volumes differ across stages, work from each task’s required hours and allocated coverage instead. The common-cohort ceiling cannot replace a review of an uneven existing queue.

Keep unresolved work in the next forecast

A missing document does not eliminate the work of obtaining or reviewing it. Record the oldest backlog age at a stated cutoff, identify the next action and name its owner. If the work moves into the next period, carry its expected time into that period rather than counting it as complete. If you already deducted time for that backlog from usable hours, do not add the same work to the stage forecast.

For a signed delivery, keep signing status separate from review status. An executed agreement can coexist with an open information request. Your capacity plan should reflect that remaining work. The qualification checklist describes what to collect; this worksheet helps estimate the firm time needed to review it.

Adjust volume, hours or scope before committing

When required work exceeds usable time, choose a concrete adjustment. Reduce the opening volume, add staffed coverage for the limiting stage, or agree which work the supplier will finish before delivery. Recalculate after the change. Moving work to a supplier only reduces firm time if the handoff and verification requirements actually change.

Also discuss when deliveries arrive. Thirty usable hours distributed across a week do not establish immediate coverage for a burst of inquiries. The worksheet plans total work; your intake director still needs an arrival and response plan appropriate to the firm’s workflow.

Use the worksheet in your acquisition review

Download the Excel file below and keep a copy for each planning period. Start with the Read me sheet, replace the amber inputs on Capacity and Stage plan, then review the deficit, allocation check and stage limits. Keep client records in the firm’s approved systems; the model needs aggregate inputs.

Blank numeric inputs remain missing. Enter an explicit zero only when the value is genuinely zero. Zero minutes at a stage means no modeled firm time for that task; it does not prove that the overall handoff is complete. Resolve any missing-input or allocation warning before relying on the figures.

Use the first cohort to replace assumptions with observed staff time and remaining work. Discuss differences with the acquisition partner, then size the next order using the revised model. The linked pilot guide covers the wider buying decision, while the paid-media and human-intake case study explains a relevant engagement scope.

Questions law firms ask