Screening Criteria for Personal Injury Intake Calls

Personal injury intake is a screening function. The moment a caller starts describing what happened to them, the firm is already making decisions about risk, resource allocation, and whether this matter belongs on its docket. Most cases take years to resolve, so a firm that signs a weak one today is paying for it in sunk attorney hours, tied-up capacity, and delayed revenue for a long time afterward. Contingency-fee economics create constant pressure to say yes: volume feels like safety, until the caseload fills up with files that never should have cleared the door. Written, consistent screening criteria are what keep that pressure from overriding judgment.

The five criteria every intake call must evaluate, in order

Liability, damages, insurance coverage and collectability, the statute of limitations, and case fit, which includes prior representation and conflict checks, decide whether a case belongs at the firm. That sequence is not decorative. A case with no liability can't be rescued by catastrophic injuries, and a case with airtight liability and a badly hurt client is worth nothing if the at-fault party is uninsured and judgment-proof. A airtight, well-documented claim is moot the instant the filing deadline has passed.

Treat each criterion as a gate. Failing any single one is grounds to refer the case out or decline it politely, no matter how strong the rest of the file looks. Knowing that these five items are qualifying logic, where a single "no" can end the conversation, rather than boxes to check on the way to a signature, is what separates a trained intake specialist from someone reading questions off a script.

Establishing liability: fault, evidence, and comparative negligence on the first call

Everything starts with one question: can fault be placed on someone other than the caller? A driver, a property owner, an employer, a manufacturer. If the caller was the only actor in whatever happened, there's usually no case to build, however sympathetic the story is.

From there, intake needs to ask about evidence immediately, on the first call, not at a follow-up. A police report, witness names and phone numbers, photos, video. Cases that arrive with none of this carry a much higher risk of turning into a "he-said, she-said" dispute that stalls out before settlement talks ever get serious. Motor vehicle cases backed by a police report tend to be the strongest of the bunch, since an objective third party has already documented fault and, often, insurance information, before the firm even gets involved.

Comparative negligence needs to be introduced as a modifier. Most states reduce a plaintiff's damages in proportion to their share of fault rather than wiping out the claim. A handful of jurisdictions work differently: any share of fault, even a small one, can bar recovery outright, so intake has to know which rule governs before drawing conclusions. The practical version of this on a call is simple: ask whether any authority or report assigned the caller fault, and pay close attention to how they answer, not just what they say.

Assessing damages: injury severity, medical documentation, and case value signals

Liability establishes who's responsible. Damages establish whether the case is worth pursuing. A claim with no documented physical injury is difficult to value and even harder to settle, so intake needs a clear read on medical treatment early: where the caller was treated, when, how often, and whether it's ongoing.

Diagnostic details matter here, imaging, surgery, hospitalization, because they tell the intake specialist whether this is a case with real, provable damages or one built mostly on subjective pain complaints. Ask whether the injury has kept the caller out of work, and for how long. Lost income is one of the more concrete, defensible damages categories, and it's often underreported unless someone asks directly.

Catastrophic cases, permanent disability, major surgery, traumatic brain injury, significant lost earning capacity, are the ones every firm wants on paper. They're also the most resource-intensive to prosecute, and that trade-off deserves to be flagged at intake, not discovered three months into litigation. One detail gets missed more often than it should: the exact incident date and the exact date of first treatment. Those two dates anchor both causation and the statute of limitations, and if they're vague or approximate in the file, a defense attorney will use that gap to argue the injury came from somewhere else.

Insurance coverage and collectability: the economic viability test

A judgment is only worth what someone can actually pay. That's why one of the first questions on any intake call should be about policy limits, since an uncollectable claim can leave the firm without a recovery on its investment. Sinking real attorney hours and case costs into a claim against a defendant with a minimum policy and no attachable assets is the kind of resource drain a contingency-fee firm may not get back.

The questions here are direct: who is the defendant's carrier? Does the caller know the policy limits, or can they find out? For commercial defendants, is there a corporate entity behind the individual, an umbrella policy, fleet coverage, anything that pushes the available limits above the state minimum? And for the caller's own protection, does their policy carry UM/UIM coverage in case the other party turns out to be uninsured or underinsured?

Clear liability and serious injury don't automatically make a case worth taking if the available coverage is at the state minimum. An attorney ultimately decides whether the numbers clear the firm's threshold, but intake's job is to surface the coverage picture clearly enough that the decision can actually be made.

Statute of limitations: calculating the deadline on day one and flagging exceptions

The statute of limitations doesn't bend for a good case. If the filing window has closed and no exception applies, the matter is dead regardless of fault, injury severity, or available coverage, and no attorney enthusiasm changes that. The deadline needs to be calculated at intake, on the first call, using the incident date, the applicable state statute, and any exceptions that might apply, not left until the consultation or, worse, the day of signing.

