Evaluating the Best Legal Service Request Management Software for Your Company

More and more legal teams are looking to invest in legal intake and legal service request management technology to create a digital front door for their business. If you’re in this camp, it is important to start by exploring the key differences between competing technologies and platforms. 

• What factors should I consider when evaluating legal service request management software?
• Which unique features does each platform offer?
• How can I ensure that the platform I choose will add value quickly and for the right price?
• Which legal technology is right for solving my intake and service request management?

These questions address valid concerns for those looking to implement intake and triage software to streamline their legal service request workflows. 

In this blog, we’ll answer these questions and provide fresh insights on opportunities for enhancing value during every phase of the software purchasing, implementation and maintenance process.

What is the Best LSRM Tool?

The best legal service request management tool is one that is one that fits nicely within your existing legal technology stack.

Legal service request management (LSRM) and workflow automation tools can complement other legal technology nicely such as contract lifecycle management (CLM) platforms or matter management systems (MMS). 

If a legal team lacks either CLM or MMS, workflow automation is a critical first step towards positioning the business for success with those two technologies. This is because it forces the business to get organized around its processes, it's easy to implement, and will help the business understand where to invest in further legal technology.  

It is important to note that workflow automation can never be a full replacement for CLM or MMS. Instead, it does a better job at central intake, and provides a better experience to everyone as each step in the workflow can be designed to show the user only the information necessary to complete that step. Additionally, workflow automation enables the intake of requests for contracting and outside of contracts, to include matters for self-service advice, review and approvals and digital compliance.

With CLM, it is more of a maturity question. If a company already has CLM, then workflow automation can help them more with self-serve contracts as the user experience is better for the counterparty.  It can also help by again centralizing requests to include non-contracting workflows, rather than forcing the business to visit different software depending on their request as the solution routes it accordingly.  If they don't already have a CLM, then they should consider if they are ready for a full CLM implementation.

So, the best legal service request management tool will utilize workflow automation to complement and enhance your existing legal technology stack to direct requests with ease and fluidity.  

Which Features of a LSRM Software Are Most Important?

When looking at features, it’s important to assess which ones are best suited for your organization and its needs.

When evaluating the existing platforms in the market that will help manage your legal service request processes, look for how easy it is to build, customize, and maintain as no one organization has the same identical process for engaging and serving the business.

With no-code workflow automation, you (yes, YOU specifically, as well as your legal staff) can build the workflow automations you need, when you need them, with zero coding or technical skills. You simply use drag and drop tools to build your digital, legal front door, and automate legal tasks such as approval workflows and document generation. You can build interactive forms that collect information and guide business users to appropriate resources and actions. Or the process may automatically populate contracts and other documents. And the best part is, through no-code, this provides an enjoyable building experience with the added flexibility to manage changes and to move fast.  

The best workflow automation platform will allow you to add custom rules, calculations, decision-tree logic, weighted scores, dynamic tables, and more to automated workflows. Combining various elements of workflows through the platform can also help legal teams meet a variety of needs or scenarios in the process, beyond legal service request management.  

With such a flexible user experience, users can easily set up and customize their own intake and triage tools with items such as portals and dashboards to easily track the progress of any legal request that comes through. It’s important to adopt a tool that enables teams to gain the flexibility to quickly respond to constant change, adapt to feedback and meet diverse legal needs on their own terms.

What Makes a Good Intake and Triage Tool?

‍The best intake and triage tools focus on making it easier for the business to engage legal.

Introducing an intake & triage system is not the same as introducing an IT ticketing system. If anything, the experience should strengthen the relationship. Instead of waiting for a response, the business will now instantly get a response with their request assigned and updates of the status provided more frequently. The relationship is in the service, not in getting to the service.

The intake and triage tool that you choose should make it easy and clear for how the business can engage legal and go beyond just intake to implement automated triage. By leveraging decision trees based on business rules and routing logic, requests can be automatically triaged to the most appropriate lawyer or resource based on considerations such as capacity, request complexity, and specialization. Additionally, this includes automatically redirecting non-legal requests to other parts of the business, completely removing the administrative overhead of capturing and allocating requests.  

From this, the business has a clearer and more streamlined experience on how to engage legal via a digital front door. There is also greater visibility over current and past requests made, with faster turnaround times on requests through self-service, or through the appropriate lawyer.

How to Get the Best Price for Legal Service Request Technology

As you evaluate legal automation platform pricing options, you will determine whether your company will pay:  

A cost-benefit analysis will help you find the best value for your money. Check out the free e-book, The General Counsel’s Guide to Legal Automation, for in-depth guidance on how to prove legal automation’s unmistakable value. In the guide, you’ll find multiple ROI formulas that allow you to pinpoint time and cost savings for the legal team and for business users across the enterprise.

What Are The Next Steps to Choosing a LSRM Software?

Choosing the right legal technology can make a significant difference to your legal service delivery, enabling the legal team to reliably deliver service excellence and spend more time being a strategic business partner.  

Building an effective intake and triage solution is thus a first crucial step to building legal functions for scale and becoming more strategic in focus.As a no-code workflow automation platform, Checkbox is used by legal teams to build intake & triage systems that are configured to each organization’s specific needs, all without coding.

Contact our team of legal technology experts to determine your current intake and triage needs, and help you visualize what an optimized service request process can look like for your company.