Harvey, Legora, Checkbox: What's Behind Each Legal Front Door

Imagine every request the business sends to legal being picked up by an AI agent. Within seconds, it gathers the missing details, checks the request against company policy, approves the routine work and passes the rest to the right lawyer, all without anyone leaving Slack.

That's the promise of the Agentic Legal Front Door. For years, legal work has arrived unstructured, scattered across inboxes and chat threads, and dependent on whichever lawyer happened to be asked. A front door replaces that with one structured point of entry that meets the business where it already works, asks the questions a lawyer would and sends each request to the right place.

And when you add AI agents to the mix, the front door stops being just a way in. It becomes the first place legal work actually gets done.

What began as an important unmet market need, initially addressed by a single vendor, has evolved into a growing category, with more providers now entering the space. This month, Harvey and Legora, two of the most well-known names in legal AI today, each launched a front door for legal teams, stepping into territory Checkbox has occupied for years. If you put them side by side, it’s hard to differentiate between the three products as each lives in business communication tools, each uses AI to clarify requests, and each has routing capabilities.

Which raises a more interesting question.

If every agentic legal front door now looks the same, what actually sets them apart?

The answer lies in what happens after a request walks through the door. Where does the work go? Who keeps the record of what happened to it? And whose rules decide what AI is allowed to do along the way?

With AI agents moving into legal work, what would have sounded like a stretch a few years ago, an agent that opens a request, drafts the response, approves the routine work and hands the rest to a lawyer, doesn't feel all that far off today. The more work agents take on, the more it matters where that work lands, who is on the record for it, and who sets the limits.

Broadly speaking, vendors have answered those questions in one of two ways:

1. Either the front door leads into a single vendor's platform, where the work, the record and the rules sit alongside that vendor's AI, or
2. The front door leads into a layer the legal team owns, directing each request to the most suitable lawyer or tool, while maintaining a consistent AI-powered workflow as those tools evolve.

While Harvey, Legora and Checkbox all offer an agentic legal front door, each has approached the questions differently. So, in this guide, we’ll explain what a legal front door is, what’s behind each, and what those differences mean for an in-house legal team.

What Is An Agentic Legal Front Door?

An agentic legal front door is a tool that provides in-house legal teams a single, structured way to receive and triage legal requests from the business, with AI agents that don't just collect requests but clarify them, route them, and act on them.

An agentic legal front door (LFD) is a single, structured way that enables the business to more effectively bring work to legal, with AI agents doing the admin work a lawyer would otherwise do by hand, and in some cases, the work itself. It replaces the usual scramble of context-free Slack messages, forwarded contracts, and requests mentioned in passing, which leave lawyers chasing details before the real work can start.

In practice, it meets the business in their everyday tools such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, email or a CRM like Salesforce, so every request starts as a conversation rather than a tedious form. The legal AI agent asks the follow-up questions a lawyer would, such as “what’s the contract value?” or “who are the counterparties?”, then sorts each request by type, urgency and risk. Based on that information, the LFD will consult legal’s internal playbooks and rules, and route the request to the appropriate lawyer, team, workflow or tool.

For routine work, it goes a step further, answering a routine policy question, generating a standard NDA or starting an approval process without a lawyer stepping in. With an agentic front door at the entry way to legal, every action, whether taken by a lawyer or an agent, is logged automatically. To grasp the difference… a legal request that might have once taken a day of back-and-forth just to scope can now be clarified, routed and, where the rules allow, resolved in the time it takes to send a Slack message. However, it’s important to note that the more a legal agent does, the more it matters whose rules it's following. That means, more AI, not less control.

Why Is It Hard to Tell Agentic Legal Front Doors Apart?

Most agentic legal front doors now promise the same features, so the difference that matters is where each one leads and who governs the work.

If you compare product pages, launch announcements, and feature lists for Agentic Legal Front Doors offered by Checkbox, Harvey, and Legora, you’ll see that they read very similarly. Legal intake from various channels, AI that clarifies requests, intelligent routing, and audit trails. For legal teams trying to choose between these three, that makes comparison hard. When the features match, the demos start to blur together.

