Today, businesses are requiring increasing amounts (and growing types) of legal support. This puts pressure on legal teams to not only deliver high-quality legal services, but to do so more efficiently and effectively than ever before.
The main problem is that workloads continue to grow despite resources not scaling accordingly. This puts a bad reputation on legal for being a bottleneck to the business which is further aggravated by the lack of visibility and data to prove otherwise.
Legal Service Request Management as a Solution
With legal service request management (LSRM), business users can readily access legal services through a centralized ‘digital front door’, allowing the legal team to streamline and effectively manage requests across the business.
Implementing a legal service request management solution improves turnaround times as business users can self-serve tasks such as document generation, approvals, and advice.
How Does Legal Service Request Management Solve Key Challenges?
| Pain Point | Solution |
|---|---|
| Manual Triage | Automated routing & prioritization |
| No Visibility | Real-time dashboards & reporting |
| Inconsistent Handling | Standardized workflows & self-service portals |
Through better intake and triage, lawyers can ensure they’re always working on tasks that are high value and best suited to them while unlocking visibility and reporting on the volume, type, and status of requests.
When To Focus on Legal Service Request Management
Is it time for you to make an investment in legal intake and legal service delivery? Here are some key indicators that suggest legal teams, specifically legal ops, need to focus on improving their legal service request management:
You need to focus on LSRM if you have…
- High Volume of Legal Requests
- Inefficient Manual Process
- Limited Visibility & Reporting into Legal Requests
- Lack of Consistency
1. High Volume of Legal Requests
When the volume of legal work becomes so high and impossible to manage, the legal team is pressured to rethink how they can streamline their service intake. Legal request management can help direct legal requests best suited to each lawyer and ensure that the most urgent requests are prioritized and enable better load balancing across the team and capacity planning.
Legal can also leverage the infrastructure of their intake and triage system to create a ‘digital front door’ that not only organizes and allocates work, but also allows some of that work to get done in a self-serve and automated matter.
2. Inefficient Manual Process
If the legal department is using a manual process to manage legal requests or are facing the problem of volume as above, it may be time to consider investing in technology that can automate both the intake of legal service requests and the resolution of those requests. This can help to reduce errors, improve accuracy and speed up the entire process.
Manually triaging requests takes time away from lawyers to perform high value, strategic tasks. Resolving requests manually also creates a bottleneck for the business who is unable to progress their work as they wait for legal teams to complete their requests. By leveraging self-serve through automated tools to the business, this can enable faster turnaround times for the business and on more complex requests by providing more capacity for the lawyers.
3. Limited Visibility and Reporting into Legal Requests
Lack of visibility occurs when the legal department is struggling to get a clear view of all the legal requests that are coming in, but also extends to when business users do not have a view of the status or history of requests.
Having limited visibility into legal requests also inhibits lawyers from gaining the resources they need to support their narrative of legal being overworked or under capacitated. When lawyers have visibility into the requests coming in, they can collect data that shows the output and workload across the legal team, which helps justify resourcing needs and enables better reporting to the business.
Through legal request management, legal teams gain visibility and reporting on the volume, type, and status of requests from intake through to resolution to measure performance metrics such as SLAs and productivity. For the business, this provides visibility over the requests made and an easily searchable record of current and past requests.
4. Lack of Consistency
If the legal department is struggling to ensure that all legal requests are being managed consistently, legal service request management can help by standardizing the resolution of requests and direct legal requests to the suitable lawyer.
Knowing Your Organization’s Legal Service Request Management Maturity
A legal team’s service request management maturity refers to the current state or level of an organization’s ability to manage its legal service delivery. The varying stages of maturity can describe how the legal team manages requests and indicate the opportunity for service delivery optimization and readiness for automation.
With legal service request management maturity, there are different steps for improving your levels of maturity, depending on the stage of your organization. Steps to improve maturity can be as simple as dedicating specific guidelines for the way the business engages legal or preparing process maps for requesting legal services.
Steps to Improve LSRM Maturity
Step 1: Ad Hoc
No standard process; requests come via email or chat.
Example: No centralized intake, everything is reactive.
Step 2: Defined
Guidelines in place for request submission and basic intake tracking.
Example: Legal asks the business to email a shared inbox with specific info.
Step 3: Streamlined
Intake forms, process maps, and partial triage are used.
Example: Business users submit requests via a legal intake form.
Step 4: Optimized
Self-serve and automation are introduced for routine matters.
Example: NDAs auto-generated with legal review only when needed.
Step 5: Scalable & Measurable
Full visibility, reporting, and continuous improvement based on data.
Example: Dashboards track request types, turnaround times, and SLAs.
To learn more about legal service automation maturity, access our Legal Service Request Management Maturity Guide. Within the guide, you can learn about which stage of maturity your organization is in, with the proper steps to improve your maturity while supporting your legal team’s ability to manage its legal service delivery.
