Legal Service Request Management Maturity Guide

Introduction

Today, businesses are requiring increasing amounts and growing types of legal support. This demand however, does not often translate to more resources in the legal department to meet that increase. This is partly due to the expectation that legal should do more with less, and partly because most legal teams lack the data to demonstrate their value to the business and to justify needing additional resources to meet company goals.

As a result, the business either becomes dissatisfied with the turnaround times from legal, or the lawyers end up working in overdrive just to keep up - with This Legal Service Request Management Maturity Guide looks to identify the ideal state of intake and triage automation and define the necessary steps for legal teams to streamline their workflows and service delivery. high risks of burnout. Both of these effects are further aggravated by the opaqueness of legal requests, which sets the business up to misunderstand legal. This further feeds into that dissatisfaction, and putting legal somewhat in the dark when it comes to managing workload and efficient output. As the age old saying goes: ‘What isn’t measured cannot be managed.

This is why many modern legal teams are now looking towards digitizing their intake and triage process as a solution to improving their legal service request management.

But what should it look like and how can we get there?

This Legal Service Request Management Maturity Guide looks to identify the ideal state of intake and triage automation and define the necessary steps for legal teams to streamline their workflows and service delivery.

Importance of Intake & Triage Automation

With intake and legal triage automation, business users can readily access legal services through a centralized ‘digital front door’, allowing the legal team to streamline and effectively manage requests across the business.

Implementing a legal intake and triage automation solution improves turnaround times, as business users can self-serve tasks such as document generation, approvals, and advice. 
 For legal teams, better intake and triage ensures the lawyers are always working on tasks that are high value and best suited to them, whilst unlocking visibility and reporting on the volume, type, and status of requests from intake through to resolution.

The legal intake and triage process should be a straightforward process for both legal teams and business users alike. The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), describes the process as the following:

We also understand the concerns that are often associated with considering such a system, such as the risk of losing the personal touch from legal or the heavy change management lift in changing business user behaviour. In this guide we will address these concerns and define the steps to move up the maturity curve so that you can unlock more value and happiness for your team.

The Service Request Management Maturity Model

Legal intake and triage automation maturity measures the current state or level of an organization’s ability in managing its legal service delivery. The various stages of maturity describe how requests are being managed and indicate the opportunity for service delivery optimization and readiness for automation.

The Stages of Maturity

At Checkbox, we created a maturity model for legal service request management. The following stages and key attributes are:

Stage 0: Cost Centre | Adhoc & Unorganized

Requests are ad hoc, coming from a mix of unstructured channels such as email, Slack/Teams messages, and phone calls.

Where are requests coming from?

Requests are ad hoc, coming from a mix of unstructured channels such as email, Slack/Teams messages, and phone calls.

Stage 1: Basic Service Delivery | Centralized Inbox

Stage 1 is where a centralized channel for legal requests has been introduced for business users to submit their requests. This stage usually emerges when the volume of legal work becomes so high and impossible to manage, that the legal team is pressured to rethink how they can streamline their service intake. Advancement to this stage is also catalyzed by a growing legal team where work is done across multiple lawyers. Unlike Stage 0, engaging with the legal team to raise a request is much less confusing since the requests are all directed to one location. It also allows some data capture since the number of requests can be counted, albeit with very manual effort.

In Stage 1, teams may also feature a resource who manually monitors the inbox, possibly tracking requests on a spreadsheet, and triages the requests as they come in based on the lawyer with the best fit for the request type or capacity.

Where are requests coming from?

Requests are directed to a legal-specific channel e.g. legal@company.com inbox or #legal Slack / Teams channel.

Stage 2: Controlled Service Delivery | Standardized Intake Form

Stage 2 is where legal requests are submitted via a standardized form, enabling legal teams to start seeing some consistency with legal requests. The requests populate a spreadsheet or dashboard that an admin can easily manage. The forms provide a streamlined way to capture information, build in controls and validation, and automates the reporting of metrics including the volume & type of requests.

Where are requests coming from?

Requests are submitted via an intake form (Google Forms, Matter Management System) in a centralized location, where lawyers must still filter requests and manually assign them.

