Client Intake for Disability Firms: Scoring Leads Before You Sign

Every contingency slot you fill is a slot you can't give to a better case. That's the real cost of a sloppy intake — not the bad case you sign, but the good one you turn away later because your docket is full. Intake isn't a clerical step; it's portfolio selection, and it deserves a scorecard.

The goal here isn't to predict any single outcome. It's to build a repeatable screen that disqualifies the cases that can't win on the law, grades the ones that can, and ranks the rest so your sign-up decisions reflect approval probability and expected fee rather than how compelling the caller sounded.

The technical screens that should auto-disqualify

Some cases are dead on the law before medical evidence ever matters. A good intake catches them in the first few minutes, because no amount of record-building fixes a technical bar.

• Date last insured (DLI). For Title II, the claimant has to be insured when disability onset occurs. The insured-status rules at 20 CFR 404.130 — generally 20 of the last 40 quarters — set the window. A remote or already-expired DLI doesn't kill every case, but it converts the file into a retrospective-evidence problem that your intake should flag, not discover at the hearing.
• Substantial gainful activity (SGA). A caller earning above the 2026 SGA limit of $1,690/month (non-blind) is exposed to a Step 1 technical denial regardless of how sick they are. 20 CFR 404.1572 defines what counts as substantial and gainful — it's worth screening current earnings, not just the diagnosis.
• Work credits / insured status. SSDI is an insurance program. A claimant who hasn't worked enough, recently enough, may lack insured status entirely — and SSI, with its resource limits, is a different conversation. SSA's How You Qualify overview is the baseline both screens trace back to.
• Duration. The impairment has to be expected to last at least 12 months or result in death. Short-horizon injuries don't qualify, and intake should say so plainly.

Medical-strength screening at intake

Once a lead clears the technical gates, the question shifts from eligible to provable. You're not diagnosing — you're estimating whether the record can carry the limitations the claimant describes.

A few signals separate a provable file from a hopeful one:

• Treatment continuity. Ongoing care with a treating source beats a thin file every time. Long gaps, no specialist, or a diagnosis with no functional documentation are the holes that sink otherwise sympathetic claims.
• Objective findings. Imaging, labs, pulmonary studies, longitudinal mental-health notes — whatever the relevant Listing or RFC analysis turns on. The narrative of symptoms is not the same as evidence of them.
• Listing-level vs. RFC cases. Flag at intake whether you're likely meeting a Listing or winning on residual functional capacity plus vocational factors. The second path is more work and more sensitive to the claimant's age and skill profile.

This is also where condition-level base rates earn their place. Knowing how a given impairment cluster tends to resolve by stage keeps your read honest when a caller's account runs ahead of their records.

Stage-of-claim and deadline triage

Where the claim sits changes both the urgency and the economics, so intake should capture it on the first call.

• Net-new applications give you the most control over record development but the longest road to fee.
• Post-denial leads carry a hard 60-day appeal deadline from the date on the notice. A lead two days from a blown reconsideration deadline is a different triage priority than one with five weeks of runway — your intake queue should sort on it.
• Hearing-level and beyond lets you read the office and judge context and price the case against a more concrete win probability.

Deadline triage isn't optional polish. A missed appeal window is malpractice exposure and a lost claimant in one stroke, and it's entirely preventable with a date field that drives the work queue.

Scoring leads for likely approval and likely fee

The scorecard is where the screens become a number you can rank on. The structure is straightforward expected-value:

Score ≈ approval probability × expected fee − cost-to-serve.

Approval probability comes from the inputs above — technical clearance, medical strength, and stage — calibrated against real base rates by condition and, where the case is hearing-bound, by hearing office and judge. Expected fee is bounded by the SSA fee-agreement cap (the lesser of 25% of past-due benefits or the current cap), so the lever that actually moves fee is the size and back-dating of the past-due period, which traces back to onset and DLI. Cost-to-serve scales with stage of entry, record-development burden, and how far the case has to travel.

You don't need false precision. A consistent A/B/C/D grade applied the same way to every lead beats a brilliant one-off analysis you only run on the cases that already feel good. The point of scoring is to make the marginal sign/decline decision defensible and uniform across whoever is staffing intake that day.

Workflow and tooling to do this at volume

A scorecard that lives in one partner's head doesn't survive contact with a busy phone. To run this at volume, the screen has to be the workflow:

• Standardize the intake form around the gates above — earnings, work history, onset, DLI, treatment sources, denial date — so every lead is captured the same way and nothing is "remembered later."
• Auto-disqualify on the hard bars (over-SGA earnings, expired DLI with no pre-DLI evidence, sub-12-month duration) before a case ever reaches an attorney's desk.
• Score and route the survivors, so the strongest cases get a same-day callback and the marginal ones get a documented decline rather than silent drift.

This is exactly what AISSDI's Lead Scorer is built to operationalize: feed it the intake signals and it returns a probability-grounded score instead of a gut call. For top-of-funnel, the Approval-Odds Estimator lets a prospective claimant self-screen before they ever reach you — which both improves lead quality and pre-qualifies the caller. And if you want the screen on your own site, the embeddable widget puts the estimator on your intake page so scoring starts before the first conversation.

None of this tells you which case will win. It tells you which cases are worth your finite contingency slots — and that's the decision intake actually exists to make.