Client Intake and Task Tracking: Can One System Do Both?

Client intake and task tracking can run in one system, and in most firms under about thirty people they should. Practice management platforms like MyCase and PracticePanther include both, with intake forms feeding records that then carry tasks and deadlines. The catch is that intake and task tracking are almost always sold on different tiers, so the plan that turns both on is usually double the advertised entry price.

Last updated August 2026. Vendor prices read from each vendor's own pricing page on 14 August 2026.

The question comes up constantly in software shortlists and it is usually asked the wrong way round. People ask which tool does both. The more useful question is whether the two jobs are actually the same job, because intake and task tracking sit on opposite sides of a line that decides how the whole system should be built.

Intake and task tracking are different problems wearing the same interface

Intake is everything that happens while you still do not know whether this person becomes a client. Someone inquires, you find out what they need, you decide whether you can help, you check for conflicts, you agree terms. The defining feature of this stage is uncertainty: most of the records you create here will never turn into work, and a good chunk of them will be declined.

Task tracking is what happens once the answer is yes. There is a matter, it has deadlines, and specific people owe specific things by specific dates. The defining feature here is obligation. Nothing is speculative, and missing something has consequences that intake simply does not have.

That difference shows up immediately in the data model. Intake records are cheap, numerous and mostly disposable. Matter records are expensive, fewer and permanent. A system optimized for one is usually a little awkward at the other, which is why platforms that do both tend to feel like two products sharing a navigation bar. That is not a criticism so much as an honest description of what you are buying.

It also explains a mistake worth avoiding: running intake inside your task system by creating a task for every inquiry. Firms that do this end up with a task list that is mostly noise, because eighty percent of those items are inquiries that went nowhere. The reverse mistake, running matters out of your intake pipeline, fails for the opposite reason: pipeline stages have no concept of a deadline that must be met.

What the platforms that do both actually charge

Every major US practice management platform includes task and deadline management on its entry plan, because that is the core product. Intake is the part they gate. Read from each vendor's own pricing page on 14 August 2026:

The pattern is consistent enough to plan around. Task tracking is table stakes and comes with the cheapest plan. Intake is treated as an upsell and sits one or two tiers up, at roughly double the entry sticker. If you are comparing entry prices across vendors while shopping for both capabilities, you are comparing numbers none of you will pay. We keep the full breakdown on our MyCase pricing page and the wider category on legal intake software pricing.

One caution on the figures above. A large number of comparison pages currently publish MyCase at $39, $89 and $109 per user. Those numbers are not on MyCase's pricing page as read on 14 August 2026, where the annual rates are $50, $100 and $130. Check the vendor page on the day you budget rather than trusting a roundup, including this one.

Where the single system genuinely wins

The strongest argument for one platform is that the handoff between intake and matter work is where things get dropped, and a handoff inside one database is much harder to drop than a handoff between two tools.

When a signed client converts from an inquiry into a matter, everything already collected should travel with them: contact details, the description of the problem, the documents, the conflict check result, who referred them. If intake lives in a separate tool, somebody re-keys that, and re-keying is where information goes missing. It is also where conflict data quietly degrades, because the adverse parties captured at intake are exactly the fields people skip when copying a record by hand.

Reporting is the second real win. A single system can answer questions that two systems cannot answer without a spreadsheet: which referral sources produce matters rather than just inquiries, how long inquiries sit before someone responds, what proportion of consultations convert. Firms running split stacks usually cannot answer those at all, which is a bigger problem than it sounds because it means marketing spend is being allocated blind.

Where it falls down

The honest limitation is that intake modules inside practice management platforms are forms and pipelines. They record an inquiry. They do not conduct one.

A web form sits there until someone fills it in. It does not ask a follow up question when an answer is vague, it does not chase the three documents that never arrived, and it does not do anything at all at 9pm on a Friday when a good portion of legal inquiries actually arrive. The task tracking side has the same shape: it will faithfully hold a task saying "call back the Henderson inquiry" for as long as nobody calls back the Henderson inquiry. Neither module creates the response, they record whether one happened.

