Legal intake and triage
For an in-house legal team that takes requests from the whole company and has no single front door. The stages, the agent’s mandate, the reviewer step, the record fields, the measure a pilot uses and the exit terms.
One queue, one clock, one named owner.
Who it is for
An in-house legal team that receives requests from the whole company and has no single front door. The symptom is familiar. Two lawyers answer the same question in the same week. An urgent request sits in a mailbox nobody owns. At the end of the quarter nobody can say what the team actually spent its time on. This is the workflow I would start with in almost every in-house engagement, because it is the only one that produces the baseline the others are later measured against.
The trigger
A request arrives. An email to a shared mailbox, a chat message to whoever is online, a form submission, a forwarded contract, or a corridor conversation that somebody writes down afterwards.
The stages
Capture
Requests from the agreed channels land in one place, unchanged, with their attachments and their sender.
Bind
Each request becomes a named file with a type, an owner, a clock and a priority. No work starts before the file exists.
Classify
The agent proposes the type, the urgency and the owner, inside its mandate, and names the rule that produced the proposal.
Confirm
A lawyer accepts the proposal or changes it. The change is recorded next to the proposal, so the routing rules can later be corrected from evidence rather than from memory.
Route
The file goes to the named owner with the clock running. The requester receives an acknowledgement that says what happens next and by when.
Close
The file closes with an outcome, and the closing entry stays in the record.
What the agent may read, keep and do
| May read | The request and its attachments. The matter-type list and the routing rules. The team’s own intake history. The company directory, to place the requester in a business unit. |
|---|---|
| May keep | The proposed classification, the rule behind it, and the reviewer’s correction, for the retention period agreed with you. No copy of an attachment outside the file. |
| May do | Propose a type, an urgency and an owner. Draft the acknowledgement. Ask the requester for one named missing field. Open the file. It may not answer a legal question, contact anyone outside the company, or close a file. |
Where a person signs
Stage 04, and the workflow will not pass it. A named lawyer accepts or changes the classification before anything is routed. Matter types you mark sensitive, such as investigations, employment matters and anything privileged, skip the proposal entirely and go straight to the lawyer you name. The agent’s mandate does not include reading them.
What the record contains
Every entry is append-only, per section 5.3 of the operating standard.
These are the fields, not a real matter. No client work appears on this site.
| Field | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| File | The identifier and the matter type |
| Arrival | The channel the request came in on, and the time it landed |
| Requester | The person who asked, and the business unit they sit in |
| Proposal | The proposed type, urgency and owner, with the rule that produced them |
| Review | The reviewer’s decision and the time of it |
| Routing | The final type, the owner and the clock |
| Acknowledgement | The wording that was sent back to the requester |
| Close | The closing outcome and its time |
Entries are written as the run happens and are append-only. A correction is a new entry naming the one it corrects. Section 5 of the operating standard says what that means in practice.
The measure a pilot uses
One measure, chosen by you, with a baseline taken before the pilot starts. The one I would usually propose is the share of requests that reach the right owner without a second hop, measured against the two weeks before the workflow ran. Two others earn their place: the time from arrival to acknowledgement, and reviewer minutes per request. You set the number that counts as a pass, and you set it in advance.
The systems it usually sits on
A shared mailbox and a chat tool, a form or a service desk, and whatever the team already uses to hold matters. In a corporate stack that is usually a matter or intake system such as LawVu, Onit, SimpleLegal, Streamline AI, Checkbox, BRYTER or Clio, beside a document system such as iManage, NetDocuments or SharePoint. In Türkiye the queue usually has to respect UYAP deadlines and UETS e-Tebligat arrivals as well, which is a clock question before it is a software question. LEXSAS resells none of these and claims no certified connector to any of them.
The first week
- Day one
- The scope call: channels, matter types, the reviewer, the systems, the measure.
- Days two and three
- I read two weeks of your real requests with you. The matter types come out of what actually arrived, not out of a template.
- Day four
- The routing rules and the agent’s mandate are written down, and you correct them. Most of the value of the week is in these corrections.
- Day five
- The record format and the wording of the acknowledgement are agreed, the baseline count starts, and the pilot dates are fixed.
Exit terms
The matter-type list, the routing rules, the mandate, the record format, the evaluation set and every run record are yours in an exportable format from the first day, not at the end. If we stop, they stay, and the queue keeps running without me. If any part of the workflow depended on my continued involvement, I would tell you before the pilot rather than after it.
Three questions
No. It proposes a classification and names the rule behind it. A lawyer accepts or changes the proposal, and those changes are what improve the rules.
Types you mark sensitive bypass the agent and route straight to the lawyer you name. The mandate does not give the agent read access to them.
No. The queue can start in the mailbox and in the tool you already track matters in. A pilot that needs a purchase before it can start has already failed its first test.
The controls behind this page are in the LEXSAS operating standard, sections 2 to 5. If this is the queue that is actually hurting, start with this one. Get in touch