Mass tort intake is not a different process from ordinary client intake so much as the same process run at a volume that exposes every shortcut in it. Thousands of enquiries arrive against a single set of criteria, most will not qualify, and the ones that do have to be documented well enough to survive scrutiny years later. Three things break first, and all three are decisions made before the first claimant arrives.
The screening criteria have to be data, not instructions
Every campaign runs against eligibility criteria: exposure window, product, diagnosis, jurisdiction, prior representation. If those live in a briefing document that intake staff apply by hand, the answers drift within a week and there is no way to re-run the screen when the criteria are refined. Held as structured questions with recorded answers, the same population can be re-screened against amended criteria without contacting anyone again, which at this volume is the difference between an adjustment and a restart.
Provenance matters more than at any other intake
Where a claimant came from, what they were told, which version of the questionnaire they answered and when, are all facts that get examined later. That argues for stamping each intake record with the campaign, the form version and the timestamp at the moment of capture rather than reconstructing it afterwards from a spreadsheet. It also argues for never editing an answer in place: corrections should be new facts with their own timestamps, because the earlier answer is itself evidence about what was asked.
Declination at scale is a retention question
Most enquiries will not qualify, and each one still generates a record and an obligation to say no clearly. The volume makes it tempting to delete the misses, which is exactly the wrong instinct: the declined population is the part most likely to be asked about, both by the people declined and by anyone reviewing how the screen was applied. Decide the retention period deliberately, apply it uniformly, and record the declination reason as a coded value so the pattern across thousands of records can actually be read.
Questions people ask about mass tort intake
Is mass tort intake different software from ordinary client intake?
The requirements are the same in kind and much harder in degree: versioned questionnaires, coded declination reasons, re-screening and retention. Some general intake tools handle it; many quietly assume a human reads every submission.
How should changing eligibility criteria be handled?
Version the questionnaire rather than editing it, so every stored answer says which version it answered. Then a criteria change is a re-screen against existing structured data instead of a fresh outreach to everyone.
What is the most common mass tort intake failure?
Losing the ability to explain how a given claimant was screened, usually because criteria lived in a document, answers were edited in place, and the form changed three times without versioning.