5-Step Playbook to Automate Legal Intake Without Losing…

5-Step Playbook to Automate Legal Intake Without Losing Control

If your team spends more time triaging than advising, you’re not alone. For many in-house teams, 30–50% of inbound legal requests are repeatable: NDAs, vendor reviews, policy questions, and low-risk redlines. With the right guardrails, AI agents can auto-resolve a majority of these within minutes—while routing the rest to counsel with full context.

This is where Sandstone earns its name. By layering your playbooks, positions, and workflows into a living operating system, intake stops being a bottleneck and becomes the front door to faster, safer decisions.

Why Intake Is the Highest-ROI Starting Point

Intake is where legal ops can create outsized impact quickly. You already have institutional knowledge—policies, fallback positions, and approval paths—just scattered across docs, DMs, and heads. Centralizing that into a knowledge layer and automating triage yields immediate wins:

Faster acknowledgments and first responses (minutes, not days).
Fewer context-switches for counsel.
Clean data for forecasting, resourcing, and risk.

For a 50–200 person sales org, automating NDAs and standard order forms often reduces turnaround by 30–50% and frees 10+ hours/week from legal. Start where volume is high and judgment is predictable.

Action: Identify your top three request types by volume and map the “happy path” for each in a single page.

What ‘Good’ Looks Like: Guardrails + Adoption

Speed without control is a non-starter for legal. Your intake automation should be anchored to policy—and prove it. Hallmarks of a strong setup:

Source-of-truth playbooks: Dynamic rules for positions, thresholds, and approvers.
Human-in-the-loop: Clear escalation when confidence or risk thresholds aren’t met.
Audit and analytics: Every decision cited to a clause, policy, or precedent.
Natural channels: Slack/Teams, email, and portals your business already uses.
System integrations: CLM, ticketing (Jira/ServiceNow), CRM (Salesforce), and IDP (SSO).

In Sandstone, AI agents retrieve answers from your verified playbooks, propose decisions with citations, and push outcomes back to your CLM or workflow tools—so adoption isn’t another change-management mountain.

The 5-Step Playbook (30 Days)

Segment and baseline (Week 1)

Bucket requests: NDAs, vendor questionnaires, policy FAQs, low-risk redlines, finance approvals.
Baseline KPIs: First-response time, cycle time, auto-resolution rate, and escalations.

Codify the playbook (Week 1)

Turn positions into decision trees: when to self-serve, when to escalate.
Define thresholds (e.g., data residency, liability caps) and approval owners.
Establish fallback: If confidence < X% or rule not met, route to counsel.

Configure the agent (Week 2)

Create structured intake forms + Slack/Teams shortcuts.
Connect Sandstone to your CLM to generate or fetch templates (e.g., NDA, DPA).
Enable actions: draft responses with citations, propose redlines, answer policy FAQs, trigger approvals.
Example: For an NDA request, the agent selects the right template, auto-fills party data, applies pre-approved edits, and routes for signature—no lawyer needed unless a non-standard clause appears.

Pilot with one business unit (Week 3)

Launch to Sales or Procurement.
Monitor exceptions, auto-resolve rate, and first-response SLA (<2 minutes).
Weekly review: close gaps in the playbook and retrain on real examples.

Scale and harden (Week 4)

Expand to the next two request types and a second channel (e.g., email → Slack).
Add approvals and reporting dashboards for leadership.
Lock governance: change control on playbooks, audit trails, and access.

Tip: Don’t wait for “perfect” playbooks. Start with 70% coverage and let usage refine the edge cases.

Metrics That Matter (And Realistic Benchmarks)

Track what the business feels and what legal needs:

Time-to-acknowledge: under 2 minutes via Slack/Teams.
First-response SLA: under 30 minutes for standard requests.
Auto-resolution rate: 40–70% for NDAs and policy FAQs; 20–40% for low-risk redlines.
Cycle time reduction: 30–50% within the first quarter.
Escalation quality: fewer, better-context tickets to counsel.
CSAT: quick pulse in Slack after resolution; target 4.5/5.

These numbers are achievable when AI operates on your verified knowledge—not the open web—and when intake lives where your business already works.

Where This Fits With CLM (Start Light, Integrate Deep)

Legacy thinking says you need to replatform CLM to modernize intake. Reality: you can stand up an AI intake layer that integrates with your existing CLM in weeks. Sandstone acts as the knowledge and decision layer:

Intake and triage live in Slack/Teams.
Decisions cite your playbooks and push to your CLM for drafting, approvals, and signature.
Data flows back for reporting, so knowledge—and outcomes—compound over time.

For most legal ops teams, the bottleneck isn’t features—it’s adoption. Start where adoption is easiest, then add depth without replatforming.

One Practical Next Step

Pick one: NDAs or vendor reviews. Stand up a 14-day pilot with a narrow playbook and a single channel (Slack). Baseline your metrics, launch to one team, and iterate weekly. If you can’t show a 30% cycle time cut within a month, expand coverage or tighten thresholds.

Sandstone is built for strength through layers and crafted precision—modular workflows that match how your team actually operates. When intake turns institutional knowledge into action, legal becomes the connective tissue of the business: fast, trusted, and scalable.

Ready to see it in action? Schedule a 10-minute walkthrough of Sandstone’s AI intake and triage.

