Having in-house legal tool that targets legal intake and triage can help relieve pressure from legal teams to fulfill requests and make it easier for anyone with a legal question to find answers.
Without such a tool, it can be difficult for business users to find the appropriate resources for their legal inquiries and cause lawyers to spend too much time on low value, repetitive tasks.
What is the Ideal Legal Intake & Triage Process?
What is Legal Intake?
Legal intake is the process by which a legal team receives, reviews, and organizes requests or questions from other departments within the company to decide what legal help is needed and who should handle the matter.
The legal intake and triage process should be a straightforward process for both legal teams and business users alike. The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), the world’s leading association for LegalOps professionals, describes the ideal legal department intake and triage process as the following:
- A business client submits a legal request form and the required background information
- An In-house counsel runs a diagnosis, then:
- Validates the matter objectives and success factors
- Categorizes the matter’s risk and complexity
- Assigns the appropriate lawyer
What is the Scope of Your Tool?
Depending on your organization’s size, your tool can be used differently to solve various needs. For example, smaller organizations might decide on a centralized legal intake and triage tool that provides basic legal information to their business users seeking legal advice.
Larger organizations, on the other hand, might need their legal intake and triage system to offer an extensive library of legal resources and forms to ensure that business users get the answers to their legal questions and direct them to the proper lawyer to fulfill their request.
5 Steps to Define the Scope of Your Tool
Defining the extensiveness of your legal intake and triage tool is one of the most important decisions to make when developing your system. These five steps can help successfully implement your new legal intake system and create clear expectations for your business users on how to engage with your legal intake and triage tool.
Step 1: Set Engagement Protocols for Legal Requests
Establish a set of protocols for the business to engage the legal department: The first and easiest step in defining the scope of your legal intake solution is by controlling the inputs that come into your system. For example, routine decisions that can be addressed via a self-service portal that provides resources to answer a question do not need to be put through the system as a legal request, saving lawyers even more time when it comes to managing requests.
Step 2: Standardize Request Structure with Guided Forms
Create and enforce instructions for the business on how to structure their requests: After business users have been made aware when to make a legal request in the system, it is important to offer them guidance on how to structure their requests. A simple form outlining the basic information to include when making a legal request can be helpful for business users too.
The forms can include information like:
- The business unit making the request
- Nature of request
- Summary of issue
- Deadline
- Involved parties
- Relevant document to make request
Step 3: Educate Business Users on Intake Best Practices
Ensure an efficient legal intake service by educating business users and giving them access to defined protocols and instructions. After setting parameters for your legal matter intake and legal triage tool, educating your larger organization on how to use the tool and when to use it are paramount to your system’s success. Whether the HR or finance department is making the request, all departments and business users must know the proper way to interact with the system.
For example, AI legal intake systems, such as Checkbox, have extensive integration capabilities that allow business teams to submit legal requests through platforms such as email, Slack, Teams, and more. And then, using AI-powered term extraction, conversation tracking, and routing capabilities, the software takes care of the rest. This includes submission clearance and triage.
Step 4: Define Legal Ownership for Request Types
Determine which types of requests are assigned to which the proper legal personnel: Before making your system available for use, determining which lawyer addresses which types of requests can help to streamline service request delivery even further. By doing this, it removes any confusion from the legal team about who should be performing which request, and ensures the intake triage process runs both smoothly and efficiently.
Step 5: Track and Report on Legal Request Metrics
Track requests to view work-in-progress and report on key metrics. Tracking data through your tool is essential in empowering legal teams to make better, more well-informed decisions about the resources they have available to them.
By tracking legal requests, you can see:
- The number of requests coming in
- Requests by business units
- Project turnaround time
- Types of requests
Legal Intake & Triage Readiness Checklist
Use this checklist to ensure your legal intake and triage system is set up for success:
Defined protocols for when and how business users should engage legal
Standardized intake forms that guide request structure (e.g., issue type, deadline, documents)
Clear instructions and training materials available to all departments
Mapped request types to the appropriate legal team members
Tracking system in place for request volume, turnaround time, and business unit origin
Self-service resources for handling routine or low-risk inquiries
Regular review of data to inform resourcing, efficiency, and legal value reporting
Meet with our legal automation experts today to evaluate your current intake and triage methods, learn how to get started in building a legal front door for your organization, and capture best practices we have seen with other leading legal teams.
