Why Legal Teams Should Automate Legal Intake and Triage

With businesses now requiring increasing amounts of legal support, in-house lawyers have inadvertently been subjected to managing hefty volumes of legal requests manually. With legal intake and legal triage automation, business users can readily access legal services through a centralized ‘legal digital front door’ whilst allowing the legal team to streamline and effectively manage legal requests across the business.

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The Current Legal Request Experience for Business Users

To understand why businesses require an automated legal intake and triage tool, we must first understand how business users currently engage with legal departments and the associated pain points.

Business users find it difficult to find the appropriate legal resources

There are so many policies and processes that are fragmented across different sources of information. Even when a business user finds the correct information, they are often discouraged from the walls of text that they need to read through. This is why business users find it easier just to reach out to lawyers directly.

Business users use inefficient channels to make legal requests

The most common methods of requesting legal services are manual and unstructured. These include emailing, calling, or catching a lawyer in the hallway or at their desk (see poll results below). Due to the unstructured nature of these channels, there is often unnecessary back and forth which is time consuming for the business user.

Business users experience a long turnaround time from legal

Due to the demanding volume of requests sent through to the legal team, business users are added to the legal service queue and will frequently experience long wait times before their request is responded to, let alone addressed. This creates a bottleneck for the business who is unable to progress their work and deals as they wait for legal teams to complete their request.

‍Results based on poll conducted during Checkbox’s Legal Intake and Triage webinar

The Current Legal Request Experience for the Lawyers

The current method of handling legal intake and requests is not only frustrating for the business users, but the legal team too. Here are the key pain points for lawyers when dealing with legal requests from the business.

1. Lawyers need to always clarify requests from the business

Because business users do not know what information the legal team needs to meet their request, information is often incomplete or inaccurate. This results in additional back and forth correspondence which is inefficient and frustrating for lawyers.

2. Lawyers spend too much time on low value, repetitive tasks

Low value tasks including generic advice or document generation often takes up a large portion of the lawyer’s time and takes them away from more complex, high value tasks that actually require expert decision making and judgement.

3. Lawyers are asked for help on non-legal matters

Because the business does not understand the clear boundaries of responsibility of the legal team, lawyers are often asked to address concerns that are non-legal in nature and outside of their responsibilities.

4. Lawyers do not have work evenly distributed or assigned efficiently to them

Particularly for larger legal teams, requests can often go to the wrong lawyer or be assigned in a way that results in one lawyer taking on more work than the others.

5. Lawyers have difficulty finding appropriate legal resources

Because key legal information is not well organized and centralized, lawyers also face the same challenge as the business of having to do a lot of manual labour and reading in order to address common legal requests.

How Does Legal Intake and Triage Automation Help?

The legal intake and triage tool is an automated solution designed to aggregate service requests from business users which are then appropriately prioritized and triaged to lawyers. Checkbox’s simple drag and drop interface allows users with no tech knowledge or background to create customized apps to manage legal operations, including a legal intake and triage tool that is suited for your operations.

The Benefits of Implementing a Legal Intake and Triage Software

1. Faster turnaround time to deliver legal services

Because business users can self-serve basic tasks such as standard document generation and advice, there is a dramatic reduction in the turnaround time for legal requests. This also means that high priority and importance tasks are addressed sooner, due to an overall shorter legal requests queue as the legal intake tool filters, distils and forwards only the tasks that exceed the priority and risk threshold set by the legal team.

2. Increased visibility of legal service requests

Businesses are generally unaware of the volume and type of requests they receive per day. By implementing legal intake and triage automation, legal teams will be able to capture and report on legal activity that is otherwise not captured in offline conversations, phone calls and email inboxes.

3. Standardized instruction from the business

Standardized instruction allows the legal team to better understand the nature of work coming from the business users which enables them to allocate tasks and manage requests more effectively and accurately, reducing the need for back and forth correspondence.

4. Increased lawyer efficiency via prioritization

By implementing an legal intake software, business professionals will be able to take advantage of both passive and active prioritization. In the background, the automated decision-tree powered filtering system will categorise tasks based on their risk threshold and allocate them to lawyers if they require their engagement or simply guide business users to self-serve if the risk is low.

If the prioritization criteria or risk thresholds are required to be customized, legal teams have the ability to use drag and drop to build their own logic into the application. Furthermore, legal intake and triage automation tools built on Checkbox can integrate with your existing matter management systems to create, update and close matters automatically as well as provide data on the requests to promote centralization of data.