How AI-Driven Intake Accelerates Contracting for In‑House Legal Teams
The slowest part of most contracts isn’t redlining; it’s everything that happens before the first edit. Requests arrive as Slack pings, email forwards, or tickets with missing context. Legal starts in detective mode, not counsel mode. Fix that layer, and you unlock speed where it matters.
The Hidden Bottleneck Is Intake, Not Review
When requests are unstructured, legal work starts with scavenger hunts: What’s the business goal? Which template? Who can approve risk? Where’s the latest position on liability caps? That ambiguity turns legal into a perceived bottleneck—even when drafting is fast.
Structured intake changes the physics. It captures the right variables up front (counterparty, deal value, data types, region, template, deadlines), normalizes them into a matter record, and routes to the right workflow with clear SLAs. The result: fewer back-and-forths, cleaner handoffs, and cycle time that shrinks before anyone touches a clause.
Sandstone’s view is simple: intake is where institutional knowledge should surface. If your playbooks, positions, and workflows live in a living, AI-powered operating system, every request is an opportunity to apply what the organization already knows.
What AI Intake Looks Like in Practice
“AI intake” is not a chatbot bolted onto a form. It’s a set of agents and decisioning steps that make requests complete, routable, and auditable from the start:
- Classification and triage: Detect request type (e.g., NDA vs. MSA vs. order form), business unit, and urgency. Auto-route to the appropriate lane and SLA.
- Context enrichment: Extract key facts from attached documents and threads (counterparty name, governing law, data sharing, deal value) and populate the matter record.
- Playbook retrieval: Dynamically surface the relevant policy or clause guidance based on context (e.g., “For SaaS with PII in the EU, liability cap = 12 months with carve-outs X/Y”).
- Risk tiering: Combine structured inputs with policy logic to assign a risk score that determines path (auto-approve, standard review, escalated review).
- Action generation: For low-risk matters, generate the correct template or redlines aligned to approved positions; for higher-risk, assemble a briefing so counsel can start with the facts and recommendations.
- System updates: Log to your matter system, notify stakeholders, and keep an audit trail without manual data entry.
On platforms like Sandstone, these agents sit inside the legal workflow rather than off to the side. Intake, triage, and decisioning become part of the same living knowledge layer that powers drafting and approvals.
A Contract Workflow You Can Automate This Quarter
If you want a fast win, start with NDAs or low-risk vendor agreements—high-volume, repeatable, policy-driven.
1) Smart intake: Requester answers 6–8 targeted questions; AI extracts remaining facts from the draft or email attachment. The system tags jurisdiction, data categories, and commercial context.
2) Risk tiering: Policy logic classifies the request. Example: Mutual NDA with no personal data → auto-approve. Unilateral NDA with data exports → standard lane. Vendor DPA with cross-border transfers → escalate.
3) Action selection: For low-risk, the system issues the correct template or applies approved redlines automatically. For standard risk, it produces a one-page brief: summary of deltas, recommended positions, and pre-populated comments linked to your playbook.
4) Routing and SLAs: Auto-assign to the right reviewer; notify the business with expected timelines. Exceptions go to the appropriate approver (e.g., security, privacy, finance) with contextual summaries.
5) Close and learn: On signature, the workflow updates the matter, links to the procurement record, stores clause-level metadata, and feeds insights back into the playbook—so decisions compound instead of disappearing.
This is where “strength through layers” pays off. Layered data (matter fields, clause positions, approvals) builds a durable foundation. The next request gets faster not because people rush, but because the system is smarter.
Measure What Speeds Up the Business
Avoid vanity metrics and track the ones that move outcomes:
- Time to first response: Minutes, not days. Per request type and business unit.
- Cycle time by risk tier: Low-risk should approach same-day; escalations should be predictable.
- Auto-resolution rate: Percent of requests resolved without attorney time, with controls.
- Playbook coverage: Portion of positions that are automated and up to date.
- Rework loops: How often reviews bounce due to missing info—your intake quality score.
- Requester satisfaction: Lightweight CSAT/NPS after close to validate perceived speed and clarity.
Sandstone surfaces these metrics natively, tying each to specific steps in the workflow so you know where to tune: question design, routing logic, or playbook depth.
A Practical Next Step
Pick one high-volume, low-risk contract type and run a 30-day pilot:
- Inventory the top 10 facts you need at intake.
- Codify your current positions (acceptable, fallback, unacceptable) for the 8–12 clauses that change most.
- Define risk tiers and who approves exceptions.
- Configure an intake form and AI extraction on Sandstone; connect routing to your existing tools (Slack, email, ticketing).
- Measure baseline cycle time for two weeks, then turn on auto-actions for low-risk. Compare.
Actionable takeaway: Don’t boil the ocean. Automate one lane end to end—intake, triage, action, and measurement—so the business feels the speed and trust immediately.
Build the Bedrock
Intake is where law meets the business in real time. When it’s AI-driven and playbook-backed, legal stops being a bottleneck and becomes connective tissue—accelerating revenue, de-risking decisions, and documenting how the company operates. That is the promise of a modern legal ops platform and knowledge layer like Sandstone: crafted precision that fits your processes, natural integration with how teams already work, and layered decisions that make your legal foundation stronger with every request.