Fixing legal intake starts with how people knock on the door

Designing a single intake path to replace informal requests and capture institutional knowledge.

👋 Hey there, I’m Hadassah. Each week, I unpack how in-house legal teams use AI to enable the business, protect against risk, and free up time for the work they enjoy most—what works, what doesn’t, and the quick wins that make all the difference.

Before we dive in, a quick note: this is just one example of a legal team solving an operational bottleneck. There are plenty of ways to approach these kinds of problems, and the right solution will always depend on your specific needs and context. My goal is to give you some food for thought as you define what that solution should be.

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Problem

The legal team we spoke to this week was operating without a clear front door. Requests arrived through every possible channel—email, Teams, WhatsApp, hallway conversations—often without context or consistency. As a result, lawyers struggled to prioritise effectively, track ownership, or even remember which requests were still outstanding. Some matters slipped through the cracks entirely, others bounced around as lawyers tried to work out who should handle what.

At the same time, the team had quietly become the informal help centre for the business. Lawyers repeatedly answered the same operational questions about approvals, signatories, templates, and jurisdiction-specific processes, with no mechanism to capture or reuse those answers. Knowledge lived in inboxes and individual memories, disappearing team members moved on.

The result was wasted time, unnecessary back-and-forth with the rest of the business, and no reliable data to show what the team was working on or how it contributed to business goals. Without visibility or control, the risk of becoming a bottleneck increased, and the team had no practical way to fix it using their existing processes.

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Solution

So… the team decided to take back control over how work entered the department. Rather than trying to optimise downstream work, they focused on the very first interaction: intake. The goal was to create a single, structured front door that would replace informal channels, capture the right information upfront, and route requests intelligently without adding friction for the business. The resulting setup centred on Coheso.

Let’s dig a little deeper: Coheso was implemented as the single entry point for legal requests, providing structured intake forms with built-in conditionality so business users only answered relevant questions. Requests were automatically assigned to the appropriate lawyer based on predefined rules, removing the need for manual triage. Coheso also provided Q&A functionality; this allowed the team to encode operational knowledge—such as delegation of authority or common procedural guidance —to prevent lawyers from being involved directly in answering routine questions.

The broader tech stack reinforced this workflow. Coheso integrated via API with the company’s CLM system, LinkSquares, allowing data collected at intake to flow directly into contract generation and downstream processes. The team continued to operate within a Microsoft environment, but Coheso became the dedicated starting point for legal work. The goal was not just speed, but control: fewer handoffs, clearer ownership, better data, and habits that would scale as the team evolved.

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Results

• Requests that previously arrived through multiple informal channels were routed through a single, structured intake process.

• Lawyers gained visibility into request types, ownership, and recurring operational questions, reducing reliance on individual memory.

• Time spent answering repetitive “help centre”-style questions decreased as knowledge was captured and reused.

• The legal team established a foundation for data-driven reporting on workload, request complexity, and business impact.

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Process

The project unfolded gradually, with discovery preceding any technical decisions. One-on-one conversations with every lawyer on the team surfaced pain points, workflow bottlenecks, and blind spots. These discussions also highlighted a cultural reality: most team members had never worked with a legal front door before, and many assumed unstructured intake was simply how legal work is done. These insights shaped a clear objective: standardise intake, preserve institutional knowledge, and reduce time spent acting as an on-demand help-centre. Only after defining these needs did the team select a solution designed to meet them where they were.

Rather than imposing a solution, the Head of Legal involved lawyers directly in designing it. Small working groups iterated on intake forms, testing conditional logic and refining questions to ensure requests arrived with the information lawyers actually needed. Responsibility was distributed by subject matter, allowing different team members to shape forms relevant to their domains of work. This collaborative approach helped surface inconsistencies—think: multiple versions of the same template—and created momentum for standardisation.

Vendor selection followed this internal alignment. After evaluating multiple tools and experiencing significant tech fatigue, Coheso was chosen based on its ability to support structured intake, auto-assignment, and a user experience the team felt comfortable leaning into. The decision was pragmatic and fast once requirements were clear, with leadership alignment secured through a focused demonstration rather than a prolonged approval process.

Adoption proved more complex than anticipated as it ultimately relied less on configuration and more on behavioural change. Not to mention, security reviews, hosting requirements, and vendor coordination stretched timelines. An external implementation operations contractor helped bridge technical conversations, while the legal team worked through parallel efforts to address the deeper challenge of trust and habit formation within the team itself. Lawyers were cautious about relying on new tools, particularly those with AI functionality, and some struggled to engage with the system effectively without reverting to familiar workarounds.

This is also why a traditional “go-live” would not be enough to get this new workflow off the ground. Instead, adoption had to be reinforced through continuous engagement: iterative form improvements, hands-on guidance, and targeted training focused on how lawyers actually worked. By slowing down rollout, doubling down on pilots, and investing in practical training, the team avoided forcing change before users were ready. The result was not immediate transformation, but a foundation for sustained use.

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Quick Wins

To get to that end-state, this team acknowledged that building a legal front door is as much about reshaping habits and expectations as it is about introducing new technology. And they did so not with a big bang but with small, practical wins that built momentum and kept the project moving forward.

For them, those wins looked like:

• Therapy-style discovery sessions. One-on-one conversations with every lawyer on the team surfaced real friction points and created early buy-in before any tool was introduced.

• Collaborative form design. Intake forms were built and tested by the lawyers who would use them, ensuring they were relevant to the actual work to be done and reducing resistance down the line.

• Early-on standardisation of templates. Centralising and cleaning up templates removed downstream confusion and made structured intake viable.

• Clear ownership rules. Auto-assignment eliminated informal forwarding and made responsibility visible from the moment a request for support was submitted.

• Training focused on habits, not features. Ongoing guidance helped lawyers learn how to use the system properly—for instance, through effective prompting—to make sure every lawyer felt enabled to get the most out of the new way of working.

• Incremental rollout. Piloting forms and workflows allowed the solution to mature organically instead of forcing immediate, full-scale adoption.

Now it’s your turn. If your team is dealing with something similar, I hope this story sparks a few practical ideas you can put to work.

And… if you’ve been through something similar—or solved a different operational challenge altogether—I’d love to hear your story and spotlight your win.