Legal intake virtual assistant, bilingual and supervised. Facts captured, never interpreted.
Here is the service in plain terms. You get one dedicated bilingual operator, full time on the Operator tier at $1,497 per month, working inside your own case management system from a managed Latin American office on Eastern Time with a shared supervisor, under a supervising attorney letter your firm signs before Day 1. During your business hours the operator answers new callers in Spanish and English, runs your intake script, asks your acceptance checklist and records the answers word for word, captures the names your conflict check needs, books consultations, chases unsigned leads and requested documents, and logs all of it in Clio, Filevine, MyCase, Lawmatics, or whatever you run. Anything that is legal work, advice, evaluation, an outcome promise, a fee, the meaning of a document, goes to your attorney by scripted refusal, in both languages. Built for immigration, family, employment, criminal defense, estate and probate, bankruptcy, and general practice firms anywhere in the United States with Spanish-speaking callers.
ICP: law firms with Spanish-language intake volume · Intake only · Supervising attorney letter before Day 1 · Nationwide
- SCOPE
- Intake only · never legal advice, never case evaluations
- REFUSALS
- Five, scripted and reviewed weekly in English and Spanish
- PLATFORMS
- Any case management system: Clio · Filevine · MyCase · Lawmatics · CASEpeer · others
- PRECONDITION
- Supervising attorney engagement letter signed before Day 1
- HOURS
- One scheduled shift per operator, anchored on Eastern Time · evenings and weekends via Team or Custom
One desk owns the new caller, or the attorney does.
In most firms under about ten attorneys, intake is nobody’s whole job. It is the receptionist’s spare minutes, the paralegal’s afternoons, and the attorney’s own phone at 6 PM. An intake operator earns the seat by owning the entire front end, first ring through booked consultation, in both languages, with every step logged where your team can audit it and every legal question routed instead of answered. Six lanes make up the standing role.
Every new caller reached, in two languages
A caller reaches a live person who answers in the caller’s language and runs your approved intake script: what happened or what they need, when, where, who is involved, what documents or notices they hold, how they found the firm. Facts are captured as stated. Nothing waits in voicemail for the one bilingual person in your office, and nothing gets interpreted on the call.
Your acceptance checklist, asked and recorded verbatim
Your firm defines the checklist: matter types you take, jurisdictions, date thresholds, the questions that decide whether a consult is worth booking. The operator asks the checklist, records the answers word for word, and flags the file for attorney review. The operator never grades the answers, never predicts what your attorney will think, and never tells the caller whether they qualify.
The parties logged so your check can run
Before a consultation is booked, the operator collects the full names of every party the caller mentions and enters them the way your conflict process requires, then records what your system returns. Whether a conflict exists, and what to do about one, stays with your attorney. The operator makes sure the question can be answered fast, not that it is answered by the wrong person.
Slots filled, reminders sent, no-shows called back
Qualified callers get booked into the consultation slots your attorneys define, with confirmation and reminders in the caller’s language. No-shows get a same-day reschedule call instead of a dead lead. Fees are never quoted or negotiated by the operator; if your script prints a consultation fee, the operator reads it exactly as written and routes every other fee question to your attorney.
The chase that turns a call into a signed client
The lead who called Tuesday and went quiet gets a structured follow-up sequence in their language until the consult happens or the lead closes out per your rules. Documents your attorney requested, identity papers, notices, pay records, court paperwork, get chased and logged as received. Collected, named your way, attached to the file, and never read for meaning.
Every step documented where your team can audit it
Whether you run Clio, Filevine, MyCase, Lawmatics, CASEpeer, PracticePanther, or another system, the operator works inside it: complete intake fields, source attribution, verbatim checklist answers, and a next action your paralegal can act on without calling the lead back to re-ask. Notes land in English so attorneys and staff read one clean record, whatever language the call happened in.
This page frames the engagement by role for firms outside personal injury. Personal injury intake is a separate engagement with its own refusal set, including settlement value and medical records, and a capped number of concurrent firms; it lives on our personal injury intake outsourcing page. Firms weighing the phone alone, without the desk behind it, will find the category on our bilingual virtual receptionist page.
