How Legal Automation Tools Help Streamline Routine Legal Tasks

The Burden of Routine Work on Legal Teams

For many in-house legal departments, a significant portion of time is spent on repetitive, manual tasks that, while necessary, do not require legal expertise. Activities such as reviewing intake requests submitted via email, generating standard contracts like NDAs, routing approvals, and tracking workloads in spreadsheets are common examples.
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Despite their low complexity, these tasks are rarely optimized, leading to an operational burden that limits the team’s ability to focus on higher-value work such as risk management, strategic counsel, and regulatory compliance.

On top of that, legal professionals often enter the field with the expectation of solving complex problems and driving business outcomes. When their days are filled instead with administrative work that offers little intellectual reward, job satisfaction declines.

Over time, this can lead to burnout driven by the lack of alignment between daily responsibilities and professional fulfillment.

What Are Legal Automation Tools?

Legal automation tools are software solutions designed to streamline and standardize repetitive legal processes. These tools help lawyers handle high volumes of low-risk work efficiently by automating tasks that would otherwise require manual input, communication, or coordination.

Legal automation tools help to intake requests, trigger pre-defined processes, and ensure that information is routed to the right people at the right time. This can include anything from automatically generating a contract based on a submitted form to triaging legal requests according to priority and category.

Unlike traditional legal technology that focuses on document management or e-signatures in isolation, legal automation tools are built to manage end-to-end legal service delivery. 

The goal of these tools is not to replace lawyers, but to remove inefficiencies from their workflows. By automating the routine, legal teams can spend more time on judgment-driven work and strategic initiatives.

Top Routine Tasks You Can Automate with a Legal Automation Tool

Legal teams are increasingly turning to automation to handle high-volume, low-risk work more efficiently. While not every legal task can or should be automated, many routine processes are ideal candidates. Below are some of the most common use cases for legal automation tools:

1. Legal Intake and Triage

Managing legal requests through email or informal channels leads to fragmented workflows, missing information, and inconsistent prioritization. With legal automation software such as Checkbox, business users can submit legal requests through two intelligent channels: structured e-forms and an AI legal chatbot embedded directly within your communication tools (i.e. Slack and Microsoft Teams).

The platform can instantly capture the relevant context, apply business rules, and triage the request to the right legal resource based on factors such as request type, urgency, and team capacity. This integrated intake experience not only eliminates the inefficiency of back-and-forth emails but also provides legal teams with immediate structure and visibility over incoming work.

2. Document Generation

Tasks like creating contracts, NDAs, MSAs, or other standard agreements are often time-consuming when done manually. Legal automation tools can generate these documents instantly using pre-approved templates and conditional logic. This enables business users to self-serve for routine contracts, reducing legal bottlenecks.

3. Approval Routing

Internal approvals for contracts, policies, or legal opinions often involve multiple stakeholders. Legal automation tools can manage these workflows by routing documents for review and approval in the correct order, with reminders and real-time tracking to prevent delays.

4. Matter Creation and Assignment

Legal automation can help legal departments create new matters automatically upon intake, log key details, and assign work to the appropriate legal team member. This ensures consistency and improves visibility into team workload.

5. Compliance and Reporting Tasks

Recurring tasks such as policy attestations, compliance certifications, and data collection for audits can be standardized and scheduled through automation. Legal teams can use tools to ensure accuracy, track completions, and generate reports in real time.

Key Benefits of Using Legal Automation Tools

Implementing legal automation platforms bring measurable improvements across productivity, accuracy, and team performance. Below are some of the key benefits legal departments can expect:

⏱️ Faster Turnaround Times

Automation reduces manual processing and back-and-forth communication, allowing legal teams to respond to requests and complete routine tasks more quickly.

🛡️ Greater Consistency and Reduced Risk

By standardizing workflows and using pre-approved templates, legal teams can ensure more consistent outcomes and reduce the risk of human error.

🪣 Increased Capacity for Strategic Work

Freeing legal professionals from repetitive, low-value tasks creates more bandwidth for complex matters that require legal judgment and strategic input.

👀 Improved Visibility and Reporting

Legal automation tools provide real-time tracking and analytics across matters and workloads. This gives teams better visibility into performance, bottlenecks, and resource allocation.

😄 Higher Internal Satisfaction

When business stakeholders can self-serve for common requests and receive faster support, overall satisfaction with the legal function increases. This helps legal improve legal service delivery and be seen as a true business partner.

How to Choose the Right Legal Automation Tool for Your Team

When evaluating legal automation tools, it’s important to prioritize solutions that are easy to use, flexible, and scalable. Look for platforms that offer both structured intake forms and AI chatbot-driven intake through channels your team already uses (i.e. Slack, email, Microsoft Teams, etc.). This ensures legal requests are captured efficiently, no matter where they come from. 

The tool should also support end-to-end workflows in a single platform (i.e. document generation, approval routing, and matter tracking).

Integration and visibility are also critical. The best legal automation tool should connect seamlessly with your existing systems, such as CLM, CRM, document management, e-signature, and communication tools. 

It should provide real-time reporting and centralized dashboards to give your team a clear view of work in progress, capacity, and performance. As well as, offer live tracking links to business users who have submitted matters. 

Choosing a platform with these capabilities will set your legal team up to operate more efficiently and demonstrate its value across the business.

Don’t let manual work hold your team back. Book a demo today and see how Checkbox is already helping legal teams save time, increase visibility, and reduce burnout across the board.