Eight workflows, one standard

Four workflows for in-house legal teams

The volume comes from the whole company. The work is routing each request to the right place, keeping it supervised, and being able to show afterwards who decided what.

1. 01Legal intake and triageIn-house

   Requests from anywhere in the company land in a single queue and are opened as a named file.

2. 02Contract first-pass reviewIn-house

   Standard contracts are read against the review playbook and every deviation is marked by clause.

3. 03Regulatory and compliance operationsIn-house

   Notices, applications and regulator correspondence run in a single list set to the tightest deadline.

4. 04AI governance and release gateIn-house

   Every AI workflow has a register entry and every change passes through a gate.

Four workflows for law firms

The client wants speed and price, the partners want the standard kept. The legal work is done by the firm’s lawyers; the workflow carries the file, the mandate and the record.

1. 05Matter intake and engagement scopingLaw firm

   The instruction becomes a file after conflicts screening and a written matter scope.

2. 06Research and citation verificationLaw firm

   Every citation is checked against the decision’s own text and the check is logged.

3. 07Drafting from precedentLaw firm

   The first draft is built from the firm’s own archive and the source of each clause is marked.

4. 08Matter record and client reportingLaw firm

   Stage, owner and signature stay in the file; the report is assembled from that record at month end.

What all eight share

Every page carries the same eleven headings in the same order: who it is for, the trigger, the stages, what the agent may read, keep and do, where a person signs, what the record contains, the measure a pilot uses, the systems it usually sits on, the first week, exit terms and three questions.

The repetition is not a matter of style; it is the argument. The eight workflows are one machine at eight desks. The full method is set out in numbered clauses in the operating standard.

Where to start

For an in-house team, intake and triage, because it is the one that produces the baseline the other three in-house workflows are later measured against. More on that on the page for in-house legal teams.

For a law firm, research and citation verification, because a wrong reference is a professional problem before it is a client problem, and because the check is easy to measure. More on that on the page for law firms.

If a different queue is the one actually hurting, we start there instead. The rule is one workflow, not the right workflow chosen in advance by me.

How each one is delivered

The same way, every time: the workflow mapped with your team, the agent’s mandate written down, the reviewer step named, the record format agreed, and one pilot with a measure you set in advance. You keep all five.

1. 01

   A call of about an hour

   The workflow, the team, the systems, the reviewer. No charge, no obligation.

2. 02

   A written scope

   Stages, mandate, record format, the one measure, the dates and the price.

3. 03

   A supervised pilot

   A baseline first, nothing unattended, and a pass or fail on a date fixed at the start.