In-House Legal Teams: 5 Steps to Automate Intake and Triage
A practical, five-step playbook for GCs and legal ops leaders to automate intake and triage with AI agents, cut cycle time, and turn institutional knowledge into an operating system — grounded in how…
McKinsey estimates roughly 23% of a lawyer’s work is automatable. Yet most in-house teams still lose hours each week corralling intake across email, Slack, and spreadsheets. The result: slow cycle times, inconsistent answers, and knowledge that evaporates as soon as a matter closes. There’s a better path: treat intake and triage as a product — and let AI do the heavy lifting with guardrails set by legal.
Why Intake Is the Fulcrum for Faster Decisions
Intake is where legal risk meets business speed. Capture the right context once, codify your positions, and let an AI agent route and respond — you stop re-litigating the same questions. For mid-size to enterprise teams, a well-instrumented intake flow can move first response from days to minutes while boosting consistency and trust. That’s the heart of Sandstone’s approach: layered knowledge, modular workflows, and decisions that build on each other.
5 Steps to Automate Intake and Triage
Step 1: Define Standard Request Types and Required Context
List your top 8–10 request types: NDAs, DPAs, vendor contracts, marketing review, product counsel, policy exceptions, subpoena response, equity docs. For each, lock in mandatory fields: business owner, counterparty, deal value, data categories, jurisdiction, deadline, linked records (Salesforce, Jira, procurement). In Sandstone, dynamic forms use conditional questions — ask only what’s needed, every time — and pre-fill from systems the business already uses.
Step 2: Turn Policy Into Living Playbooks
Translate positions into structured, machine-readable rules: thresholds for redlines, fallback clauses, approval matrices, and risk checks. Example: auto-approve NDAs under mutual form; escalate DPAs if data leaves approved regions; route pricing terms over a set threshold to Finance. In Sandstone, these become living playbooks with version history, so updates flow into every intake, template, and decision — knowledge compounds instead of disappearing.
Step 3: Triage With AI and Clear SLAs
An AI agent classifies requests, checks for duplicates, validates required context, and assigns owners by skill, workload, or region. It sets SLAs by risk tier, sends confirmations, and nudges requesters for missing info. When a rule triggers escalation — sensitive data, high deal value, unusual jurisdiction — the agent routes to the right decision-maker and logs the rationale. Every triage decision is auditable and repeatable, not a one-off judgment call.
Step 4: Automate First Drafts and Checks
Move from inbox to action. For common matters, the agent can generate a first draft using approved templates and clause positions, annotate deviations, and run checklists: privacy triggers, open-source flags, export controls, marketing claims. It can propose a path: proceed on standard terms, swap in fallback language, or request approvals. Legal stays in control; the system accelerates everything around the judgment.
Step 5: Close the Loop and Learn
When a matter finishes, capture outcomes: signed template vs negotiated, time to first touch, cycle time by request type, exceptions granted, blockers. Feed those signals back into playbooks and routing so the system gets sharper. In Sandstone, every intake, triage, and decision strengthens the foundation — strength through layers — so next time is faster and clearer.
What Good Looks Like: KPIs That Matter
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Median first-response time by request type
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Cycle time from intake to resolution (p50 and p90)
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Percent auto-resolved or auto-drafted with human review
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SLA adherence by risk tier and business unit
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Rework rate (docs sent back for missing info)
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Requester satisfaction after close (simple 1–5)
Track these in your intake system, not a separate report. If you can’t measure it in real time, you can’t improve it at scale.
Actionable Next Step: Run a 14-Day Intake Pilot
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Map your top 5 request types and define must-have fields for each.
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Encode three non-negotiable positions into a lightweight playbook (e.g., DPA data transfer, NDA jurisdiction, approval thresholds).
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Launch one dynamic intake form with AI triage for those requests; measure first-touch time, cycle time, and percent of requests handled without email back-and-forth.
In Sandstone, this is a fast start: connect Slack or email, plug in templates, set routing rules, and let the agent handle confirmations, nudges, and first drafts where appropriate.
The Bedrock of Trusted, Scalable Legal Ops
Great legal work scales when knowledge is accessible and actionable. By turning intake, playbooks, and routing into a living, AI-powered operating system, you move legal from reactive inbox to proactive, business-facing partner. Crafted precision where it matters; natural integration where teams already work. That’s how legal stops being a bottleneck and becomes the connective tissue that helps companies grow with clarity and confidence — one well-designed intake at a time.
About Jarryd Strydom
Jarryd Strydom is a contributor to the Sandstone blog.