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In your corporate legal department, what is the legal intake process for receiving work from business stakeholders throughout the company? Perhaps you have a tried-and-true methodology that works extremely well, or, you’re testing the waters with a legal intake process that feels clunky and inefficient.
Regardless, every corporate legal department needs an efficient way to manage inbound requests from all business units, assess whether the legal work requires assignment to the legal team, and determine the risk level of the query and whether it requires immediate action. And, that’s only the beginning.
On the other hand, imagine a legal department without a legal intake process! The department would be in continuous chaos with no one managing, assigning or expediting requests from any point of the company.
Legal intake is necessary. It provides valuable benefits to the functionality and operation of the law department. The law department is unique as it serves its company to protect, mitigate risk and stave off threats. In addition, the department functions internally and serves its internal constituents, much like an agency serves its clients. A legal work intake process helps inform everyone about company issues and potential matters.
A legal intake process informs the law department of a query from any business unit or stakeholder in the company. This can be done via a digital intake form, and it can also be done with AI tools.
The benefit is that the requestor asking for legal assistance can inform the department about the issue in as much detail as possible. This saves time upfront so an intake professional can screen and triage the requests. If the request needs legal expertise, it passes through the queue to be assigned to a lawyer.
There are various levels of legal intake requests. Some are simpler, like answering questions, while others require a member of the in-house legal team to be assigned and manage the work.
Any request for assistance, whether legal intake or not, that enters the legal department must be clear. Legal intake forms are the first entry point, and their design needs to be clear for the requestor, most of all.
Ensure that the work intake forms that are accessible to all business stakeholders provide the opportunity for open-ended answers and are not just a checklist.
The questions provided on the work intake form should be thorough so that the request delivers the best possible information to a lawyer. If a member of the legal team has no questions for the requestor and can decipher the issue without further interaction, that is a sure sign that the legal intake form works well.
A basic item for a work intake form centers around the category of the issue. This helps set the stage right away so lawyers can determine which area of need is required. The issue category can be around a contract dispute, Contract Lifecycle Management Overview for Legal Departments (lexisnexis.com) intellectual property protection, harassment case, breach of copyright or privileged information, a general question, or HR issues, for example.
The overall goal of a legal work intake request form is to ensure that anyone who needs legal support can understand the questions in simple, non-legal speak.
On the other hand, users unfamiliar with a legal intake ticketing process may balk at having to use one. Many corporate stakeholders likely are accustomed to emailing the legal department for a direct line of communication. This, however, is inefficient and wastes valuable time for the legal team. Users may be surprised to find that a work intake process creates faster response time.
A work intake form should benefit business stakeholders and the in-house legal team. Work intake streamlines workflow, CounselLink Work Management Software | LexisNexis helps lawyers respond quickly to company matters, and also assists in measuring the volume of legal intake requests, the area and category, and where they originate.
Another benefit of legal intake is tracking requests in a single platform. Companies use Slack, Teams, Zoom, and other internal communications tools. Legal communication stored, briefly, on an ancillary solution can get lost in the shuffle of fast-paced electronic conversations. Time is wasted searching for a previous communication.
Using the metrics compiled from a work intake process gives legal operations more fuel for strategic business decisions. For example, if one business unit seemingly has a consistently higher volume of inbound requests for help from the legal team, then legal and operations can collaborate to integrate other services and tools to manage that department.
Adoption of this process ensures that legal requests are reviewed, triaged, assigned, managed, and tracked. Those who prefer to ignore new systems will soon determine that any requests for legal assistance attempted via other modes of communication will not be addressed…to the detriment of the requestor.
While it may take some time initially to onboard users to a legal intake process, the valuable benefits soon surface for business stakeholders, the in-house legal team and legal operations.
As with most new modes of collaboration, this process helps streamline the entire company. No one wants to send a Teams chat and ask a busy lawyer on the in-house legal team whether their email was received. The intake form serves as a digital record of the request, and notifications can be configured to inform the requestor of the project status.
In-house legal departments that select an advanced enterprise legal management solution including a work intake feature end up far ahead of the game.
Business stakeholders can open the solution, locate the work intake feature in the navigation menu and proceed to simple completion of their request for legal support.
The request is reviewed, triaged, assigned to an in-house lawyer, and managed. Should the issue become a matter, then a matter is immediately created within the enterprise legal management platform. A team is assigned, and legal services begin to resolve the situation.
Legal intake is a basic feature of enterprise legal management for corporate law departments, and those using the tool find great benefits as a result.
To learn more about this solution for your corporate legal department, speak with us.