Family law intake — handled with care.

Family law intake is not a sales call. The person on the other end is often navigating the hardest week of their life — and the way the firm picks up the phone shapes whether they retain or walk away. Generic answering services treat the conversation as a transaction; Sempull treats it as the first hour of the attorney-client relationship.

Our family law intake protocol is built with practicing family-law attorneys. We lead with conflict checks, not case detail. We validate before we qualify. And we hand off to counsel with a structured, dignified summary — not a wall of free text.

Contested and uncontested dissolution, legal separation, custody and parenting plans, child support and modification, spousal support, paternity, adoption, prenuptial and postnuptial agreements, domestic violence (PFA/restraining orders), and Hague Convention international custody matters.

Family-law conflict checks are uniquely difficult: a prospective client and the opposing party often share a last name, a household, children, or in-laws who may already be clients. A casual intake that captures the full case narrative before running a conflict check is a conflict waiting to surface mid-litigation — often with a motion to disqualify attached.

Sempull's family-law protocol inverts the usual order. Caller name, spouse or partner name, opposing counsel (if known), and any prior matters are run against your case management system before any matter detail is captured. If a conflict surfaces, the call ends with a courteous referral — not with privileged information already in the firm's possession.

A caller in a domestic-violence situation is in the worst minute of their week, often calling from a closet or a parking lot, often with very little time before they have to hang up. A generic intake script that drills for chronological detail will lose them inside two minutes. Sempull's DV protocol does three things in order: validate the caller, screen for immediate safety (do they have a safe place to go, are children present, is the abuser in the same building), and then — only then — capture the minimum qualification needed to route to counsel.

Emergency cases warm-transfer to on-call counsel; non-emergency DV calls book a same-day or next-business-day consult on a private line. Every DV call ends with the National Domestic Violence Hotline number (1-800-799-7233) read back to the caller, regardless of whether the firm takes the case.

Spanish-speaking callers facing custody disputes, restraining orders, or divorce are often navigating two systems at once — the family court and the immigration consequences of the family change. A bilingual intake agent who understands that intersection is the difference between a retained client and a hang-up. Sempull's Spanish-speaking agents are trained on the family-law/immigration overlap (VAWA self-petitions, U-visa-eligible DV, custody implications of TPS or DACA status) so the right cases reach the right attorneys without rounds of follow-up calls.

Family-law intake at a serious firm is not just "what kind of case is it?" — it's a structured screen for jurisdiction (state of marriage, state of residence, state of children), asset complexity (business interests, retirement, real property, hidden assets), and document availability (marriage certificate, financial records, prior court orders). Sempull's qualification captures the full picture during the first call so attorneys can quote scope and retainer accurately at the consult, not three weeks in.

A surprising share of family-law revenue comes from calls placed between 6 PM Friday and 8 AM Monday — exactly the window when most firms are sending callers to voicemail. A parent locked out of a custody exchange on a Saturday night, a spouse who just left an abusive home on a Sunday morning, a client who got served during a holiday weekend: none of those people are going to leave a voicemail and wait until Tuesday. They are going to call the next firm on the search results page. A true 24/7 family lawyer answering service is the only way to be the one who picks up.

Sempull's 24/7 family law intake runs the same trauma-aware, conflict-first protocol at 3 AM on a Sunday as at 10 AM on a Wednesday. Emergency matters — active DV, child removal, immediate restraining-order need — are warm-transferred to the on-call attorney on the schedule your firm sets. Non-emergency after-hours calls are fully qualified, conflict-checked, and booked into the first appropriate slot on the attorney's calendar, with a confirmation text sent to the caller before they hang up. The firm wakes up Monday with consults on the book, not voicemails to return.