Litigation Funding Intake

The old intake asked everything, of everyone, up front. People stopped partway through. Attorneys chased the rest by phone, which is the most expensive way to collect a form field ever invented.

You can’t delete a question the law requires. You can decide when to ask it, and who has to face it.

Intake became a dynamic form with conditional logic. You answer what applies to you and nothing else. Questions that do not apply never render, so the form gets shorter as the system learns more about the case instead of longer.

When somebody said a question was mandatory, I checked it. Every time, against the objective, the end goal, and the actual compliance requirement. Not because I doubted anyone. Because “we need this” and “the law requires this” get said in the same tone of voice, and only one of them is immovable.

That verification is what bought the room to design for the emotional state. You cannot lower cognitive load on a flow where every question is untouchable. You can lower it a lot on one where six of them turn out to be preferences.

I had two designers on this. Which changed what my job was: less drawing, more deciding what got drawn and why, and making sure the reasoning behind a screen survived being handed to somebody else.

The hardest part was cognitive load, not compliance. A required question is a fixed cost. What you control is how many of them somebody has to hold in their head at once, and whether the next one arrives before they have recovered from the last.

So the flow got built for somebody with about forty percent of their usual attention. One decision per screen where the decision is heavy. No question that requires reading a previous answer to make sense. Nothing that punishes you for stopping and coming back an hour later.

The worst screen was choosing an attorney. We could not pick one for you, legally, and that is not a rule anybody was going to bend. But the alternative as originally scoped was handing somebody in the middle of a bad month a list and asking them to rank lawyers.

What shipped was the top three near you, sortable. Three is small enough to hold. Nearby is a reason you can understand without explanation. And sortable means the people who do want to compare can, without making everyone else do it.

Qualified leads went up 20% and drop-off fell 35%, in the first three months after launch. Those two normally trade against each other: take friction out, get more completions and worse leads. Moving both the right way means the form did not get shorter so much as it started asking for different things.