Think Your Legal Team Has a Bandwidth Problem? It Might Just Be Your Intake

If your lawyers spend 20–30% of their week chasing missing context—no contract version, no counterparty, no due date—you don’t have a bandwidth problem. You have an intake problem. The fastest way to reclaim time isn’t hiring more people; it’s redesigning how work enters, gets triaged, and finds the right path on day one.

Workload Is the Symptom. Intake Is the System.

Backlogs feel like a resource gap. But the block is often upstream: fragmented channels (email, Slack, spreadsheets), unclear request types, and no standard for “ready to work.” When intake is loose, everything downstream slows—approvals, redlines, risk reviews, procurement alignment.

Your legal team becomes a switchboard—manually screening requests, escalating edge cases, and pushing for details that should have been captured up front. That’s a process problem. Fixing it compounds value: faster cycle times, fewer handoffs, cleaner data, and happier requesters.

The reframe: Don’t start with “more hands.” Start with “fewer mysteries.”

Run This 15-Minute Intake Audit

A quick diagnostic will tell you if intake—not headcount—is the bottleneck. Ask:

- Channels: How many ways can someone ask legal for help? Can you consolidate into one front door?

- Completeness: What percentage of requests arrive with required context (document, counterparty, business owner, due date, template used)?

- Routing: How much time is spent forwarding requests to the right lawyer or queue?

- Deflection: How many requests could be resolved with a playbook, template, or clause library instead of bespoke work?

- SLAs: Do you have explicit first-response and cycle-time targets by work type (NDA vs. MSA vs. privacy review)?

- Feedback: Do requesters know what “good” looks like when they submit work? Is the guidance embedded at the point of intake?

If two or more answers are unclear—or the data doesn’t exist—your workflow is sending false signals about “bandwidth.”

What AI-First Intake Looks Like in Practice

Modern intake is not a form. It’s an always-on legal ops agent that captures context, routes intelligently, and applies your playbooks before a lawyer lifts a finger. On a platform like Sandstone, that looks like:

- Smart front door: A single link for the business to submit requests—embedded in Slack, email, or your intranet—mapped to your core work types.

- Dynamic prompts: Required fields adapt by request. If someone selects “Vendor Agreement,” the agent asks for the vendor profile, data flows, security posture, and deal value. No more back-and-forth.

- Knowledge-first deflection: The agent detects if the request matches a common scenario (e.g., standard NDA) and offers self-serve with your pre-approved template and guardrails—no ticket needed.

- Auto-triage and assignment: Requests are routed by region, risk, value, or business line. Escalation paths and approvals trigger automatically.

- Playbook application: The agent pre-annotates contracts using your playbooks—flagging fallback positions, required clauses, and approval checkpoints—so the first human review starts at “80% ready.”

- System sync: Metadata, versions, and decisions flow to your CRM, CLM, and ticketing tools. Nothing falls through the cracks.

The result is layered strength: each request adds structured data, refines your routing, and hardens your playbooks. Knowledge compounds instead of disappearing into email.

The KPIs That Prove You Fixed the Right Problem

Measure the shift from guesswork to governance with a simple dashboard:

- First-response time by work type

- % of requests complete at submission (definition: all required fields + documents present)

- Auto-deflection rate (resolved by playbooks/templates without human review)

- Cycle time by segment (standard vs. non-standard, low vs. high risk)

- Handoff count per matter (how many people touch it?)

- Approval latency (where do days disappear?)

- Requester satisfaction (CSAT) and rework rate

When intake is right, these metrics move fast—often before you change staffing. You get speed without sacrificing control because the workflow carries the load, not the inbox.

One Practical Next Step: Ship a Minimal Intake With Guardrails

You don’t need a six-month program. In one week, pilot a focused front door for your top two work types (often NDA + vendor paper):

1) Define “ready to work” for each type (fields, documents, approvals needed).

2) Turn those definitions into dynamic prompts in your intake form or agent.

3) Add playbook-backed deflection for the simplest path (standard NDA or pre-approved fallback terms).

4) Set two SLAs: first response and overall cycle time. Make them visible.

5) Route by rules (region, deal size, risk) and capture decisions as structured data.

Run the pilot with a friendly business unit for two weeks. Compare metrics to your baseline. Expand from there.

Why This Matters Now

Legal is the connective tissue of the business—not a bottleneck. When intake, triage, and playbooks live as a single, AI-powered operating system, you trade heroic effort for reliable flow. That’s the Sandstone approach: strength through layers, crafted precision, and natural integration with how your team already works.

The payoff is speed, alignment, and trust. Every request reinforces your foundation—so knowledge doesn’t vanish, it compounds. Fix intake first, and you’ll find you didn’t need more bandwidth; you needed a better path for the work you already have.