What's really going on

Thirty leads a week is 120+ a month, and immigration cases run for months, not days. Every lead has a long thread: consultation booked, documents requested, follow-up in six weeks. When multiple team members talk to the same person without a shared record, two things break — leads get double-messaged, and leads get forgotten between handoffs. That's lost retainers, not lost inquiries.

What to do instead

1. HubSpot Free CRM (free, unlimited users) — one shared contact record per lead, so anyone on your team can see the last email, the last call note, and who owns the next step.
2. Pipedrive (~$14-15/user/mo — check current pricing) — if you want a cleaner visual pipeline by case stage (consult booked → retainer sent → docs in → filed), and you're fine paying per seat.
3. Set one rule this week: every lead gets logged within 10 minutes of first contact, with an owner's name on it.

First action, today: open HubSpot Free, import your last 30 leads from wherever they live now (inbox, phone, sheet), and assign an owner to each. One person, 30 minutes.

What you're being oversold

Someone will pitch you Clio Grow, Lawmatics, or a full legal-CRM suite at $75-100/user/mo with intake forms, e-signatures, and case management bolted on. You don't need that yet — you need shared visibility. Buy the specialty suite when your bottleneck is document workflow, not lead tracking. Meanwhile, every lead that falls through a crack at your volume is a retainer walking to the firm across town.

When to revisit this

When you catch yourself needing to track case milestones and deadlines inside the same tool your intake team uses — that's when a legal-vertical CRM earns its price.

The part worth getting right

The call is whether your team splits by stage or by ownership. If one person does intake and hands off to an attorney, you need clear stage gates and a handoff rule — HubSpot's pipeline view handles that. If each team member owns their leads end-to-end, you need "mine vs. theirs" filters and less pipeline structure — Pipedrive fits that better. Pick the wrong shape and you'll migrate in eight months with half your notes lost in the export.