That matters because the failure mode in intake is speed, not record keeping. Firms rarely lose leads because the pipeline was badly organized. They lose them because nobody picked up, the callback happened two days later, and by then the person had hired somebody else. We covered the research on that in speed to lead for law firms.

The second limitation is the conflict data problem. A conflict search can only return names somebody entered, and a four field intake form asking for name, email, phone and a short description will not capture the eight to twelve entities a routine personal injury matter involves. The tracking system faithfully records an incomplete check. The full procedure is in how to run a conflict check at a law firm.

How to decide for your firm

A rough rule that holds up in practice: under about ten people with no dedicated operations staff, buy one platform and accept that its intake module is basic. Between ten and thirty, one platform still usually wins, but budget for the tier that includes intake rather than the entry plan. Above thirty, or wherever inquiry volume is high enough that response time is a real business problem, a dedicated intake layer in front of the platform starts paying for itself.

Three questions worth answering before you shortlist anything:

• Where is the actual failure? If matters and deadlines are the mess, you need practice management and its intake module will be fine. If inquiries go unanswered for a day, no amount of pipeline software fixes that.
• How many seats, honestly? Per user pricing is quoted for one and paid for all. Count paralegals, admin and billing staff. A four attorney firm is often seven or eight seats, which on MyCase Pro is the difference between $4,800 and $9,600 a year.
• Who answers at 6pm? If the answer is nobody, that is a coverage problem, and it is upstream of every tool on your shortlist.

Firms with an operations person often solve the routing half differently, keeping matters in the practice platform but routing each new request to the right owner automatically so nothing sits in a shared queue waiting for someone to claim it. That works well when the bottleneck is assignment rather than capture.

The stack most firms end up with

In practice the arrangement that works for firms past the smallest end is not one tool or two competing tools. It is a practice management platform doing everything after the engagement letter, with something in front of it that handles first contact.

That is the gap Consultations fills. The AI runs the discovery conversation itself: it asks your qualifying questions, screens the inquiry against criteria you set, collects the documents, books the paid consultation and hands the lawyer a prepared brief, at any hour. It is priced flat per firm at $49 to $299 a month, so the bill does not move when you hire. Everything after the signature stays where it belongs, in your practice platform. We do not do matters, billing, trust accounting or conflict searching.

If you are earlier in the decision and still working out which category of tool you need at all, our legal CRM software page draws the line between pre-engagement and post-engagement systems, and client intake software covers what the intake layer itself should do.

Frequently asked questions

Can one software handle both client intake and task tracking?

Yes. Every major legal practice management platform includes both, including MyCase, PracticePanther, Clio and Smokeball. Task tracking is included on the entry plan at all of them. Client intake is gated one or two tiers higher, so the plan that includes both typically costs about twice the advertised starting price.

Should intake and matters live in the same database?

Usually yes, because the handoff between them is where information gets lost. Re-keying a signed client from an intake tool into a matter system is where documents, referral sources and adverse party names go missing. The exception is firms whose intake problem is speed of response rather than record keeping, since that is not solved by any database.

Do I need separate intake software if I already have practice management?

Only if your problem is upstream of the record. If inquiries are being captured and just need organizing, the built in module is enough. If the phone goes unanswered, callbacks take days, or consultations start with questions the firm should already have asked, that is a coverage and conversation problem that a form and a task list cannot fix.

What does client intake and task tracking cost?

Read on 14 August 2026, the cheapest published plans including both are PracticePanther Business at $99 per user per month monthly or $89 annual, and MyCase Pro at $120 monthly or $100 annual. Both are per user, so a six seat firm pays roughly $6,400 to $7,200 a year on annual billing. Clio does not publish enough to calculate a figure.