Stage 3: Customer Centric | Automated Intake & Triage

Stage 3 is where legal teams go beyond just intake and implement automated triage. By leveraging decision trees based on business rules and routing logic, requests are automatically triaged to the most appropriate lawyer or resource based on considerations such as capacity, request complexity, and specialization. This includes automatically redirecting non-legal requests to other parts of the business, completely removing the administrative overhead of capturing and allocating requests. Visibility and reporting on requests are automated and extended to also measure the ongoing status of workflows. Having an overview of all requests gives important legal data such as:

• The time it takes to fulfill a legal request
• The status of the workflow of the request
• Who made the request
• Who the workflow is currently with (not necessarily legal)

This data provides the much needed visibility of the throughput and workload across the legal team, helps justify resourcing needs, and enables better reporting to the business.

Stage 4: Strategic Business Partner | Self-service Automation

Stage 4 expands from the previous stage of automated intake and triage to introduce self-serve capability. Legal can now leverage the infrastructure of their intake and triage system to create a ‘digital front door’ that not only organizes and allocates work, but also allows some of that work to get done. Not all requests require legal team time as seen in the figure below. After the deployment of selfservice tools, time is given back to legal, allowing them to shift their attention from low-value to high-impact work. The business also wins with faster turnaround times. This is how a scalable legal department is built, with request management and request resolution both being conducted effectively.

The full picture for data is also unlocked, with not only request data available but also the metadata behind the automated, self-service journeys. This data not only enables better management and transparency to demonstrate the value of legal, but enables legal to come to the strategic table with unique business insights.

Overcoming Objections to Legal Intake & Triage

“We don’t want to become a ticketing system like IT”

As legal, we value our relationships with the business. However, introducing an intake & triage system is not the same as introducing a 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.

“Changing the behavior of how the business engageswith legal is going to be too difficult”

Just like implementing any improvement, change management is inevitable. The key is to highlight the benefits of this change to the business, not legal. Yes, the business may want to just pick up the phone to legal. But the more nonurgent, standardized work that goes through an intake system, the more time legal can actually spend on requests that demand urgency and attention. Positioning, storytelling, and empathy is everything!

“We already have intake in [insert existing technology]”

Intake and even some workflow automation is included functionality for many existing technologies. However, despite the same label, it is limited to only that technology and type of use-cases. A Legal Intake & Triage system is more universal and distinct. It sits in front of your existing technology stack and integrates in. This ensures full coverage of all types of requests coming into the legal department as well as providing the full picture on request data.

“We don’t have the confidence or resourcesto design and implement this”

There are some pretty incredible consultancies in the market that live and breathe workflow design and implementation best practices. You don’t have to go at it alone. Speak with us and we can make some introductions.

Where Are Legal Teams At With Their Maturity?

Recently, Checkbox issued a survey for legal operations professionals from companies including Equitable, Panasonic, Baxter and The New York Times, on their current intake & triage practices.

The findings show that many teams sit at Stage 0 of maturity with 47% handling legal requests from adhoc, unorganized channels. It is worth noting that while only 21% have an automated triage system (Stage 3-4), a total of 79% indicate using various forms of manual triaging (Stage 0-2). The same 21% also report to having better intake, better triage processes, and greater visibility.

The Disconnect between Importance and Urgency

A majority of 68% report high levels of importance in solving their existing intake & triage workflow. Yet such recognition of its importance has not necessarily translated to high levels of urgency - with only 21% taking active measures to improving their current intake & triage workflows. 

The disconnect comes from understanding the available solutions and knowing what a better service request management model looks like. Being able to identify the quick, small wins for improvement and progressing between stages of maturity is key.

Steps to Increase Maturity Levels

It’s clear that streamlining service delivery can enable legal teams to drive impactful change to the business. Yet many organizations struggle to level up their digital maturity – let alone taking the first step towards process improvement. 

Taking the necessary steps to move up in intake and triage automation maturity can be daunting, so we’ve shared some of the necessary actions needed to increase your maturity from your current stage.

Moving Forward

With unstructured legal requests consistently coming from the business, getting caught up in the intake & triage process can lunge legal teams further and further way from the work that really matters.

Building an effective intake & 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.