Names first. Facts later.

Picture the scene. A woman living in Lugano inherits, with her brother, their father’s house in Valencia. They cannot agree on what to do with it. One evening she looks for a law firm with offices in Switzerland and Spain, finds one that seems serious and opens its contact form. At the top it says “Tell us about your case”. She writes twenty lines: the rough value of the house, what she thinks her brother wants, an account at a Spanish bank nobody mentions, what she would be prepared to give up.

Two days later she receives a polite email: the firm cannot take the matter. They do not tell her why, and they cannot. The firm has advised her brother for years. The twenty lines are already on its server, in a shared inbox and perhaps on a partner’s phone.

Nobody acted in bad faith. The problem is the order. The website asked for the facts before it checked the names.

What the rules say.

In Switzerland, the Federal Act on the Free Movement of Lawyers, known as the BGFA or LLCA, requires lawyers in Article 12(c) to avoid any conflict between their clients’ interests and those of people they have business or private relationships with. Article 13 adds professional secrecy without time limit and towards everyone, covering everything clients confide to them in their professional capacity, and requires lawyers to make their auxiliaries respect it. Article 321 of the Criminal Code punishes disclosure, on complaint, with up to three years’ imprisonment or a monetary penalty, including when an auxiliary commits it.

In Spain, the Code of Conduct of the Spanish legal profession forbids, in Article 12, defending or advising interests that conflict with those of another current or former client, and requires the lawyer to withdraw from both when a conflict arises between two clients, unless all of them authorise otherwise. The General Statute of the Spanish Legal Profession, where Article 16 regulates advice given online, asks for something very specific: to obtain sufficient proof of the client’s identity and the information needed to avoid conflicts of interest. It says so about a service that starts on a screen, which is exactly what a contact form is today.

None of these rules mentions web design. But all of them describe an order: first know who is who, then listen.

The problem with the big text box.

Many law firm websites end the same way: name, email, phone and a large text box inviting the visitor to describe the case. It is the form a building contractor would use to send a quote. In a law firm it has three flaws.

• It receives confidences unfiltered. What the client writes arrives before anyone knows whether the firm may hear it, and that knowledge can make it harder for the firm to act for the other side later.
• It travels by email. The text usually arrives as an unencrypted email to a shared address, gets forwarded, printed and kept with no deletion date.
• It mixes two jobs. The team has to read the story to find the names, when what it needs first is the names, correctly spelled and listed separately.

Then there is the person writing. Someone who contacts a law firm is usually worried, and a blank screen invites them to tell everything. Nobody has told them to wait.

How Orvalle solves it.

Orvalle is a fictional law firm, with offices in Lugano and Madrid, that I designed to show what the website of a firm at this level should look like. Its first contact does not ask for the case. It asks for names.

1. Step 1

   Who is writing

   Name, country of residence and how they would like to be answered. Nothing else.

2. Step 2

   The other parties

   The people and companies involved, one per line: the brother, the other company, the bank. Names only, no story.

3. Step 3

   The type of matter

   A fixed category, such as estates, family, property or corporate. It tells the firm who would handle it, not what happened.

4. Step 4

   The check

   The firm runs the names against its register of clients and matters. If there is a conflict, it replies that it cannot take the matter, without giving reasons, and it has received no confidences.

5. Step 5

   The first consultation

   If there is no conflict, the client books and pays for the first consultation. Documents come later, through an encrypted channel rather than email.

A visible sentence explains why: “Before you tell us about your case, we need to check that we do not represent any of the other parties. That is why we only ask for names.” That sentence does more for trust than any photograph of a law library. The names of people who do not become clients are deleted after 30 days.

What the firm gains.

Someone with a conflict finds out early, not after telling their life story. Someone without one arrives at the first consultation with the names already checked, the category chosen and the appointment paid for. The meeting starts with the matter, not with the paperwork.

Behind the website, this can be automated. The names can be run against the firm’s practice management software, allowing for spelling variants, former surnames and companies in the same group, and reach whoever reviews conflicts as a list of possible matches, not as an email to read from top to bottom. The decision stays with a person. What disappears is the searching.

The order also helps with the rest of the engagement. In Spain, the Right of Defence Act gives clients the right to be told, simply, how fees are set and who their lawyer is, with their bar association and number. An orderly first contact is the natural place to start telling them.

What the website does not decide.

The website does not replace the firm’s conflict check. It orders the information so that the check comes before the confidences. What counts as a conflict, what to do about a former client or when to ask the parties for consent are decisions for the firm and its rules, not for a form.

In a law firm, the contact form is not a mailbox. It is the first act of the engagement.

A test for tonight. Open your firm’s website on your phone, as a new client with an urgent problem, and start typing into the form whatever would come first: the name of the other side, the amount, what you signed and should not have.

Before you press “Send”, ask yourself who you are telling all of this to, and whether your firm already knows it can act for you. Then a less comfortable one: if tomorrow the other side writes through the same form, who on your team reads both messages?

The Orvalle concept shows one way to put that first minute in order, in six languages. If you want to know how your firm’s website handles it today, the Strategic Diagnostic starts exactly there.