What an AI phone assistant should do for a personal injury firm

An AI phone assistant for a personal injury firm should answer every call including after hours, collect a structured intake with the facts that determine whether the firm can take the case, capture the names needed for a conflict check, escalate anything urgent to a person, book a consultation, and never give legal advice. If it does those six things reliably, it earns its place. If it cannot do the last one, it is a liability.

This article sets out what good intake looks like in a PI practice and what to demand from any tool, human or AI, that answers your phone.

Why the phone matters in personal injury

PI is a practice area where the client picks a firm within hours, often on the first call that gets answered. Injured people call from hospital waiting rooms, from home after work, and on weekends. A firm that routes those calls to voicemail after 5 p.m. is handing the cases to whoever picks up.

The intake call also carries real risk. Every fact the caller gives could later be discoverable or misremembered, the caller may already have talked to an insurer, and the date of injury may be closer to a limitations deadline than they realise. The person or system answering the phone has to gather enough to let a lawyer make a fast decision and has to avoid saying anything that sounds like advice.

The intake questions that matter

Not every question is equally important. These are the ones a lawyer needs before deciding whether to take a consultation, roughly in priority order.

Date and place of injury

The single most important fact. Personal injury limitations periods vary by state and by claim type, commonly somewhere between one and a few years, with shorter notice-of-claim requirements when a government entity is involved and different rules for minors and for wrongful death. The assistant does not analyse any of this. It records the date precisely, records the state and location, and flags any incident more than a year old or involving a public entity for immediate lawyer review.

What happened

A short narrative in the caller's words: vehicle collision, slip and fall, workplace injury, medical treatment gone wrong, product failure, dog bite. The assistant should let the caller talk, then confirm the type of incident, whether police or an incident report was made, and whether there were witnesses.

Injuries and treatment

What was hurt, whether the caller went to an emergency room or urgent care, whether they have seen a doctor since, and whether treatment is ongoing. Gaps in treatment matter to value and to causation, and the intake should record dates where the caller has them.

Insurance and prior contact

Whether the caller has their own auto or health insurance, whether they know the other party's insurer, whether an adjuster has called, and, critically, whether they have given a recorded statement or signed anything. A caller who has already signed a release is a different conversation.

Other parties

The names of everyone involved: the other driver, the property owner, the employer, the manufacturer, the doctor. This is the conflict check input as well as the case facts. The assistant collects names and passes them on; it does not tell the caller whether the firm has a conflict.

Prior representation

Whether the caller has already hired or spoken to another lawyer about this incident. If another firm has been retained, the call needs a person.

Source and contact

How the caller found the firm, and the best phone number and time to reach them. This is marketing data as well as intake, and a firm that does not capture it cannot tell which spending works.

After-hours calls

The value of an AI assistant is highest outside business hours, which is also when the stakes of getting it wrong are highest, because nobody is listening. The requirements:

• Complete intake, not a message. The assistant should run the full set of questions above, not just take a name and number.
• Honest expectations. Tell the caller when someone will call back, and make sure someone does.
• Escalation rules that reach a human. Some situations should wake someone up: a caller who says they were just served with papers, a hearing or deadline in the next day or two, a caller in obvious distress or in the middle of a medical emergency, a caller who says an insurer is pressing them to sign today. The firm decides the list; the assistant follows it and transfers the call or texts the on-call lawyer.
• A record. Every call transcribed and summarised into a structured intake the firm can review in the morning.

Handoff to staff

Intake ends when a person takes over. The handoff should be clean:

1. The structured intake, transcript and any recording arrive in the firm's system as a lead, not as an email someone has to retype.
2. The lead shows what the assistant did: questions asked, answers given, anything flagged, whether a consultation was booked.
3. A lawyer or intake manager reviews and either accepts, declines or asks for more, and the caller is told the result promptly.
4. Accepted leads become matters with the intake already attached, so the first meeting starts from facts rather than a blank page.

A firm should be able to see, in one place, every call the assistant took this week and what became of it.

What the assistant must never do

This is the section to read twice.

No legal advice. Not "you have a strong case", not "you should see a doctor before you call the adjuster", not "the deadline is two years". Any question about the merits, value, strategy or what the caller should do gets one answer: that is a question for the lawyer, and here is when you will speak to one. The assistant can explain the firm's process and what happens next. That is all.

No promises. Not about outcomes, not about whether the firm will take the case, not about fees beyond what the firm has scripted (for example, that the firm offers a free consultation).

No contradicting the firm. The assistant follows the firm's script and escalation list. If it does not know, it says so and escalates.

No leaking. The assistant should not tell one caller anything about another, should not confirm or deny that the firm represents anyone, and should not reveal a conflict check result.

No pretending to be a person. Callers should be told they are speaking with an automated assistant. Many state and federal rules on automated calls and recording apply, and a firm should confirm its consent and disclosure script with counsel in its jurisdiction.

Configure these as hard limits, then test them. Call your own number and try to get the assistant to tell you whether your case is worth anything. If it does, fix that before anything else.

How to evaluate an AI phone assistant

Before signing anything, ask a vendor to show you:

• A live call, not a demo recording, where you play a caller with an old injury and a government defendant, and see whether it flags both.
• The escalation configuration: who gets reached, how, and what happens if they do not answer.
• The structured intake it produces and how it reaches your case management system.
• What it says when asked for advice.
• Where recordings and transcripts are stored, who can access them, and whether the vendor trains models on your calls.
• Language coverage, if your client base needs it.

Then run it in parallel with your existing answering for a few weeks and compare the leads.

How Frix intake works

Frix intake is an AI assistant that answers the firm's calls around the clock, in English and Spanish, on a dedicated local number you forward to. The firm sets the assistant's name and voice, the greeting, and the intake questions, and can upload its existing intake forms and FAQs so the assistant asks what the firm already asks. Escalation situations, such as a caller who was just served or a deadline in the next day, are configured by the firm, and the assistant recognises them and escalates the call.

Each call becomes a structured lead the firm can approve or reject, with the transcript attached. Accepted leads become matters, and the assistant can book the consultation on the firm's calendar. Intake data lives in the same system as matters, files and Donna, so the lawyer picking up the case can ask about it with citations to the transcript. Frix does not train models on customer data, and the security page explains how call data is handled.

For how this compares with practice-management tools that bundle a reception feature, see Frix vs Clio. For the broader platform, see Donna and the free Law Library.