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How does a trusted Intake Process help legal departments with receipt, routing, and request management?

How does a trusted Intake Process help legal departments with receipt, routing, and request management?

Published on : 20/06/2023 20 June Jun 06 2023
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Incorporating a trusted Intake Process for incoming requests, routing, and management can help legal departments: Prioritize their work, respond to internal department requests in a timely and consistent manner, reduce errors and omissions, enhance collaboration between legal departments and other parts of the organization, and track and report requests that come in.

Prioritising Work

First, it helps the legal department to quickly identify high priority requests and allocate resources accordingly. This can help ensure that the most important requests are dealt with first and that timely responses are provided to clients. Additionally, it can help the legal department to keep track of requests, manage workflow, and ensure that tasks are completed in a timely manner.
 
Example: An insurance’s company’s legal department handles requests for claims that might require legal action to recuperate some losses.

In particular cases, a claim can recuperate some losses if addressed with a tight timeframe. When that legal department has an intake tool, that does the heavy lifting of triage and moves away from email, that legal department can easily identify and respond to escalations coming in by email that reference a case that has already been filed in the intake tool such as a collaborative portal.

This “email escalation” process is nothing innovative in itself, however, by email not being the main “intake route” for the legal department, email becomes free to serve as a point of escalation, without skirting these requests outside of the system and intake tool that collects data for KPIs to measure performance, etc.

Finally, it can help the legal department to ensure that requests are routed to the most appropriate team member, reducing the chances of requests being missed or delayed due to miscommunication.
 

Find out more about Galexy's Collaborative Portal


Timing & Consistency

All requests have to be treated and responded to in a timely manner.

A proper Intake Process can help you do that while also making sure that responses are consistent across the organization.

Also, it provides visibility into the legal department’s response times and effectiveness, which can help legal departments identify areas for improvement and make improvements to their process. Having a trusted Intake Process allows legal departments to respond to requests from other departments quickly and accurately, which can help build trust and strengthen relationships between departments and the legal department.

Examples:
  • Uneven workload distribution that goes unnoticed, leading to risk of job dissatisfaction
  • Justify requests for additional budget for the department,
  • Minimise risk of missing important deadlines,
  • Legal not having enough time to assess and study a situation that can evolve into a risk or a liability for the company.

Having an intake process and adequate tool alleviates the risks mentioned above and increases efficiency and employee retention (overall satisfaction).  

Minimizing Errors & Omissions

A clear structure for the receipt, routing, and management of requests will directly affect your risks and errors ratio.

Galexy's collaborative portal ensures that requests are received, routed, and managed in the most efficient and accurate way possible, reducing the chances of errors and omissions. It also ensures that requests are properly tracked and monitored, allowing legal departments to quickly identify any issues that may arise and address them in a timely manner.

Lastly, it can provide legal departments with useful data and insights into the types of requests they receive, allowing them to proactively plan for future needs and potential issues.


Collaborating Across the Company

Having a clear and accurate intake process can help the legal department better understand the needs of the organisation, and provide the necessary legal services in a timely and effective manner. This, in turn, can help improve collaboration between the legal department and other departments, as they will be able to better understand the legal issues that need to be addressed and the resources that need to be allocated.

Examples:
  • Leveraging workflows
  • Having structured data points to streamline the progress of a file
  • Sharing access to a “collaborative space” such as a ticket where users can access and add/modify information
  • Audit friendly
Imagine a request being sent to legal by email, and many inputs are required (IT, finance, sales, procurement, legal). This request will maybe be divided into pieces that are sent to the right departments, along with background information and explanations that are added manually. Or it can be a very long and hard to follow email chain that is circulated. There is so much room for misunderstandings, delays, errors or additional back & forth for clarification.

Now imagine that same request coming in through an intake tool that has workflow features, which would automatically route the file to IT, sales, finance, legal, etc. Now let’s add another layer, what if there are “request forms” and for example one of the forms is called “IT Contract review” which automatically asks the user if he has an NDA, IT Security checklist, etc.

Every required person/department can leave notes, add files, etc. Much more structured flow, efficient progress, visible collaboration and very audit friendly as all electronic trails are conserved.
 

Tracking and reporting Directly to Legal

Having an organized and accurate intake process can help to improve communication between legal departments and other departments in the organization, as requests can be routed and managed more effectively.


KPIs
KPIs allow for tracking and reporting on incoming requests to legal by sources, issue, and the individual or team responsible for handling the request.

This can provide important information to legal departments about the types of requests they are receiving, and which departments or individuals should be prioritized for legal assistance.
 

Find out more about our KPIs Tools

 

About the author:

Legal Suite is the worldwide leader in digital transformation for corporate lawyers. We have delivered our state-of-the-art software for general counsel and in-house general counsel to 65,000 users for over two decades. www.legal-suite.com
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