Several recent changes make this more than a routine lookup. Florida's negligence statute of limitations dropped to two years for incidents on or after March 24, 2023, a real cut from the prior rule that plenty of callers still assume is in effect. Missouri cut its medical malpractice deadline from five years down to two. Minnesota has a proposed cut to its own medical malpractice window, from four years to two. Utah moved the other direction, extending its discovery period to four years and its statute of repose out to eight. California opened a two-year revival window for adult sexual assault claims running from January 1, 2026 through December 31, 2027. Callers with older claims in that category may have a live filing opportunity they have no idea exists.

Certain case types carry their own clocks, and intake needs to flag them the moment the case type comes up in conversation. Claims involving minors are subject to tolling rules that vary by state and can push the deadline out considerably. Claims against a government entity almost always require written notice within a short window, often somewhere between 60 and 180 days, before a lawsuit can even be filed, and missing that notice deadline kills the claim just as thoroughly as missing the limitations period, except the clock runs much faster. Medical malpractice has its own statute and its own repose period, now shortened in Missouri, with similar legislative proposals active in other states. Products liability and construction defect claims are governed by statutes of repose on top of the standard limitations period, so screening only on the headline number, without checking repose, is how a firm ends up signing a case that was already dead on arrival.

Pre-existing conditions: how to screen without wrongly rejecting viable cases

Insurance carriers have a go-to defense against injured plaintiffs with any prior medical history: attribute the whole injury to the pre-existing condition and argue the defendant owes nothing. Intake needs to capture that history carefully and completely, as the documentation that will eventually counter that exact argument.

The eggshell skull doctrine covers this: a defendant is liable for the full extent of the harm their negligence causes, even when the plaintiff was unusually vulnerable to that harm because of a condition that predated the incident. The legal question isn't where the condition came from. It's whether the defendant's conduct made it worse or sped it along, and if the answer is yes, the defendant is on the hook for that aggravation.

Compensation in these cases tracks the additional harm, the gap between the plaintiff's medical costs and limitations before the incident and their situation after it. Intake specialists who understand this distinction can document pre-existing conditions thoroughly, instead of treating any mention of prior injury as an automatic red flag.

Prior representation, conflict checks, and case-type fit

Every caller gets asked early: has an attorney already been hired for this matter? It sounds like a formality. It sounds like a formality, but it isn't. Signing a client who's already represented elsewhere creates an ethics problem and burns firm resources on a case that was never available to take.

After the call, a standard conflicts search runs to confirm the firm doesn't already represent, or hasn't previously represented, someone connected to the other side of the matter. That step happens before any retainer goes out, as a standard step.

Case-type fit is the last practical filter, and it looks different depending on what walked through the door. Auto accident cases need vehicle details, road conditions, and insurance carriers on both sides confirmed, with a police report as the baseline standard. Slip-and-fall and premises liability cases hinge on the property's condition, whether the owner had notice of the hazard, and whether anyone reported it before the caller got hurt. Medical malpractice cases require treatment records and related documentation, on top of navigating the shortened deadlines now active in Missouri and any pending changes in other jurisdictions. Workplace injury cases need employer information, OSHA involvement if any, and a clear read on workers' comp status, since the interplay between a comp claim and a third-party tort claim changes the whole strategy. Truck and commercial vehicle cases call for proactive screening of commercial and umbrella coverage, since the numbers involved are usually much larger than a standard auto policy. Mass tort intake needs a confirmed medical diagnosis and a documented exposure duration before the call gets treated as viable.

Building these as conditional branches on the intake form, triggered by whatever case type the caller identifies early on, keeps the right questions in front of the specialist at the right moment instead of relying on memory alone.

Evidence preservation: what intake must ask for in the first conversation

Evidence has a shelf life. Photos get deleted, vehicles get repaired or scrapped, witnesses stop returning calls. If intake doesn't push the caller to lock down evidence in the first 24 to 72 hours after the call, some of it may never be recoverable again.

Ask for the police or incident report, photos and video of the scene, the vehicle, the property, and the injuries themselves, ideally with time stamps intact, medical records and bills from every provider who's treated the caller, insurance information for both sides, pay stubs or other income documentation if lost wages are part of the claim, and any communication with an insurance company, texts, emails, requests for a recorded statement. Witness names and contact information belong on that list too. They provide independent verification and add credibility to the caller's account, and the defense will be looking for those same witnesses just as hard.

Callers should also be advised about their rights regarding communications with the opposing insurer, since early missteps in that area can affect the claim before the firm has even signed the client. The intake form should capture the current state of available evidence so nothing critical falls through the cracks before the case is signed.