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5 Signals Your Legacy Legal Intake Is Holding Back Speed and Trust in 2025

Is your shared inbox slowing the business? See five signs your intake and triage need an upgrade—and how AI-driven workflows accelerate legal ops in 2025.

Jarryd Strydom

September 16, 2025
5 Signals Your Legacy Legal Intake Is Holding Back Speed and Trust in 2025
Legal teams tell us that 35–50% of contracting cycle time is lost before work even starts—during intake, triage, and handoffs. That’s avoidable drag. In 2025, leading Legal Ops teams are replacing shared inboxes and static forms with AI-driven intake that routes, answers, and enforces playbooks in real time. Below are five signals it’s time to modernize—and what to do next.
  1. Requests disappear into a shared inbox (and resurface as escalations)

If most requests arrive through a legal@ inbox or DM, you’re running a black box. Ask three simple questions: Who submitted? What’s the business context? What’s the next step? If you can’t answer in one click, you’re already behind. Inboxes hide duplicates, stall approvals, and create the perception that legal is a blocker.

Modern intake creates a single “front door” wherever business users work (Slack, email, CRM). An AI agent classifies the request, pulls metadata (counterparty, template, region), and applies your routing rules instantly. No hunting for context. No manual forwarding.
Action: consolidate all channels to one front door. Turn on automatic acknowledgement with clear SLAs by request type.
  1. Your forms look like IT tickets—and adoption proves it
Twenty required fields don’t make intake smarter; they make it slower. Busy sellers and PMs skip portals that feel like busywork. The result: incomplete data, friction, and more back-and-forth from legal to fill the gaps.
Adaptive intake flips the model. Ask only what matters based on the request and prior signals. If it’s a standard NDA for an existing counterparty, the AI collects what’s missing and moves it to e-sign. If it’s a high-risk DP addendum, the agent asks targeted questions, attaches your latest positions, and flags privacy for review.
Action: replace static forms with dynamic, conversational intake tied to your playbooks.
  1. Triage depends on a single coordinator (or heroic paralegal)
When one person routes everything, throughput equals their calendar. PTO becomes a backlog. Priority calls are subjective. And you lose resilience when that person leaves.
AI triage agents standardize decisions using your layered rules: business unit, contract type, risk flags, dollar thresholds, and geography. They auto-assign owners, pre-fill matter records, attach relevant playbooks, and suggest next steps so attorneys start in context—not in the dark.
Action: codify routing rules in a system, not someone’s head. Start with 10 high-volume scenarios and expand weekly.
  1. Playbooks exist, but aren’t enforced at the edge
Most teams have positions tucked away in Confluence, Word, or a wiki. The problem: they’re static. Business users don’t know what applies, and reviewers re-litigate settled issues.
Turn playbooks into executable logic. When a clause trips a fallback, the agent proposes the approved alternative and cites the rationale. When a risk threshold is crossed, the workflow branches: privacy review, finance approval, or exec sign-off. Every exception becomes structured data—so your knowledge compounds instead of disappearing.
Action: convert your top 20 redlines and approval rules into machine-readable playbooks. Attach them to intake, not just review.
  1. You can’t answer basic ops questions without a spreadsheet
How many requests came in last week? Which teams generate the most volume? Where do cycle times spike? If the answer requires multiple systems and a manual export, your data isn’t operational.
Modern intake captures clean metadata at the point of creation. Dashboards show SLA by request type, owner workload, and bottlenecks by step (intake, triage, approval, signature). You can rebalance work, adjust thresholds, and show finance the ROI of self-serve paths with real numbers.
Action: baseline three metrics now—volume by type, median time-to-first-touch, and percent auto-routed. Improve each by 10% this quarter.
A simple 14-day plan to modernize intake
You don’t need a rip-and-replace. You need a layered foundation.
  • Map: instrument where requests come from today (email, Slack, CRM, procurement). Categorize the top 10 types.
  • Encode: turn your current playbooks and approvals into short, atomic rules. Start with NDAs, vendor reviews, and low-risk SOWs.
  • Automate: deploy an AI front door that classifies, routes, and answers FAQs. Measure time-to-first-touch and auto-resolution rate.
On Sandstone, an AI intake and triage agent sits on top of your existing tools. It pulls context from email, Slack, and CRM; enforces your layered positions; and guides the next step. Strength through layers. Crafted precision. Natural integration.

Why this matters now

Speed without trust is risky. Trust without speed stalls growth. Intake is where both are won or lost. When requests are structured and routed by rules—not heroics—legal stops firefighting and starts operating as the connective tissue of the business.
Sandstone turns playbooks, positions, and workflows into a living, AI-powered operating system. Every intake, triage, and decision strengthens your legal foundation—so knowledge compounds, cycle times fall, and the business moves with clarity and confidence.
Practical next step: run the 14-day plan above and benchmark improvements. Then expand to two new request types per sprint. See how a layered, modular approach reduces time-to-value—without the monolith.

About Jarryd Strydom

Jarryd Strydom is a contributor to the Sandstone blog.