Lower the Barrier, Get Better Clients

Julien Emery

September 30, 2025

I got this comment from a LinkedIn post last week.

As a lawyer, the single most valuable thing you can do to grow your practice might be this: make it easier for people to tell you their story.

The lower the barrier to entry, the more potential clients will reach out and go through the process— and the more great cases you’ll find.

Clients aren’t looking for perfect websites or long credentials. They’re looking for the easiest path to be heard, understood, and guided.

We’ve seen lower barriers to entry in other industries drive significant growth:

E-commerce exploded when checkout processes were simplified. Amazon’s “Buy Now” button is worth billions.
Telehealth platforms grew fast by letting patients book in minutes instead of waiting weeks to see a doctor in person.
Fintech apps took off by letting people open accounts without walking into a branch or filling out stacks of paperwork.

The lesson? Fewer barriers = more users, more growth.

It’s no different in law.

If your intake process is fast, empathetic, and easy — instead of slow, formal, and confusing — more people will go through it.

Here’s what helps:

Let clients record their story and use AI tools to analyze it, then review it with them.
Provide AI intake options for people to record everything that happened to them and let AI tool organize it for you to spot the good cases.
Ask simple questions that invite storytelling, not legalese.
Let people stop and start on their own terms and have everything auto organized for them so they can confirm it’s correct.

Lower the barrier. The best cases are behind it.

Want to learn more about lowering the barrier to legal services with consumer-first intake?