The Ultimate Guide to Legal Intake and Triage Automation
Legal teams don’t lose time in the drafting. They lose it at the door. In many in-house teams, 30–50% of turnaround time evaporates before work even starts—during intake, triage, and clarification. The result: delays, inconsistent decisions, and buried institutional knowledge.
This guide lays out how to modernize intake and triage with AI agents—grounded in your policies and playbooks—so legal becomes a proactive force for speed, alignment, and trust.
Why Intake Breaks Legal Velocity
Most intake is a maze of emails, Slack pings, and spreadsheet forms. Requests arrive incomplete. Policies live in PDFs no one opens. Triage becomes an inbox sport handled by whoever has context that day.
When intake is unstructured, you get:
- Missing data and back-and-forth clarification
- Misrouted work and uneven workload distribution
- Invisible cycle time and brittle SLAs
- Decisions trapped in DMs instead of your knowledge base
The fix isn’t another form. It’s a system that captures the right data at the start, applies policy in-line, and routes with context—every time.
What Great Intake and Triage Looks Like
High-performing teams treat intake as the front door to a living operating system:
- Structured requests: Dynamic, conditional forms that ask for the right fields based on request type (e.g., NDA vs. SaaS review).
- Embedded policy: Decision trees that encode risk thresholds, approval matrices, and fallback paths.
- Smart routing: Assignment by matter type, priority, region, and risk—balanced automatically.
- Clear SLAs: Time-to-first-response and resolution targets published and monitored.
- Knowledge capture: Every decision, template, and exception saved to your knowledge layer for reuse.
- Auditability: A defensible trail of who decided what and why.
This is the foundation Sandstone is built to support—strength through layers, crafted precision, and natural integration with the tools your business already uses.
Where AI Agents Create Leverage
AI agents don’t replace counsel; they operationalize your playbooks at scale. In platforms like Sandstone, an intake agent can:
- Read requests from email, Slack, Jira, or your portal and classify matter type.
- Extract key entities (counterparty, contract value, data types) to validate completeness.
- Apply your risk rules (e.g., DPAs for PII; escalations for high ARR or non-standard terms).
- Auto-resolve low-risk matters with approved templates or playbooked positions.
- Route complex matters with context, suggested next steps, and a draft response.
Because Sandstone ties agents to your living knowledge layer—playbooks, positions, and workflows evolve with every decision—triage gets smarter over time. Each intake strengthens the foundation instead of recreating it.
A 30-Day Playbook to Pilot Intake Automation
Start small, prove value fast, then expand. Here’s a focused pilot plan:
Week 1 — Map the Work
- Choose one high-volume flow: NDAs, vendor DPAs, or sales order forms.
- Define the intake schema: required fields, attachments, risk flags.
- Document decision rules: what can auto-approve, when to escalate, who to route.
Week 2 — Configure and Connect
- Stand up a Sandstone intake form and Slack/email channel.
- Configure an AI triage agent using your playbook and sample matters.
- Connect routing to your matter queues, Jira, or ticketing system.
Week 3 — Test and Calibrate
- Run 50 historical requests through the workflow.
- Review misclassifications and adjust field prompts and rules.
- Add auto-responses for the top 5 frequently asked questions.
Week 4 — Go Live with Guardrails
- Launch to a single department (e.g., Sales or Procurement).
- Monitor SLAs, completeness rates, and escalation volume daily.
- Hold a 20-minute feedback loop with stakeholders twice weekly.
Success criteria: Faster time-to-first-response, higher request completeness, and a measurable auto-resolution rate for low-risk matters.
Metrics That Matter
Set a baseline before launch, then compare after four weeks:
- Time-to-first-response: Minutes, not days—reflects triage health.
- Cycle time by request type: From submission to resolution.
- Request completeness rate: % of requests accepted without clarification.
- Auto-resolution rate: % handled with templates/playbooks without attorney time.
- SLA adherence: % meeting published service levels by priority.
- Deflection to self-serve: % resolved via knowledge without opening a matter.
Teams that instrument these measures often see meaningful reductions in response times and a clear uptick in consistency—because every request follows the same, auditable path.
Your Next Step
Block one hour this week to shortlist your pilot flow and codify three non-negotiable rules. If you can write them in a playbook, you can automate them in Sandstone.
Build on a Foundation That Compounds
When intake and triage are powered by a living knowledge layer, legal stops being a bottleneck and becomes connective tissue for the business. Sandstone turns playbooks and positions into an AI-powered operating system—layered data, modular workflows, and decisions that build on each other. Every request strengthens your foundation, accelerates the next one, and reinforces trust.
That’s how modern legal teams scale with clarity and confidence—through a streamlined, scalable intake system that compounds knowledge and unlocks velocity at the heart of the business.