Who handles the open inquiries when your intake person is away?

Find the work that cannot wait for their return

Start with the absent employee’s open intake actions. Include overdue work, tasks due during the absence and tasks with no due time. Check recent messages for promises that never became tasks. A tidy task list can still miss someone who was told, ‘I’ll send you the available times.’

For each item, establish what has already happened and what still needs doing. Read the latest exchange before assigning another follow-up. Someone may have replied elsewhere, booked a consultation or asked the firm to stop contacting them. Those changes affect the work you are handing over.

Keep the original promise and due time. Do not move dates just to remove overdue items from view. If the firm cannot meet a promise, the manager needs to assign an appropriate update or decision, while keeping the missed commitment visible. Send any legal deadline concern to the designated lawyer under the firm’s rules.

For planned leave, prepare recurring tasks before the handoff. Oklahoma Bar Association practice-management adviser Julie Bays recommends having another person know how important recurring work is done and recording the steps while the experienced employee performs them. That helps with the method. You still need to transfer the live actions waiting today.

• Oklahoma Bar Association: preparing for a key employee’s absence

Name who starts coverage and checks the gaps

Choose the manager who activates coverage. Record when it starts, when the team expects to review it and who acts if the cover person is also unavailable. A planned return date helps with scheduling; it does not automatically transfer all unfinished work back.

With planned leave, the employee and cover person can review the open list together. With an unexpected absence, the manager starts from the shared records and message channels the firm permits them to access. Mark missing information and assign someone to find it. The plan should work without requiring the absent employee to answer routine questions from home.

Check the cover person’s existing work before adding more. Agree which tasks they can accept and bring any uncovered actions back to the manager. A task assigned to someone who has no time to do it is still a coverage problem.

Set the limits of the temporary role. The person may be able to send approved consultation times but not change fees or answer a case-specific question. Use the delegation guide to define those decisions. Covering an absence changes who handles the action; it does not give that person new legal authority.

Transfer the next action, not just the inquiry

An inquiry can hold several actions with different owners. Intake may owe an appointment update while an attorney considers a legal question. Assigning the whole inquiry to a cover person should not hide the attorney’s review or make intake responsible for giving the legal answer.

Keep the relevant exchange, promised action, due time and contact preferences in the firm’s approved record. Add the temporary action owner and any reviewer whose answer is needed. Use a short task description that tells the receiver what to do, such as ‘Send approved consultation times through the agreed email channel,’ rather than ‘Follow up.’

Keep detailed notes in the system where the team already works. A private list copied into someone’s personal messages creates another place that can fall out of date. A coverage sheet can point to the record and its actions without reproducing sensitive information.

For a task awaiting review, name both the reviewer and the person who tracks the promised update. Use the intake handoff guide to make that transfer clear. Waiting for an answer is a status, not a substitute for someone checking what is still owed.

Have the cover person open and accept the task

Ask the receiver to open the record using their own approved account. Have them find the latest exchange, the permitted template or calendar, the due time and the person who handles exceptions. Then confirm that they understand the next action and can take it on.

Record acceptance beside the action. If access, instructions or capacity are missing, keep acceptance incomplete and give the manager the specific gap. The manager needs to resolve it or find another person. Do not share the absent employee’s password to make the assignment appear workable.

An assignment email does not establish acceptance. In Clio Grow, staff can edit a task’s description, assigned users, due date and reminders. Assignment emails depend on the user’s notification setting, and Clio’s help page says overdue tasks do not trigger a notification. Check the task view rather than relying on an email to reveal unfinished work.

Those are Clio Grow features. Check the behavior of your own system instead of assuming every CRM sends the same alerts. Whatever the tool, the useful check is the same: can the receiver find the action, explain it and accept responsibility for it?

• Clio Grow: editing tasks and assignment notifications

Follow two open actions through an absence

Suppose Alex is away and Sam is covering intake. Inquiry Q-021 is waiting for a list of approved consultation times. Q-022 has a case-specific question with the designated legal reviewer, and intake has promised an update. The two records need different actions.

Sam opens Q-021, checks the contact arrangement and finds the calendar used for approved slots. If Sam can access it, understands the promise and has time to act, Sam can accept the scheduling task with its existing due time. This records who will act; it does not mark the message as sent.

For Q-022, the legal question stays with its reviewer. Sam can accept the administrative task of checking for the answer and arranging the promised update through the approved process. Sam should not fill the silence with a legal explanation.

If Sam cannot open the calendar for Q-021, acceptance remains incomplete. The coverage manager must resolve access or assign a person who can do the work. Putting Sam’s name on the record has not solved that problem.

Keep incoming replies covered too

The opening handoff is a snapshot. New inquiries and replies will arrive while the employee is away. Decide who checks each approved inbox, phone queue and unassigned-work view, and how new actions reach the cover person. Use the firm’s existing service commitments to set the checking times.

A reply can change the next task. If someone chooses a proposed consultation time, the receiver needs to check availability and complete the firm’s confirmation steps. If they ask a new question, someone needs to route or answer it. Use the follow-up guide to let the reply change the work instead of leaving the old reminder untouched.

Check where the task itself lives. Clio says Grow and Manage tasks do not sync, even though Grow task due dates can appear in the Manage calendar. Seeing a calendar entry is therefore not proof that the underlying task has transferred. Confirm the action owner in the system that holds the task.

Review automated messages separately from staff assignments. Do not assume that changing an owner stops, restarts or updates a sequence. Use the CRM follow-up testing guide for those checks. Preserve open reviews and contact preferences while the person responsible changes.

• Clio Grow: task and calendar visibility across Grow and Manage

Hand unfinished work back explicitly

When the employee returns, review what finished, what changed and what is still open. Read the latest messages rather than restoring the old task list. The cover person may have made a new promise, received a contact preference or passed a question to a reviewer.

For each remaining action, agree who will handle it now. Keep the current owner until the receiver accepts the transfer. Some work may stay with the cover person because the action is already in progress; record that choice so the returning employee does not send another follow-up.

Suppose Q-021 has since replied with a preferred time, but the consultation is not yet confirmed. Hand back the action to check and confirm that slot, with the reply and due time. Do not hand back the older instruction to send a list of times. The next action changed while Alex was away.

Update ownership without erasing the history. Mark work complete only when its required action was done, not because it moved between people. Keep the legal reviewer attached to any unresolved question. The handback is finished when each open action has an accepted owner and the team knows who will contact the person next.

Use this sheet to check the transfer

Use these fields for each open action. Keep the sheet in the firm’s approved system, or use it as a checklist beside the existing task. The record link should lead to the current detail; the sheet should not become a second, competing history.

For Q-021, a coverage note could read: ‘Send approved consultation times through the agreed email channel. Original due time retained. Sam to check calendar access and accept. If access is unavailable, coverage manager to resolve or reassign.’ Once Sam actually accepts, record that confirmation. Do not fill in acceptance before it happens.

• During coverage, inspect unaccepted actions, missed promises, access failures and new work with no owner. Give each gap a person and a review time.
• At handback, check for duplicate follow-up and actions returned with outdated instructions. Correct the record before another person acts.
• If you track owner interruptions, record what staff needed and why. Compare periods with similar workload and absence coverage. Do not turn fewer questions alone into a claim of time saved or more clients.

• Explore Intake & CRM setup for shared records and team handover