Lead Statuses

A lead status is the single label that tells your team — and your automations — where a lead stands right now. VerdictFlow ships with sensible defaults and lets you tailor them in Settings → Properties → Pipeline to match your firm's intake process.

What statuses are for

• Sort and filter — every list view, kanban board, and report can be grouped or filtered by status.
• Trigger work — automations and auto-routing rules react to status changes (e.g. "send a referral when status moves to Ready for Referral").
• Tell your team what to do next — a clear status removes the "what was the plan with this lead?" question every morning.
• Measure conversion — reports show how many leads make it from one status to the next, so you can spot bottlenecks.

The default pipeline

Every new firm starts with this baseline:

You can rename, reorder, hide, or add to any of these.

Customizing the pipeline

1. Open Settings → Properties → Pipeline.
2. Drag statuses into the order leads should flow through.
3. Click any status to rename it, change its color, or mark it as a "terminal" status (won't move forward automatically).
4. Add new statuses for anything missing — e.g. Awaiting Records, Statute Watch, Sent for E-Sign.
5. Save. Existing leads keep whatever status they had; only new transitions follow the new layout.

Conventions that work well

• One column = one decision point. If two statuses always have the same next step, merge them.
• Use color to show urgency, not category. Red for "needs action this week," gray for "nothing to do," green for "won."
• Pair every "in flight" status with a clear exit. In Review should always lead to either Qualified or Closed — no leads should sit forever in a middle status.
• Lock down terminal statuses. Mark Closed and Retained as terminal so accidental drag-and-drops can't reopen a settled case.

Changing a status

There are three ways:

• Lead detail page — use the status dropdown at the top.
• Kanban view — drag the lead card between columns. See Lead Pipeline (Kanban view).
• Bulk action — select multiple leads in table view and use Change status.

Every status change is recorded on the lead's activity timeline, with the user, timestamp, and the previous status — useful when an automation or partner firm changed something and you need to retrace what happened.

What automations watch for

When a lead moves into a particular status, your automation rules can:

• Send an email or SMS to the client.
• Create a task on the assigned team member's queue.
• Generate and send a fee-sharing or retainer agreement.
• Push the lead into your case management or CRM (Clio, HubSpot).
• Auto-route the lead to a partner firm via a routing rule.

The status change itself becomes the trigger — your team's day-to-day stays focused on moving cases, while the routine follow-up runs automatically.

Permissions

Only owners and admins can edit the status pipeline. Members can move leads between existing statuses but can't add, rename, or delete them.

Next steps

• Lead pipeline (Kanban view) — see and move leads visually by status.
• Automations — wire status changes to actions your team would otherwise do by hand.
• Process automation — chain multiple status changes into a real end-to-end workflow.