What Is Work Intake In Legal Departments

In the corporate legal department, work intake, similar to legal intake, is how work enters the legal team’s queue. Lawyers in a law department work on active matters and are not looking for legal issues to join their purview until a stakeholder raises a red flag. That red flag can be a simple legal question, or it may be an issue that requires legal team attention. Regardless, the process remains the same: stakeholders raise legal concerns, and the legal team must address them.

What is Work Intake

Legal work intake is the process by which corporate lawyers receive and manage work requests from stakeholders within an organization. That process can be mature using software to respond and manage the requests, or it may be nascent with stakeholders using email communication to inform the legal team of an issue that requires attention.
Traditionally, email communication was the standard method to communicate with the legal team. This email could either dump into a general legal team mailbox managed by a paralegal or legal operations professional, or the sender could direct the email to a lawyer with whom they are familiar. The latter method may or may not be efficient, as that lawyer could be out of the office, the issue being surfaced may need to be forwarded to a different specialist, or other reason for delay.

Legal issues could also be communicated at the water cooler, a common place for conversation, which then requires a scheduled meeting and further delay in the attention to the legal issue.

Another method to inform a legal team about a stakeholder’s legal concern is to send documents via inter-office mail. Several of these methods shared would only work if the legal team is back at the office after the pandemic and not working remotely.

Best Method for Legal Work Intake

The digitization of the legal department has helped make things like legal work intake more efficient. This also means that stakeholder issues can be resolved faster or passed to a legal expert for management. Enterprise legal management software provides work intake features making this process highly efficient and effective. Stakeholders can utilize the ELM dashboard to enter their legal concern with some description so that it is queued with the appropriate lawyer for management.

In addition, robust enterprise legal management platforms now include a feature called Ask Legal. Powered by AI, Ask Legal is a legal assistant that allows stakeholders to self-serve answers to their legal questions. Built with information from corporate policy and accessible files developed by the legal department, Ask Legal eliminates steps that inhibit resolution of legal issues. For example, it can automatically deliver a non-disclosure agreement, privacy policy or non-compete, to stakeholders.

AI helps streamline the workflow and makes the legal department more efficient and productive. AI can also route legal requests to the appropriate lawyer and provide status updates about what’s in the work intake queue.

Other matter management software should also facilitate the work intake process. It’s unclear how many issues by stakeholders become matters because every company is different. Having the opportunity to self-serve various legal concerns helps appease stakeholders.

Benefits of Legal Work Intake Applications

We mentioned above that legal work intake applications streamline workflow and make work intake more efficient for the legal department. This type of efficiency reduces the time spent on administrative tasks, i.e. the time it takes for a lawyer to manage a work intake request. In addition, stakeholder requests for assistance can be centralized and organized, making it easier to track and manage workload. With a work intake application, leadership has visibility into the status of requests for both lawyers and stakeholders. This transparency into the volume of work in the legal department is a critical aspect of workflow and productivity, not to mention talent recruitment.

Lawyers and stakeholders are not the only ones who benefit from work intake applications. Legal operations professionals find efficiencies, as well.

• Automation of pre-matters and matters can be processed more quickly through the department.
• Lawyers get assignments faster, and legal operations can track a matter through the process without interfering with the legal team.
• Reports can be generated quickly with a click of a button so that leadership and general counsel know the status of completed versus active matters or issues taking time from legal team productivity.
• More is learned about the business units requesting the highest volume of legal assistance, and leadership can investigate to find the reasons why.
  Overall communication improves, providing for one hand knowing what the other is doing.

ELM Platform Manages Legal Department Productivity

Law departments that require a foundation for productivity, efficiency and collaboration need an advanced enterprise legal management platform with various features that contribute to these efficiencies.

In particular, ELM software that integrates contract lifecycle management, matter management, financial management, vendor management, and work management in one accessible and unified workspace provides the best ELM solution for the law department.

AI powers many of the features of ELM to create even more efficiencies for the legal team. Outside counsel can also tap into the ELM software and upload case management documents, add work history, manage invoices and billing, and much more.

The integration with contract lifecycle management applications provides the capability to link contracts with respective matters. This feature enables lawyers to save valuable time searching for documents.

To learn more about work intake in enterprise legal management software, contact us.