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August 1, 2024
Table of Contents
Legal intake refers to the initial process by which legal departments receive and triage legal requests from the business, such as Sales, Marketing, HR, or other departments, to review and provide legal analysis and advice on. Common high-volume requests may include sales questions, sales contracts, vendor agreements, marketing compliance reviews, open source license reviews, product questions, and non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).
Due to the high volume and fast-paced nature many request from the business, it’s crucial for legal departments to have processes, and software tools in place to streamline legal intake. These systems help in efficiently allocating tasks at scale, prioritizing and balancing workloads, and ensuring that matters are directed to the right legal professional based on their expertise.
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Any legal request, especially high-volume, repetitive legal requests, can be managed by legal intake and triage workflow software. Legal automation software can automatically and intelligently parse and sort legal requests, making it a powerful tool for reducing administrative work and processing legal requests more efficiently.
To gauge the efficiency of the legal intake process, some metrics worth tracking include:
Monitoring these metrics can be incredibly helpful for in-house legal teams. It not only underscores the timely and quality support that the legal department provides to the business but also pinpoints areas where operations can be streamlined and service delivery enhanced. Manually tracking these metrics can be a drag—time-intensive and error-prone, making it tough to guarantee consistent and accurate data. That's where legal intake software like Streamline AI comes into play. It does the hard work, automating the process and ensuring both efficiency and precision in tracking real-time key performance indicators.
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To see a more comprehensive guide to designing better legal intake forms and processes, read our blog post here.
To nail down what requesters are looking for, ask precise questions. Instead of a broad “What do you need?” question in the form, ask, “What kind of agreement are you looking to establish?”. By drilling down to the specifics, you can tailor the subsequent parts of the form, ensuring you capture all the information needed.
Lengthy forms deter requesters and incentivize them to email instead, which then increases Legal’s manual workload triaging emails. Make forms concise, but don’t sacrifice the information gathering.
Instead use conditional logic to display fields in response to answers. This ensures requesters see the questions applicable to their request use case. For example, you don’t need one vendor agreement request form for large purchases over $20,000 and another separate one for purchases under $20,000. Instead, build if/then conditionality to personalize questions for each purchase size.
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Arrange fields from simple to complex. Begin with asking the basics, like counterparty names, and then dive into the details. This gradual approach ensures users continue on because they’re already invested.
While it's tempting to ask for every single detail details, it can overwhelm users. Only include necessary questions. If needed, gather extra information later.
Cluster related fields together. For example, group address details like street, city, and state together. Grouping by topic simplifies the user’s thinking process.
Scale your legal team's efficiency and effectiveness with modern workflow automation tools designed for in-house legal.
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