Streamlining Legal Intake at Scale: Why AI Agents Turn Chaos Into Clarity
Legal work slows where it starts. In many in-house teams, 40–60% of requests arrive through email or Slack with missing context, and up to a third of legal time disappears into triage. Every delay compounds risk and slows revenue. If legal is the connective tissue of the business, intake is the artery—and today it’s clogged.
The Real Visibility Gap Starts at Intake
“Visibility” isn’t just dashboards. It’s knowing exactly what’s coming in, what it is, who owns it, the risk posture, and when it’ll be done. Fragmented channels, ad hoc templates, and tribal knowledge make that impossible. Requests bounce. SLAs slip. Data quality is too thin to drive decisions—or automate anything. The cost is concrete: longer sales cycles, procurement bottlenecks, inconsistent positions, and opaque spend.
Sandstone approaches this differently. Instead of another form that no one uses, we layer AI-driven intake across the channels the business already loves—email, Slack, ticketing—then codify your playbooks, positions, and workflows into a living operating system. The result is consistent decisions, captured context, and real-time status from the moment a request lands.
Why AI Agents Change Intake Dynamics
AI agents shift intake from manual triage to proactive control. Running on Sandstone’s knowledge layer, they:
- Detect and classify requests from any channel (NDA vs MSA vs marketing review)
- Extract key data (counterparty, term, spend, region, PII, urgency) and apply matter taxonomy
- Validate completeness, ask for missing context, and route to the right owner or queue
- Enforce playbooks, surface standard positions, and flag exceptions for human review
- Create auditable records and SLAs, so status and throughput are visible instantly
This changes everything because work starts clean. You cut cycle time, standardize risk decisions, and generate the data you need for forecasting and resourcing—without asking the business to change behavior.
Proof Points: Outcomes You Can Measure
- Faster cycle time: Teams adopting AI triage routinely cut intake-to-assignment time by 50–70%, shaving days off sales and vendor timelines.
- Consistent risk posture: Centralized positions applied at intake reduce one-off exceptions and rework, improving negotiation efficiency.
- Better forecasting: Clean, structured metadata from day one enables accurate demand planning and SLA tracking by request type and region.
- Lower outside counsel spend: Early classification and routing keep routine items in-house, reducing unnecessary external sends.
- Higher stakeholder trust: Predictable SLAs and transparent status restore confidence across Sales, Finance, and Procurement.
How It Works on Sandstone
Sandstone is built for strength through layers: a knowledge layer for playbooks and positions, modular workflows for routing and approvals, and AI agents that learn from outcomes.
- Connectors: Capture requests from Slack, email, web forms, and procurement tools. No forced behavior change.
- AI Triage: Classify request type, extract fields, detect risks (PII, governing law, indemnity), and suggest next steps based on your playbook.
- Dynamic Workflows: Route by expertise, region, or risk score; spin up standard tasks; set SLAs; trigger approvals.
- Human-in-the-loop: Edge cases escalate with context; counsel accepts, edits, or overrides—feeding back into the model.
- Live Record: Every intake becomes a structured matter with lineage, metrics, and an audit trail, visible across dashboards and APIs.
Because knowledge compounds instead of disappearing, decisions get sharper and faster over time. What starts as AI-assisted triage becomes AI-accelerated execution.
High-Impact Use Cases to Pilot
- NDAs at scale: Auto-classify NDAs, pull counterparty details, apply your preferred template, and return a signed-ready draft within minutes. Typical result: 60% reduction in turnaround.
- Sales paper triage: Detect redlines, map clauses to your positions, and route by deal size and risk. Typical result: fewer escalations and faster approvals for standard deals.
- Vendor onboarding: Intake DPAs, SOWs, and security reviews together; auto-check PII flags and route to privacy/compliance. Typical result: clear cycle-time baselines and fewer handoff gaps.
A Practical First Step
Run a two-week intake sprint:
1) Map three intake channels (email, Slack, form) and the top two request types by volume.
2) Codify your playbook for those types: templates, fallback positions, escalation rules, SLAs.
3) Stand up Sandstone’s AI triage for those flows; define taxonomy and owners.
4) Measure baseline vs week-two metrics: time-to-assignment, first-response time, percent complete on first pass.
Actionable takeaway: Limit scope to a narrow, high-volume pathway (e.g., NDAs). Prove a 50%+ cycle-time reduction. Then expand to adjacent flows.
The Bedrock of Trust and Growth
When intake is clean, everything downstream gets easier—faster decisions, fewer escalations, better data, tighter spend. Sandstone turns intake from a reactive inbox into a proactive operating system where every request strengthens the legal foundation. That’s how legal becomes the connective tissue of the business: scalable, streamlined, and trusted.
If you’re ready to see intake clarity in action, start with one high-volume workflow and let the results compound.