Turn an inbox into a tracked pipeline, with a conflict record your risk partner and your insurer can both inspect.
Most firms cannot say how many enquiries arrived last month, what they were worth, or what proportion converted. This guide covers the configuration that changes that, and the conflict-check record that is usually the quiet win.
Lead and opportunity model, business process flow design, duplicate detection for conflict screening, Outlook integration and the field discipline that determines whether fee earners use it.
An enquiry arrives to a partner who is in court. It sits. Three days later they respond and the prospective client has instructed somebody else. Nobody records that this happened, so the firm never learns.
The conflict check is the other half. Most firms run them thoroughly and informally — a senior person is asked and thinks carefully. The check is good; the record is a memory.
Check these before beginning. Most stalled implementations stall on one of them.
Dynamics 365 Sales Professional or Enterprise. Professional is sufficient for most firms; Enterprise adds forecasting and relationship intelligence.
System Administrator or System Customizer for configuration; a practice lead who can approve the process design.
An accurate party and matter history for conflict screening. If your practice management system holds it, plan the integration before you build the workflow.
Which practice group goes first. Pick the one that most wants it.
Configuration is straightforward once these are clear. Skipping them is why most first attempts produce something that works and cannot be maintained.
A lead is an unqualified enquiry. Qualifying it produces an opportunity, an account and a contact. For a law firm, qualification is the point at which the conflict check has passed and the firm is willing to act.
A process flow guides a user through stages and can require fields at each stage. Unlike a hard validation, it shows the path rather than blocking work — which is the right balance for fee earners who will abandon a system that fights them.
Duplicate detection rules can match on party name across accounts, contacts and leads. It is not a full conflicts engine, but combined with a recorded check step it produces a defensible, searchable record.
Settings shown are the ones that matter, not every field on the form. Values are starting points to validate against your own environment.
Keep the required field set very small. Every mandatory field is a tax on capture, and an enquiry recorded partially is worth far more than one not recorded at all.
Add practice area, source and indicative value. Resist anything else at this stage.
Four stages work for most firms: Received, Conflict Check, Qualified, Engaged. The conflict stage is where the record is created.
Make the conflict outcome a required field to leave that stage. This is the one place where a hard requirement is worth the friction.
Create rules matching on account name, contact full name and any party field you add. Run them as a manual check from the conflict stage rather than as a background job, so the check is a deliberate act with a recorded result.
Record what was searched, what was found and who decided. That record is the deliverable.
An enquiry that sits untouched is the failure mode this whole exercise exists to fix. Configure an automated flow that notifies the owner at a threshold and escalates to the practice lead beyond it.
Agree the thresholds with the practice rather than imposing them. Different work has genuinely different urgency.
Fee earners will not leave Outlook. The Dynamics 365 App for Outlook lets an enquiry be captured from an email without switching applications, and this single factor predicts adoption better than anything else.
Pilot with the practice group that least wants this. What they find is what would have killed the wider rollout.
Every one of these is avoidable, and every one of them is common enough that we check for it by default.
The most common cause of failed legal CRM. Nineteen required fields produces nineteen placeholder values and a pipeline report built on nothing.
It is a screening aid. The professional judgement remains with the person doing the check; what you are building is the record of that judgement, not a replacement for it.
Litigation and corporate will not accept the same intake process and should not be asked to. Configure per practice group and share what genuinely can be shared.
It is the single highest-value configuration in the project. A fee earner who must open a separate application will not record the enquiry.
Pick a practice group and a matter type, and we will configure intake, conflict check and matter opening against your terminology, then put it in front of your partners.
Describe the situation in your own words.
