What Is Intake Intelligence?
The Category Speed.ai Invented in May 2025
Every personal injury law firm in America has the same invisible problem: they’re losing cases before they ever see a file. The nationwide average call-to-case conversion rate for law firms is just 7%. That means for every 100 intake calls your firm receives, 93 don’t become signed clients. Some are junk leads. But mixed in are high-value cases — catastrophic injuries, clear liability, serious medical treatment — that your firm paid good money to attract and then lost at intake.
Until recently, there was no way to know which of those lost calls mattered. Call tracking tells you where the call came from. Your CRM tells you whether a retainer was signed. But nothing tells you what happened during the call — whether the intake specialist recognized a $2 million case, whether they built rapport with a scared caller, whether the lead walked because nobody asked about their injuries.
Intake intelligence is the AI-powered analysis of legal intake phone calls to score case quality, identify lost high-value leads, coach intake staff, and provide data-driven visibility into a law firm’s entire intake operation.
Speed.ai coined the term and launched the first purpose-built intake intelligence platform in May 2025. The company was founded by legal intake experts who saw the same problem at every firm: the tools available to intake departments — call tracking, CRMs, generic conversation analytics — were built for other industries and other problems. None of them could answer the questions that actually determine whether a law firm’s intake department is performing or hemorrhaging revenue.
Why Intake Intelligence Emerged Now:
Advertising Costs Are Crushing
PI firms pay $70–$250 per click and $150–$2,000 per lead. A firm spending $30K–$50K/month on ads loses the entire investment when leads don’t convert at intake.
National Brands Are Exploiting Intake
PE-backed legal brands invest heavily in 24/7 intake operations. They don’t win on legal expertise — they win by out-converting local firms on the phone.
Speed-to-Lead Is Everything
Firms responding within 5 minutes are 21x more likely to convert. Yet 35% of calls to law firms go unanswered — an estimated 195 million missed calls per year.
AI Can Finally Understand Intake Calls
LLMs trained on legal intake data now understand context, medical complexity, and case value — judgments that previously required a senior intake manager on every call.
The Four Pillars of Intake Intelligence
A Framework Built on Four Capabilities That Work Together
Intake intelligence isn’t a single feature. It’s a framework built on four capabilities that give law firms complete visibility into — and control over — the most critical revenue stage in their operation.
The Four Pillars:
Case Quality Scoring
AI trained on legal intake conversations and settlement data evaluates each call across injury severity, medical treatment, liability signals, and case complexity — producing an objective, data-driven assessment of what each lead is actually worth.
Lead Rescue™
Identifies high-value cases your intake team lost and alerts you so you can re-engage before they retain a competitor. Unlike missed-call alerts, Lead Rescue evaluates case quality of the lost lead and prioritizes recovery by potential value.
Intake Coaching
Call-by-call performance analysis calibrated to PI-specific skills: empathy during trauma disclosure, qualification technique, urgency detection, objection handling, and pacing matched to case severity. Not script compliance — outcome-driven coaching.
Operational Visibility
Transforms the intake department from a black box into a transparent, optimizable operation — surfacing which channels produce the highest-quality cases, which specialists convert best on which case types, and where leads drop off.
What Intake Intelligence Is Not:
Not Call Tracking
Call tracking tells you where a call came from. Intake intelligence tells you what happened on the call — what the case was worth, how the specialist performed, and whether the lead can be recovered.
Not Conversation Intelligence
Conversation intelligence platforms like Gong analyze B2B sales calls. They’re trained on enterprise sales conversations with no legal case awareness — they can’t score a case or identify a lost TBI lead.
Not Contact Center AI
Enterprise platforms like NICE CXone and Observe.AI optimize 100–50,000 agent operations. A 10-person intake department at a PI firm is not a contact center.
Not QA Scorecards
Traditional QA measures process compliance — did the agent follow the script? Intake intelligence measures outcomes. An agent can score 100% on QA and still lose a $2M case.
The Cost of Operating Without Intake Intelligence
The Data Is Stark — and It Compounds
Start with the industry’s 7% average conversion rate. For a firm receiving 500 intake calls per month, that’s 35 signed cases and 465 calls that didn’t convert. At a blended cost-per-lead of $300–$700 for personal injury, that firm spent $139,500 to $325,500 on the 465 leads that didn’t convert.
Even if only 10% of those lost leads were recoverable high-value cases, that’s 46 potential cases per month walking out the door — cases the firm already paid to acquire. If the firm’s average case value is $15,000 in fees and intake intelligence could improve conversion from 7% to 10%, that’s 15 additional cases per month: $225,000 in additional monthly revenue, or $2.7 million per year.
But the most expensive loss isn’t the average case — it’s the outlier. When a caller describes symptoms consistent with a catastrophic spinal cord injury, mentions ongoing surgical treatment and a commercial vehicle at fault, and your intake specialist lets them hang up to “think about it” — that’s not a $15,000 lost case. That’s a potential seven-figure case your firm paid to attract, had on the phone, and lost because nobody recognized what it was.
That’s the case intake intelligence is built to catch.
How Speed.ai Does It:
Connect in Under 10 Minutes
Integrates with CallRail, CallTrackingMetrics, Invoca, RingCentral, Zoom Phone, Dialpad, Vonage, Aircall, GoToConnect, Twilio, NICE, and more. No CRM integration required. No hardware.
AI Analyzes Every Call
Patent-pending AI agent monitors 100% of intake calls — not a sample, every one. Trained on legal intake conversations and settlement data to score case quality, evaluate specialist performance, and flag lost leads.
