How to implement legal intake in 10 days.

Before you buy anything, look at how requests reach your team today. For most in-house legal groups the answer is: email, Slack DMs, the occasional ticket, and someone grabbing the GC in the hallway. That isn't a workflow — it's a series of interruptions in a trench coat.

The good news: you can replace it with a single front door in ten working days, using tools you probably already own. Here's the sequence.

Day 1–2: Map the current requests

Pull the last 60 days of legal requests from every channel you know about. Dump them into a sheet. For each, capture: who asked, what they needed, how it routed, and how long it took. Don't categorise yet — just look.

Two patterns almost always emerge. First, the majority of requests fall into three or four types: new vendor contracts, existing vendor renewals, customer contract review, and everything else. Second, the bottleneck isn't the work — it's the hand-off.

Day 3: Design the intake form

Keep it short. Seven fields or fewer. If you ask for more than that, requesters will abandon the form and go back to email. The fields that matter:

• Request type (the 3–4 from your sheet)
• Counterparty
• Contract value (banded, not free-text)
• Requested-by date
• Business context (one paragraph)
• Uploads
• Requesting team

Anything else you think you need — risk tier, data sensitivity, legal hold status — derive from the fields above, don't ask for it.

Day 4: Build the routing matrix

Intake without routing is a new inbox, not a workflow. For each request type, define: who reviews first, who approves, and at what threshold it escalates. Put it in a sheet. Make it boring.

If you can't explain the routing in five lines, simplify it until you can. Everyone involved — legal, finance, the requester — should be able to hold the whole matrix in their head.

Day 5–6: Wire the tools

Form → tracker → notifications. Use whatever your company already uses: a Typeform or Google Form posting into an Airtable base, with a Slack webhook announcing new requests to the legal channel. Total build time should be under half a day. If it takes longer, you're over-engineering.

Day 7: Pilot with one team

Pick a single business team — usually sales or procurement, whichever sends you the most contracts. Tell them: for the next two weeks, every legal request comes through the form. No exceptions, including from the person who runs the team.

Don't announce it company-wide yet. You want to find the sharp edges with one team before the whole company notices.

Day 8–9: Fix what the pilot surfaces

You'll find two or three things: a field requesters keep misunderstanding, a routing rule that doesn't fire, or a request type you missed. Fix them in place. Don't start over.

Day 10: Roll out company-wide

Send one email. Post in the relevant Slack channels. Update the internal wiki. Put the form link in your email signature. Most importantly: stop answering legal questions in DMs. Redirect politely and firmly to the form. After two weeks of redirects, the habit sticks.

What good looks like at day 30

By the end of the first month, cycle time on your highest-volume request type should drop 25–40%. Not because legal got faster — but because the routing overhead disappeared. You'll also have, finally, a real backlog view: every open request, its owner, and its age.

Now — and only now — is it worth looking at CLM software. You know the shape of your work. You have a baseline. You know which parts actually need automating, and which were just routing problems wearing a software mask.