Nonprofit Client Intake: Fill & Download for Free

As someone who has been an intern and a nonprofit administrator, these would be my tips for maximizing the value of your internship:Think carefully about where your career is going. At a minimum, I'd suggest researching some job titles that you'd be interested in, looking for postings, and taking notes on the experience and skills that they require. That will be your blueprint for your internship.Shadow people. Get to know what they do. Ask lots of questions. Ask--point blank--if you can help them by performing some of those tasks. For example, during my social work internship, I asked a case manager if I could do some client intakes and assessments. She agreed, as it freed her up to take care of other matters. Focus on shadowing people with jobs that you wouldn't mind doing someday.Seek out challenges. If you are interning at a good place, your experience will be more or less self-directed. Most organizations are perfectly content to have interns file papers and water the office plants, if that's all they want to do. Be engaged with what your charity is doing. If you hear about any big projects that they are working on, ask how you can help. At a minimum, sit in on meetings and ask your supervisor questions about things that interest you. Also, ask for copious feedback. Ask people to tell you what you're doing right, what you're doing wrong, and how you can improve.Make some allies. Within a month or two, you'll be able to tell if you are fitting in. If you have a good relationship with your supervisor and colleagues, great! If not, consider another internship if at all possible. You don't want to donate your time (or, in a paid internship, work for next to nothing) if you can't reasonably expect a recommendation or a job offer at the end of the road.Focus on hard skills. For instance, if you were looking at a career in nonprofit fundraising, you'd want to familiarize yourself with donor management software. If you wanted to work in a marketing capacity, learning about SEO, social media, and the use of analytics software would be a big plus. Hard skills are great on a resume or CV.Keep track of your accomplishments. This is critically important. When you go to write your resume/CV, you'll want to list measurable things that you've accomplished, not just your job responsibilities.Relax, and treat the internship as a learning experience. You're not going to do things perfectly from day one. You're going to get discouraged from time to time. You might even decide halfway through the internship that it's nothing like you thought, and nothing you'd ever want to do. That's all very normal. Just remember thatI hope this helps! It sounds like you're definitely thinking about skills and experience, the two most crucial things that you need in an internship. Good luck!

Jennifer Ellis lays it out that to own or otherwise receive profits from a law firm you have to bring in lots of clients, own a firm, or otherwise convince other lawyers to keep you around even if you don’t contribute to billable work.Although you do have to be a lawyer to own a law firm or receive a share of fees, in the US and many other places, there can be some creative ways for a non-lawyer to earn a lot of money building a law firm, kind of like ways for the head of a nonprofit to make lots of money.The hard part is not the structure, it is convincing people to work for you at such a firm, or if they have a choice, not getting fired as dead weight. More than most any other profession, including sales, lawyers feel entitled to keep the money from clients they manage, and the number one reason clients are loyal to their law firm is that they respect their main lawyer’s personal service and quality of legal insight and work. There is room for an occasional “rainmaker” who passes work off to practicing lawyers, but to get there usually requires decades of building a practice during which they do lots of good work. Becoming a rainmaker without rising through the ranks is rare, it would be like becoming a coach without ever playing ball, or dean of a college without ever being a professor.Occasionally somebody comes up with an idea of a scalable legal services enterprise that automates client intake, management, billing, and legal work through technology and processes rather than by sheer force of intake, work, and collections. Or an affiliate referral business. Most of these do not work out. I don’t think anybody has hit the magic formula here. There is a lot of competition from more traditional law firms that can just adopt the same automation tools, and have a lot more legal horsepower to use them.