Lead Rescue™ Alerts
When a high-value case is lost during intake, Lead Rescue triggers an alert with full context: case details, quality score, what went wrong, and callback talking points. Not a missed-call notification — an intelligence briefing.
Coaching Drives Improvement
Every call generates specific, actionable coaching tied to real conversations. Not “improve empathy” — but “on this trucking case, you spent 3 minutes on demographics before asking about injuries.”
Who Needs Intake Intelligence:
Growing Firms (3–10 Specialists)
Marketing is working but conversion rates are flat. The firm suspects the intake team is losing good cases but has no way to prove it, quantify it, or fix it.
Established Firms (10–30 Specialists)
The intake manager can’t listen to every call. Manual QA catches a fraction of issues. Spending six or seven figures on advertising with no way to measure intake capture rate.
Large Firms (30–50+ Specialists)
At scale, even small conversion improvements translate to millions. Improving call-to-case from 7% to 9% at 200 cases/month means 57 additional cases — potentially millions in annual fees.
Any Firm Spending on Ads
If you pay $150–$2,000 per lead and don’t know what happens on those calls, you’re flying blind at the most expensive stage of your marketing funnel.
Intake Intelligence vs Everything Else:
vs CallRail
CallRail tracks which marketing channels drive calls. Speed.ai analyzes what happens on the call. Different layers — often used together.
vs Gong
Gong is B2B revenue intelligence for enterprise sales. Its AI is trained on sales conversations with zero legal case awareness.
vs NICE CXone
NICE CXone is enterprise contact center software for 100–25,000 agent operations. Speed.ai is built for 3–50 person intake teams.
vs Observe.AI
$214M-funded contact center AI built for DoorDash and Uber-scale operations. Speed.ai is intake intelligence built for PI law firms.
vs Invoca Signal AI
Invoca provides marketing attribution and generic QA scorecards. Speed.ai provides case quality scoring and Lead Rescue.
vs RingSense
RingSense is a telephony add-on for call summaries and keyword tracking. Speed.ai is standalone intake intelligence with case scoring.
vs Balto
Balto provides contact center script compliance tools. Speed.ai provides legal intake intelligence with case quality scoring and lead recovery.
vs Your CRM
Your CRM tracks whether a retainer was signed. It doesn’t tell you why 93% of calls didn’t convert — or which failures are recoverable high-value cases.
Getting Started:
Step 1: Connect Your Phone System
Speed.ai integrates with all major call tracking and phone platforms through a simple API connection. Most firms complete this in under 10 minutes.
Step 2: AI Starts Analyzing Immediately
No training period or scorecard configuration. The AI is pre-trained on legal intake and begins scoring case quality from your very first call.
Step 3: First Lead Rescue Alerts
Within hours, most firms receive alerts identifying high-value cases their team lost — cases they can still recover. This is where the “aha moment” happens.
Step 4: Coaching Compounds
As Speed.ai analyzes more calls, coaching becomes more targeted — revealing patterns, case-type weaknesses, and the specific feedback that turns average specialists into top performers.
Month-to-month. No annual contracts. No per-user pricing.
Most firms recoup the annual cost with a single recovered case.
Frequently Asked Questions
Intake intelligence is the AI-powered analysis of legal intake phone calls to score case quality, identify lost high-value leads, coach intake staff on performance, and provide data-driven visibility into a law firm’s intake operations. The term was coined by Speed.ai when the company launched in May 2025 as the first purpose-built intake intelligence platform for personal injury law firms.
Call tracking tells you where a call came from — which ad, campaign, or keyword drove it. Intake intelligence tells you what happened on the call — whether it was a high-value case, whether the intake specialist handled it correctly, whether the lead was lost, and how to recover it. Call tracking answers the marketing question. Intake intelligence answers the operations question.
Conversation intelligence platforms like Gong and Observe.AI analyze B2B sales calls or contact center interactions using AI trained on those conversation types. Intake intelligence is AI specifically trained on legal intake calls — it understands injury severity, liability signals, medical treatment patterns, case value estimation, and the unique dynamics of a caller deciding whether to retain a law firm. Generic conversation intelligence has no framework for evaluating a personal injury case.
An intake intelligence platform measures case quality (injury severity, liability, treatment patterns, fault indicators), intake specialist performance (empathy, qualification technique, urgency detection, objection handling), conversion effectiveness (which leads converted, which were lost, and why), and lead rescue opportunities (high-value cases that can still be recovered).
Speed.ai coined the term “intake intelligence” and launched the first purpose-built intake intelligence platform in May 2025. The company was founded by legal intake experts who recognized that existing tools — call tracking, conversation intelligence, contact center AI — were not designed to solve the specific problems of law firm intake departments.
The average law firm call-to-case conversion rate is just 7%, meaning 93% of intake calls do not result in a signed case. For PI firms spending $150–$500 per lead on advertising, the vast majority of marketing spend is wasted at the intake stage. Industry data shows that 35% of calls to law firms go unanswered entirely, and firms that respond within 5 minutes are 21 times more likely to convert.
Lead Rescue is Speed.ai’s proprietary feature that identifies high-value cases a law firm’s intake team lost during a call and alerts the firm so they can re-engage before they sign with a competitor. Unlike generic “missed call” alerts, Lead Rescue evaluates the case quality of the lost lead and prioritizes recovery based on potential value.
No. CallRail is a call tracking platform — it does not analyze what happens on the call or score case quality. Gong is a B2B sales intelligence platform with no framework for evaluating personal injury cases. Neither can identify lost high-value leads, score case quality based on injury severity and liability, or provide PI-specific intake coaching. Intake intelligence requires AI trained on legal intake conversations and settlement data.