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Why Legal Teams Are Choosing AI Intake Triage Over Email Chaos in 2025

Email- and Slack-first intake is slowing legal to a crawl. Here’s how AI triage turns scattered requests into clear workflows—so your team moves faster without adding headcount.

Jarryd Strydom

September 4, 2025
Why Legal Teams Are Choosing AI Intake Triage Over Email Chaos in 2025
AI legal intake triage hero image
AI legal intake triage hero image
If your lawyers spend two hours a day mining Slack and email for missing context, you don’t have a contract problem—you have an intake problem. The cost is real: longer cycle times, frustrated business partners, and policy drift as people “go around” legal to keep moving.
In this post, we break down how AI intake triage works in practice, what to automate first, and the KPIs that signal it’s working. The goal: turn legal from a perceived bottleneck into connective tissue that helps the business move with clarity and confidence.
TL;DR
  • Stop letting email threads define your workflow—let AI triage define the path.
  • Automate classification, routing, and low-risk approvals to cut cycle time.
  • Start with a one-week intake audit and a 30-day pilot on a single workflow.

The Intake Problem: Lost Context, Slower Decisions

Most in-house requests arrive incomplete—no counterparty, no value, no deadline, and no template preference. Lawyers chase details. Business partners wait. Work piles up in personal inboxes with no shared visibility.
Legacy CLM can help once a request becomes a contract, but it rarely solves the upstream chaos. You need a front door. One that asks for the right information, every time, and immediately applies your playbooks. That’s where AI triage changes the game.
What AI Intake Triage Looks Like (In Practice)
On Sandstone, intake meets people where they work—forms, Slack, or email—then an AI agent does the busywork:
  • Classifies the request (NDA, MSA, DPA, policy, guidance) against your taxonomy.
  • Extracts key facts (counterparty, value, jurisdiction, data types) from uploads and text.
  • Checks your playbook to determine risk tier and the next step.
  • Auto-responds with missing fields and suggested language when context is thin.
  • Routes to the right owner, sets SLAs, and creates a trackable task.
  • For low-risk paths (e.g., mutual NDAs under your standard), auto-approves and sends the doc for e-sign—no lawyer time.
Every intake, triage decision, and outcome updates the knowledge layer. The system gets sharper. Your positions compound instead of disappearing in someone’s sent folder.
Stand Up AI Triage in 30 Days
You don’t need a big-bang rollout. Pick one high-volume, low-variance workflow and prove value fast.

Week 1: Baseline and Design

  • Audit seven days of intake: count request types, missing fields, and reroutes.
  • Define a single-page playbook for the chosen workflow (e.g., NDAs): thresholds, redlines, auto-approve criteria.
  • Draft a lightweight intake form (ten fields max) and Slack command.

Week 2: Configure and Test

  • Configure Sandstone’s classifier with your labels and example documents.
  • Map routing rules to owners and SLAs; connect to email, Slack, and e-sign.
  • Dry-run ten historical requests; close the gaps the AI surfaces.

Week 3: Pilot with Real Traffic

  • Redirect that workflow’s requests to the new front door.
  • Turn on auto-approve for the clearly low-risk path; keep others routed for review.
  • Track time-to-first-touch, cycle time, and rework.

Week 4: Tune and Expand

  • Analyze exceptions and update the playbook with approved fallback language.
  • Add one adjacent workflow (e.g., vendor DPAs) using the same pattern.
  • Publish a simple internal guide: “How to submit legal requests in Slack.”
KPIs That Matter (And What Good Looks Like)
Don’t measure volume. Measure velocity and precision.
  • Time-to-First-Touch: Target under 2 hours during business hours with AI acknowledgement in minutes.
  • Intake Completion Rate: >90% of requests submitted with required fields on first pass.
  • Auto-Resolve Rate: 20–40% of selected workflow requests closed without attorney time.
  • Cycle Time: 30–50% faster for piloted workflows after 30–60 days.
  • Rework/Back-and-Forth: Down and trending—fewer loops to collect missing info.
When these numbers improve, trust improves. Business partners learn the front door gets them answers faster than DMing a lawyer.
Common Pitfalls (And How to Avoid Them)
  • Overengineering the form: Ten essential fields beat 30 optional ones. Let AI fill the rest.
  • Skipping the playbook: AI needs your guardrails. Write crisp thresholds and fallback language.
  • Ignoring Slack and email: Meet people where they already work; don’t force a portal-only world.
  • No change story: Tell the business what they get—faster turnaround and predictable SLAs.
  • Measuring the wrong thing: Celebrate cycle-time wins, not just request counts.

Actionable Next Step: Run a One-Week Intake Audit

Pick five days. Tag every request by type, missing data, reroute, and cycle time. You’ll quickly see your top two automation candidates. Turn that into a one-page playbook and a new front door in Sandstone. Then flip on auto-approve for the safest path and measure the delta.

What This Means for Legal Teams

When intake is intelligent, legal stops triaging in the dark and starts operating as the company’s knowledge layer. Sandstone’s AI-powered triage blends into how you already work, codifies your positions, and routes decisions with crafted precision. The result is speed, alignment, and trust—at scale.
Ready to see it in action? See how Sandstone AI Intake Triage works.

About Jarryd Strydom

Jarryd Strydom is a contributor to the Sandstone blog.