5 Signs Your Legal Intake Process is Broken

Lawyers and Legal Departments are excellent at juggling many different balls in the air, coming at them from a myriad of different angles with complex questions and multiple stakeholders. However, managing all these requests in your head and through multiple channels and across an entire in-house legal team is not scalable and is bound to end badly. If you have no legal intake process, or it is not being used properly, then your intake process is broken!

While matter management software will help you track legal work after you receive a request, improving your legal operations process starts upstream - with an effective and efficient legal intake process. 

What are the five signs your in-house legal intake process is broken?

1. Request details are repeatedly incomplete. 
2. Tasks pile up and deadlines slip.
   
3. Stakeholders are frustrated with a 'black box' level of visibility. 
4. Intake feels like a drain instead of a launchpad for new opportunities.
5. Leadership can’t see trends.

The impact of poor legal intake processes on morale is significant - across both the Legal Department and its stakeholders - and leads to lost time and productivity. Let's dig into these five signs of a broken legal intake process in more detail.

Sign #1: Request details are repeatedly incomplete.

Have you ever received an email with three lengthy documents attached and just two frustrating words: "Please review." Of course not. 🤔

When you have to spend the first 3-4 messages with your internal client capturing key information about the commercial context, deadlines, parties involved and strategic relevance of a legal request, you are wasting both your time and that of your internal client - the ultimate definition of 'busy work'.

Where information could be included in a request and automatically routed through to document creation, you are not only wasting time on gathering the information, you are also manually entering information unnecessarily. In-house legal document creation should flow directly from your request through to your lawyers for finalization.

Sign #2: Tasks pile up and deadlines slip.

There are very few in-house Legal Departments with idle capacity, so it is always a challenge to meet tasks and deadlines as required... but if these are slipping constantly and for high priority matters, then your intake process needs some urgent attention.

Your intake process should help you prioritize work. If you do not have full visibility across the legal work being requested by your business stakeholders, who within the Legal Department is responsible and when it is required, then something is going to slip through the cracks. Legal requests should feed directly into your in-house matter management solution to provide you with the who, what, when and why of workloads and help you meet your deadlines for the most important tasks.

Sign #3: Stakeholders are frustrated with a 'black box' level of visibility.

The most common complaint from business stakeholders when your legal intake process is broken: "I sent it to the Legal Department a week ago, and I haven't heard anything back!"

If you do not have a clear or automated way to reassure your business that their request has been received, reviewed and assigned, then you are bound to get frustrated business clients. If you are hearing increasing rumblings, or a more vocal complaint about a minor issue, then you know you are pushing the wrong buttons!

Imagine you are on hold with your phone provider and you have no idea where you are in the queue or how long it will take. 😠 Communication can fix many complaints; if your business stakeholders feel like they have some visibility over the process, and are reassured that their issue has been received and assigned, then much of their frustration will dissipate.

Sign #4: Intake feels like a drain instead of a launchpad for new opportunities.

Receiving new instructions from your business clients is a truly fabulous opportunity to collaborate on new projects, clients or solve a key problem, bringing your teams together. This should be the start of something interesting and challenging, and you should be able to disseminate the information quickly and easily so you can get to the juicy part of the legal question.

If, however, you cringe when you receive a new email, or feel yourself sinking down into your chair with the weight of muddling through new instructions, then the challenge is already a burden and does not lend itself to increased collaboration. 

It's time for you to find a simple intake process that delivers you the key details and documents for easy dissemination to move you quickly to the legal request and collaboration with your business stakeholders.

Sign #5: Leadership can’t see trends

Knowing where demand for legal work originates is essential for:

• Organizational risk management: if you cannot immediately spot trends then you might be missing critical risk. Examples include: 
  • increasing demand for a legal request type: "Why is there a spike in supplier claims from manufacturing?"
  • a drop in demand from a business unit: "Why have sales contract reviewed dropped dramatically? Is there a new cowboy sales person who is not getting sales contracts reviewed?"

• Legal Department resourcing: rapid increase in a specific category of work may suggest that your Legal Department needs additional resourcing - internal or external - for that area of legal specialization. Understanding the changes in legal work types over a period of time will help you to recruit appropriately, or arrange training for your legal team. 

Conclusion

An effective legal intake process isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s foundational to a well-functioning Legal Department. When intake is broken, everything downstream suffers: deadlines slip, morale dips, and the legal team becomes a bottleneck instead of a business partner. But the good news? Fixing it doesn’t require a massive overhaul. Small, strategic improvements can make a huge impact.

Start by asking the right questions, identifying where requests fall through the cracks, and implementing a process that’s clear, consistent, and easy to follow. With the right legal intake process in place, your team will spend less time chasing information and more time delivering real value to the business.

Ready to get started? Download our Legal Intake Checklist and take the first step toward transforming how your Legal Department works.