Real-World Examples of Legal Automation in Practice

Legal automation is the process of using technology to streamline repetitive tasks, reduce manual effort, and create more visibility across the legal function. It is often simple, targeted, and incredibly effective. 

However, legal automation can be hard to imagine if you haven’t used it before. You might wonder, what does it actually look like in a legal team’s day-to-day work?

To help put it into perspective, we’ve pulled together some real-world examples of legal automation in practice. From intake and triage, to contract approvals and matter management, here’s how legal teams are putting automation to work.

What Legal Automation Looks Like in Practice

Legal automation is about turning repeatable, manual processes into streamlined, tech-enabled workflows. Instead of relying on shared inboxes, spreadsheets, or manual handoffs, legal teams use automation to standardize how work comes in, how it’s handled, and how it’s tracked.

Common characteristics of legal automation in practice include:

• Standardized legal intake that ensures requests come in with the right context and urgency.
• Self-serve tools that allow the business to handle low-risk matters without legal stepping in.
• Automated routing and approvals to eliminate manual triage and bottlenecks.
• Dashboards and reporting that give leadership real-time visibility into legal’s workload and performance.

Common Areas Where Legal Teams Use Automation

While legal automation can be applied in many different ways, some areas consistently deliver the biggest impact (especially for in-house legal teams managing high volumes of recurring work with limited resources).

Here are the most common areas where legal teams are using automation to drive efficiency and scale:

📥 Legal Intake and Triage

Managing incoming legal requests is often chaotic and spread across emails, chats, and spreadsheets. Automation helps centralize intake, standardize request information, and route matters to the right people based on type, urgency, or workload.

📑 Contract Generation and Approvals

Drafting and approving routine documents (like NDAs or sales agreements) can eat up hours of legal’s time. With automation, business users can generate contracts and agreements themselves using pre-approved templates, while legal retains control through built-in approval workflows.

💻 Matter and Case Management

Tracking matters manually leads to poor visibility and missed deadlines. Automated matter management brings everything into one place, making it easier to monitor progress, assign tasks, and report on legal team performance.

🫡 Self-Service for the Business

Repetitive legal requests like FAQs, policy clarifications, or document access, can often be handled through automated self-service tools and AI chatbots. This empowers business teams to get answers quickly without waiting on legal.

🛡️ Compliance and Regulatory Workflows

Keeping up with internal policies, audits, and regulatory reporting is time-consuming. Automation can schedule reminders, track attestations, and manage documentation across teams, reducing risk and manual effort.

Example 1: Automating Legal Intake and Triage

Problem

Legal requests often come in through scattered channels such as email, Slack, conversations, and more. This makes it hard to prioritize, track, or even make sure all required details of the matter are collected up front. Legal teams are left juggling ad hoc requests with little visibility into who’s handling what or how urgent each task really is.

Capability

With automation, legal teams can centralize intake and triage into a single, streamlined process. Requesters submit matters through a standardized form or guided conversation, and the system automatically creates a matter and routes it accordingly based on predefined logic (i.e. issue type, region, or urgency).

Feature

Legal automation tools like Checkbox enable this through automated intake forms and AI legal chatbots that collect key details upfront and automatically assign matters to the appropriate legal team member. Priority tagging, SLAs, and centralized dashboards give legal teams full visibility and control.

Outcome

Instead of wasting time sorting through inboxes or communicating back-and-forth for missing information, legal can operate from a single source of truth, ultimately responding faster, managing workloads more effectively, and ensuring no request goes unanswered.

Example 2: Automating Contract Generation and Approvals

Problem

Routine contracts like NDAs, MSAs, or DPAs, often clog legal’s pipeline. Traditionally, business teams rely on legal for every draft and approval, creating unnecessary delays and pulling legal away from higher-value work. The process is typically manual, inconsistent, and slow.

Capability

With automation, legal can empower the business to self-serve on low-risk contracts while maintaining oversight and compliance. Automated workflows generate contracts using pre-approved templates, apply conditional logic for variations, and route documents for approval without back-and-forth emails.

Feature

Checkbox’s legal workflow automation features allow legal teams to easily build self-serve contract generation portals that walk users through a simple form, auto-generate contracts based on their responses, and send them for approval or signature. Legal maintains full control over the rules, templates, and thresholds for escalation.

Outcome

Contracts get turned around faster, legal workload decreases, and risk is reduced through consistent use of compliant templates. The business gets what it needs without waiting days for legal to weigh in on routine paperwork.

Example 3: Automating Matter and Case Management

Problem

When legal work is tracked across spreadsheets, emails, or disconnected tools, it’s nearly impossible to get a clear picture of what’s in progress, who’s responsible, or how much capacity the team has. This lack of visibility makes it hard to prioritize work, pinpoint risks, report on outcomes, or demonstrate legal’s impact to the business.

Capability

Automating matter and case management brings all legal work into a centralized platform where it can be organized, tracked, and reported on in real time. Tasks, deadlines, documents, and status updates are all tied to individual matters, creating a complete and up-to-date record of legal activity.

Feature

Matter management software with built-in legal automation tools like Checkbox provide configurable performance dashboards, task tracking, and collaboration features. Teams can assign work, set timelines, attach relevant documentation, and generate reports all in one place.

Outcome

Legal leaders gain real-time visibility into workloads, can allocate resources more effectively, and have data readily available to report on performance. Legal teams reduce time spent chasing updates and can focus more on strategic work instead of administrative overhead.

How Checkbox Enables These Legal Automation Use Cases

Checkbox makes legal automation practical and accessible for in-house teams by eliminating the need for reliance on IT and coding. 

Whether it’s streamlining intake and triage, automating contract generation, or centralizing matter management, Checkbox brings structure and efficiency to legal work that’s often fragmented and manual.

With smart intake forms, AI legal assistants, automated workflows, and real-time dashboards, Checkbox offers a single source of truth for all legal matters. Legal teams get full visibility, the business gets faster service, and leaders gain the data they need to scale legal’s impact and demonstrate value across the organization.

Ready to see what legal automation could look like for your team? Book a demo with Checkbox today.