What is far less talked about in the market yet arguably more important is where the front door actually leads, and who governs the work once a request is through it. Harvey's and Legora's front doors lead into their own building, where the work, the record and the rules sit alongside each vendor's AI. Checkbox's legal front door leads into your house: a layer the legal team owns, where AI does the work and your rules decide what it's allowed to do. It governs the work, routing each request to the right lawyer or tool by legal's rules.

You won’t usually see that difference in a feature list, but it's important to be aware of as it determines whether legal can actually stay in control over time. Later in this blog, we’ll cover what to ask vendors about their legal front door so you can choose the right one for your organization.

How Are Harvey, Legora, and Checkbox Different?

The three legal front doors lead to different places because each company started from a different foundation. Harvey and Legora added their front doors to broader legal AI platforms, so users enter those platforms. Checkbox began with legal intake and has spent years building the house behind it.

	Checkbox	Harvey	Legora
Started as	Legal Intake Platform (2019)	Generative AI Assistant for Law Firms (2022)	AI Workspace for Lawyers (2023)
Legal front door launched	2023	2026	2026
Designed around	Business users and legal ops, with legal intake, AI-powered triage, and self-service as the foundation	Lawyers, with legal research and document review as the focus	Lawyers, with legal research, review, and contract drafting as the main objective
What’s behind the front door	Matter management, workflows, AI agent, and integrated downstream tools	Harvey’s agents, Contract Intelligence, lawyer queues, and shared spaces	The Legora Agent and Skills

Checkbox

Checkbox has been working on legal intake since 2019 and launched its agentic legal front door in 2023. Since then, it has worked alongside leading in-house legal teams and strategic partners to build out the house behind the front door: matter management, so every request becomes a matter with its routing, approvals and status in one place, and workflows that handle repeatable work the same way every time. AI clarifies requests and takes action across the platform, while legal’s rules and playbooks decide what it’s allowed to do.

Harvey

Harvey was founded in 2022 and made its name as a generative AI assistant for law firms, helping lawyers with research, drafting and document review. It has since grown into a broad legal AI platform, and in October 2026 it announced Harvey Intake, a front door for in-house teams that routes requests into Harvey's agents, Contract Intelligence, lawyer queues and Shared Spaces for outside counsel.

Legora

Legora launched in 2023 as an AI-powered workspace for lawyers, used by law firms and enterprise legal departments for research, review and drafting. It announced Legora Intake the same day as Harvey, in October 2026. Intake hands each request to the Legora Agent, which prepares the work using the team's Skills and playbooks. It’s currently available only in Slack. Microsoft Teams, email, and MCP integrations are planned, so it supports fewer channels and integrations than some competitors.

Who Owns the Legal Front Door?

Ideally, the legal team owns the legal front door. In practice, owning an agentic legal front door means legal ops can shape three things directly: the questions it asks, the workflows behind it, and the rules it applies, from what can be resolved on the spot to what always needs a lawyer.

This matters because businesses are constantly evolving, launching new products, entering new markets, and changing internal policies. Each change should show up in how legal takes in work. If adding a single intake question or adjusting an approval chain means raising a ticket with a vendor or joining IT's queue, the front door slowly drifts out of step with the business it serves. Stack those delays up over a quarter, and people start doing what they always do when a system gets in the way… they work around it. The Slack DMs return and the forwarded emails creep back in.

Harvey, Legora, and Checkbox divide ownership of their legal front doors differently. Harvey lets the legal team define its own rules, request types, and default owners, while Legora takes a more hands-on approach, with Legal Engineers who learn how a team works and then configure intake to match. Checkbox is different in that it gives legal ops a no-code builder, so the team can create and change the front door itself without having to raise a ticket or wait for developers.

Which suits a team depends largely on how often it expects to change and scale. Teams that value a guided setup may lean toward a configured approach. Teams that expect the business to keep moving under their feet may find more value in being able to make updates without waiting on anyone else, and easily integrating with preferred downstream tools.

