A woman calls at 4:50 on a Thursday. She's calm, organized, has dates written down, wants to talk about custody. You clear the last slot of your day for her, because a custody call always sounds urgent and you'd rather not be the attorney who let a real case walk to the next firm.
Twenty-five minutes in, it comes out: she lives in DC, the marital home is in Montgomery County, her husband works in Arlington and has already retained a lawyer, and that lawyer is someone in your own building you've referred cases to twice. You didn't lose a slot. You lost a slot to a case you were never going to be allowed to take.
I want to walk through the five questions that would have surfaced all of that in the first ninety seconds instead of the last five minutes, because a wasted consult isn't just an annoying afternoon. It's a scheduled hour you can't sell to someone you could actually help, and in a DMV family-law practice, that hour gets contested for constantly.
What a burned consultation slot actually costs you
Think about what a free or discounted consult really is: a block of your calendar that isn't billing anyone while you're in it. Book six of those a week and one turns out to be unretainable, unwinnable, or a conflict you should've caught at hello, and you've given away an hour you can't get back and can't rebill. I don't think solo family-law practices talk about this cost enough, probably because it doesn't show up on any report the way a missed payment does. That's the same math as the phone-tag problem in reverse: instead of losing time chasing a call that already happened, you're losing time on a call you scheduled yourself, in good faith, without asking the two or three questions that would've told you not to.
The fix isn't screening harder in the room. It's screening before the room, on the call that books the slot.
The five questions, in the order I'd ask them
The order matters more than the list, and I'll tell you why as I go: I front-load the two questions that can disqualify a case outright — can you even take it, and are you allowed to — so you never spend breath on case details for a matter that was never yours. Everything after that assumes you cleared those first.
1. Where do the parties actually live, and where's the marital home? Not the same question, and the gap between them is where most wasted consults hide. A caller's own address tells you where she sleeps tonight. It doesn't tell you where the court with authority over her divorce or custody matter sits, and each jurisdiction sets its own residency threshold before it will even hear a filing. Ask both addresses before you ask anything else.
2. Who's on the other side, full name? Get the spouse's or opposing party's complete legal name before you book anything, not during the meeting. Run it against your client list and your conflicts list while the caller's still on the phone. A conflict caught at minute one costs you thirty seconds. A conflict caught at minute twenty-five costs you the slot and an awkward call to end it.
3. What kind of matter is this, specifically? "Family law" covers custody, divorce, support modification, adoption, protective orders, and more, and you don't handle all of it the same way, if at all. "I need a divorce" and "I need to modify custody because he moved to Virginia" are different intake paths, different documents to have ready, sometimes different attorneys in your own firm. Ask what actually happened, not just the category.
4. Is anyone in danger right now? This is the one question that changes everything else about how fast you move. A caller describing an active-violence situation or a protective-order need isn't someone you schedule for Thursday. That's an escalation, today, by whatever route your practice has for it. Everything else on this list can wait for the scheduled slot. This one can't.
5. Can this caller actually retain you? Is she the one deciding, and paying, or is she calling on behalf of a sibling who isn't on the line? Has she already spoken with an attorney and is really shopping for a second opinion she won't pay for? A consult slot works best for someone ready to become a client this month, not someone gathering information for a decision that's still six months out. Neither is wrong to want, but they're different calls and only one of them needs your calendar today.
The DMV trap that question one is built for
I gave you the real version at the top: a DC resident, a Maryland marital home, a Virginia-employed spouse. That's not a rare edge case around here, it's Tuesday. People in this region live in one jurisdiction, work in another, and married or bought a house in a third, and family-law venue often follows the marital home or a residency requirement, not wherever the caller happens to be answering her phone from. Skip that question and you can end up deep into a consult before realizing the matter belongs in a Maryland courtroom, under Maryland's rules, possibly with an attorney who's actually licensed to appear there, and you just aren't that attorney for this case. It's not only a venue problem, either — a personal-injury intake runs into a related jurisdictional trap of its own, with a statute-of-limitations clock attached instead of a court's authority over the case.
That's the whole reason this is question one and not question three. Everything downstream, whether you can even take the case, assumes you've already sorted out whether it's yours to take.
Where I'd put this if I could hand it to something else
I'm building Dialkeep to ask exactly these five questions before a consult ever lands on a calendar, the same way the /law page describes: capture the facts, never touch the legal judgment, escalate anything that smells like danger instead of queuing it politely. So here's the honest version of what I can offer you today versus later. Today, this is a checklist for whoever already answers your phone — a human, running these five questions off an index card. The receptionist I'm building to run them on every call automatically isn't picking up calls for anyone yet; it's still in development, and I'd rather tell you that plainly than sell you a launch date I haven't shipped. Use the checklist now. The automated version is the thing I'm working toward, not the thing you'd be buying this week.
Run it on your next call
You don't need software to use these five questions tomorrow morning. Write them on an index card, hand them to whoever answers your phone, and see how many consult slots they save you in a month. I'd start with question one regardless of everything else on this list, because the DMV geography makes it worth asking every single time, not just when something sounds complicated. If it turns out you're screening calls yourself between clients more often than you'd like, that's its own kind of phone tag, and it's worth knowing what that's actually costing you before you decide it's fine.
Built for small law firms
The call you miss at 9pm is the case that calls the next firm at 9:01. No law line exists yet — plumbing is the trade line that's live today, and when a law line ships, the plan is for it to capture the facts and hand the judgment calls to you, not answer them. It isn't built. I'm not going to sell you a line that doesn't exist — check back when it does.
The 9pm custody call hires whoever answers. Be that firm →