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How AI Intake Triage Cuts Legal Cycle Time in 30 Days

Most in-house teams lose days to incomplete requests and manual triage. Here’s a 30‑day plan to use AI agents to standardize intake, route work, and turn legal into a faster, clearer partner to the…

Jarryd Strydom

September 3, 2025
How AI Intake Triage Cuts Legal Cycle Time in 30 Days

Legal Ops Insights

Most teams don’t lose time in negotiation — they lose it before work even starts. Across the mid‑market and enterprise legal orgs we talk to, 20–30% of contracting cycle time is burned on incomplete requests, back‑and‑forth to collect context, and misrouted matters. Fix intake, and you cut days off the clock.
The Hidden Tax of Ad‑Hoc Intake
When requests arrive via email or chat with missing details (counterparty, value, data use, timeline), legal becomes a switchboard:
  • Work bounces between counsel because routing is unclear.
  • Risk flags surface late because the right playbook wasn’t invoked.
  • Knowledge stays in DMs instead of a searchable system.
The result is latency and inconsistency — the opposite of the predictability your business partners expect. If you’re scaling a lean team, you don’t have capacity to triage by hand. You need a layered system that captures the right data once, routes it correctly, and applies your positions automatically.
That’s where AI agents on Sandstone’s knowledge layer change the equation: they turn intake from free‑form requests into structured, decision‑ready work.
What AI Agents Can Do Today (No Hype)
Modern AI is good at pattern recognition, extraction, and policy checks. Put it to work at the front door:
  • Classify the request (NDA, vendor/DPA, sales papering, marketing review) based on language in email/Slack.
  • Extract entities (counterparty, value, data types, region) and populate required fields.
  • Validate against your policies (e.g., “Over $250k requires Finance co‑approval”) and request missing info in plain language.
  • Route to the right workflow with the right playbook attached (self‑serve NDA vs. legal review, privacy review vs. procurement track).
  • Create the matter record automatically in your ticketing system and link source messages for audit.
Because Sandstone is a living operating system — playbooks, positions, and workflows in one place — each triage reinforces institutional knowledge. The agent doesn’t just move a ticket; it applies your layered logic consistently, so decisions compound instead of disappearing.

Pro tip: Start with three high‑volume, well‑bounded request types: NDAs, vendor reviews (including DPAs), and sales papering on your paper. They account for a large share of volume and respond well to structured triage.

A 30‑Day Rollout Plan on Sandstone
You don’t need a big‑bang transformation. Ship value fast and expand.
  • Week 1 — Map the Front Door: Identify top request types and define the minimal required fields and decision gates for each. Load your playbooks and approval rules into Sandstone.
  • Week 2 — Connect the Channels: Enable Slack/email intake, set up forms where needed, and integrate ticketing (e.g., Jira/ServiceNow) and document repositories. Turn on AI classification and extraction in shadow mode to benchmark accuracy.
  • Week 3 — Pilot and Calibrate: Run with a friendly business group. Let the agent ask for missing info, route matters, and attach playbooks. Counsel reviews outputs and corrects edge cases — Sandstone learns from each correction.
  • Week 4 — Go Live and Publish SLAs: Roll to the next two teams. Share simple SLAs (e.g., “Intake to assignment in 2 hours”). Add a requestor‑facing status page so the business sees progress without pinging legal.
Key KPIs to track from day one:
  • Intake completeness rate (first‑time pass rate)
  • Intake‑to‑assignment time
  • % of requests auto‑routed without human triage
  • Rework due to missing info
  • Requestor satisfaction (one‑click CSAT)
What ‘Good’ Looks Like by Day 30–60
High‑functioning teams see a new baseline:
  • 60–80% of requests auto‑classified and routed at intake.
  • Intake‑to‑assignment time drops from days to hours.
  • Fewer escalations because the right playbook is attached up front.
  • A clean, searchable record of decisions that trains new team members without slowing seniors.
Governance improves too. Because Sandstone captures positions (e.g., data localization, indemnity caps) as reusable, layered rules, you get consistency without rigidity. When policy changes, you update the rule once; the agent applies it everywhere the next minute.

Actionable Next Step: Run a One‑Week Intake Audit

Pick one workflow (e.g., vendor reviews) and run this checklist:
  • Pull 20 recent requests. How many were complete on first submission?
  • Time from request to assignment. What caused the longest delays?
  • Top three fields missing most often.
  • Where did routing go wrong (e.g., privacy vs. commercial vs. security)?
  • Which playbook decisions repeated across matters?
Then configure a Sandstone intake with those five fields required, attach the relevant playbook, and enable the AI agent to request missing info automatically. Measure the same metrics for the next 20 requests. If cycle time and rework don’t improve by at least 20%, adjust required fields or routing rules and retest.
The Bedrock of Speed, Alignment, and Trust
Legal shouldn’t be a bottleneck; it should be the connective tissue of the company. When intake becomes structured and knowledge‑driven, every request strengthens your foundation. Sandstone’s crafted, modular workflows and natural integrations meet teams where they already work, so you scale precision without adding friction.
Ready to see it in action? Talk to our legal ops experts for a 15‑minute walkthrough, or spin up a pilot intake and watch cycle time drop in weeks, not quarters.

About Jarryd Strydom

Jarryd Strydom is a contributor to the Sandstone blog.