Three ways to staff intake. Each solves a different problem.
Search for legal intake help and three different purchases come back wearing one label. Naming which problem each one solves is the honest way to sell any of them.
Hiring an in-house intake specialist. The right call when the seat has to be physically in the office: greeting walk-ins, notarizing, walking a file down the hall. Go in with the full ledger open, because the wage is the smallest line once you add employer taxes, benefits, a software seat, the recruiting cycle for bilingual talent, and the empty desk every time the seat turns over. Our in-house hire vs managed agency comparison walks the whole ledger.
A legal answering service or AI receptionist. A shared pool or a software agent that picks up, runs a short intake form, and books or transfers. If the thing keeping you up is literally the call at 11 PM, that category is the honest purchase, and we will say so on the fit call. What it does not give you is a person who owns the desk: nobody on that model works your unsigned-lead list, chases the documents your attorney asked for, or drills the notario refusal until it is automatic in Spanish.
A managed bilingual intake operator on a scheduled shift. This is our product. One dedicated operator running your whole intake loop inside your case management system, in English and Spanish, during the scheduled window when your new callers actually call, with a supervisor and a warm bench behind them and a supervising attorney letter over the seat. You keep every legal question, every fee, and every judgment. You stop being the intake desk.
What surrounds the operator is the actual product.
Remote staffing pitches in this category sell arrival credentials: resumes, platform badges, years of legal experience claimed on a profile. All of it walks out the door with the person, and every intake desk eventually loses a person. The durable questions are structural: where does the operator sit, who issues the machine they work on, who reviews their calls against the refusal list, and what happens the week they leave. Our answers hold whichever operator is in the seat.
Operators work from a managed Latin American office on company-issued equipment. Access to your case management system and phone line happens on machines we control, under logins that are logged, and the confidentiality obligations of the engagement are written into the supervising attorney letter. When a client asks how a remote operator handles privileged information, the answer exists in writing.
A supervisor sits in the same office, samples recorded calls every week against the refusal list in both languages, checks the intake queue against your SOPs, and corrects drift the same day. Boundary discipline is somebody’s standing job, not a policy you hope survives a busy Monday.
Three bench operators sit behind every engagement in the same office, under the same supervisor, with your intake script, acceptance checklist, calendar rules, and refusal scripts on file as written SOPs. Replacement is continuity: the incoming operator inherits your documented desk, which is what makes the 5-business-day SLA a commitment instead of a hope.
The office is anchored on Eastern Time and the operator’s shift is scheduled where your new-caller volume actually lands, including the lunch-hour and early-evening windows when people call about their own matters. Across the operation, 20+ hours of live coverage a day are available, scheduled per engagement. One operator works one shift; covering evenings and weekends at the same time is a Team or Custom configuration.
Every operator is a native Spanish speaker with professional-fluency English. Spanish is not a surcharge or a separate queue; it is how the bench is built, because in immigration, family, employment, and criminal defense the Spanish-first caller is often the majority of new business.
Intake scope, with the law kept where it belongs.
An intake operator who quietly starts telling callers whether they qualify, what a notice means, or what the firm will charge is not a convenience. It is the unauthorized practice of law wearing a headset, and in Spanish it is the notario problem your callers already know to fear. The boundary is written into the supervising attorney letter before Day 1, drilled in both languages before the first live call, and checked weekly against recorded calls. Five refusals hold on every call.
When a caller pushes for an answer, the script is the same in either language: I am not a lawyer and not a notario, I cannot answer that, what I can do is take down everything carefully and get you in front of the attorney. The question gets logged so your attorney knows it was asked.
No legal advice
The operator never tells a caller what the law means for their situation, never advises on deadlines, eligibility, or filing requirements, and never suggests a course of action beyond booking the consultation. A caller who asks a legal question hears, in plain language and in their own language, that the operator is not a lawyer and that the question goes to the attorney.
