Case study
Casework — Intake Automation for Legal Aid
A bilingual intake system that triages incoming cases, extracts key facts, and drafts the first case file — cutting intake from days to hours.
01The problem
Harbor Legal Aid received more requests than its intake team could screen. Applicants waited up to nine days for a first response; urgent housing cases sat in the same queue as routine document reviews. Every intake meant an hour of manual transcription into the case system.
02What we built
We built a structured-intake pipeline: a guided form-and-upload flow, an extraction model that pulls parties, dates, deadlines, and case type from applicant documents, and a triage classifier that scores urgency against the clinic's own criteria — with every score explained and overridable. Drafted case files land in the existing case-management system, never a parallel one.
03The outcome
First-response time dropped from nine days to same-day for urgent cases. Intake capacity rose 3× with the same staff. The clinic's board cited the system in securing a major grant renewal.
