Potential New Matters

A call comes in. An email lands. A repeat client mentions, between paying their last bill and walking out, that their mother wants a Will. None of these are matters yet — you haven’t opened a file, billed any time, or committed to act. But they’re all real bits of work-in-waiting, and if you don’t track them somewhere they fall through the cracks.

That’s what a Potential New Matter (PNM) is: a lightweight record of an enquiry, captured the moment it lands, before you’ve decided whether to take it on. Certum Draft calls these Leads. They live in Notion, they get a folder on disk, and they can graduate to full matters when (and only when) the work is actually on.

This page walks through the whole lifecycle: capturing a Lead, working with the Lead Inspector, syncing to Notion, triaging legacy folders, converting to a Matter, and declining the ones you won’t take.

Capturing a new PNM

The fastest path is the toolbar. On the dashboard, click + New PNM — the wizard opens as a single-sheet form with four fields.

The form is deliberately small. The whole point of a PNM is that it’s cheap to log — you should be able to capture a caller while they’re still on the phone.

1. Inquiry (required). The shortest sensible description: who and what. “Cleese Will inquiry”, “Praline conveyancing question”, “Anchovy estate — sister called”. This text becomes the folder name on disk and the title of the Notion record.

2. Source. How they found you. The picker has five options — Referral, Repeat client, New client, Google or web, Other — matching the categories the firm tracks for marketing attribution.

3. Practitioner. Who’s got carriage. The picker lists the firm’s principals; pick whoever the caller will follow up with.

4. Likely matter type (optional). A free-text guess — “Wills”, “Conveyancing”, “Lease dispute”. You’re not committing to a template yet; this just makes triage easier later. Leave it blank if you’re not sure.

Click Save. Three things happen, in order:

1. A new Lead row is created in your Notion Leads database, with Stage set to new and Next action by defaulted to a sensible follow-up date.
2. A folder is created in your PNM root on disk, named with a date prefix and the inquiry slug.
3. A small lead.json anchor is written into the folder, binding it to the Notion record.

Note

The default First contact channel on Save is phone. Most enquiries arrive that way. If yours came in differently, you can change it in the Lead Inspector after Save — the wizard keeps the form minimal so it stays fast.

Caution

The Save is “Notion-first, disk-second” by design. If Notion is unreachable, nothing is written anywhere — the wizard shows an inline error and stays open so you can retry. If the Notion record succeeds but the folder write fails (rare; full disk, permissions glitch), retrying re-uses the existing Notion row instead of creating a duplicate. Either way, you don’t end up with orphan halves.

The Lead Inspector

The Lead Inspector is the working surface for a single Lead. Open it from the dashboard’s Open Leads column — click any lead row.

The Inspector lays out in three sections, top to bottom:

Lead details

The first block holds the fields that drive a Lead’s lifecycle:

• Stage — new → contacted → quoted → instructed → declined. Move the lead forward as work progresses.
• Source — what you set in the wizard, editable here if you got it wrong.
• Practitioner — who’s got carriage. Free text in the Inspector (the wizard restricts to a fixed list; the Inspector relaxes that so you can hand a lead to anyone).
• Next action by — a follow-up date. The default is seeded from Stage when the lead is created; bump it forward each time you act.
• Likely matter type — same field as the wizard, still freely editable.

Edits sync to Notion automatically with a 1.5-second debounce — keep typing and only the final value is written. The Inspector shows a small “synced” / “pending” / “sync failed” indicator so you know where you stand.

Contact

A collapsed-by-default disclosure holding three fields the wizard doesn’t surface:

• Caller name — the person who actually rang or emailed (which may not be the eventual client)
• Caller phone
• Caller email

These are deliberately stored as raw, unparsed text. There’s no auto-split into surname and given names — that decision gets made later, when the lead converts to a matter and you formally create a Client record.

Notes

A free-text editor for anything you want to keep with the Lead: what they said on the phone, what you quoted, why you’re waiting. Edits sync to Notion on the same 1.5-second debounce as the structured fields.

Tip

The Notes editor is the right place to record anything that doesn’t fit the structured fields — court dates, fee estimates, who referred them, what you promised. It all stays attached to the Lead and travels with it if it converts to a Matter.

