The Burden of Routine Work on Legal Teams
For many in-house legal departments, a significant portion of time is spent on repetitive, manual tasks that, while necessary, do not require legal expertise. Activities such as reviewing intake requests submitted via email, generating standard contracts like NDAs, routing approvals, and tracking workloads in spreadsheets are common examples.
Where Legal Teams Spend Their Time
| Routine Tasks | High-Value Tasks |
|---|---|
| Email-based intake requests | Risk assessment and mitigation |
| Manual NDA and contract generation | Regulatory strategy and compliance advisory |
| Chasing approvals and signatures | Stakeholder alignment and legal enablement |
| Updating spreadsheets to track workload | Strategic legal counsel to the business |
Despite their low complexity, these tasks are rarely optimized, leading to an operational burden that limits the team’s ability to focus on higher-value work such as risk management, strategic counsel, and regulatory compliance.
On top of that, legal professionals often enter the field with the expectation of solving complex problems and driving business outcomes. When their days are filled instead with administrative work that offers little intellectual reward, job satisfaction declines.
Over time, this can lead to burnout driven by the lack of alignment between daily responsibilities and professional fulfillment.
What Are Legal Automation Tools?
Legal automation tools are software solutions designed to streamline and standardize repetitive legal processes. These tools help lawyers handle high volumes of low-risk work efficiently by automating tasks that would otherwise require manual input, communication, or coordination.
Legal automation tools help to intake requests, trigger pre-defined processes, and ensure that information is routed to the right people at the right time. This can include anything from automatically generating a contract based on a submitted form to triaging legal requests according to priority and category.
Unlike traditional legal technology that focuses on document management or e-signatures in isolation, legal automation tools are built to manage end-to-end legal service delivery.
The goal of these tools is not to replace lawyers, but to remove inefficiencies from their workflows. By automating the routine, legal teams can spend more time on judgment-driven work and strategic initiatives.
Top Routine Tasks You Can Automate with a Legal Automation Tool
Legal teams are increasingly turning to automation to handle high-volume, low-risk work more efficiently. While not every legal task can or should be automated, many routine processes are ideal candidates. Below are some of the most common use cases for legal automation tools:
1. Legal Intake and Triage
Managing legal requests through email or informal channels leads to fragmented workflows, missing information, and inconsistent prioritization. With legal automation software such as Checkbox, business users can submit legal requests through two intelligent channels: structured e-forms and an AI legal chatbot embedded directly within your communication tools (i.e. Slack and Microsoft Teams).
The platform can instantly capture the relevant context, apply business rules, and triage the request to the right legal resource based on factors such as request type, urgency, and team capacity. This integrated intake experience not only eliminates the inefficiency of back-and-forth emails but also provides legal teams with immediate structure and visibility over incoming work.
2. Document Generation
Tasks like creating contracts, NDAs, MSAs, or other standard agreements are often time-consuming when done manually. Legal automation tools can generate these documents instantly using pre-approved templates and conditional logic. This enables business users to self-serve for routine contracts, reducing legal bottlenecks.
3. Approval Routing
Internal approvals for contracts, policies, or legal opinions often involve multiple stakeholders. Legal automation tools can manage these workflows by routing documents for review and approval in the correct order, with reminders and real-time tracking to prevent delays.
4. Matter Creation and Assignment
Legal automation can help legal departments create new matters automatically upon intake, log key details, and assign work to the appropriate legal team member. This ensures consistency and improves visibility into team workload.
5. Compliance and Reporting Tasks
Recurring tasks such as policy attestations, compliance certifications, and data collection for audits can be standardized and scheduled through automation. Legal teams can use tools to ensure accuracy, track completions, and generate reports in real time.
Key Benefits of Using Legal Automation Tools
Implementing legal automation platforms bring measurable improvements across productivity, accuracy, and team performance. Below are some of the key benefits legal departments can expect:
Faster Turnaround Times
Automation reduces manual processing and back-and-forth communication, allowing legal teams to respond to requests and complete routine tasks more quickly.
Greater Consistency and Reduced Risk
By standardizing workflows and using pre-approved templates, legal teams can ensure more consistent outcomes and reduce the risk of human error.
Increased Capacity for Strategic Work
Freeing legal professionals from repetitive, low-value tasks creates more bandwidth for complex matters that require legal judgment and strategic input.
Improved Visibility and Reporting
Legal automation tools provide real-time tracking and analytics across matters and workloads. This gives teams better visibility into performance, bottlenecks, and resource allocation.
Higher Internal Satisfaction
When business stakeholders can self-serve for common requests and receive faster support, overall satisfaction with the legal function increases. This helps legal improve legal service delivery and be seen as a true business partner.
How to Choose the Right Legal Automation Tool for Your Team
When evaluating legal automation tools, it’s important to prioritize solutions that are easy to use, flexible, and scalable. Look for platforms that offer both structured intake forms and AI chatbot-driven intake through channels your team already uses (i.e. Slack, email, Microsoft Teams, etc.). This ensures legal requests are captured efficiently, no matter where they come from.
The tool should also support end-to-end workflows in a single platform (i.e. document generation, approval routing, and matter tracking).
Integration and visibility are also critical. The best legal automation tool should connect seamlessly with your existing systems, such as CLM, CRM, document management, e-signature, and communication tools.
It should provide real-time reporting and centralized dashboards to give your team a clear view of work in progress, capacity, and performance. As well as, offer live tracking links to business users who have submitted matters.
Choosing a platform with these capabilities will set your legal team up to operate more efficiently and demonstrate its value across the business.
Ready to modernize your legal team with in-house legal solutions that streamline requests, automate workflows, and surface the data that matters? Book a demo with Checkbox today.
Frequently Asked Questions
What’s the difference between legal automation tools and legal AI platforms?
Legal automation tools are designed to streamline and standardize legal workflows using rules-based logic and templates. Legal AI platforms typically focus on advanced tasks like contract review or legal research using machine learning or natural language processing.
Are legal automation tools only for repetitive admin work?
While they excel at automating routine tasks, legal automation tools also improve visibility, standardize complex workflows, and enable strategic reporting. They support both low-value and higher-complexity operational processes across the legal function.
Can legal automation tools be integrated with our existing document management or CLM systems?
Yes, legal automation tools such as Checkbox are designed to integrate with platforms like document management systems, CLMs, CRMs, e-signature tools, and communication platforms to streamline end-to-end workflows. These integrations reduce double handling and ensure data consistency across systems.
How do automation tools help reduce risk in everyday legal processes?
Automation tools reduce risk by enforcing standardized workflows, eliminating manual errors, and ensuring compliance with internal policies. They also provide audit trails and real-time visibility for better oversight and control.
What should legal teams look for in vendor support and onboarding when adopting an automation tool?
Strong vendor support includes hands-on onboarding, workflow-building assistance, training resources, and responsive customer success teams. Legal teams should look for partners who understand legal operations and can offer scalable, ongoing support.
How quickly can teams see results after implementing legal automation tools?
Many teams start seeing measurable improvements in efficiency, turnaround time, and visibility within the first few weeks of implementation. Quick wins often come from automating common processes like intake, NDAs, and approvals.