5-Step Playbook to Automate Legal Intake Without Losing Control

If your team spends more time triaging than advising, you’re not alone. For many in-house teams, 30–50% of inbound legal requests are repeatable: NDAs, vendor reviews, policy questions, and low-risk redlines. With the right guardrails, AI agents can auto-resolve a majority of these within minutes—while routing the rest to counsel with full context.

Why Intake Is the Highest-ROI Starting Point

Faster acknowledgments and first responses (minutes, not days).
Fewer context-switches for counsel.
Clean data for forecasting, resourcing, and risk.

Action: Identify your top three request types by volume and map the “happy path” for each in a single page.

What ‘Good’ Looks Like: Guardrails + Adoption

Speed without control is a non-starter for legal. Your intake automation should be anchored to policy—and prove it. Hallmarks of a strong setup:

Source-of-truth playbooks: Dynamic rules for positions, thresholds, and approvers.
Human-in-the-loop: Clear escalation when confidence or risk thresholds aren’t met.
Audit and analytics: Every decision cited to a clause, policy, or precedent.
Natural channels: Slack/Teams, email, and portals your business already uses.
System integrations: CLM, ticketing (Jira/ServiceNow), CRM (Salesforce), and IDP (SSO).

The 5-Step Playbook (30 Days)

Segment and baseline (Week 1)

Bucket requests: NDAs, vendor questionnaires, policy FAQs, low-risk redlines, finance approvals.
Baseline KPIs: First-response time, cycle time, auto-resolution rate, and escalations.

Codify the playbook (Week 1)

Turn positions into decision trees: when to self-serve, when to escalate.
Define thresholds (e.g., data residency, liability caps) and approval owners.
Establish fallback: If confidence < X% or rule not met, route to counsel.

Configure the agent (Week 2)

Create structured intake forms + Slack/Teams shortcuts.
Connect Sandstone to your CLM to generate or fetch templates (e.g., NDA, DPA).
Enable actions: draft responses with citations, propose redlines, answer policy FAQs, trigger approvals.
Example: For an NDA request, the agent selects the right template, auto-fills party data, applies pre-approved edits, and routes for signature—no lawyer needed unless a non-standard clause appears.

Pilot with one business unit (Week 3)

Launch to Sales or Procurement.
Monitor exceptions, auto-resolve rate, and first-response SLA (<2 minutes).
Weekly review: close gaps in the playbook and retrain on real examples.

Scale and harden (Week 4)

Expand to the next two request types and a second channel (e.g., email → Slack).
Add approvals and reporting dashboards for leadership.
Lock governance: change control on playbooks, audit trails, and access.

Tip: Don’t wait for “perfect” playbooks. Start with 70% coverage and let usage refine the edge cases.

Metrics That Matter (And Realistic Benchmarks)

Track what the business feels and what legal needs:

Time-to-acknowledge: under 2 minutes via Slack/Teams.
First-response SLA: under 30 minutes for standard requests.
Auto-resolution rate: 40–70% for NDAs and policy FAQs; 20–40% for low-risk redlines.
Cycle time reduction: 30–50% within the first quarter.
Escalation quality: fewer, better-context tickets to counsel.
CSAT: quick pulse in Slack after resolution; target 4.5/5.

These numbers are achievable when AI operates on your verified knowledge—not the open web—and when intake lives where your business already works.

Where This Fits With CLM (Start Light, Integrate Deep)

Intake and triage live in Slack/Teams.
Decisions cite your playbooks and push to your CLM for drafting, approvals, and signature.
Data flows back for reporting, so knowledge—and outcomes—compound over time.

For most legal ops teams, the bottleneck isn’t features—it’s adoption. Start where adoption is easiest, then add depth without replatforming.

One Practical Next Step

Pick one: NDAs or vendor reviews. Stand up a 14-day pilot with a narrow playbook and a single channel (Slack). Baseline your metrics, launch to one team, and iterate weekly. If you can’t show a 30% cycle time cut within a month, expand coverage or tighten thresholds.

Ready to see it in action? Schedule a 10-minute walkthrough of Sandstone’s AI intake and triage.

5-Step Playbook to Automate Legal Intake Without Losing Control

Action: Identify your top three request types by volume and map the “happy path” for each in a single page.

What ‘Good’ Looks Like: Guardrails + Adoption

Tip: Don’t wait for “perfect” playbooks. Start with 70% coverage and let usage refine the edge cases.

One Practical Next Step

Pick one: NDAs or vendor reviews. Stand up a 14-day pilot with a narrow playbook and a single channel (Slack). Baseline your metrics, launch to one team, and iterate weekly. If you can’t show a 30% cycle time cut within a month, expand coverage or tighten thresholds.

About Jarryd Strydom

5-Step Playbook to Automate Legal Intake Without Losing Control

Action: Identify your top three request types by volume and map the “happy path” for each in a single page.

What ‘Good’ Looks Like: Guardrails + Adoption

Tip: Don’t wait for “perfect” playbooks. Start with 70% coverage and let usage refine the edge cases.

One Practical Next Step

Pick one: NDAs or vendor reviews. Stand up a 14-day pilot with a narrow playbook and a single channel (Slack). Baseline your metrics, launch to one team, and iterate weekly. If you can’t show a 30% cycle time cut within a month, expand coverage or tighten thresholds.

About Jarryd Strydom