1. Start with Fort Payne’s actual service boundary
Your firm may serve Fort Payne and matters elsewhere in DeKalb County, but those are not interchangeable geographic claims. Fort Payne city is recorded as a municipality in DeKalb County. That distinction matters when you decide which inquiries should enter the same workflow, which should be routed for review and which fall outside the firm’s service area. Population cannot answer those questions. A useful automation review begins with the locations and matter types your firm actually accepts.
Recommended approach
Write the service boundary as an operating rule: identify accepted locations, excluded locations, matter types and urgency conditions. Then decide what an inquiry must contain before it is assigned to a person. Keep geography as a routing input only when your firm has chosen to use it; do not treat the Fort Payne population estimate as a forecast of inquiries or cases.
