Automated Matter Intake: The Future of Legal Operations

Manual legal processes aren’t just outdated—they’re becoming unsustainable.  

Today, legal teams at fast-growing companies are increasingly turning towards automation, drawn by streamlined workflows and clear, measurable outcomes.  

While conversations among General Counsels (GCs) and Legal Ops professionals continue around which solutions offer the most value, experts emphasize that the best approach is one tailored precisely to the organization’s needs.  

So, even as automation makes legal work more seamless, choosing the right solution requires thoughtful consideration. Let’s explore why forward-thinking legal departments are embracing automated matter intake, what solutions are available, and how they’re using it to deliver greater visibility, efficiency, and strategic value.

What Is Automated Matter Intake?

Automated matter intake is a technology-based method for capturing, managing, and tracking legal requests.  

Unlike traditional manual intake—which typically involves emails, phone calls, and spreadsheets—automated intake gathers and organizes requests through a single, centralized system.

This approach is more efficient and transparent than manual processes because it provides real-time visibility into matter statuses, workloads, and priorities. Automated intake systems often include digital intake forms, automated triage, and dashboards for tracking, enabling legal teams to quickly assign, prioritize, and manage new matters.

Advanced automated matter intake solutions incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) to intelligently classify, prioritize, and route incoming requests. AI-powered intake further streamlines the legal matter intake process, allowing legal teams to optimize workflows and effectively measure and demonstrate their value.

Challenges of Manual Matter Intake

Manual matter intake is still common in legal teams, but managing requests through emails, spreadsheets, and conversations causes several issues:

Lack of Visibility

Incoming requests scattered across multiple channels result in:

• Unclear statuses and ownership

• Missed or duplicated work

• Difficulty prioritizing and reporting

Inefficiency and Errors

Relying on manual methods creates repetitive, time-consuming tasks:

• Constantly updating spreadsheets or email threads

• Increased chance of human errors and delays

• Frustration and wasted resources within legal teams

Limited Scalability

Manual intake makes it challenging for growing legal teams to:

• Keep pace with increasing requests

• Accurately forecast capacity or resource needs

• Clearly demonstrate value and justify new hires or budget increases

Ultimately, manual matter intake processes limit a legal team’s ability to effectively manage workloads, report performance metrics, and strategically support business growth.

Key Benefits of Automating Intake

Automated matter intake addresses the limitations of manual processes by streamlining and centralizing request management. Implementing automation provides several immediate and long-term benefits for legal teams:

Improved Visibility and Control

• Centralizes incoming requests into one clear dashboard

• Provides real-time tracking of matter statuses and workloads

• Enables informed decision-making and prioritization based on transparent data

Greater Efficiency and Productivity

• Reduces manual, repetitive administrative tasks

• Accelerates the assignment and approval process

• Minimizes human error and prevents duplicated efforts

Enhanced Collaboration

• Improves communication and clarity among stakeholders and legal team members

• Creates a single, shared source of truth for all matters and documentation

• Simplifies updates and feedback loops, reducing follow-up emails and meetings

Actionable Reporting and Metrics

• Generates insightful data to measure team performance and resource allocation

• Demonstrates legal’s strategic impact clearly to company leadership

• Enables data-driven forecasting and proactive planning

In short, automated matter intake transforms the legal operations function—making processes efficient, transparent, and scalable. By automating intake, legal teams gain the visibility and insights they need to better demonstrate their value and strategically support business growth.

How AI Enhances Matter Intake

AI is reshaping the legal matter intake process, enabling teams to move beyond routine tasks and focus on what matters most—high-impact, meaningful legal work.  

If you visited the legal department of a fast-growing company today, you’d likely see fewer team members buried in email threads and spreadsheets. Instead, legal professionals gather around strategic dashboards, collaboratively discussing priorities and proactively managing risk. With AI-powered intake tools, legal teams can spend less time manually sorting and assigning matters, and more time advising business partners and driving strategic outcomes.

Many legal operations professionals are transitioning into more strategic roles, and AI makes it possible for them to quickly perform at a higher level. For example, with new matter intake or when a new request is lodged, AI can instantly categorize requests based on urgency, matter type, or business impact, automatically routing them to the most suitable lawyer or legal team member. Traditionally, legal staff would spend hours assessing, categorizing, and assigning incoming requests manually—rather than strategically evaluating their impact on the business. Now, legal professionals focus on higher-level decision-making, such as aligning matter intake with organizational priorities and allocating resources effectively, leaving AI assistants to handle the repetitive administrative work.

Finally, AI in matter intake doesn’t eliminate the need for human judgment—it enhances it. Legal professionals still need to assess nuanced situations, advise stakeholders, and make strategic business judgments. But AI allows them to spend far less time tracking down basic facts, sorting through emails, or manually updating spreadsheets.  

The Future of Legal Operations with Automated Intake

As the first point of contact for incoming legal requests, the intake process directly influences how smoothly matters are handled from start to finish. And the future of legal operations is digital-first, with automated matter intake being recognized as an essential component of effective, strategic legal teams.  

As workloads and expectations continue to grow, legal departments will increasingly rely on technology-driven solutions to efficiently manage incoming matters. Automated matter intake tools will enable teams to better anticipate and balance workloads, accurately measure performance, and proactively identify areas for improvement.

AI-powered capabilities will continue to evolve, making matter intake even smarter and more predictive. Legal teams will benefit from intelligent insights that help them anticipate business needs, allocate resources effectively, and demonstrate their strategic value clearly to leadership.

Going forward, legal departments that embrace automated intake will gain a competitive advantage. By spending less time on repetitive administrative tasks, legal professionals will shift their focus toward high-value, proactive legal advisory—helping their organizations scale efficiently, manage risk effectively, and achieve strategic goals.

How Checkbox Can Help

Checkbox offers legal intake and triage software that transforms matter intake from a fragmented administrative burden into a streamlined, efficient, and strategic process. Designed specifically with legal in mind, Checkbox provides a centralized, AI-powered solution to simplify and automate the entire intake process.

With Checkbox, legal teams gain:

• Centralized Intake: Flexible integrations that consolidate all incoming requests from applications such as Teams, Slack, email, and more, into one unified system.

• Intelligent, AI-Powered Routing: AI instantly categorizes and prioritizes matters, automatically assigning each to the most appropriate team member based on pre-set factors like complexity, urgency, and expertise.

• Real-Time Tracking & Visibility: Customizable dashboards offer immediate visibility into workloads, matter statuses, and key metrics—enabling data-driven decision making.

• Strategic Insights & Reporting: Built-in analytics deliver insights that empower legal teams to clearly demonstrate their value and impact to company leadership.

Want to see Checkbox’s automated intake in action? Book a demo and discover how Checkbox can help elevate your legal operations.