Why Legal Teams Should Automate Legal Intake and Triage

With businesses now requiring increasing amounts of legal support, in-house lawyers have inadvertently been subjected to managing hefty volumes of legal requests manually. 

However, by automating legal intake and legal triage, business users can readily access legal services through a centralized legal digital front door while also allowing the legal team to streamline and effectively manage legal requests across the business.

Let’s explore the current legal request experience for business users and lawyers, the role of legal intake and triage automation in boosting team efficiency, and the benefits that in-house legal software can bring.

👩‍💻‍ Business Users: Current Legal Request Experience

To understand why businesses require legal intake automation, we must first understand how business users currently engage with legal departments and the associated pain points.

1. Difficulty Finding the Appropriate Legal Resources

There are so many policies and processes that are fragmented across different sources of information. Even when a business user finds the correct information, they are often discouraged from the walls of text that they need to read through. This is why business users find it easier just to reach out to lawyers directly.

2. Use of Inefficient Channels to Make Legal Requests

The most common methods of requesting legal services are manual and unstructured. These include emailing, calling, or catching a lawyer in the hallway or at their desk (see poll results below). Due to the unstructured nature of these channels, there is often unnecessary back and forth which is time consuming for the business user.

3. Experience Long Turnaround Times from Legal

Due to the demanding volume of requests sent through to the legal team, business users are added to the legal service queue and will frequently experience long wait times before their request is responded to, let alone addressed. This creates a bottleneck for the business who is unable to progress their work and deals as they wait for legal teams to complete their request.

‍Results based on poll conducted during Checkbox’s Legal Intake & Triage webinar

👩‍⚖️‍‍ Lawyers: Current Legal Request Experience

The current method of handling legal intake and requests is not only frustrating for the business users, but the legal team too. Here are the key pain points for lawyers when dealing with legal requests from the business.

1. Need to Clarify Requests From The Business

Because business users do not know what information the legal team needs to meet their request, information is often incomplete or inaccurate. This results in additional back and forth correspondence which is inefficient and frustrating for lawyers.

2. Too Much Time Spent on Low Value, Repetitive Tasks

Low value tasks including generic advice or document generation often takes up a large portion of the lawyer’s time and takes them away from more complex, high value tasks that actually require expert decision making and judgement.

3. Constantly Asked For Help on Non-Legal Matters

Because the business does not understand the clear boundaries of responsibility of the legal team, lawyers are often asked to address concerns that are non-legal in nature and outside of their responsibilities.

4. Work Is Unevenly Distributed or Assigned Inefficiently

Particularly for larger legal teams, requests can often go to the wrong lawyer or be assigned in a way that results in one lawyer taking on more work than the others.

5. Difficulty Finding Appropriate Legal Resources

Because key legal information is not well organized and centralized, lawyers also face the same challenge as the business of having to do a lot of manual labour and reading in order to address common legal requests.

How Does Legal Intake and Triage Automation Help?

The legal intake and triage software is a legal tech solution designed to automatically aggregate service requests from business users and accurately route them to lawyers through automated submission triaging that occurs in the back-end.

For example, Checkbox’s simple drag and drop interface allows users with no tech knowledge or background to create customized apps to manage legal operations, including a legal intake and triage tool that is suited for your operations.

Benefits of Implementing Legal Intake & Triage Software

1. Faster Turnaround Time to Deliver Legal Services

As business users can self-serve basic tasks such as standard document generation and advice through automated legal services, there is a dramatic reduction in the turnaround time for legal requests. This also means that high priority and importance tasks are addressed sooner, due to an overall shorter legal requests queue as the legal intake tool filters, distils and forwards only the tasks that exceed the priority and risk threshold set by the legal team.

2. Increased Visibility of Legal Service Requests

Businesses are generally unaware of the volume and type of requests they receive per day. By implementing legal intake management automation, legal teams will be able to capture and report on legal activity that is otherwise not captured in offline conversations, phone calls and email inboxes.

3. Standardized Instruction From The Business

Standardized instruction allows the legal team to better understand the nature of work coming from the business users which enables them to allocate tasks and manage requests more effectively and accurately, reducing the need for back and forth correspondence.

4. Increased Lawyer Efficiency

By implementing a legal intake software, business professionals will be able to take advantage of both passive and active prioritization. In the background, the automated decision-tree powered filtering system will categorise tasks based on their risk threshold and allocate them to lawyers if they require their engagement or simply guide business users to self-serve if the risk is low. If the prioritization criteria or risk thresholds are required to be customized, legal teams have the ability to use drag and drop to build their own logic into the application. 

Legal intake and triage automation tools built on Checkbox can integrate with your existing matter management systems to create, update and close matters automatically as well as provide data on the requests to promote centralization of data. They can also give internal clients access to automated legal advice for routine FAQs and less-complex matters.

Want to learn more? Book a demo with Checkbox today to see how to automate intake and triage with legal intake and self-service software.