Creating a Legal Front Door: Intake and Triage as the New "Must-Have"

What is a Legal Front Door?

The ‘Digital Legal Front Door' describes a single point where the business goes to access services from the legal team. It enhances the way that the business interfaces with legal through a blend of self-service and connecting with lawyers.

Streamlining Intake & Triage with a Legal Front Door

In-house legal teams can no longer deny the opportunity that intake and triage presents in positioning in-house lawyers as valuable assets to the company. The role itself is evolving, meaning that in-house teams need to optimize their operating models to stay on top of emerging challenges. We have seen with the pandemic that new challenges can quickly arise, and it is the responsibility of in-house legal teams to respond accordingly. In house legal software with automation & self-service capabilities are necessary tools that every in-house lawyer should utilize to transform their intake and triage processes and improve the access, value and speed of their services.

With 87% of legal requests continuously pouring in from emails, and the rest coming from phone calls and face-to-face conversations, these unstructured methods of legal request collection can create communication gaps. This creates difficulties in progressing legal requests and causes many requests to be ignored. Business users awaiting status updates on their legal requests also have no visibility over the status of their requests, creating a significant bottleneck in internal and customer-facing business processes involving other departments. This often leads to an elevated risk of missed deadlines, lost opportunities, reputational damage and lower profitability. Legal teams must rise to the occasion to solve these issues and prevent further issues from arising.

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A digital front door for intake and triage is no longer a 'nice to have', but a 'must have' that every legal department should implement to manage the speed & prioritization of service delivery, generate department data and become the springboard for other legal tools in an organization. There are several ways that legal departments can accomplish this, whether it be through an automation technology platform, or other solutions, it is undeniable that intake and triage processes need an upgrade.

Legal teams should not be put off by the potential hurdle of creating a digital legal front door. Digital options are essential to creating a streamlined intake and triage process, especially for automation. However, if automation is not an option, then simply setting up rules and basic intake procedures and regulations can make the process so much simpler with standardization. For example, a legal front door can also include document automation, approval workflows and self-service advice, which all contribute to improving the legal intake and triage process.

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Legal teams are also not the only ones who benefit from a standardized, digital intake and triage process: intake and triage is not a new process, nor is it specific to just the legal function, but all business users receive help from digitizing and standardizing intake and triage. IT departments have been digitizing intake and triage since their inception, with IT help desks and IT service request management. Much like intake and triage for legal teams, service request management relates to core IT practices like incident, problem and change management. This also applies to other departments where HR are already ahead of the curve for service request management, and if legal teams want to elevate their departments, then they will need to manage their requests in a more automated, efficient and effective way.

What issues does a legal front door address?

One of the most common issues is that requests from the business are received in an ad-hoc and decentralized manner. There is little thinking about process improvement, knowledge management, data and visibility. By implementing legal intake and triage automation, legal teams will be able to standardize the intake of requests and automatically triage then. Legal activity that is otherwise not captured in offline conversations, phone calls and email inboxes can be captured and reported on for data-driven insights and further process optimization, removing bottlenecks across the company.

Exploring the benefits of adopting a legal front door

By implementing legal intake and triage automation, legal teams will be able to standardize the intake of requests and automatically triage then. Legal activity that is otherwise not captured in offline conversations, phone calls and email inboxes can be captured and reported on for data-driven insights and further process optimization, removing bottlenecks across the company.

If you are looking to build an effective and scalable in-house legal team, then managing the way that the business makes its requests is an essential part. HR, IT and finance departments have already paved the way for legal departments to adopt automation technologies, thus positioning them as excellent strategic partners to the business. It is time for legal teams to take back their time, work on advancing business value and become strategic enablers.

How to successfully implement a legal front door

Successfully implementing a legal front door involves three things: people, process and technology. To ensure that your organization can reap the full benefits of the legal front door, all three of these aspects must be aligned.

