The Ultimate Guide to AI-Powered Legal Intake and Triage

Knowledge workers spend roughly 20% of their time searching for information. In legal, that number feels higher when intake is scattered across email, Slack, and legacy portals. Every missing detail or misrouted request turns into ping-pong, delays, and risk. The fix isn’t another form—it’s an intelligent intake and triage layer that captures context, routes with precision, and turns decisions into reusable knowledge.

Why Intake and Triage Are the Hidden Bottleneck

Intake is where legal work starts—and where many teams lose momentum. Common failure points:

- Requests arrive everywhere with inconsistent context

- Manual triage burns senior time on low-value sorting

- Policies live in PDFs, not in the flow of work

- Decisions aren’t captured, so the same questions repeat

The result: long time-to-first-response, unpredictable SLAs, and a reputation for being a blocker. A modern intake stack fixes this by standardizing data capture, automating triage, and embedding playbooks so the system learns as it runs.

What AI Agents Do in a Modern Intake Stack

AI agents on platforms like Sandstone act as always-on legal operations teammates:

- Capture: Accept requests from email, Slack, Jira/ServiceNow, or a web form and normalize them into a shared schema (matter type, urgency, business impact, data owner, contracts attached)

- Enrich: Ask targeted follow-ups for missing details and pull context from CRM, procurement, and document systems

- Classify and Route: Apply your playbooks (e.g., NDA under $50K routes to self-serve; vendor DPA with high risk routes to privacy counsel) and assign owners with SLAs

- Draft: Generate first-pass artifacts—NDA markups, issue lists, risk summaries, approval emails—based on your templates and positions

- Escalate: Flag exceptions with rationale and recommended next steps

- Learn: Log outcomes so future requests are faster, sharper, and more consistent

Because Sandstone is a knowledge layer as well as a workflow engine, every intake and decision strengthens your operating system—turning guidance into action, and action back into guidance.

A Pragmatic Playbook: From Request to Resolution

Here’s a blueprint you can run without reorganizing your stack:

1) Define the schema: For your top three request types (e.g., NDA, vendor review, marketing claims), agree on required fields, risk thresholds, and SLAs. Keep it brutally practical.

2) Connect entry points: Route email aliases, Slack channels, and procurement portals into a single Sandstone intake. Maintain the familiar requester experience; don’t force new tools.

3) Encode playbooks: Translate your policies into decision trees and prompts. Examples: auto-approve pre-vetted NDA templates; require DPA for vendors processing personal data; escalate claims with superlatives or comparative advertising.

4) Automate first-pass work: Use agents to draft responses, redlines, issue lists, and approval memos. Lawyers stay in the loop for judgment calls.

5) Capture outcomes: Record rationale, positions, and final documents. The next, similar request becomes a one-click resolution.

This is not about replacing counsel. It’s about removing the friction around counsel so expertise is applied exactly where it matters.

Metrics That Matter (and Pitfalls to Avoid)

Track a small, consequential set of KPIs:

- Time-to-first-response and time-to-resolution by request type

- Data completeness at submission (pre- vs. post-automation)

- Auto-resolution rate and deflection to self-serve

- SLA adherence and requester satisfaction (CSAT)

- Rework rate (number of back-and-forth cycles per request)

Pitfalls to avoid:

- Automating chaos: Without a clear schema and playbooks, you speed up confusion

- Black-box routing: Keep decision rationale visible for audit and trust

- Over-permissioned access: Enforce least privilege and automatic redaction for sensitive data

- One-and-done configuration: Review metrics monthly and refresh prompts and templates

Start Small: A 30-Day Blueprint with Sandstone

Week 1: Pick a high-volume, low-complexity flow (e.g., NDAs). Define the intake fields, approved templates, and routing rules. Document exception criteria.

Week 2: Connect channels (email/Slack/form) into Sandstone. Configure the AI agent to request missing details automatically and to classify and route based on your thresholds.

Week 3: Load your playbook and positions. Enable first-pass drafting for NDAs and approval emails. Pilot with one business unit. Maintain a human-in-the-loop review.

Week 4: Measure KPIs, capture feedback, iterate prompts and templates. Expand to a second flow (vendor privacy review or marketing claims) using lessons learned.

Actionable next step: Choose one workflow (NDAs or vendor reviews) and set a single success target—cut time-to-first-response by 50% in 30 days. Configure the Sandstone agent to gather required details, route, and draft. Review results weekly.

The Foundation for Speed, Alignment, and Trust

Legal shouldn’t be a bottleneck; it should be connective tissue. When intake and triage run on an AI-powered knowledge layer, you get speed without sacrificing control, consistent decisions without heavy process, and institutional memory that compounds. That’s the promise of Sandstone: strength through layers, crafted precision, and natural integration with how your teams already work. Build the foundation once—then let every request make it stronger.