Usually as the lead partner for a client you start by listening, not asking questions. After the pleasantries it's best to have them do an informal pitch / product demonstration, and then you pitch yourself and your firm. Ask them to send you their deck and make sure somebody is taking notes.One good, direct question to avoid beating around the bush is "how can we help you?" The first three companies below sound like small talk but they frame lots of issues. After that it's directed brainstorming.Tell me about your company. What's its name? What does it do?Who do we know in common? How were we introduced? What brings you here?Where are you based? Where's your office? What's it like?Are you incorporated? When? Who did it? What state?Who is your lawyer now? Do you currently have an in-house lawyer or someone else within the company handling the legal matters? Are you satisfied with their work? Is it cost effective? Is there anything you want and expect from a lawyer you are not getting now?How many cofounders do you have? Have they quit their day jobs? Are they getting paid? Do they have any other engagements or ongoing obligations? What's the equity split and understanding among them? What are their roles? Who will be the lead in dealing with legal matters?What are the founders' personal objectives in running the company? What other experience do they have in entrepreneurship (or big business, academia, finance, government work, politics, nonprofits, etc.)? How do they know each other and how long? Have they worked together before?Do you have investors? Who invested and who is the lead? When? What form? How much money? How documented?Have you issued stock certificates and signed stock purchase agreements and other founding agreements? Have you kept up with Board minutes and approvals? Government filings? A cap table?Do you have a Board of Directors and/or a Board of Advisors? Who?Any employees? Contractors? Vendors and suppliers? Strategic partners? Who are they / what's their background? Do you have agreements in place with them?Is anyone working from another country or place? On visa? Trying to get a visa? Under a noncompete from a former company or other restriction?Is there anyone who left? How was that handled or documented?Do you have any pending legal questions or issues? Involved in any disputes or concerned about them? Licenses or applications?What's the product or service you're offering? What parts of it are you building? Renting? Buying? Reselling?At what stage is your product / company? Idea/concept? In development? Prototype? Beta? In operation? Pivoting? Who is building the productWhat's your sales model?Do you have a pitch deck? Business plan? Accountant? Executive summary? One-pager or marketing materials? Budget? Any other way of documenting, or thinking through, your future plans?Who are your main competitors? Suppliers? Actual or potential business partners?Who are your customers? How many of them do you have? Where are they located? What kinds of people / companies are they? How much are they paying? What kind of agreements are they signing or going to sign?How are you marketing, advertising, and distributing your product? Where and in what channels? With whom?Do you think anything about your product, service, sales, or operations are unique? Novel? Have you considered trademark and copyright protection? What's your strategy for copyrights and trade secrets?All this is second nature after you've been doing it for a while. One question leads to another, and you brainstorm through things. Whether at the first meeting or promptly after engagement you need to suss out a few things. You can also ask them directly.How can we help them?How complete and solid are the company's legal documents, and in what areas does it need work? Are they ready to do that work?What jurisdictions (US and foreign) are implicated?Does the firm have the resources and competencies to serve the client? Is there a good personal and business fit?Are there any conflicts of interest?Which other lawyers is the client talking to? Do they seem to prefer a solo lawyer? Small firm? Big name?How likely is it to be a potential client, when, at what dollar level, and for what purpose? Can the company afford it, and if not what alternate billing arrangements make sense if any?Do we want to work with them? Does it fit our firm's mission?Are there any applicable regulations and regulatory risks to their business?How sophisticated, capable, and high level is the team?What's the likelihood of this company's growth and success?What are the likely growth paths? Funding? Acquisition? Long-term cash operation?Going to be a good client? Listen to advice? Keep things orderly? Likely to get into lots of trouble?Any actual or potential legal red flags, litigation, disputes? Common red flags include founder disputes, fundraising or solicitation that violates securities laws, lack of documentation, history of suing people or getting sued, financial duress, being underfunded and unfundable, not paying bills or firing their lawyers, labor and wage violations such as unpaid interns or treating employees as contractors, operating in a regulated field without a proper license or compliance, poor or no company structure, IP lost due to not being protected (or infringing 3rd party IP).Is the business operating in known territory where there are legal exemplars and best practices, or is it going to require lots of custom work?Free-form: brainstorm through the legal issues raised by their particular business model and product, consider whether it is in a field with a known way of operating and existing form agreements (e.g. e-commerce, contract development, renting out hotel rooms, etc.)What IP filings, risks, protections, potential infringement are present?What's the HR situation?A few things are absolutely required, either by bar ethics / law, or by your malpractice firm. These include a signed engagement agreement that clearly states who the client is and what the rates / fees will be, making sure you're competent to do the work, assessing any firm risk management issues, and running the client's friendlies and hostiles through a conflict check system.My firm's playing around with the idea of an online questionnaire or white paper, either to show the client in advance to demystify the engagement process, or to a client service specialists within the firm to standardize new client intake.