Fix Legal Intake, Fix Everything: The Root of In-House Inefficiency

Legal teams are constantly under pressure to do more with less—handling high volumes of requests, ensuring compliance, and driving strategic value for the business. Yet, despite investments in technology, additional headcount, or process improvements, many teams still struggle with inefficiencies. Why? The culprit is often hiding in plain sight: intake.

Legal intake—the process of capturing, triaging, and managing incoming legal requests—is the foundation of how work enters the legal department. When it’s broken, everything downstream suffers. Let’s explore this through three real-world scenarios that illustrate why intake is the hidden root cause of inefficiencies and how solving that first unlocks amazing potential to solve many other challenges impacting in-house legal operations.

Story #1: The Sales Deal Bottleneck

How poor legal intake delayed a multimillion-dollar contract

A fast-growing SaaS company was closing a high-value enterprise deal, but legal’s contract review process became a major blocker. The sales team submitted the contract via email, buried in a long thread with multiple attachments and vague instructions. Legal spent days chasing missing information, clarifying redlines, and deciphering contract priorities. By the time the contract was finalized, the customer had cooled off, and the deal was delayed.

Perspective: Vendors who communicate a clear vision first have a major advantage. Insidesales.com estimates win rates to be affected by as much as 50%. Has your speed to executing NDA's been a blocker for the commercial team? Has incomplete information and disorganized emails impacted turnaround time, and subsequently revenue? Many companies seek to solve for contract review here, but actually, the culprit is intake.

Story #2: The Mystery of the Unanswered Requests

How legal intake inefficiencies led to dropped legal requests

A large retail company’s legal team was overwhelmed with contract reviews, compliance questions and HR issues. Employees submitted requests in multiple ways—some through emails, others via Slack messages, and a few even through passing hallway conversations. With no centralized tracking system, requests fell through the cracks, leading to frustrated stakeholders, compliance risks, and in one situation a penalty exceeding $1M. The team was highly capable, but their existing technology lacked the visibility needed to track, prioritize, and assign requests efficiently.  

Gut reaction might be to address head count, or try to ask legal to do a better job of tracking their cases - good ideas, but ultimately solving for the wrong problem. Once again, the culprit is intake. The nature of existing channels leaves data completely unstructured, requiring manual effort to track things that just adds more work to the legal teams plate when they're already stretched.  

Story #3: The Retail Legal Chaos

How a decentralized legal team faced lack of visibility, leading to inefficiency and misalignment

A large multinational retailer operated multiple brands, each with its own legal needs. Requests for contract reviews, employment law guidance, and compliance issues flooded in from different business units, but there was no standardized intake process. Some teams submitted requests via email, others through spreadsheets, and a few even relied on informal verbal requests.

This lack of visibility meant that high-value attorneys were stuck handling routine tasks while complex, high-risk issues were delayed. Leadership had no insight into workload distribution, making it impossible to measure performance or allocate resources effectively. With no centralized intake or tracking, legal teams across the company were working in silos, duplicating efforts, and wasting valuable time on misaligned priorities.

Their solution? Move everyone to a consolidated system that IT was already using. At first, it seemed like the right answer. But the business and the legal teams preferred their existing communication channels. Weak adoption caused the project to fail.

The Big Takeaway: Fix Legal Intake, Fix Everything Else

These examples all point to one clear conclusion: legal inefficiencies don’t start with slow approvals or contract mismanagement—they start at intake. To eliminate bottlenecks, improve response times, and maximize strategic impact, the solution also needs to start at intake. A structured, automated legal intake system reduces inefficiencies, improves visibility, and ensures the right work is handled by the right people at the right time.

So why do we shy away from addressing this simple piece of the puzzle? Because we value our relationship with the business and feel accessible—because it feels like a lot of change management. All valid reasons. But what if you could enable your team to stay in email or chat? What if you uncovered new ways to add real value to your relationship through insights? What if the "system" was mostly hidden in the background, using intelligence to capture the data while your teams focus on just doing their job? This tech exists, and once you solve for intake, you unlock all kinds of opportunities for automated workflow, better visibility, reusable work product, improvements to cycle time, and so much more.

Legal inefficiencies start at intake. With the right legal intake software, you can fix that and everything else improves.