How to Fix Legal Intake: AI Triage That Speeds the Business

Most legal delays start at the front door. Work lands in inboxes without context, spins in Slack threads, and waits for someone to decipher what’s actually needed. Fix the intake, and cycle time drops. You don’t need more hands—you need a smarter gate that turns questions into decisions.

Diagnose the Bottleneck: Intake, Not Review

If your team feels overloaded, look at where work begins. In most in‑house orgs, requests arrive unstructured and incomplete. That forces legal to chase details, re-route matters, and triage by gut. The impact is predictable: long queues, uneven quality, and “Is legal the blocker?” whispers.

Three signals you have an intake problem:

- High rework: frequent back-and-forth to fill missing data.

- Queue volatility: simple tasks mixed with complex ones, all treated the same.

- Shadow channels: sales and product create workarounds to avoid slow response.

The fix isn’t another form for the sake of it. It’s a front door that teaches the business how to ask—and uses what you already know to route, standardize, and resolve faster.

Design the Front Door: Forms That Teach the Business

Start with one high-volume workflow (NDAs, vendor onboarding, marketing review). Design a request that collects only what legal truly needs to move. Keep it crisp, guided, and conditional.

What great intake captures:

- Identity and urgency: who’s asking, when do they need it, what’s the impact.

- Business context: deal size, region, data types, regulated use cases.

- Decision triggers: terms that flip the task to self-serve, playbooked, or expert review.

Use friendly language and examples. If someone picks “Vendor collects personal data,” immediately ask which data types and regions, not ten generic questions. The goal is a calm, fast path to the right outcome—without legal playing translator.

Automate Triage With AI Agents (On Sandstone)

This is where an AI-powered knowledge layer turns process into progress. In Sandstone, intake flows into an AI triage agent that applies your playbooks, positions, and thresholds in real time.

What the agent does out of the box:

- Classifies the request by type and complexity using your historical matters.

- Checks policy thresholds (deal size, data sensitivity) and assigns the right path.

- Generates a first-response summary for the requester with next steps and ETA.

- Suggests self-serve templates (NDA, DPA) or autogenerates drafts with preapproved clauses.

Because Sandstone is layered by design, each decision strengthens the next. The agent doesn’t just answer—it learns from outcomes, turns edits into new rules, and compounds institutional knowledge. You get accuracy without reinventing process, and the business gets speed without risk creep.

Turn Playbooks Into Decisions, Not PDFs

Static playbooks die in wikis. Operational playbooks live in the workflow.

Translate your positions into decision logic:

- If vendor handles EU personal data and uses sub-processors, add DPA Annex X and trigger privacy review.

- If deal value < threshold and terms unchanged, auto-approve with notification.

- If marketing uses trademark in external creative, require brand counsel sign-off.

In Sandstone, these become modular rules you can tune without code. When an intake hits a rule, the AI agent explains the decision, cites the policy, and logs the rationale. That transparency builds trust with business partners and reduces escalations. Over time, you see exactly where the rules create speed—and where they need refinement.

Measure What Matters: Speed, Deflection, Quality

You can’t scale what you don’t measure. Track a small set of KPIs that map to outcomes, not activity:

- Cycle time by request type: request to resolution.

- First-response time: minutes, not days.

- Deflection rate: percentage resolved via self-serve or auto-approval.

- Rework rate: matters that bounce back for missing info.

- Exception density: percentage that requires counsel judgment.

Sandstone’s dashboards segment by workflow, region, and requester, so you can tune the system. If rework is high for vendor reviews, add conditional questions. If exceptions spike on DPAs, tighten your clauses. This is continuous improvement, not a one-off project.

One-Week Pilot: Ship a Smart NDA Intake

Pick NDAs as your proving ground. In one week, you can show measurable lift.

Day 1–2: Map your current path. Define required fields (party names, governing law, mutual/unilateral, deal value). Pull your approved templates and fallback clauses.

Day 3–4: Build the intake in Sandstone. Add conditional logic (if unilateral and you’re the discloser, route to Template A; if mutual and deal value < threshold, auto-approve). Encode your clause positions.

Day 5: Turn on the AI agent. Enable auto-draft generation and first-response messages. Set SLAs (service levels) for human touch when needed.

Day 6–7: Launch to a small group (sales ops or BD). Monitor cycle time, deflection, and feedback. Iterate once.

Result: faster signatures, fewer interruptions, and a clear narrative to stakeholders: legal is accelerating deals.

The Bedrock of Trust and Growth

When intake, triage, and decisions live in one operating system, legal stops firefighting and starts compounding knowledge. Sandstone is that foundation—strength through layers, crafted to your contours, and natural in how your team already works. The business gets clarity; legal gets leverage. Start with one workflow, prove the speed, and let the wins stack. That’s how modern legal ops becomes the connective tissue of a company—steady, scalable, trusted.