The intake was quick. The conflict check was optional.

What they asked for

"Build a Power Apps intake with automated routing, conflict-check prompts and status tracking."

Not a data-entry problem, a risk problem. The manual intake made the conflict check (the step that guards the firm's biggest malpractice exposure) inconsistent and skippable. Speed isn't the win; a check that never gets skipped is.

Every time, the check runs. The conflict check moved from a skippable step into a gate the system runs on every matter, before it opens.

The situation

A law firm came to us wanting to speed up new-matter intake and client onboarding. On the surface it read as an efficiency project: intake was manual, details were rekeyed across systems, and every delay landed on a brand-new client's first impression of the firm. All true, and all worth fixing.

But when we looked at how a matter actually got opened, the real exposure was somewhere else entirely. The conflict check, the step that determines whether the firm can even act for this client without breaching its duty of loyalty, depended entirely on who ran it and how much time they had. Under deadline pressure, with a partner keen to get started, it was the step most likely to be rushed, done partially, or quietly deferred until later. The firm was fastest and loosest on precisely the step that carried the most risk. That was the problem worth solving. The typing was secondary.

What we found

Our diagnostic surfaced three compounding issues.

Intake was manual and rekeyed. Client and matter details were entered and re-entered across separate systems: slow, error-prone, and a poor first touch for a new client.

Conflict checks were inconsistent. The check depended on who ran it and how much time they had, so under deadline pressure it was rushed, partial or quietly deferred, exactly when the exposure is greatest.

Nobody could see where a matter stood. With no status tracking, a matter could sit waiting on a conflict clearance, engagement terms or a signature with no one owning the next step, so time-to-matter dragged and clients were left chasing.

The stakes are not abstract. Conflicts of interest rank, year after year, as the No. 1 cause of legal malpractice claims: in Ames & Gough's annual survey of the insurers that cover roughly 80% of the largest US law firms, conflicts are cited first or second every single year. The conflict check is the one intake step that guards against it, so a faster intake that lets that check slip isn't efficiency; it's accelerating toward the firm's biggest exposure. (Source: Ames & Gough, Lawyers' Professional Liability Claims Survey.)

So we did not treat this as a form-speed project. We treated it as a way to make the conflict check un-skippable, and let the speed come as a by-product. That the pattern works at scale is well established: global professional-services firm AECOM streamlined its project onboarding on Microsoft Power Platform, capturing and routing new-engagement information through a single automated workflow, exactly the approach we applied to matter intake.

What we did

One intake, entered once. A Power Apps intake captures client and matter details a single time into Microsoft Dataverse and reuses them everywhere they are needed: no rekeying, no transcription errors, and a clean, professional first touch instead of the client being asked the same questions three times.

The conflict check as a gate. Power Automate runs the conflict check automatically on every new matter and holds it: no matter opens until the check has run and any hit has been reviewed and cleared. There is no path to an open matter that bypasses the check, so the step that used to be skipped under pressure is now the one step that structurally cannot be. The control finally matches the risk.

Status everyone can see. Every in-flight matter shows exactly where it stands (waiting on conflicts, on engagement terms, on a signature) with a named owner for the next step, so nothing stalls silently in someone's inbox. Partners and operations can see the pipeline, clients stop chasing, and time-to-matter falls out of the process rather than being fought for.

How we rolled it out

We didn't boil the ocean. We built the intake and the conflict-check gate for one practice group first, proved that no matter could open without a cleared check and that intake genuinely got faster, then rolled it out group by group, keeping the new-business and risk teams in the build, so the workflow matched how the firm actually opens work.

The shift

Before, most of the time to open a new matter was the conflict check sitting in a queue. After, it runs automatically as a gate, so the whole cycle (intake capture, conflict check, route and open) collapses from days to hours.

Outcomes

• ~55% faster intake: details entered once and routed automatically, with no rekeying between systems.
• Zero rekeying: captured once in Dataverse and reused everywhere, so transcription errors between systems disappear.
• Days to hours on time-to-matter: a conflict-cleared, open matter in hours once the check and routing are automatic.

The win wasn't a faster form. It was a conflict check that never gets skipped, and a matter that opens clean.

An illustrative engagement. The scenario and figures are representative, drawn from outcomes across comparable Microsoft Power Platform deployments, not the audited results of a single named client.