Before You Add AI, Fix Intake: How Legal Can Futureproof Its Operating Model

Last week, I had the chance to speak at Legal Innovators NYC, and like most good conferences, it gave me a chance to step back, reflect, and have some real conversations with legal teams facing the same uphill climb.

One common theme across what I’ve been hearing from a lot of legal teams is that the pace of business is accelerating, legal requests are growing, and legal is expected to keep up without more resources, time, or tools.  

So, in this post, I’m going to be breaking down some of the key takeaways from my session and why I believe futureproofing legal doesn’t start with AI. It starts with intake.

We Can’t Scale Legal the Old Way

Since legal is a demand-driven function, you don’t get to choose when or how work shows up. Whether it’s a contract to review, a campaign to sign off, or a policy that needs rewriting, when the business moves, legal moves with it. That’s the job. But the problem with that is when the business scales, the volume of legal work explodes and resources rarely grow to match it.

It not only results in bottlenecks and increased risk, but also lawyer burnout. Ultimately, you get a business that feels like legal is slowing them down, and a legal team that’s just trying to keep up.

So, naturally, legal starts looking for leverage. Some teams invest in contract lifecycle management tools (CLMs), others jump on the AI hype train. And while those tools have their place, I’d argue this: If you haven’t fixed how legal work comes in, none of those tools will actually help.

Futureproofing doesn’t start with AI. It starts with legal intake.

Why CLMs and AI Alone Won’t Save You

A CLM can help if your only problem is contracts. But that’s not the reality for most legal teams.

When the legal workload starts to feel unmanageable, the first instinct is usually to throw tech at it. But investing in tools like CLMs and standalone AI only work if your problem is narrowly scoped or if your house is already in order.

And all legal teams I speak with aren’t struggling only with contracts. They’re dealing with all sorts of matters ranging from marketing reviews, employment issues, and compliance requests to intellectual property (IP) and privacy policies.

A CLM might help manage the contract lifecycle, but it won’t triage a compliance query. It won’t help a product manager figure out if they need legal review. And AI, whilst powerful, can’t fix disorganized processes. Essentially, you can’t automate what you haven’t mapped and you can’t layer AI on top of chaos.

So, before you invest in the next big legal tech solution, ask yourself:

How are requests reaching legal right now, and what happens to them once they do?

The Real Bottleneck? Intake.

You can’t scale legal without first fixing how work gets in.

Legal requests show up in email threads, Slack messages, Teams chats, hallway conversations, and shared drives. By the time a lawyer picks it up, there’s missing context, urgency pressure, or worse… it’s already late.

There’s no consistent triage, visibility into who’s working on what, or data to help you forecast/report on value. Just a lot of juggling, context switching, and trying not to drop the ball.

When intake is broken:

• High-value work gets buried under low-value noise,

• Work goes to the wrong people,

• Requests slip through the cracks, and

• Lawyers spend their day reacting instead of strategizing.

So, while everyone’s busy chasing automation and AI, the smartest legal teams are focusing on the first step: cleaning up the legal front door. Because until you fix that, everything downstream is just chaos with better branding.

Why the Legal Front Door Has Been Broken

The idea of a “legal front door” isn’t new. Tons of teams have tried to implement them, only to have the business ignore them and lawyers quietly work around them.

Why? Because most intake systems are designed like IT ticketing tools. And legal is not IT.

Traditionally, legal has built a profession on relationships. On being approachable, context-rich, and collaborative. So, when someone asks you, “Hey, can you take a quick look at this?” they’re not expecting to be told: Sure, please go fill out a 12-field form on an internal portal you forgot existed.

And honestly, most legal teams don’t want to fill out forms either. You don’t want another admin-heavy system that turns us into project managers or data entry clerks.

Here’s what happens with the wrong front door:

• The business doesn’t use it.

• Legal doesn’t update it.

• Leadership doesn’t trust the data.

So, if you’re going to make intake work, you need to shift the mindset: Good tech should meet people where they already are (and get out of the way).

A Better Way: Invisible Intake, Intelligent Routing

Today, intake doesn’t need to be a form. It can be a conversation, right where the work starts.

Technology has finally caught up to what legal teams actually need. Instead of “modern intake” meaning dragging the business into some clunky portal, it means letting them keep working in the tools they already use (email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Salesforce, etc.) and quietly capturing and triaging that work behind the scenes.

The best legal intake software solutions today can:

• Monitor various channels for legal requests.

• Triage requests automatically using AI or logic blocks to determine what it is, how urgent it is, and where it should go.

• Route self-service requests (like the need to generate a routine NDA) to automation workflows.

• Escalate complex matters directly to the right lawyer, with all the context pre-filled.

• Create a matter record automatically, so lawyers don’t have to update anything manually.

No change management or friction. Just an intake layer that feels invisible to the business and invaluable to legal.

And the best part is, you don’t need a developer to build it. In-house legal software like Checkbox offer no-code solutions which allow you to drag, drop, and deploy workflows.  

Example: Align Technology

Align Technology’s legal team used Checkbox to design an automated intake and triage process for incoming legal requests, starting with high-volume NDAs. Business users now submit requests through a centralized front door, where intake automation routes matters appropriately. Most NDAs are generated through self-service, cutting turnaround from five days to just one hour and reducing legal touchpoints by 96%.

No IT. No code. Just legal ops taking control of their operating model. With a structured intake process in place, the team now has visibility, prioritization, and a scalable foundation to expand automation into other workflows.

This is what futureproofing looks like:

• Intake that meets the business where they are

• Automation that scales legal’s impact

• Tools that legal can build and manage themselves

Futureproofing Legal Starts Here

If you want to scale legal, start by fixing how work flows in.

AI is exciting and CLMs have their place, but if your team is still drowning in messy email requests and can’t track what’s coming in, all the AI in the world won’t help.

Before you automate anything, ask yourself:

• Can we see what’s coming into legal in one place?

• Can we route and triage that work efficiently?

• Are we focused on the highest-value requests or just reacting to whatever hits first?

If the answer is no, your first step isn’t AI. It’s intake.

Because once intake is working, you can:

• Automate low-value work confidently,

• Layer in AI where it actually helps,

• Show leadership the data that proves legal’s value, and

• Finally operate like the strategic, business-critical function legal was always meant to be.

This isn’t about chasing trends. It’s about building a resilient, scalable legal engine that won’t break under pressure. And it starts with the front door.

Curious what this looks like in action? Book a demo today and we’ll show you how leading teams are futureproofing their operating models in preparation for 2026 without reliance on IT or forms fatigue.