A divorce lawyer's website intake form: what to ask before the first call

Published September 3, 2026 · Updated October 11, 2026 · By Christopher Ross

Call a plumber about a leak and the person on the phone asks one question before anything else: is water coming out of it right now. That single answer decides the truck, the hour and the price. Everything else can wait for the visit.

Want this handled instead of DIY'd? See the solo-practice site and its price.

A family law intake form can work the same way. Six questions do it: what the person needs help with, whether the matter is agreed or contested, whether there are children, where each party lives, whether anything has been filed or served, and how it is safe to reach them. Five of the six are answered with a tap.

The standard form asks none of them: name, email, phone and a box labeled "How can we help?", which produces two hundred words of narrative with no jurisdiction, no timeline and nothing you can sort on. You then spend twenty unbilled minutes on a call to discover the matter is in another state.

A better form does not have to be longer. It has to be structured.

What 24 real contact forms asked (September 2026 sample)

On 2026-09-21 I checked the contact pages of 45 family law firm websites found through web searches in the US and Canada. It is a small, non-random sample, so the counts describe those sites only, not the profession. Eight would not load. Of the 37 reachable, 24 had a plain form that could be read; the other 13 used a scripted or embedded form, or, in three cases, had no contact page to find. Twenty of the 24 readable forms were on US sites and 4 on Canadian ones. Questions were matched by keyword, so an unusually worded one can be missed.

The median form had five fields, from two to eighteen. The two questions that decide whether you can take a matter at all, where the parties live and whether a deadline is running, were on three forms and none. That is the gap the six questions fill.

The trade-off, stated honestly

Every field you add costs you some completions. That is real and it is why the four-field form persists.

What matters is that the cost is not evenly distributed. A tap on a radio button costs a visitor almost nothing. A line of typing costs a great deal, especially on a phone, especially to somebody upset. So you can add five multiple-choice questions and lose fewer inquiries than you would by adding one more open text box.

The six questions worth asking

• What do you need help with? Radio buttons matching your own practice areas, with "not sure yet" as the last option. Include that option and mean it. Good matters arrive from people who do not know which box they are in, and forcing a wrong guess is worse than letting them say so.
• Is the other party in agreement, or is this contested? Three choices: we agree on most things, we disagree on most things, and I do not know yet. It separates a flat-fee agreed matter from a litigated one, and it changes the fee conversation before it starts.
• Are there children under eighteen? Yes or no. Scope and urgency both move on this answer.
• Where do you live, and where does the other party live? Two short fields, state or province level. This is the question that saves you the most wasted calls, and it is the one the four-field form never asks.
• Has anything been filed or served yet? Nothing yet, a filing has happened, or I have been served with something. If a person has been served, a deadline may already be running, so that inquiry goes to the top of the pile today.
• How and when is it safe to reach you? Phone, text or email, plus morning, afternoon, evening or any time, plus a plain checkbox along the lines of "please do not leave a voicemail."

That last one matters more in family law than in any other practice area a small firm might run. A call to the wrong number at the wrong hour can cause a real problem in somebody's house. Ask the question, honor the answer, and say on the page that you will.

A call to the wrong number at the wrong hour can cause a real problem in somebody's house.

The spec, ready to hand over

Give this table to whoever maintains your site and ask for it as written. The right-hand column is the reason each field exists, so the person building it does not quietly drop one.

What to leave off

Five things stay off a first form, and the sixth, placeholder text standing in for labels, gets its own section further down.

A long narrative box. Keep one if you want it, but cap it, label it "anything else we should know before we call," and make it optional. How much detail a stranger should be able to type into your website before any relationship exists is a question for your own counsel, not for me. Ask them, then build the box to that answer.

Anything about money at this stage. Income, assets and property values on a first web form read as invasive. That conversation belongs on the call, where you control the setting and the record.

Dropdowns with forty entries. On a phone a long dropdown is a small disaster. Radio buttons for anything under about eight choices.

A picture-puzzle challenge. A hidden honeypot field is a free first layer that catches some automated submissions and costs your visitor nothing. If spam still gets through, add an invisible bot check on top. Puzzles that make an upset person identify traffic lights on a cracked phone screen cost you real inquiries. The table above shows which of those two habits firms have actually picked up.

Required fields you do not need. Every asterisk is a place somebody can get stuck. Make the name and one contact method required and very little else.

Order matters more than people expect

Put the situation questions first and the contact details last.

The conventional order is backwards for this reader. Asking a person in crisis for their full name and phone number in the first two fields, before they have any sense of what the form is for, is a place a half-completed form can die. Start with "what do you need help with," which is the question they came to answer anyway, and by the time they reach the name field they have invested enough to finish.

The four things around the form

The form itself is half the job.

Say what happens next, above the submit button. One sentence: "I read every inquiry myself and reply within one business day." A person who has never hired a lawyer does not know whether they are about to hear from you, from a call center, or from nobody. Then keep the promise, because that sentence sets a clock.

Send an automatic reply that sounds like a person. Confirm you have it, restate the response time, and give the phone number in case something is urgent before then. Three sentences is enough.

Store submissions somewhere other than email. Email alone loses inquiries, silently, to spam filtering and to the day somebody is out. Keep a stored copy in the site's own records as well as sending the notification, and add a hidden field recording which page the inquiry came from. After six months that hidden field tells you which pages actually produce work.

Decide who can read them, and for how long. A completed form is a record of a stranger's divorce, and a shared inbox the whole office can see is a decision even when nobody made it on purpose. Ask your counsel what your obligations are, then set access and a deletion schedule to match.

Two mechanical things that quietly break forms

Use real labels, not placeholder text. The gray hint text inside a field disappears when somebody starts typing, so anyone interrupted mid-form loses their place. The W3C's own form guidance says placeholder text is not a replacement for a label and is not broadly supported by assistive technology. Labels sit above the field and stay put. Six of the 24 sampled forms had at least one field where placeholder text was doing a label's job.

Set the right keyboard. A phone field should bring up the number pad and an email field the email keyboard. In HTML that is one attribute per field (inputmode, or the matching input type), and it is easy to miss.

Test it on the first of every month

Put a recurring reminder in your calendar and submit your own form from your phone. Check that the notification arrives, that it is not in junk, that the automatic reply goes out, and that the stored copy is there.

Contact forms break quietly. A hosting change, a mail provider tightening its rules, an expired integration, a plugin update. The failure produces no error and no complaint, because the people it fails are strangers who assume you did not want the work. One test submission a month is the cheapest insurance in this entire business.

Where this fits

Every build I do includes a form along these lines, and I will set the questions to your practice areas rather than to a generic list. Solos get the most out of it, because the time it saves is time you were personally spending. That page is here: websites for solo family law attorneys. For how much site the form sits inside, see how many pages a family law firm website needs, and if you run a mediation practice the options in question one change, which is covered in copy for mediators versus divorce attorneys.

One thing I will not do is tell you what a form may or may not say where you practice. Disclaimer wording, whether a submission creates any relationship, and what has to appear near the submit button are questions for your bar and your own counsel. Tell me what has to be there and I will build it so you can edit it yourself when it changes.

Questions about your own form, or a build: hello@divorcewebdesigner.com, or the contact page.

Checked against W3C WAI and MDN help pages on 2026-09-21: Labeling controls and instructions (W3C WAI), inputmode (MDN). The form counts are from my own sample of public contact pages collected 2026-09-21, published as counts only, with no firm named.

Common questions

Canadian? The same three sizes in Canadian dollars are on the CAD pricing page.