Automating Matter Intake: Triage and Routing as the New "Control Tower"

Automating Matter Intake: Triage and Routing as the New "Control Tower"

Across Sandstone deployments, 25–40% of legal cycle time is lost before work even begins—in intake, triage, and routing. Requests seep in from email, Slack, and procurement portals with missing context and unclear owners. A control tower approach fixes this, turning intake into a predictable system that accelerates outcomes instead of slowing them down.

A control tower is not a portal. It’s a living operating layer that standardizes what comes in, classifies it, routes it with SLAs, and learns from every decision. Built well, it becomes the connective tissue between business and law.

Define the Control Tower

In-house, “intake” is the capture of requests; “triage” is classifying risk, urgency, and type; “routing” assigns the right path—self-serve, playbooked response, or expert review. The control tower binds these steps with governance and data.

In Sandstone, this looks like layered precision: structured request forms (or AI-normalized emails/Slack), policy-backed triage rules, and modular workflows that fit your org chart, matter types, and approval paths.

Why Now: Volume, Velocity, Scrutiny

Workflows are fragmented (sales tools, vendor portals, chat) while legal is judged on cycle time and consistency. CFOs demand measurable throughput; business teams want self-serve; risk teams need audit trails. Modern AI finally makes normalization and classification reliable at the edge—right where requests originate.

The risk of waiting is real: inconsistent advice, shadow processes, and queues you can’t see or defend. The payoff for acting is faster deals, fewer dropped balls, and fewer escalations.

Benefits That Land With the Business

- Faster time-to-yes: Requests hit the right path the first time.

- Higher deflection to self-serve: Templates and positions answer repeatable asks without attorney time.

- Clear SLAs and expectations: Stakeholders know when and how work will be handled.

- Better allocation: Workload balances by complexity, specialty, and capacity.

- Measurable risk control: Every decision leaves a trail; governance becomes automatic.

Build It in Layers

- Map intake sources: Email aliases, Slack channels, sales/procurement tools, web forms. Decide what to standardize and what to normalize with AI.

- Standardize request forms: Capture essentials (counterparty, value, dates, data types, urgency) with conditional fields to keep it light.

- Define triage taxonomy: Matter types, risk tiers, required approvers. Keep it simple enough to maintain, rich enough to route.

- Set routing rules: Self-serve for NDA/BAU templates, playbooked review for moderate risk, expert escalation for high risk.

- Establish SLAs: Differentiate by risk and business criticality; publish them visibly.

- Instrument dashboards: Queue health, cycle time, SLA adherence, deflection, backlog age.

With Sandstone, AI agents extract metadata from unstructured requests, auto-classify by policy, propose the right template, and route to the right lane. Every interaction enriches your knowledge layer so the system gets sharper over time.

Tools and Enablers That Matter

- Integrations where work happens: Email, Slack/Teams, CRM, CLM, procurement, ticketing.

- AI normalization and classification: Turn messy asks into structured, triage-ready data.

- Template library + positions: Approved clauses, negotiation stances, and playbooks embedded in flow.

- SLA engine and capacity-aware routing: Assign by skills and load, not just name.

- Audit-first records: Immutable trails of decisions, versions, and approvals.

Natural integration is key. The system should fit how your team works today and layer in control without forcing behavior change.

Pitfalls to Avoid

- Overcollecting data: Only ask for fields you truly use in routing or reporting.

- One giant queue: Segment by type and risk, or you’ll throttle throughput.

- Undefined “urgent”: Create explicit criteria and fast lanes with clear trade-offs.

- Shadow escalations: Close the loop by routing chat/email back into the system.

- No change management: Train requesters with microcopy and consistent patterns.

Each has a simple remedy: prune fields quarterly, create lanes, codify urgency, integrate your comms, and publish a one-page “How to Work With Legal.”

Metrics That Prove It Works

- Intake-to-assignment time

- Total cycle time by matter type and risk

- SLA adherence and breach rate

- Deflection rate to self-serve and playbooks

- Reopen/return-to-sender rate (quality proxy)

- Requester satisfaction (CSAT) and internal NPS

Case Sketch: From Chaos to Control

Before: 70% of requests arrive via email with no context. Cycle times average 12 days. NDAs consume attorney hours, and leadership has no queue visibility.

After: A Sandstone control tower normalizes email/Slack intake, classifies by policy, and routes NDAs to self-serve with guardrails. Moderate-risk reviews flow to a specialist pool with 3-day SLAs; high-risk escalations trigger approver workflows. Cycle time drops to 6 days, 55% of matters deflect to self-serve, and SLA adherence hits 92%.

Your Next Step

Run a two-hour mapping workshop. Identify your top five request types, define “urgent,” create one self-serve template lane, and set two SLAs. Pilot for 30 days with a single business unit and instrument the metrics above.

When intake, triage, and routing operate as a control tower, legal stops being a bottleneck and becomes the operating system for speed and trust. That’s the promise of Sandstone: strength through layers, crafted precision, and natural integration that turns every request into compounding knowledge.

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