The action row

At the bottom of the Inspector sits the action row, which changes shape depending on the Lead’s state:

• Convert to Matter — when the lead is active and unconverted. Disabled until the lead has a folder on disk and you’ve configured a Matters folder in Preferences; hover the button to see why if it’s greyed out.
• Open Linked Matter → — replaces Convert once a lead has been converted. Jumps to the resulting matter workspace.
• Mark Declined… — opens the decline-reason picker (see Marking a Lead as Declined below).
• Resurrect — replaces Mark Declined when the lead is already in the declined stage. Reopens it for further work.
• Abandon Conversion… — only appears when a previous Convert attempt left the lead in a broken state. See Converting a Lead to a Matter below.

Notion sync

PNM is Notion-first. When you create a Lead, the canonical record lives in your Notion Leads database; the folder on disk is just a working space, and lead.json is a thin anchor binding the two.

What syncs, and when

Action	Sync timing
Create Lead	Immediate — happens before the folder is written
Edit any Inspector field	Debounced 1.5s — only the final value reaches Notion
Stage change	Same debounce as field edits
Convert to Matter	Multi-step (see below); each step writes Notion in turn
Decline	Immediate

The Inspector reads back the lead’s last-edited timestamp on every write to detect conflicts — if a colleague has touched the row in Notion since you opened the Inspector, a refresh banner appears so you don’t blindly overwrite their edit.

Default watchers

Notion’s “Watchers” people property triggers a notification whenever a row is updated. The firm can configure a default list of watchers — every new Lead the wizard creates gets the same people tagged automatically.

1. Open Settings → Notion → Default watchers on new PNM Leads.

2. Tick the firm members you want notified by default. Bots and integration accounts are filtered out automatically.

3. Close Settings. The next Lead you create will tag those users.

Note

Watcher selection only takes effect for new Leads created after the setting changes. Existing Leads keep whatever watcher list was applied at the time they were created. Editing watchers on a Lead-by-Lead basis is done directly in Notion; the Inspector doesn’t currently expose per-Lead watcher editing.

If a watcher is removed from your Notion workspace, the next Lead create silently drops them and shows a one-shot banner in Settings so you can re-pick someone else. See Notion Integration for the full setup.

Triaging orphan PNM folders

Most firms come to Certum Draft with a pre-existing pile of “enquiry” folders on Dropbox — every place a partner stashed a call note for the last five years. None of those have Notion Lead records, because Notion Leads didn’t exist when they were created.

The Triage view is how you sort them out.

The banner

When Certum Draft detects PNM-shaped folders in your matters root that don’t have a lead.json anchor, a transient banner appears under the toolbar:

N PNM folders to triage — link them to Leads, ignore them, or mark obviously-dead ones declined.

Click Triage now to open the reconciliation view. The banner also appears as an ”📁 N orphan folders →” affordance at the bottom of the dashboard’s Open Leads column.

The reconciliation view

The view lists every orphan folder, one per row, with a date prefix and the modification time. Each row gives you three actions:

• Create Lead — opens the New PNM wizard pre-filled with the folder name as the Inquiry. On save, a Notion Lead is created and a lead.json is written into the existing folder (the folder itself is preserved, not recreated).
• Ignore — writes a .lead-ignored sentinel file into the folder. The folder stays where it is, but it stops appearing in the orphan list. Use this for folders that aren’t enquiries at all (admin notes, drafts, anything not lead-shaped).
• Open in Finder — the small folder icon opens the folder in Finder so you can look at what’s actually in there before deciding.

For obviously-dead leads — old folders for inquiries that never went anywhere — tick the row checkbox on the left and use the Mark Declined… button in the footer to bulk-process them. The bulk action creates Lead rows in Notion with Stage set to declined, plus the decline reason you pick, then writes .lead-ignored sentinels so they don’t reappear.

Tip

You don’t have to triage everything at once. The banner reappears as long as there are orphan folders left; close it and come back to it when you’ve got a quiet afternoon. Triage decisions are durable — lead.json and .lead-ignored both stick.

Caution

Ignore doesn’t delete the folder or move it. The contents stay exactly where they were; the only change is a hidden .lead-ignored sentinel that hides the folder from the orphan list. If you ever want a previously-ignored folder back in the orphan list, delete the sentinel (it’s a zero-byte hidden file in the folder).

Converting a Lead to a Matter

When a Lead becomes real work, hit Convert to Matter in the Inspector. This kicks off a multi-step saga: a Lead in Notion needs to graduate to a full matter (folder, metadata, template, possibly a Notion Matter record) while keeping the Lead row intact and linked.

