5 Plays To Turn Legal Intake Into A Growth Engine
Intake isn’t a queue—it’s the control room for speed, risk, and trust. Here are five practical plays to standardize intake, automate triage, and prove impact with metrics your business will care…
5 Plays To Turn Legal Intake Into A Growth Engine
If your legal team feels underwater, look at intake. In many in-house teams, a day a week silently disappears to chasing context across email, chat, and spreadsheets. That’s not just burnout—it’s hidden cycle time that slows deals and blurs risk.
The fix isn’t another form. It’s a living intake system that captures context once, routes work by risk, and turns playbooks into decisions. With AI agents layered into your workflow, intake becomes the fastest way to create leverage, not just track tickets.
Play 1: Standardize Intake At The Edge
Meet the business where it works—Salesforce, Slack, email—while enforcing a single structured spine for requests. Use dynamic forms that branch by request type (NDA vs. MSA vs. marketing review) and ask only what’s necessary. Auto-enrich with metadata: counterparty, contract value, region, data types, and renewal dates.
On Sandstone, an intake agent can parse a Slack message, open the appropriate request type, and pre-fill fields from the CRM. You reduce back-and-forth, and every request starts with usable data. Track the metric that matters: percent of requests with complete context at creation and the average time-to-first-touch.
Play 2: Route By Risk, Not By Inbox
Manual triage is where speed goes to die. Instead, score requests on impact and risk, then route accordingly. High-risk asks (cross-border data transfers, exclusivity clauses) go to senior counsel; low-risk, repetitive matters (mutual NDAs, standard vendor terms) get automated workflows or paralegal queues.
Configure clear rules: contract value thresholds, data sensitivity, regulated industries, and jurisdiction. Let an AI agent analyze attachments (drafts, SOWs), flag risky language, and assign an initial risk tier. This is how you protect time for the work that actually needs judgment.
Watch two numbers: median time-to-assign (triage speed) and the share of requests resolved without attorney escalation. When those move, your whole business feels it.
Play 3: Turn Playbooks Into Decisions
Playbooks in PDFs don’t scale. Convert them into executable logic: if/then rules, clause libraries, and fallback positions tied to data inputs. For example, if contract value is under a set threshold and no PII is processed, auto-approve the short-form DPA; if over, insert the negotiated fallback clause.
With Sandstone, a drafting agent can propose redlines that align with your positions, explain the rationale, and log which playbook rule fired—so decisions are transparent and auditable. That’s crafted precision: your standards, enforced at speed.
Track playbook coverage (percent of requests with an applicable automated rule) and variance rate (how often humans override the agent’s suggestion). Rising coverage and falling variance signal your knowledge is becoming actionable.
Play 4: Close The Loop With SLAs And Feedback
Set service-level agreements (SLAs) by request type and risk tier, and make them visible to the business. A lightweight status page or automated updates in Slack reduces “what’s the status?” pings and builds trust.
At completion, collect a two-question pulse: Was the guidance clear? Did legal unblock the outcome? Feed that back into your rules and templates. Sandstone can trigger these micro-surveys automatically and correlate satisfaction with cycle time and risk tier—so you improve the experience, not just the throughput.
Monitor SLA adherence and satisfaction side by side. Hitting SLAs but losing clarity means you’re shipping fast confusion; high clarity with missed SLAs shows where to add automation or re-balance staffing.
Play 5: Prove Value With A Lightweight KPI Set
Don’t drown in dashboards. Anchor on a simple, executive-ready set:
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Volume by type and risk tier
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Median cycle time by tier and stage (intake, drafting, negotiation)
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Automation coverage (percent handled by agents/templates)
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Business impact (deal acceleration days saved, vendor onboarding speed)
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Risk outcomes (exceptions granted, flagged clauses accepted)
Sandstone’s knowledge layer ties these to the underlying requests, playbook rules, and drafts, so your report isn’t a vanity chart—it’s a map of how decisions were made. That’s how you turn anecdotes into operating leverage.
Actionable Next Step: Run A 14-Day Intake Pilot
Pick one high-volume workflow (e.g., NDAs). In two weeks:
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Stand up a dynamic intake form at the edge (Slack + CRM),
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Define a simple risk score (low/medium/high),
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Encode three playbook rules, and
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Measure cycle time, SLA hit rate, and agent coverage.
Socialize the before/after in one slide with metrics and a real example. If you cut median cycle time by even a day, you’ve created visible, bankable value.
The Bedrock Of Speed, Alignment, And Trust
Great legal ops isn’t about tickets—it’s about decisions compounding in the right direction. When intake becomes a living, AI-powered operating system, knowledge doesn’t disappear; it strengthens with every request. That’s the promise of Sandstone: strength through layers, crafted precision, and natural integration that turns legal from a bottleneck into the connective tissue for growth.
About Jarryd Strydom
Jarryd Strydom is a contributor to the Sandstone blog.