A divorce lawyer's website intake form: what to ask before the first call

Six well-chosen questions turn a message box full of narrative into a list you can triage in eight seconds. Here is the field-by-field version.

Call a plumber about a leak and the person on the phone asks one question before anything else: is water coming out of it right now. That single answer decides the truck, the hour, the price, and whether anyone else on the list gets bumped. Everything else can wait for the visit.

Want this handled instead of DIY'd? See pricing and get a fixed-price quote.

Website intake forms in family law almost never do that. The standard one has four fields, and three of them are name, email, and phone. The fourth is a box labeled "How can we help?" which produces two hundred words of narrative, no jurisdiction, no timeline, and nothing you can sort on.

You then spend twenty unbilled minutes on a call to discover the matter is in another state.

A better form does not have to be longer. It has to be structured.

The trade-off, stated honestly

Every field you add costs you some completions. That is real and it is why the four-field form persists.

What matters is that the cost is not evenly distributed. A tap on a radio button costs a visitor almost nothing. A line of typing costs a great deal, especially on a phone, especially to somebody upset. So you can add five multiple-choice questions and lose fewer inquiries than you would by adding one more open text box.

That is the whole design principle. Ask more questions, but ask them in a form that can be answered with a thumb.

The six questions worth asking

1. What do you need help with? Radio buttons, matching your own practice areas. Divorce, custody or parenting time, child support, spousal support, property division, modifying an existing order, or not sure yet. Include the last option and mean it. A meaningful share of your best matters arrive from people who genuinely do not know which box they are in, and forcing them to guess wrong is worse than letting them say so.

2. Is the other party in agreement, or is this contested? Three choices: we agree on most things, we disagree on most things, and I do not know yet. This is the single highest-value question on the form. It separates a flat-fee agreed matter from a litigated one, and it changes the fee conversation completely before it starts.

3. Are there children under eighteen? Yes or no. Scope, urgency, and often jurisdiction all move on this answer.

4. Where do you live, and where does the other party live? Two short fields, state or province level. This is the question that saves you the most wasted calls, and it is the one most often missing.

5. Has anything been filed or served yet? Nothing yet, a filing has happened, or I have been served with something. The last answer usually means a deadline exists and the inquiry should go to the top of the pile today.

6. How and when is it safe to reach you? Phone, text, or email, plus a free choice of morning, afternoon, evening, or any time, plus a plain checkbox along the lines of "please do not leave a voicemail."

That last one deserves its own paragraph, because it matters more in family law than in any other practice area a small firm might run. A call to the wrong number at the wrong hour can cause a real problem in somebody's house. Ask the question, honor the answer, and say on the page that you will.

What to leave off

A long narrative box. Keep it if you want one, but cap it, label it "anything else we should know before we call," and make it optional. Most firms have their own reasons, which their counsel can explain far better than I can, for limiting how much detail a stranger can type into a form before any relationship exists. Ask yours.

Anything about money at this stage. Income, assets, and property values on a first web form read as invasive and convert badly. That conversation belongs on the call.

Dropdowns with forty entries. On a phone a long dropdown is a small disaster. Radio buttons for anything under about eight choices.

A CAPTCHA. A hidden honeypot field catches most automated submissions and costs your visitor nothing. Puzzles that make an upset person identify traffic lights on a cracked phone screen cost you real inquiries.

Required fields you do not need. Every asterisk is a place somebody can get stuck. Make the contact details required and very little else.

Order matters more than people expect

Put the situation questions first and the contact details last.

The conventional order is backwards for this reader. Asking a person in crisis for their full name and phone number in the first two fields, before they have any sense of what the form is for, is where a lot of half-completed forms die. Start with "what do you need help with," which is the question they came to answer anyway, and by the time they reach the name field they have invested enough to finish.

The three things around the form

The form itself is maybe half the job. These are the rest.

Say what happens next, above the submit button. One sentence: "I read every inquiry myself and reply within one business day." A person who has never hired a lawyer does not know whether they are about to hear from you, from a call center, or from nobody. Then keep the promise, because that sentence sets a clock.

Send an automatic reply that sounds like a person. Confirm you have it, restate the response time, and give the phone number in case something is urgent before then. Three sentences. Nobody has ever complained that a confirmation email was too short.

Store submissions somewhere other than email. Email alone loses inquiries, silently, to spam filtering and to the day somebody is out. Keep a stored copy in the site's own records as well as sending the notification, and add a hidden field recording which page the inquiry came from. After six months that hidden field tells you which pages actually produce work, which is information almost no small firm has.

Two mechanical things that quietly break forms

Use real labels, not placeholder text. Gray text inside a field disappears the moment somebody types, which means anyone interrupted mid-form loses their place. It also fails for visitors using assistive technology. Labels sit above the field and stay put.

Set the right keyboard. A phone field should bring up the number pad, an email field the email keyboard. This is one attribute per field and it is missing on a startling number of law firm sites.

Test it on the first of every month

Put a recurring reminder in your calendar and submit your own form from your phone. Check that the notification arrives, that it is not in junk, that the automatic reply goes out, and that the stored copy is there.

Contact forms break quietly. A hosting change, a mail provider tightening its rules, an expired integration, a plugin update. The failure produces no error and no complaint, because the people it fails are strangers who assume you did not want the work. I have seen firms sit on a broken form for months. Two minutes on the first of the month is the cheapest insurance in this entire business.

Where this fits

Every build I do includes a form along these lines, and I will set the questions to your practice areas rather than to a generic list. Solos get the most out of it, because the time it saves is time you were personally spending. That page is here: websites for solo family law attorneys.

One thing I will not do is advise you on what a form may or may not say where you practice. Disclaimer language, whether a submission creates any relationship, and what disclosure has to appear near a contact form are all governed by your bar and belong to your own counsel. Tell me what has to be there and I will build it so you can edit it yourself when it changes.

Questions about your own form, or a build: hello@divorcewebdesigner.com, or the contact form.