What gets pre-filled

Convert opens the standard New Matter wizard with a few fields seeded from the Lead:

• Matter type — from the Lead’s Likely matter type
• Person acting — from the Lead’s Practitioner
• Matter name — from the Lead’s name (used as the folder-label hint)

That’s the lot. The caller’s name, phone and email are not auto-filled into client fields. Certum Draft will not silently parse a free-text caller name into surname and given names — that’s exactly the kind of inference the project has banned (it’s the same policy that prevents auto-parsing addresses). You’ll be prompted to pick or create a Client explicitly during the wizard, as you would for any new matter.

Note

This is intentional and load-bearing. A caller name like “Mrs Cleese” doesn’t tell you whether the surname is Cleese or Mrs-Cleese or whether there’s a middle initial; a name like “Lancelot and Praline” doesn’t tell you they’re a couple, business partners, or one person with a comma in their name. The Convert flow trusts you to decide.

The conversion saga

Behind the wizard sits a write-ahead saga: the conversion is journaled to disk before each non-reversible step, so if anything fails midway — power loss, network outage, app crash — the next launch can detect the half-finished attempt and either complete it or roll back cleanly.

In practice, this is invisible. The flow is:

1. Begin — Certum Draft writes a conversion-journal.json into the Lead’s folder marking the attempt in progress.

2. Wizard — the New Matter wizard runs as normal. You pick or create the Client, confirm the matter details, and submit.

3. Matter created — the matter folder is built, metadata is written, and the Notion Matter record is created.

4. Lead linked — the Notion Lead is updated: Stage → instructed, conversion state → lead_linked, Linked matter populated, Next action by cleared.

5. Note appended — a “Converted to matter 2026-00123 on 28 May 2026” note is appended to the Lead’s Notion notes (idempotent — appending twice would be a duplicate, so the saga checks first).

6. Archive — the journal is moved to an archive file. The Lead now shows Open Linked Matter → instead of Convert to Matter.

If something goes wrong

If the saga fails partway — typically a Notion 5xx or a network drop between steps — the Lead Inspector shows a repair banner the next time you open it. The fix is one of two buttons:

• Repair — the Inspector retries the failed step. Each step is idempotent, so retrying is safe.
• Abandon Conversion… — back out of the attempt entirely, clearing the journal. Useful if you’ve decided not to proceed, or if the matter was created manually outside the saga.

Tip

You almost never need to think about the saga. It’s there so the rare network-fail-mid-convert case doesn’t leave you with a half-created matter and no easy way to recover. If you see the repair banner, click Repair and move on.

Marking a Lead as Declined

Not every lead becomes work. To decline, click Mark Declined… on the Inspector. A popover appears with a reason picker:

• No response — they didn’t get back to you.
• Client declined — they told you no.
• Conflict — you can’t act because of a conflict of interest.
• Out of scope — it’s not work you do.
• Referred elsewhere — you sent them to someone else.
• Other — anything else.

Pick a reason, confirm. The Notion Lead is updated: Stage → declined, Decline reason set, Next action by cleared.

The folder on disk stays exactly where it is — declined leads can resurface (people change their mind), and the working notes are still useful context. To bring a declined Lead back to life, open the Inspector and click Resurrect: Stage goes back to new, Decline reason is cleared, and the Lead reappears in the Open Leads tile.

Note

Declined leads still count toward the firm’s marketing attribution numbers (which Source did they come from, how many declines vs conversions). They just don’t appear in the Open Leads tile. The reasons matter — bulk-declining everything as “Other” makes the marketing report useless.

The Open Leads dashboard tile

The dashboard’s left column is the Open Leads tile. It shows up to five active leads (anything not declined or already converted), with idle-badges on the rows that haven’t been touched recently. Click any row to open the Inspector.

The orphan sub-badge at the bottom of the tile mirrors the toolbar banner — ”📁 N orphan folders →” opens the same reconciliation view. The “See all leads →” link at the top opens the full Notion Leads database in your browser.

For the dashboard’s full anatomy and how PNM fits alongside Recent Matters and Notion activity, see the Dashboard page.

Settings (where to configure)

PNM has two configuration touchpoints, both in Preferences:

• Notion → Leads database — the database ID Certum Draft writes Leads into. Set this during first-time Notion setup; if you ever change databases, both new and existing Leads need to migrate together (the app doesn’t move Leads between databases automatically).
• Notion → Default watchers on new PNM Leads — the firm members tagged on every new Lead. See Default watchers above.

For the PNM root folder location and other paths, see Settings.

Related

• Dashboard — where Open Leads, the triage banner and the New PNM button live
• Creating a New Matter — the wizard the Convert flow drives
• Notion Integration — Leads database setup, watchers, authentication
• Settings — folder locations and other configuration