No case evaluations or merit opinions
The operator never says a matter sounds strong, weak, or worth pursuing, never scores it, and never predicts whether the firm will take it. The intake record holds facts as the caller stated them. Evaluation is your attorney’s work, and the record is built so your attorney can do it fast.
No outcome or timeline promises
Will I get approved, will I get custody, how long will this take, can they deport me before the hearing. The operator never answers any of them, never references past results, and never engages when a caller pushes for reassurance. The question gets logged so your attorney knows it was asked, and the file routes to attorney review the same business day.
No fee quotes or negotiation
The operator never quotes retainers, flat fees, hourly rates, payment plans, or contingency terms, and never negotiates. The single carve-out is a consultation fee your script prints, read exactly as written. Every other fee conversation belongs to your attorney under your jurisdiction’s rules, and the script routes it there without exception.
No document interpretation
The operator can log that a notice, a court paper, an immigration letter, a pay record, or a medical record was requested or received when your checklist calls for it. The operator never reads meaning into any of them, never tells a caller what a notice requires, and never characterizes what a document means for the matter.
The precondition behind all five: a supervising attorney at your firm signs an engagement letter before Day 1 that names the intake-only scope, lists the refusals, sets the routing rule for every legal question, records the confidentiality obligations of the engagement, and documents consent to weekly recorded-call review in English and Spanish. Firms unwilling to put a supervising attorney behind their intake are not a fit, and we say so on the first call.
The caller who asks whether they qualify is not asking for an opinion. They are asking whether anyone in this office will listen carefully. The refusal, done right, is the yes.
A supervisor's note
In these practice areas, the Spanish caller is the practice.
44.9 million people in the US speak Spanish at home (US Census Bureau, 2024 ACS). For an immigration, family, employment, or criminal defense firm that number is not demographics; it is the new-business line. It is the caller who explains a removal notice through a cousin because the office line promises an English conversation. It is the custody matter that went to the firm down the street because someone there picked up in Spanish. It is the consultation reminder sent in a language the client does not read, and the empty slot on Thursday.
An intake operator built bilingual inverts the default. Spanish-first callers reach a live person on the first ring, describe their situation completely, and hear the refusals in their own language, which is what turns a compliance rule into trust in communities that have been burned by notarios. Consultations get confirmed in the language they will be read in, which fills the calendar. And every note still lands in English in your case management system, so the file stays clean for the attorney. The category context for that discipline is our bilingual virtual assistant service; this page is the intake desk cut of it.
Nobody arrives knowing your checklist. Seven days closes the gap honestly.
Providers in this category advertise intake staff who arrive ready for your firm, as if your acceptance checklist, your calendar rules, your escalation contacts, and your refusal scripts were industry standards rather than decisions your firm made. They are yours, and only your team can teach them. So the model says it plainly: your team teaches, our supervisor documents, and the written SOPs are what the operator works from on Day 1 and what any future replacement inherits.
Your supervising attorney signs the engagement letter: intake-only scope, the five refusals, routing rules for every legal question, confidentiality obligations, and consent to weekly recorded-call review in both languages. Nothing starts without it.
You add the operator to your case management system and phone line with the access your policy allows, working in your Clio, Filevine, MyCase, Lawmatics, CASEpeer, or PracticePanther. Your intake manager or supervising attorney walks through the desk: your intake script, your acceptance checklist, your conflict-check process, your consultation calendar rules, any consultation fee your script prints, and where every escalation line sits. Our supervisor sits in and turns all of it into written SOPs, including the refusal scripts in English and Spanish.
The operator shadows whoever runs intake today, on live calls and the live queue, and runs role-plays on the hard moments under supervisor review: the caller who asks whether they qualify, the caller who asks what it costs, the caller who wants to know what the notice means, the caller who pushes for reassurance. The refusal gets drilled until it is automatic in both languages.
The operator takes live intake calls with the supervisor on the line at reduced volume. Anything ambiguous gets flagged, answered by your team, and written into the SOP the same day.
