Managing the volume and complexity of incoming requests is a constant challenge for in-house legal teams.
Legal intake can become chaotic without a structured approach, leading to bottlenecks, delays, and frustrated stakeholders. By implementing effective intake workflows and workload balancing strategies, legal teams can ensure that requests are handled efficiently, resources are allocated effectively, and business stakeholders receive timely and strategic support.
The Challenges of Legal Intake
The legal intake function is often the first point of contact between the business and the legal team. Requests can range from simple contract reviews to complex regulatory queries, and they arrive through various channels, such as emails, messaging apps, or ad-hoc conversations.
Without a clear system for managing and prioritising these requests, the legal team risks being reactive rather than strategic.
Common challenges include:
- An unfiltered influx of legal queries can overwhelm the team, making it difficult to focus on high-value work.
- Without a framework, urgent but low-value tasks may take precedence over more critical legal matters.
- Stakeholders may be unaware of legal’s workload, leading to unrealistic expectations and inefficiencies.
- A lack of standardisation can result in duplicated efforts or missed deadlines.
So how can in-house legal teams design an intake workflow that balances workload and ensures efficient request handling?
Designing an Effective Legal Intake Workflow
A well-structured intake system should capture all relevant information at the outset, categorise requests appropriately, and enable effective triage.
Here are key steps to optimising intake management:
1. Centralising Intake Through a Single Channel
Legal teams should seek to direct all (or at least most!) requests through a single, structured intake channel. This could be a dedicated email inbox, a self-service portal, or legal intake software.
Standardising intake reduces inefficiencies and ensures that requests aren’t lost in team member inboxes or informal conversations.
2. Using Triage to Categorise Requests
Not all legal requests require the same level of attention. Implementing a triage system enables legal teams to categorise and prioritise requests effectively.
Categories could include:
- Business-critical and time-sensitive matters, such as regulatory issues or urgent contract escalations, require immediate attention.
- Strategic legal matters requiring careful handling, such as mergers, major disputes, or compliance initiatives.
- Routine matters such as contract reviews, NDAs, or template-based advice.
- Simple requests that can be handled via automated tools or self-service.
This structured approach ensures that legal teams spend their time where it matters most.
3. Implementing Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Providing Clear Guidance
Setting clear expectations with the business is key to managing workload. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) define response times based on the priority of the request.
For example:
- Urgent regulatory matters must be responded to within 24 hours
- Initial contact review response time is within three working days
- Routine queries are responded to within five working days
Publishing these SLAs helps stakeholders understand what to expect and reduces unnecessary follow-ups.
It’s also useful to clearly define what qualifies as ‘urgent’ and communicate this to business stakeholders. This helps them understand how their requests align with the legal team’s priorities.
For example:
How “urgent” is your legal request?
Urgent – Immediate risk to the business, legal or regulatory breach, court deadlines, or crisis situations
High – Significant business impact, tight deadlines, or reputational risk
Medium – Important but not time-critical, moderate business risk
Low – Low risk, long lead times, or discretionary work
4. Leveraging Technology to Automate Routine Tasks
Legal technology can significantly ease the burden of intake management.
Legal teams should explore:
- Tools like legal intake software can automate triage and assign tasks to the right team members.
- Self-service standard contracts and NDAs that can be self-generated by business users, reducing manual legal input.
- A self-service FAQ facility that can provide business teams with quick access to legal guidance and internal policies, enabling them to resolve basic queries independently using a curated list of internally supplied Q&As.
By automating repetitive tasks, legal teams can free up capacity for more complex legal work.
5. Assigning Workloads Strategically
Workload distribution should be intentional. Rather than a “first come, first served” approach, legal teams should allocate work based on expertise, interests, urgency, and capacity.
Consider:
- Assigning team members to intake on a rotational basis ensures requests are processed efficiently without overwhelming any one individual.
- Monitoring workloads in real time helps redistribute tasks where necessary, ensuring no one is overburdened.
- Legal operations professionals can oversee intake and triage, ensuring legal resources are optimally allocated.
Strategic allocation ensures that complex matters are handled by the right experts while preventing bottlenecks.
Embedding a Culture of Efficient Legal Intake
Process and technology alone won’t fix intake challenges. Embedding the right behaviours within legal and business teams is essential.
1. Training Business Teams on Legal Processes
Legal teams should proactively educate business stakeholders on engaging with legal efficiently.
This includes:
- Encouraging the use of intake portals rather than direct emails.
- Providing clear guidance on required information for different types of requests.
- Training on self-service tools and automation.
A well-informed business team combined with a structured intake process reduces unnecessary back-and-forth, improving overall efficiency and service delivery.
2. Regularly Reviewing and Refining the Intake Process
Legal intake is not a “set and forget” process. Regularly reviewing intake data helps identify trends, bottlenecks, and opportunities for improvement.
Questions to consider include:
- Do the processes or workflows need updating?
- Are SLAs being met consistently?
- Are certain request types overwhelming the team?
- Can more requests be automated or handled via self-service?
Continuous optimisation ensures the intake system evolves with business needs.
3. Communicating Workload Transparency to the Business
A lack of visibility can lead to unrealistic expectations from stakeholders. Providing transparency on legal workload through dashboards, reports, or regular business updates helps manage demand effectively.
Legal teams can use simple metrics to show:
- Volume of requests received and handled.
- Average response times by request type.
- Breakdown of high-value vs routine legal work.
Some legal operations systems can capture this information while the team works, allowing for greater clarity and time savings. This transparency fosters better alignment between legal and the wider business.
Conclusion
Managing legal intake and workload is about more than just efficiency, it’s about ensuring that legal teams can focus on high-value, strategic work while maintaining service quality. By centralising and automating intake, in-house legal teams can transform their intake function from a bottleneck into a streamlined, business-enabling process.
With the right approach, intake becomes a well-oiled machine, freeing the in-house legal team to deliver real value where it matters most.
