From Pushback to 90% Adoption: Altria’s AI Legal Front Door Transformation

Legal requests scattered across channels left work invisible and untracked, so modernizing the department had to start with fixing intake.

Altria's vision was changing, and the legal department was expected to change with it. The enterprise had committed to a company-wide modernization, and leadership had a clear mandate for every function: be quicker, more efficient, and more effective.

The company had already restructured several functions under a Global Business Services model, pulling routine transactional work out of individual teams and centralizing it. Legal was next. Its goals echoed the rest of the enterprise, with one added constraint. The department committed to modernizing "while reducing outside counsel spend." For a lean team that leaned heavily on external firms, that raised the stakes.

The day-to-day problem was intake. Every legal request, whether from the business or from inside the department, arrived by phone, email, or Microsoft Teams. Requests got buried in inboxes and in some cases the team had to request work from outside counsel again because documents could not be located timely. The department also carried a familiar reputation: that legal was the holdup. And no one could say whether that was fair or not, because there was no way to see who was holding a request or how long anything actually took.

The legal team needed a system it could easily extract information from when required, and the enterprise tool Altria had at the time did not offer that confidence. It also failed to meet people where they were, with no support for the phone, email, or Teams channels the department actually used. Joy Thorpe, Director of Strategy for the Legal Center of Excellence at Altria, needed something that she or her team could customize on their own, without hiring a consultant or waiting in a ticket queue.

"We were used to white glove service, picking up the phone and asking someone for what we needed. But we had to modernize, and that wasn't the best solution going forward."

By managing resistance and keeping the tool easy to use, Altria lifted adoption from a modest 60% target to roughly 90% and finally gained real visibility into workload.

Joy Thorpe set the adoption bar low on purpose. Given how strong the resistance to an intake system had been, her initial KPI was somewhere around 60%. In the end, the system reached roughly 90%.

This number reflects a change-management story more than a software story. Thorpe sorted the department into two groups and worked them differently. The first group was open to adopting it once they understood its value, so she supported them with training, simple “tips and tricks” emails, and clear success stories, like the attorney who got two hours of his day back. The second group would adopt the system only if it was required, so the general counsel set a clear expectation in a department meeting: everyone would use the system, himself included, and he did.

When asked what drove adoption most, Joy came back to one thing: ease of use, plus options.

Users could pick the web form for detailed requests, email when that was faster, or direct message when a request came up mid-meeting. The payoff for the department is visibility. Every request lands in one dashboard, so work no longer sits in a single inbox or a personal queue. Joy can see what is coming in, who is available, and where to route it, which lets her actively manage resources across the compliance professionals, paralegals, and administrative coordinators in the center.