Written for your ethics counsel, in California terms.

This is the design decision that matters most. California Business & Professions Code §6151 defines a “runner or capper” as a person or entity acting for considerationas an agent for a lawyer “in the solicitation or procurement of business.” §6152 prohibits that arrangement. A fee paid to a non-lawyer that rises or falls with whether a case is signed, recovered, or won can be characterized as exactly that kind of payment.

So we don't structure our fee that way. Intake QA charges a flat monthly subscription to analyze your calls. It does not change whether you sign zero cases or fifty. Because our compensation is not tied to procuring or recovering any case, it cannot fairly be characterized as payment to an agent for soliciting or procuring clients under §§6151-6152. You pay us for analysis, the same way you pay your answering service or your CRM.

The stakes here rose in 2026. §6153 makes capping a crime: “punishable, upon a first conviction, by imprisonment in a county jail for not more than one year or by a fine not exceeding fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000), or by both.” SB 37 (Umberg), Chapter 645, Statutes of 2025, effective January 1, 2026, added a civil private right of action: “statutory damages of a minimum of five thousand dollars ($5,000) up to a maximum of one hundred thousand dollars ($100,000) per violation, or three times the amount of actual damages, whichever is larger,” plus attorney's fees. SB 37 does not contain a stand-alone ban on per-case vendor pricing; that conduct is reached through the §§6151-6152 capping framework, now backed by this private right of action. Flat monthly pricing keeps the question from arising.

The same logic governs our guarantee. The Intake Quality Audit is free, and the $25,000 find-it-free guarantee attaches to a diagnostic threshold and the first paid month, not to any recovery. It triggers on estimated value identifiedin your own calls; if the audit doesn't surface at least $25,000, we won't pitch a subscription, and if you start one anyway your first month is free. Because nothing here is a share of, or contingent on, recovered fees, it creates no outcome-fee arrangement under §§6151-6152 / SB 37 and no earnings claim under FTC §5 / CA §17500.

The same statutes bar acting as an agent who brings a lawyer new business. Intake QA never solicits or procures new clients. It only helps your firm re-contact people who already called your firm, your own inbound prospective clients. It is quality control and internal follow-up, not an agent bringing you strangers. §6154 voids any contract procured through a runner or capper; we never procure a contract for you.

Rule 7.2 bars a lawyer from giving anything of value for recommending the lawyer's services. Intake QA doesn't recommend your firm to anyone and isn't paid to refer.

Rule 7.3 governs solicitation. The nuance that matters: a communication made in response to the prospective client's own inquiry is treated differently from an unsolicited approach to a stranger. Save-protocol texts go only to people who already called your firm. You are responding to an inbound inquiry, not soliciting a stranger. Written communications must still honor a recipient's stated wish not to be contacted and must avoid intrusion, coercion, or harassment; every draft includes an opt-out (“Reply STOP”) and human approval. We don't claim the save protocol is categorically outside 7.3. We give you the controls, and your counsel makes the call.

These are the Chapter 7 rules effective November 1, 2018, which remain the operative rules. A separate State Bar proposal on lawyer-referral-service rules is pending and not yet enacted.

Intake calls are prospective-client information under Rule 1.18, and the duty of confidentiality under Rule 1.6 attaches. We treat every uploaded call as confidential and process it only to provide the service. Your firm remains the party that owes the duty; we're built to help you keep it. Your calls are handled by Intake QA, and we're the single party accountable for them. Your recordings run through our own analysis and transcription models, encrypted in transit and at rest, and are never used to train our models. The vendor detail is on the security page.

Rule 5.3 is the correct hook here: a lawyer must make reasonable efforts to ensure a nonlawyer's conduct is compatible with the lawyer's own obligations. Intake QA is that nonlawyer service, under your supervision. The tool never contacts anyone autonomously; a person at your firm approves every send. The AI drafts. It does not decide who to contact or what your firm owes anyone.

The California State Bar's Practical Guidance for the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in the Practice of Law (adopted November 16, 2023) and ABA Formal Opinion 512 (July 29, 2024) map existing duties to AI use: competence (Rule 1.1), confidentiality (Rule 1.6), communication (Rule 1.4), candor (Rule 3.3), supervision (Rules 5.1/5.3), and reasonable fees (Rule 1.5). Intake QA is built for that posture: the desk drafts and scores, a person at your firm reviews and approves, and it makes no legal judgments and sends nothing on its own. (On Aug. 22, 2025 the California Supreme Court directed the State Bar to consider folding these principles into enforceable rules; that is out for public comment and not yet adopted.)

California is an all-party-consent state: Penal Code §632 requires the consent of all parties to record a confidential communication (a fine up to $2,500 per violation), and §632.7 extends that to cell and cordless calls (Smith v. LoanMe, Cal. 2021). Intake QA processes calls your firm already recorded. We do not obtain consent for you, and your firm is responsible for having obtained it. A disclosure at the outset that the call is being recorded is the standard pattern: “This call is being recorded for quality assurance.”

The FCC's “one-to-one consent” rule was vacated by the Eleventh Circuit in Insurance Marketing Coalition Ltd. v. FCC (Jan. 24, 2025), which held it “impermissibly conflict[ed] with the ordinary statutory meaning of ‘prior express consent,’” and the FCC declined to challenge it and reinstated the prior rules. That heightened lead-gen consent regime is not in force, and bundled consent is again permissible. The TCPA still requires prior express written consent for marketing autodialed or prerecorded texts, and revocation must be honored, which is exactly why the same-day save protocol is compliance-gated and human-approved. Save-protocol texts go to your firm's own prior callers, include an opt-out, and send only after A2P 10DLC registration clears and a person at your firm approves. Your counsel should confirm your consent basis. (A2P 10DLC registration is pending; texting stays dark until it clears.)

Call recordings and transcripts may contain personal information under the CCPA/CPRA. Intake QA acts as your service provider: it processes the data only to provide the service and does not sell or share it. A data-processing agreement (DPA) with this service-provider language is available on request.

Outside California, some readers reach for ABA Model Rule 5.4 (sharing legal fees with a nonlawyer). It isn't the right lead authority here: our fee is a flat monthly subscription, not a share of any fee, so there is nothing to split. For a California firm the governing analysis is the runner/capper framework above (§§6151-6152), not Rule 5.4.