The operator runs the full intake cadence: new-caller queue, checklist screening, conflict-check capture, consultation scheduling, unsigned-lead and document follow-up, record hygiene. Supervisor sampling continues weekly against the refusal list in both languages. The Week 1 SOPs mean a bench replacement never starts from zero on your desk, which is what makes the 5-business-day replacement SLA a commitment rather than a hope.
$1,497 a month. Full-time. Flat. Published.
40 hrs/wk full-time. One bilingual intake operator running your desk in your case management system from our office, under your supervising attorney, with a shared supervisor and the 3-operator warm bench behind them.
Start with Operator →Starter ($897/mo, one operator at 20 hrs/wk part-time) fits firms where intake is a half-day desk. Team ($3,497/mo, two operators with a stepped-up shared supervisor, 6-month minimum) covers the business day and the evening window at the same time. Custom is quote-based for configurations beyond Team: 5 or more operators, extended-hours coverage, a dedicated supervisor. No per-call or per-lead pricing. Full detail and the universal terms at /pricing, and the full market math, hourly bands, and in-house wage loads in our Spanish-speaking virtual assistant cost guide.
Staffing an intake desk comes down to three purchases: a managed bilingual intake operator, an hourly placement, or an in-house hire. This table prices all three from published sources. Assistiq figures are our published tiers; the third-party figure was read on a first-party page on the date stamped in its row, and a price that is gated or unpublished is named as such rather than guessed.
| Model | What you get | Published pricing |
|---|---|---|
| Assistiq managed bilingual intake operator | One operator running new-caller intake, checklist screening, conflict-check capture, consultation scheduling, unsigned-lead and document follow-up in English and Spanish, and record hygiene in your case management system, under five scripted refusals and your supervising attorney, on a scheduled Eastern Time shift with weekly recorded-call review and a 5-business-day replacement SLA. | $897/mo 20 hrs/wk · $1,497/mo 40 hrs/wk, flat, no meteringPublished · assistiq.io/pricing |
| Hourly VA placement (category) | A placement-model virtual assistant billed by the hour. Supervision, refusal discipline, quality checks, and continuity planning stay with you. | Roughly $3 to $15 an hour at the Filipino placement tier and $10 to $28 an hour at the LATAM placement tier, per the ranges documented on our cost guidesDocumented ranges · assistiq.io/cost |
| In-house intake specialist (employee) | An employee in your office who can also greet walk-ins, notarize, and hand a file to the attorney down the hall. Employer taxes, benefits, a software seat, the recruiting cycle for bilingual talent, and the empty desk every time the seat turns over ride on top of the wage. | Average base pay of $21.01 an hour for an intake specialist in the United States (4.7k salaries from job postings in the past 36 months, updated September 14, 2026), plus benefits, per the Indeed career salary pageVerified Sep 2026 · indeed.com |
Verified September 2026 on first-party pages · Gated or blocked prices are never estimated
Common questions from firms staffing the intake desk.
01What does a legal intake virtual assistant do?
02Can a legal intake virtual assistant give legal advice?
03Is this a virtual paralegal service?
04Which practice areas do you take intake for?
05Can the operator tell an immigration caller whether they qualify or which form to file?
06Do you handle legal intake in Spanish?
07How much does a bilingual legal virtual assistant cost?
08Do your operators know Clio, Filevine, MyCase, or Lawmatics?
09Why do you require a supervising attorney letter?
10Do you cover evenings and weekends?
11Is this a legal answering service?
12What happens if my intake operator leaves?
13How do I hire a legal intake virtual assistant?
Comparing providers before you decide? The best legal virtual assistant companies ranking scores answering services, placement models, and managed legal staffing providers on published weights, with every price verified.
Weighing a legal answering service against a person who owns the desk? The answering service vs bilingual VA comparison walks the structural difference and the cost math.
Talk through your intake desk. 30 minutes, no slides, no sales pitch.
We will walk through your practice areas, your new-caller volume, your Spanish-speaking caller share, which case management system you run, and who your supervising attorney will be. You will know within the call whether we are a fit, including if the honest answer is that a paralegal or an answering service, not an intake operator, is what you need first.
Or reach us directly at hello@assistiq.io.