How to Automate Legal Intake and Triage to Cut Cycle Time: A Practical Playbook

How to Automate Legal Intake and Triage to Cut Cycle Time: A Practical Playbook

In many in-house teams, 30–50% of cycle time disappears before legal ever reviews substance—lost to vague requests, missing docs, and Slack/email back-and-forth. The fastest way to give time back is upstream: automate intake and triage so work arrives complete, routed, and ready.

This playbook shows you how to operationalize AI-driven intake and triage so you can reduce turnaround time, raise request quality, and create transparency across the business.

Map the Work You Actually Get

Start by mapping high-volume request types. Don’t overengineer; focus on the 3–5 categories that drive most traffic.

- What to do: Pull the last 60–90 days of requests from email, Slack, and ticketing. Cluster into types (e.g., NDA, vendor/SaaS, sales order form, policy question, marketing content review).

- How to do it: Tag each with attributes—requester function, required docs, approvals, data sensitivity, and where it ultimately landed.

- Example: You find 35% are NDAs, 25% vendor reviews, 15% sales redlines, and the rest are policy/one-off questions.

- Metric to watch: Request completeness rate (baseline it now; you’ll improve it dramatically).

- Pitfall to avoid: Designing your future state around edge cases instead of the dominant patterns.

Design a Zero-Guess Intake That Adapts

Your goal is a single front door that collects exactly what’s needed the first time—no guessing, no scavenger hunts.

- What to do: Build dynamic forms that change by request type and role.

- How to do it: For NDAs, require counterparty name, template preference, signature method, and deal context. For vendor reviews, require the contract/documents, data categories, DPIA status, security questionnaire, and business owner. For sales deals, tie to CRM record and stage.

- Example: If a requester selects “Vendor with PII,” the form auto-surfaces DPIA and security artifacts.

- Metric to watch: % of requests auto-marked “complete on submission.”

- Pitfall to avoid: Static one-size-fits-all forms that create more follow-up than they eliminate.

With Sandstone, these fields live as reusable positions (your policies) and playbooks (your how-tos). Changes to a clause policy or data rule propagate across forms instantly—strength through layers.

Put an AI Triage Agent in the Loop

AI agents shine at first-mile work: classification, extraction, validation, and smart routing.

- What to do: Deploy an agent that sits at the intake and in Slack/email to normalize requests, check completeness, and route.

- How to do it:

- Classify requests to a defined taxonomy and detect sensitive data.

- Extract key attributes (counterparty, renewal dates, governed data) from docs.

- Validate required fields; auto-ask clarifying questions in Slack; reject incomplete submissions with a friendly checklist.

- Route complete requests to the right queue or self-serve flow (e.g., NDA self-serve if risk ≤ threshold; escalate exceptions with a summary and risk flags).

- Example: A sales rep drops a third-party NDA in Slack. The agent extracts parties, detects third-party paper, and routes to the commercial queue with a one-paragraph brief plus redline policy snippets.

- Metric to watch: First-response time and auto-resolve rate (self-serve or fast-lane requests that never hit attorney review).

- Pitfall to avoid: Unsupervised automation. Keep humans-in-the-loop for threshold crossings (PII, high-value deals, novel clauses).

Sandstone’s AI agents operate on your living knowledge base—playbooks, positions, and workflow rules—so every interaction compounds institutional memory instead of disappearing.

Operationalize Routing, SLAs, and Visibility

Automation only sticks if the business sees the path and the promise.

- What to do: Publish a simple Sales–Legal SLA and a single “Start here” link. Mirror key requests directly inside Slack and CRM.

- How to do it: Route by risk tier, deal stage, and region. For routine NDAs, enable self-service with guardrails; for vendor deals with PII, auto-kickoff privacy/security checklists and assign approvers.

- Example: Legal commits to a 2-hour first response and 24-hour turnaround on low-risk NDAs; sales agrees to complete intake fields and attach the CRM opportunity.

- Metric to watch: SLA adherence and deflection (self-serve) rate.

- Pitfall to avoid: Shadow channels. Close email/SMS backdoors by redirecting to the front door with a helpful prompt.

Measure Weekly and Iterate in Sprints

Treat intake like a product, not a project.

- What to do: Run a 30-minute weekly review with Legal Ops, Sales Ops, and Privacy/Security.

- How to do it: Inspect dashboards—request volume, completeness, first-response, cycle time by type, rework rate, and satisfaction. Triage the top 3 blockers and ship fixes in a two-week cadence.

- Example: If vendor reviews lag due to missing DPIAs, add conditional logic and pre-checks; if sales redlines spike, tighten playbook guidance for fallback clauses.

- Metric to watch: Cycle time trend by request type and percent of work entering via the front door.

- Pitfall to avoid: One-time configuration. Your taxonomy and guardrails should evolve with the business.

One Practical Next Step

Block 60 minutes this week to audit the last 50 requests. Identify the top 3 types, define “complete” for each, and draft the dynamic fields. In Sandstone, turn those into positions and a single intake playbook, then enable an AI triage agent in Slack for a two-week pilot with one business unit.

Why This Matters

When intake and triage run on a living, AI-powered operating system, legal stops being a bottleneck and becomes connective tissue—accelerating deals, reducing risk, and building trust. Sandstone’s layered knowledge, crafted workflows, and natural integration ensure each request strengthens your foundation. The result: faster cycles, clearer accountability, and a legal function that scales with the business.