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Why Structured Intake Is the Highest-ROI Upgrade for In-House Legal

Most legal teams don’t have a contract problem—they have an intake and triage problem. Here’s how structured intake, powered by AI agents and a living knowledge layer, turns chaos into cycle time…

Jarryd Strydom

September 25, 2025
If your inbox feels like a never-ending triage line, you’re not alone. McKinsey estimates knowledge workers spend nearly a full day each week just searching for information. For in-house legal, that sprawl shows up as unclear requests, context hunting, and rework. The surprise: you don’t need a new CLM or headcount to claw back time. You need structured intake—the simple, high-leverage layer that converts noise into decisions.

The Bottleneck You Can Actually Control

Most legal friction begins before a lawyer touches the work. Unrouted requests, missing context, and ambiguous risk drive delays that look like “legal is slow.” In reality, legal lacks the upstream signals to move fast with confidence.
Structured intake fixes this by making every request machine-readable on day one. It captures who, what, risk posture, and desired outcome—then routes, deflects, or auto-drafts accordingly. Because the data is structured, it compounds: every NDA, vendor review, or marketing approval enriches the next one. When intake becomes a living system instead of a shared inbox, SLAs stabilize, stakeholders self-serve more often, and escalations become the exception—not the default.
This is the Sandstone approach: strength through layers (data and decisions stack), crafted precision (forms and flows shaped to your playbooks), and natural integration (intake lives where work already happens).
What “Good” Intake Looks Like
Structured doesn’t mean rigid. The goal isn’t more fields—it’s better outcomes with fewer back-and-forths. A durable pattern:
  • Smart forms that adapt questions by matter type and risk profile.
  • Embedded guidance from your playbooks (what to include, when to escalate).
  • Context capture at the source: business owner, counterparty, use case, key terms.
  • Policy-driven routing: procurement vs. sales vs. privacy vs. legal.
  • Clear SLAs and status visibility for requesters.
For common flows—NDAs, vendor diligence, DPAs, marketing approvals—good intake translates plain-language answers into structured fields. In Sandstone, those fields power downstream automation: drafting from templates, applying fallback positions, kicking off privacy checks, or pulling the latest approval matrix. The result: repeatable work gets contained and accelerated; complex work shows up clean.

Where AI Agents Drive Real Leverage

AI isn’t magic; it’s leverage when it’s bound to your policies and data. On Sandstone, agents operate inside the intake-to-decision loop, using your playbooks, positions, and workflows as guardrails:
  • Policy Agent: gates requests at the source (e.g., “Below $10k, use the standard MSA; legal not required”) and explains the why.
  • Drafting Agent: turns structured answers into first drafts using your templates and preferred clauses, tagging deviations for review.
  • Negotiation Agent: proposes playbooked fallbacks, flags redlines outside tolerances, and routes only true exceptions to counsel.
  • Diligence Agent: pulls vendor security answers, compares to your baseline, and summarizes gaps with a recommended position.
  • Status Agent: answers “Where is this?” automatically by reading workflow state across tools.
Because the knowledge layer is living, every resolved matter sharpens the next decision. Intake becomes not just a door—but a learning surface that compounds.

Metrics That Matter

If you can’t measure it, you can’t scale it. Teams that professionalize intake track:
  • Time to first response (from submit to triage decision)
  • Cycle time by matter type (intake to signature/closure)
  • Deflection rate (requests resolved without legal intervention)
  • Self-serve completion rate (forms/templates used end-to-end)
  • Exception rate (work requiring counsel after automated steps)
  • Rework rate (missing info follow-ups per request)
Sandstone surfaces these by default, so you see where to tune the form, the playbook, or the routing logic—then watch SLAs hold as volume grows.

Your Next Step: A Two-Week Intake Sprint

You don’t need a transformation program. Run a focused sprint:
  1. Pick two high-volume flows (e.g., NDAs and vendor reviews).
  2. Define “good enough” fields: business owner, counterparty, use case, value, data type, deadlines, required attachments.
  3. Encode your playbook into simple rules: standard vs. escalate, fallback positions, signature authority.
  4. Stand up adaptive forms in the tools your teams already use (Salesforce, Slack, Jira, email), pointed at a single intake URL.
  5. Turn on two agents: Drafting (first drafts from templates) and Status (automatic updates/answers).
  6. Measure for 14 days: time to first response, deflection, rework. Tighten questions and routing weekly.
In Sandstone, this looks like configuring a layered flow once and letting the knowledge evolve with every matter—no brittle scripts, no vendor sprawl.

Build the Bedrock

Speed, alignment, and trust don’t come from heroics. They come from a foundation where business and law move in harmony: a structured intake that captures context, AI agents that execute against your playbooks, and workflows that improve with every request.
That’s the promise of Sandstone: a modern legal ops platform and knowledge layer that turns institutional know-how into action—so legal stops being a bottleneck and becomes the connective tissue of the business. Start with intake, and the rest of your operating system gets stronger, layer by layer.

About Jarryd Strydom

Jarryd Strydom is a contributor to the Sandstone blog.