What Sits Behind the Legal Front Door?

Behind every legal front door is a structure where legal requests are managed, tracked, and recorded once they're through the door. In a strong setup, it's made up of three parts: a system of record that holds each request's routing, approvals, status, and history in one place; AI agents that pick up requests, move them forward, and keep people in the loop; and workflows that handle each request type in a consistent manner.

This is important because a legal front door only governs the way in. Without a structure behind it, work scatters the moment it's through. And when a request stalls, legal takes the blame for a delay it didn't cause, and there's no history to show otherwise.

Is It a Vendor’s Building or Your Own House?

On the surface, Harvey, Legora, and Checkbox have all built a similar downstream structure to their legal front doors. Each is capable of tracking requests, assigning owners, and maintaining audit trails. However, Harvey routes contract work into its own Contract Intelligence, and Legora initiates work through its own Skills. That's a natural fit for teams already running on those platforms, but it means the front door leads into the vendor's building.

Checkbox differs in that its AI legal front door leads into your legal team's own house. It routes each request to the right lawyer or tool, applies legal's own rules to everything that comes through the front door, and keeps the history in the matter, with AI agent actions recorded alongside human ones. Checkbox doesn't govern the other tools a team uses. Work done elsewhere simply comes back into the matter. After all, it's the legal team's process, not the vendor's, so Checkbox’s agentic legal front door ensures legal stays in command at all times.

Five Questions to Ask of Any Legal Front Door

Whether you're looking to invest in your first legal front door or rethinking the one already in place, here are five questions to guide you when exploring different options:

1. Are its workflows built on your standards, or on the product's defaults?
   The best legal front door is built around your company's policies and your team's standards. AI should clarify the request, while your rules decide where it goes, who approves it, and what escalates.
2. Do your rules and your record stay with you, whichever tool does the work?
   Most legal teams will use several tools over the next few years. Your legal front door should route each request to the right lawyer or tool, and your policies shouldn't have to change every time your tools do.
3. Does it cover every type of request, not just contracts?
   Employment, privacy, marketing, compliance, conflicts of interest, and gifts and entertainment requests all need an owner, a status, and a place in the GC's reporting.
4. Can legal ops change it without raising a ticket?
   If updating a legal intake question or an approval chain means waiting on a vendor or IT, the front door will slowly drift out of sync with the business it serves.
5. Can you show who approved what, and why, from one record?
   When the board asks, the answer should be your own rule, with the legal matter itself holding the history of every action, whether a person or an AI agent took it.

Key Takeaways

An agentic legal front door gives in-house legal teams a single, structured way to receive requests from the business, with AI agents that clarify, route, and act on them. With Harvey and Legora launching front doors of their own in October 2026, joining Checkbox, which has worked on legal intake since 2019 and launched the agentic legal front door in 2023, the feature lists now read remarkably alike. Each offers legal intake in everyday tools, AI that clarifies requests, intelligent routing, and audit trails.

The real differences sit behind the door. Harvey and Legora added their front doors to broader legal AI platforms, so requests flow into each vendor's own building, whether that's Harvey's Contract Intelligence or Legora's Skills. That can be a natural fit for teams already running on those platforms. Checkbox started with legal intake and built, and continuously improves, the house behind it: matter management, workflows, and an AI agent that run on legal's own rules. Legal ops can change it without code, each request is routed to the right lawyer or downstream tool, and every action, whether taken by a person or an agent, is recorded and attached to the matter's record. Your front door. Your house. Your rules.

For the first time, in-house legal teams have a genuine choice of agentic legal front doors, built by vendors that started in very different places. It's clear that legal intake alone is no longer the differentiator, and the question for GCs and CLOs should shift from "which front door has the best AI?" toward "where does our legal work go once it's through the door, and whose rules govern it when it gets there?"

Want to learn more? Schedule a call with one of our technology consultants today to see how in-house teams are building legal front doors of their own.