Designing an AI-Ready Legal Front Door: From Intake to Decision

If your team spends the first 10 minutes of every request just figuring out what it is, you’re not alone. Most in-house legal work still arrives as unstructured pings—“Quick NDA?” “Can you look at this clause?”—with no deal value, deadline, or data. The result: context-hunting, inconsistent responses, and a backlog that grows faster than headcount.

Why Intake and Triage Must Be Systematic

Ad hoc intake is not a workflow; it’s entropy. Without a single front door, legal burns cycles on reconstruction—who’s the requester, what’s the contract type, which template, what’s the risk posture? A standardized intake and triage layer fixes this by enforcing:

- Required context up front (counterparty, value, jurisdiction, deadline)

- Immediate classification by request type (NDA, DPA, SOW, policy query)

- Routing to the right path (self-serve, fast-track, or counsel review)

This is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s the baseline for modern legal teams that need predictable cycle times and audit-ready decisions. The shift is simple but decisive: stop treating intake as an inbox and start treating it as an operating function with rules, data, and measurable outcomes.

From Static Playbooks to Living, AI-Powered Decisions

Playbooks and positions are only as useful as their application. In a modern stack, they shouldn’t sit in PDFs; they should drive decisions. An AI-ready front door turns institutional knowledge into action:

- Encode positions as structured rules (fallback clauses, approval thresholds, redlines that are auto-acceptable vs. escalate)

- Attach those rules to request types, so intake automatically selects the right workflow

- Use AI agents to apply positions to documents, ask for missing context, and surface exceptions

- Capture every decision, clause change, and approval for reuse and reporting

This is Sandstone’s core thesis: layered data and modular workflows that compound. Every intake strengthens the next, because the system learns which playbook applied, where it broke, and how it resolved. The knowledge layer becomes dynamic—accessible in the moment of work and auditable after.

A Workflow You Can Automate Tomorrow: Vendor NDA to Signature

Ground the front door in a concrete task and expand. Start with NDAs; they’re high-volume, pattern-heavy, and politically visible.

1) Intake: Requester submits a short form or Slack command. Required fields include counterparty, jurisdiction, term, and urgency. Attach the counterparty paper if they insist on their template.

2) Triage: Sandstone classifies NDA type (mutual vs. one-way), chooses the correct template, and checks for procurement or privacy flags based on deal value.

3) Draft or Review: An AI agent applies your positions. If on your paper, it drafts with preapproved terms. If on theirs, it redlines standard deviations (e.g., unilateral confidentiality, perpetual term) and marks items as auto-accept, fallback, or escalate.

4) Decisioning: Items exceeding thresholds—like indefinite survival or venue outside allowed jurisdictions—trigger an approval route to the right owner (privacy, security, GC). Everything else proceeds.

5) Execution: The agent packages clean versions to e-sign, tracks counterparty status, and nudges stakeholders if SLAs slip.

6) Logging: All decisions, clause variants, and approvals are stored as structured data. Next time, similar requests fast-track; exceptions update the playbook with crafted precision.

Result: NDAs move from chaotic email threads to a repeatable path with predictable cycle times—and your team’s judgment is reserved for truly novel risk.

Measure What Matters: Four KPIs for the Front Door

Without measurement, intake is just another portal. Make it a performance system with metrics legal leaders can defend:

- Time to Triage: Minutes from request to classification. Target single-digit minutes via forms, templates, and agents.

- First-Touch Resolution Rate: Share of requests resolved without human intervention. Start with NDAs and policy questions; expand as confidence grows.

- Cycle Time by Type: Median time from intake to signature or answer. Report by NDA, DPA, SOW, marketing review to pinpoint bottlenecks.

- Exception Rate and Rework: Percent of matters routed to escalation and percentage sent back for missing info. Use these to refine forms and playbooks.

These metrics power resourcing decisions, roadmap prioritization, and credibility with the business. They also prove the compounding value of your knowledge layer over time.

Actionable Next Step: Ship a Minimum Viable Front Door

You don’t need a six-month program. Stand up an MVP in two weeks:

- Inventory the top five request types by volume

- Define acceptance criteria for each (required fields, SLAs, auto-approve thresholds)

- Encode one playbook (NDA) into positions and fallbacks

- Launch a structured intake form and Slack command

- Connect e-sign and set auto-routing for approvals

- Instrument the four KPIs and review weekly

On Sandstone, this looks like creating a request type, attaching your positions as rules, and enabling an agent to draft, redline, and route. Start small, ship fast, then layer on DPAs, SOWs, and policy queries.

Build on Bedrock

Legal shouldn’t be a bottleneck; it should be the connective tissue of the business. An AI-ready legal front door makes that real—turning every intake into a triage decision, every decision into data, and every piece of data into faster, safer outcomes. With Sandstone’s layered knowledge and modular workflows, each matter strengthens the next. That’s how legal moves from reactive support to a proactive force for speed, alignment, and trust—on a foundation built to last.