The Intake Sheet

Because a lawyer’s memory is not a system. The file is.

The client from the last lecture has gone home to fetch his documents. Tomorrow he will be back, and when he is, you will not be starting from nothing — you will be starting from whatever you managed to capture today, on whatever piece of paper was in front of you when he was talking. If that piece of paper is disorganised, tomorrow’s conversation will begin exactly where today’s left off, in the middle of the same tangle. If it has a shape, tomorrow’s conversation can actually move forward.

That is the entire argument for the intake sheet, and it is worth taking seriously before you ever open a Code or a commentary. A junior who trusts memory over paper is not being efficient. He is betting the client’s case on the accuracy of a mind that will, by next week, have heard four other stories just as urgent as this one.

Picture the file lying on your desk after the client has left. At the top, you have written a single line to remind yourself what this is about. Perhaps you wrote: “property dispute.” It looks harmless. It is not.

“Why did you write 'property dispute’?” the senior asks, glancing at the page over your shoulder.

“Because that’s what the client said.”

“That’s a label,” the senior says. “Give me the event.”

That distinction — label against event — is the whole discipline of intake in a single sentence. “Property dispute” tells you nothing a court could act on. “The defendant changed the lock on the staircase on Tuesday” tells you something. One is a category. The other is a fact, dated and attributable to a person, and facts are the only currency a plaint eventually spends.

So build the sheet around what will actually be needed later, not around what feels natural to write down first. Parties — who is who, and how each of them is connected to the property or the transaction. A timeline — not a paragraph of prose, just dates and events, in order, so that gaps become visible the moment you look at the page. Documents — not just which ones exist, but which ones you have actually seen with your own eyes, as opposed to which ones the client says exist somewhere at home. Admissions — anything the client has already said, in writing or otherwise, that the other side could later use against him; you need to know these now, not discover them in a written statement. Immediate risk — is anything about to happen that cannot wait for the ordinary pace of litigation, a sale, a demolition, a transfer, a deadline. Relief — even a rough first guess at what the client actually wants the court to do, knowing it may change as the facts firm up. Forum — where this is likely to be filed, subject to everything you will check properly later. Missing facts — an honest, growing list of the questions you still cannot answer, because a case file that pretends to be complete is more dangerous than one that openly admits what it doesn’t yet know.

And sitting quietly underneath almost every one of these headings is a question that has to be asked earlier than most young lawyers think to ask it: when, exactly, did this happen — the first time?

That question matters because of a single, unforgiving provision. Section 3 of the Limitation Act, 1963 makes limitation a threshold issue — a suit, appeal or application instituted after the period prescribed for it is, subject to the provisions of the Act, liable to be dismissed, even if the opposing side never bothers to raise the point, even if the court has to raise it on its own. It does not ask whether the client’s grievance is genuine. It asks only whether he came to the law in time. Which is why the date at the top of your intake sheet is not a bureaucratic detail — it may, quietly, decide the entire case before a single legal argument is ever made. You are not filling in a date because the form has a box for it. You are protecting against the one defect that no amount of good drafting can later repair.

The same intake sheet, read carefully enough, is also doing preparatory work for a document you haven’t drafted yet. Order VII Rule 1 of the Code of Civil Procedure requires a plaint to state, among other things, the facts constituting the cause of action and when it arose, the facts showing that the court has jurisdiction, and the relief the plaintiff claims. Look again at your intake headings — timeline, documents, forum, relief — and you will notice they are not a random checklist. They are Order VII Rule 1, disassembled into the raw material a plaint will eventually be built from. The intake sheet is not separate from the law of pleading. It is the law of pleading, encountered before it has a name.

There is one more question that belongs on the page, and it is easy to skip because it feels less urgent than all the others: what single missing date could change the entire legal strategy? Sit with that for a moment before you close the file for the night. A date you haven’t yet confirmed might mean the difference between a claim that is comfortably within time and one that is already, silently, out of it. A date you assumed rather than verified might mean the difference between a possession claim and a mere trespass. You will not always know the answer on the first day. But asking the question on the first day means you go looking for the answer before it becomes urgent, rather than after.

Before the next lecture, build one for yourself — a single page with room for parties, timeline, documents, admissions, immediate risk, relief, the limitation trigger, the forum, and a running list of missing facts. Use it on the very next story anyone tells you, whether it’s a real client or simply something a friend mentions in passing. You will find that the sheet does something a good memory never can: it makes it obvious, at a glance, exactly what you still don’t know.

Because tomorrow, the client comes back with his documents, and the two of you are about to discover something that a story alone never reveals — not merely whether he has a case, but which court, if any, is even willing to hear it.

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