From Intake Chaos to Clarity: How AI Triage Scales Legal Ops

Most in-house legal teams quietly lose a day a week to intake noise. Between email, Slack, and tickets, teams report spending up to a third of their week just parsing, routing, and chasing missing context—before the real work begins. That drag isn’t inevitable. With AI-led triage, you can convert chaotic requests into structured, assignable work in minutes, not hours.

The Hidden Cost of Unstructured Intake

Unstructured intake is more than an annoyance; it’s a throughput killer. Requests arrive without the facts needed to decide jurisdiction, template, approval path, or risk posture. Matters stall, SLAs slip, and business stakeholders lose confidence.

Three compounding problems show up consistently:

- Context gaps: Missing deal size, counterparty entity, or renewal date forces back-and-forth.

- Misrouting: Work lands with the wrong specialist, inflating cycle time.

- Knowledge loss: Decisions live in inboxes, so every similar question starts from zero.

When intake is structured, everything downstream accelerates: triage, assignment, drafting, approvals, and reporting. The fastest path to that structure today is AI—embedded where requests already originate.

What AI Triage Looks Like in Practice

On Sandstone, AI agents sit at the front door of legal. They don’t replace judgment; they prepare it. A typical flow looks like this:

1) Detect intent: The agent classifies the request (e.g., NDA, vendor review, marketing claim, employment query) and confidence-scores the prediction.

2) Gather essentials: It asks just-in-time questions to fill gaps—counterparty name, data flows, spend, processing activities, deadlines—using dynamic forms tuned to the request type.

3) Apply positions: It matches the request to your approved playbooks and fallback positions, surfacing the right template, clause guidance, and escalation thresholds.

4) Route with precision: It assigns the matter based on expertise, region, capacity, and SLA, and spins up the correct workflow (approvals, privacy, security, finance) automatically.

5) Draft and deflect: For low-risk items, it drafts first-pass documents or responses and, when possible, routes to self-serve with the right guardrails.

Every step writes back to your knowledge layer. Intake becomes a training loop: each decision strengthens the next one.

Know Your Numbers: The KPIs That Matter

If you can’t see it, you can’t scale it. AI intake isn’t just faster—it’s measurable.

Track these baseline and ongoing metrics:

- Time-to-first-response: From request received to confirmed triage. Target minutes, not hours.

- Cycle time by request type: Contract reviews, NDAs, data processing addenda—each should have a predictable range.

- Deflection to self-serve: Percentage resolved via approved templates, FAQs, or guided forms without attorney time.

- Rework rate: How often a request bounces due to missing info or misrouting.

- Knowledge reuse: Frequency that a prior position, clause, or playbook is applied without reinvention.

With Sandstone, these metrics are native—no spreadsheet archaeology required.

Design for Strength Through Layers

Effective legal ops is layered, not linear. You don’t need a monolith on day one; you need a foundation that compounds.

Think in three layers:

- Data: Normalize the facts you collect at intake (entities, regions, deal sizes, data types). This powers routing and reporting.

- Decisions: Encode positions and thresholds (what’s acceptable, what escalates, what blocks). This drives consistent outcomes.

- Workflows: Modular steps that reflect how your team actually moves (templates, approvals, signature, archival).

Sandstone is carved to fit these contours. It blends into your existing tools—email, Slack, ticketing—so the business doesn’t have to learn “a new system” to benefit from a better one.

One Practical Next Step

Run a two-week intake sprint:

- Map your top 10 request types by volume.

- For each, define the 5–7 mandatory data points needed to triage without ping-pong.

- Capture your default positions and safe fallbacks for the top three contract types.

- In Sandstone, spin up AI-led forms that trigger from email or Slack, auto-apply positions, and route by expertise/SLA.

- Set a simple KPI target: reduce time-to-first-response by 50% and increase self-serve deflection to 20%+.

You’ll feel the impact within days: fewer back-and-forths, faster assignments, clearer dashboards, happier stakeholders.

Why This Matters Now

Growth punishes bottlenecks. As the business scales, legal either becomes the connective tissue—or the constraint. AI-led intake and triage convert reactive chaos into a living operating system where every request, decision, and exception strengthens your foundation.

That’s the Sandstone promise: strength through layers, crafted precision, and natural integration. When knowledge is accessible and actionable at the front door of legal, you move from firefighting to forward motion. Throughput improves. Risk becomes visible. Trust compounds. And legal finally operates at the speed of the business—by design.