Creating Legal Workflow: How to Design and Build Efficient Legal Processes

A legal request comes in. You triage it. You reply. You forget. It comes in again.

It’s on Slack. It’s in your inbox. It’s in a forwarded email chain that starts with “FYI” and ends with “can you look at this?”

Someone asks, “What’s the status of that contract?”

You dig. You ping. You scroll. You estimate.

You’re over it. You’re under-resourced. You’re trying your best.

And still, somehow, legal is the bottleneck.

Creating an efficient legal workflow is about shutting out that noise and building a clear, repeatable way for work to flow through legal, from intake to resolution, all in one place.

Let’s walk through how to design and build in-house legal workflows that actually work for your team, business, and sanity.

Step 1: Identify Legal Process Needs

Where does legal work actually come from? That’s the first question to ask when creating legal workflows. Does work show up in a ping on Teams? Is a sales exec dragging you into a deal 24 hours before signing?

Before you automate anything, pause and look for patterns as this is the best way to identify which processes are repeatable and ready to be streamlined, high-value and will drive the most impact, or low-hanging fruit and a good starting point for quick wins. Look for:

• High-volume requests (NDAs, contract reviews, policy approvals)
• Bottlenecks (approvals waiting on someone buried in work)
• Risk areas (manual compliance, inconsistent delegation, gaps in documentation)

Step 2: Map Out Workflow Steps

Once you’ve spotted the pain, it’s time to trace the path.

Creating a legal workflow means pulling that invisible process into the light and asking: Why are we doing it this way? And what would better look like?

Sketch out the steps on a piece of paper, in a notebook, or on your tablet. You’ll start to see where things break down, where approvals start to get lost, and where legal becomes the blocker.

Step 3: Standardize and Automate Tasks

Once you’ve mapped the steps, you need to lock them in. Standardize first. That means:

• Every request comes in the same way (i.e. AI legal chatbot, digital forms).
• Every approval follows the same rules (i.e. conditional logic, agentic AI).
• Every step has an owner/assignee.

Next, automate the flow so legal doesn’t have to chase it. Route routine legal requests straight to self-service, escalate risky terms automatically, trigger reminders at the right moments, and send documents for e-signature without needing legal to actively monitor the process. The system should move the work forward (even when no one’s watching).

Step 4: Integrate with Existing Systems

You can build the cleanest process in the world, but if requests still show up in inboxes, Slack threads, or buried under five layers of a SharePoint folder, people will still default to whatever feels easiest. Therefore, creating an efficient legal process means meeting the business where they already work and pulling it all into one cohesive system. 

For example, if a business submits a request in Slack or sends an email to legal’s shared inbox, your workflow should assess it instantly and route it to the right place. If it’s a contract, send it to Ironclad. If it’s something else, keep it moving through Checkbox. Need to engage outside counsel? Push the request to Brightflag, with approvals already captured and tracked. Once it’s signed, automatically file the final contract in SharePoint or Google Drive so legal doesn’t need to chase down folders or drag files across systems.

Step 5: Measure and Optimize Efficiency

You built the workflow. It’s live. The noise has quieted. Now, you measure.

Building an efficient legal process isn’t a one-and-done project. It’s a system that evolves and data is what tells you where to tweak, where to scale, and where things are quietly breaking.

Start simple by looking at:

• How many requests are coming in?
• What types of work are taking up the most time?
• Where are the delays happening?
• What’s sitting in review for three days longer than it should?

A legal analytics dashboard gives you visibility into how your team is working. You can track turnaround times, highlight wins to leadership, and pinpoint where delays are happening (then make changes to keep things moving). As you learn what legal KPIs and metrics matter most to your team, you can tailor the dashboard with specific charts, filters, and insights that focus on the data that really drive impact.

Want to see what that looks like in practice? Book a demo and we’ll show you how Checkbox makes building efficient legal processes easy and can turn your data into real, actionable insights.