People

To have a successful implementation of a legal front door, people are the most important pieces of the puzzle. People include business users, in-house lawyers or whoever else will be interacting with the front door. For many employees, transitioning from emails and phone calls to a digital access point like the legal front door can present some change management challenges. To combat any hesitations, it is imperative to build confidence through implementing an internal communications strategy and user training to communicate the benefits of the legal front door. Working with people and any doubts they might have is the cornerstone of ensuring successful implementation. 

Process

Because introducing a legal front door will alter some workflows, the second aspect of delivering a successful implementation of a legal front door is through defining and communicating the updated process to the business. This can include defining which processes will be changed through the front door like raising a legal request or the distribution of tasks within the legal department. A good starting point for this is to think of the most crucial business processes that already exist and visualize how you would want them to look through a legal front door. 

Technology

The last aspect in successfully implementing a legal front door lies in selecting the best-fit solutions based on the needs of the organization. After communicating changes with people internally and externally, as well as defining which processes need to undergo changes through the front door, it is important to build a list of criteria and choose which software is the best equipped to solve legal intake needs. When researching solutions, it is also important to keep in mind things like compatibility or integrations with other technology and ease of use.

What are the key features & functionalities to look out for in a Legal front-door software?

The future of Legal Service Delivery with a Legal Front Door

The future of legal service delivery is evolving rapidly, driven by the integration of generative AI (GenAI) with the legal front door. As legal departments face increasing demands for efficiency from the greater business, the need for streamlined, data-driven solutions has never been more crucial for legal teams. The combination of AI and a legal front door represents a pivotal shift in how business users engage with legal teams, shaping a new era of seamless, responsive and accessible legal services.

At the core of this transformation is the rise of AI-powered legal front doors—advanced chatbots integrated across the communication channels that business users rely on daily, such as Slack, Teams, SharePoint and email. With these tools, users can interact with legal departments in a conversational manner, bypassing the outdated and traditional forms and processes. Whether it’s submitting contract requests, seeking policy clarifications or generating documents, users can be guided through their requests tailored to their specific needs. Coupled with the legal front door, conversational AI is setting a new standard for how legal services are delivered.

The future of legal service delivery is about more than just convenience. It’s about transforming legal departments into data-driven entities that deliver measurable value to the business. AI-enabled legal front doors provide legal teams, especially General Counsels, with access to real-time data and analytics. By automating intake and service delivery, legal departments can capture and analyze their key performance metrics to enable data-driven decision-making. These insights are made actionable through dynamic dashboards that present complex legal data into a single, easy-to-understand view, enabling leadership to make informed and strategic decisions.

AI-powered analytics enable legal teams to forecast and respond to business needs more effectively. With data at their fingertips, General Counsels can take a data-driven approach to their work, which not only enhances internal efficiency but also positions legal departments as strategic partners within the broader organization.

What does a Legal front door look like with Checkbox?

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Submitting a legal request should never be complicated, and it doesn’t have to be through Checkbox. Through our AI legal front door and legal assistant, business users can initiate requests and self-serve contracts, knowledge, policies, FAQ and more. Leveraging the two powerhouses of OpenAI’s GPT and no-code workflow automation, users can expect instant yet personalized responses to make for smarter legal intake and triage. Our AI-driven solution improves adoption, enables quicker turnaround times, increases legal service quality and provides greater visibility on request statuses and workflows. Checkbox’s AI Front Door unlocks the abilities for legal teams to: 

• Meet the business where they are while maintaining a standardized intake approach, making change management a thing of the past. Through Slack, Teams, Salesforce, email and more, the legal front door is just a step away. 
• Gain visibility and updates on legal requests through real-time updates on the status, people involved and the time taken to complete requests. 
• Provide self-serve automated journeys for contracts, knowledge, policies, FAQs and more to provide improved services to the business and improve turnaround times to resolve requests. 
• Enable intelligent, conversational experiences to intake, answer, triage and facilitate requests.

‍Meet with our legal automation experts today to evaluate your current intake and triage methods, learn how to get started in building a legal front door for your organization, and capture best practices we've seen with other leading legal teams.