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How Legal Ops Can Cut Cycle Time 30% With AI Intake and Triage

A practical, 30-day playbook for GCs and Legal Ops leaders to automate intake and triage with AI agents—reducing cycle time, improving data quality, and turning legal into a proactive growth partner.

Jarryd Strydom

September 6, 2025
How Legal Ops Can Cut Cycle Time 30% With AI Intake and Triage
Ask a dozen in-house leaders where their time goes, and you’ll hear a surprising constant: up to 60% gets consumed by routing, clarifying, and chasing context—not practicing law. That’s the hidden tax of ad hoc intake. The fastest path to relief isn’t another queue; it’s AI-powered intake and triage that composes knowledge into action and moves work forward, fast.
What you’ll learn:
  • The hidden costs of manual intake and why they compound.
  • What an AI intake and triage layer actually does (and doesn’t).
  • A 30-day pilot plan with the KPIs that matter.

The Hidden Tax of Manual Intake

Email and Slack make it easy to ask legal for “a quick look.” They also ensure requests arrive incomplete, unprioritized, and untraceable. Legal becomes a switchboard operator: gathering missing facts, untangling ownership, and re-answering the same policy questions. The result is long tails on simple work, inconsistent risk decisions, and knowledge that disappears into inboxes.
For mid-sized to enterprise teams, the impact is measurable:
  • Longer cycle times: every clarification adds a day.
  • Rework and escalations when context is missing.
  • Poor data: you can’t optimize what you can’t see.
AI doesn’t fix this by “doing the law.” It fixes the plumbing. By turning playbooks, positions, and workflows into a living system, you convert tribal knowledge into consistent front-door actions—so the right work lands in the right lane, with the right data, the first time.

What AI Intake and Triage Actually Means

Think of AI intake and triage as a layered, always-on legal analyst sitting at your front door:
  • Intake normalization: Guides business users through the correct form dynamically (deal type, counterparty, data location, template usage), then validates completeness.
  • Policy recall: Answers routine “can we/can’t we” questions from approved playbooks and positions, with citations and permissible options.
  • Smart routing: Classifies by matter type, risk, and business priority; assigns to the right workflow or persona (self-serve, paralegal, counsel, outside counsel) with clear SLAs.
  • First-draft generation: For standard artifacts (e.g., NDAs, DPAs, MSA orders), assembles the correct template and pre-populates fields from CRM, procurement, or prior deals.
  • Decision memory: Captures outcomes (approved deviations, fallback used, exception rationale), so each decision strengthens the next one.
On platforms like Sandstone, these functions are delivered as AI agents that operate inside your existing channels—Slack, email, or a portal—so adoption is natural. Strength through layers (data, playbooks, workflows), crafted precision (your positions, not generic ones), and natural integration (no behavior change for the business) are what make it stick.
A 30-Day Pilot You Can Run Now
Pick one high-volume, low-complexity workflow. NDAs, vendor onboarding, or low-risk sales orders are ideal. Then:

Week 1: Define the lane

  • Map the current path: entry points, required fields, templates, and who touches what.
  • Write the rules of the road: acceptable positions, fallbacks, and when to escalate.
  • Success criteria: baseline today’s cycle time, completion rates, and SLA hits.

Week 2: Configure and connect

  • Build a dynamic intake: conditional questions that capture only what’s needed.
  • Wire data sources: CRM for deal info, procurement for vendor metadata, document templates.
  • Set routing logic and SLAs: define self-serve vs. legal-review thresholds.

Week 3: Pilot with one team

  • Turn on the AI front door for a single cohort (e.g., Sales for NDAs).
  • Shadow-mode QA: AI proposes, humans approve; tighten prompts and playbooks.
  • Enable self-serve for green paths; require legal review for flagged risk.

Week 4: Measure and expand

  • Compare against baseline: cycle time, first-time-right submissions, legal touch rate.
  • Capture exceptions and feed them back into the playbook.
  • Roll out to the next cohort; keep the rules versioned and visible.
Actionable next step: choose one workflow, write a one-page playbook (purpose, inputs, positions, escalation triggers), and pilot an AI intake agent to enforce it for two weeks. Keep humans in the loop; let the system learn your edges.

The KPIs That Matter

Stop tracking only volume; optimize for flow and decisions:
  • Cycle time by path: self-serve vs. legal review vs. escalation.
  • First-time-right submissions: percentage of requests that require zero follow-up.
  • Legal touch rate: share of matters resolved without attorney involvement (by class).
  • Exception rate and reasons: where policy creates friction—and why.
  • Reuse of positions: how often approved fallbacks are applied consistently.
When AI intake and triage are working, you’ll see 20–40% faster cycle times on standard work, a sharp drop in back-and-forth, and cleaner data that powers better staffing and forecasting.
Build the Bedrock, Not Another Queue
Legal scales when knowledge compounds instead of disappearing. AI intake and triage turn your layered guidance—playbooks, positions, workflows—into an operating system that meets the business where it works and routes risk with crafted precision. That’s the foundation of trust: predictable timelines, transparent decisions, and guardrails everyone understands.
If you want a practical starting point, pick the one workflow that clogs your queue and let an AI agent handle the front door. Platforms like Sandstone are built to make that feel natural—no heavy change management, just cleaner inputs, faster outputs, and decisions that get smarter with every request. That’s how legal stops being a bottleneck and becomes the connective tissue for growth.

About Jarryd Strydom

Jarryd Strydom is a contributor to the Sandstone blog.