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2025 Insights & Actions
State of Legal Intake
and Visibility Report
We asked legal leaders on how their teams are actually operating in 2025. What’s driving alignment with the business and what’s holding them back?
Insights and Recommendations
The findings in this report make one thing clear: legal teams that embrace automation, intake modernization, and data-driven decision-making will be the ones that lead in 2025 and beyond.
Manual processes and fragmented systems are no longer viable. To meet the demands of the business, legal must evolve from reactive support to proactive partner.
What we can all learn
Automating legal intake will reduce manual work and improve responsiveness.
Streamlining tracking will lead to increased visibility across matters, statuses, and team performance.
Using centralized platforms to structure legal data and power reporting enables better business decisions.
Investing in self-service tools will reduce routine requests and free up legal capacity for higher-impact work.
While these overarching takeaways apply to all legal teams, the path towards modernization looks different for each, depending on team size, maturity, and available resources.
Below are tailored actionable next steps designed to meet the unique needs of small, mid-sized, and large legal teams:
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For Small Legal Teams
(1-5 Members)
Limited personnel and budget mean small legal teams often rely on email and spreadsheets to manage requests. This results in ad hoc processes, overwhelmed staff, and a reactive approach to legal support.
But by focusing on small, strategic wins, even the leanest teams can reduce fire drills and build the foundation for scalable operations.
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Actionable Next Steps:
1. Keep Intake Simple—but Structured
- Use tools like Google Forms or low-cost legal intake platforms to capture and triage requests consistently. Legal software like Checkbox offer affordable form and AI intake solutions with special pricing for small teams.
- Define what qualifies as urgent vs. non-urgent and create a basic triage process to prioritize effectively.
- Consider lightweight legal tech if your team—or company—is growing quickly.
2. Create Visibility Without Extra Admin
- Track requests, status, and ownership using shared spreadsheets or affordable tools.
- Identify and report on key metrics (e.g., volume, SLAs, turnaround time) to improve transparency and performance.
3. Set Boundaries and Enable Self-Service
- Build a simple FAQ or internal knowledge base to reduce repetitive questions.
- Use tools like Checkbox to automate routine tasks—such as NDAs, marketing reviews, and conflict-of-interest checks—while routing complex matters to legal.
More Considerations
If IT tools like Jira or Asana are already in use, explore whether they can support basic request tracking. However, legal-specific tools with pricing based on legal seats (not business users) often offer better cost efficiency—and avoid the clunkiness of retrofitting IT platforms for legal workflows.
Start small.
Implement phased technology adoption, beginning with intake automation before expanding further.
“Without reporting or data, asking for additional headcount feels more like a hopeful request than a defensible business case.”
— In-House Counsel for 2-Person Legal Team,
American Multinational Engineering & Manufacturing Company
American Multinational Engineering & Manufacturing Company
For Medium Legal Teams
(6-20 Members)
Mid-sized teams face growing demand for legal support, but many still rely on inconsistent intake and patchwork tracking. In some cases, teams try to manage non-contract requests within a CLM, which isn’t built for that purpose.
By focusing on automation and visibility, these teams can scale without sacrificing efficiency.
Actionable Next Steps:
1. Implement a Scalable Intake System
- Adopt a dedicated legal intake platform to manage both contract and non-contract work. Choose a system that enables tracking, reporting, and can serve as a lightweight CLM or integrate with your existing one.
- For high-volume teams, consider AI-powered intake to automatically capture and triage requests. Checkbox automates intake, tracking, and data capture in the background—giving you visibility without disrupting how legal and business teams work.
2. Strengthen Matter Tracking and Visibility
- If you’re still using spreadsheets, CLMs, or IT tools to track work, consider switching to matter management software designed for legal teams.
- Look for real-time tracking, automated status updates, and intuitive dashboards.
- Start tracking key performance metrics to surface trends, optimize workloads, and demonstrate legal’s impact.
3. Balance Self-Service with Strategic Support
- Build a knowledge base or use an AI-powered chatbot to answer common legal questions.
- Audit all matter types by time spent, risk level, and business value. Use those insights to automate repeatable tasks like NDAs and marketing reviews.
- Establish clear escalation paths so legal can focus on high-risk, high-impact matters.
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4. Integrate Legal with Business Systems
- Connect intake and matter management tools with CLM, finance, and compliance platforms to eliminate silos.
- Align legal workflows with broader business processes to boost adoption and efficiency.
“A key request sat unresolved in someone’s inbox because there was no oversight or visibility into pending matters.”
— In-House Counsel for a 15-Person Legal Team,
Technology & Manufacturing Company
Technology & Manufacturing Company
For Large Legal Teams
(21+ Members)
Large legal teams must manage high request volumes while maintaining visibility, compliance, and alignment with business goals.
To operate efficiently at scale, they need enterprise-grade automation, self-service, and cross-functional integration.
Actionable Next Steps:
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1. Adopt Enterprise-Grade Intake
- Audit matter types by complexity, value, and volume. Use that data to identify automation opportunities.
- Automate routine work like NDA generation and compliance checks, while ensuring high-value matters escalate to legal.
- Extend automation to cross-functional processes involving legal, procurement, compliance, and more.
2. Automate Self-Service and Business Enablement
- Audit matter types by complexity, value, and volume. Use that data to identify automation opportunities.
- Automate routine work like NDA generation and compliance checks, while ensuring high-value matters escalate to legal.
- Extend automation to cross-functional processes involving legal, procurement, compliance, and more.
1. Connect Legal to the Business Ecosystem
- Integrate intake and matter management platforms with tools already used by finance, procurement, and compliance.
- Build seamless, end-to-end workflows that eliminate duplication and improve data flow across departments.
4. Elevate Legal’s Role as a Strategic Partner
- Build real-time dashboards to showcase legal’s performance, optimize resourcing, and support executive decision-making.
- Use trends and recurring matter data to proactively advise the business on risks and process improvements.
- Collaborate with finance and operations to quantify legal’s contribution to cost savings, efficiency, and risk mitigation.
- Embed legal in business planning discussions from the start—shifting from reactive to proactive support.
“We look for every opportunity to automate—it’s essential for achieving efficiency and scaling our legal operations.”
— In-House Counsel for a 250-Person Legal Team,
Global Communications Services Provider
Global Communications Services Provider
next chapter
Section 6
Conclusion >
