Designing legal intake for how people actually ask questions
A practical look at agents, Slack, and habit-building inside an existing tech stack.
đ Hey there, Iâm 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 mostâwhat works, what doesnât, 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.
Problem
This time, weâre joined by the Legal Ops Manager at a global HealthTech company. When it came time to audit their hours, this team found that they were spending 8-10 hours a week answering questions across the business on repeat. These questions were as basic as:
Do I need Legal review for this contract?
Whoâs authorised to sign?
Can I work from Spain next month?
Whoâs the DocuSign owner?
They quickly realised the issue wasnât just the volume, but also the many ways requests came in. Rather than digging through company policies, business teams defaulted to informally asking Legal for quick answers in Slack DMs, stray emails, and even hallway conversations.
Because there was no single, centralised, and structured intake channel, there was no way to manage expectations and triage effectively. Inevitably, this kept Legal from focusing on strategic projects and turned them into a bottleneck that slowed down the business.
Solution
It was clear for this team that something had to change, but they didnât want to add costly tools to their stack or bother IT for support. Their solution came in the form of a light-weight agent-supported intake and triage flow built entirely using low-cost tools the business was already using:
Slack;
Google Forms;
Google Sheets;
Jira; and
Letâs dig a little deeper: Slackâbeing the companyâs central communication channelâwas used as the solutionâs main interface, with local slack channels for each country hosting day-to-day business operations. Each of these channels was connected to a localised agent powered by Wordsmith AI and trained on the companyâs policies to immediately handle common queries in the local language.
For questions that required deeper review, the agent redirected business users to a simple Google Form, which Zapier then routed through a Google Sheet and automatically turned it into a Jira ticket. Once complete, the legal team received real-time Slack alerts for each new submission, and each alert could be configured for specific types of questions to notify relevant team members directly.
Results
The team cut 50-60% of routine, low-value questions, freeing lawyers from hours of weekly copy-paste responses and improving response times across the board.
Requests that previously arrived through multiple channels now flow through a single, automated, trackable channel, giving the team full visibility.
Process
To get to these results, the team took on a hands-on approach to adoption, creating short Loom videos that showed exactly how the new flow worked and what kinds of questions the agent could handle. Local legal counsel followed up with friendly, direct messages to their business partners, explaining the new process in plain language. The goal wasnât simply to drive adoption on paper but to create a good experience for the business and encourage users to engage with the system.
Of course, habits die hard. Some business users still pinged lawyers directly or skipped the new process entirely. This wasnât a system failure, but rather a natural component of change management. To overcome this adoption hurdle, lawyers were coached to be explicitly strict, steering informal requests right back through the agent or Google Forms. None of this was about gatekeeping, it was about building a habit.
Due to budget constraints, picking the right solution was bound by the requirement to work within the existing tech stack, integrating with tools the business already used. Because the solution lived inside the existing stack, business users were met where they already worked. There were no new logins, no high-touch training sessions, no steep learning curve. People realised they got faster, clearer responses through the new process. And once that clicked, adoption wasnât a battle, but rather a mindset shift.
Of course there were limitations. Only limited Jira licenses were available and setting up the automation function wasnât entirely plug-and-play either. Getting around this all required some creative thinking as well as trial-and-error, but in the end it meant the team could avoid introducing entirely new tools that might not be adopted or would further separate them from the rest of the business.
Finally, to build trust into the DNA of the solution, the legal team continued to monitor the dedicated Slack channels to provide support and verify the agent-generated answers, jumping in when needed, and managing incoming requests directly in Jira through Slack alerts or the platform itself.
Quick Wins
It wasnât a shiny new piece of tech that made this workflow stick. It was the way the team approached the problem as well as the messy middleâmeeting business users where theyâre at, working creatively with existing tools, and building habit from day one. Getting a new workflow off the ground is rarely about one big moment of success. More often, itâs about the small, practical wins that build momentum and keep a project moving forward.
For this legal team, those wins looked like:
Localised Slack channels. Creating country-specific channels for legal queries was a simple move with instant impact; it centralised questions, improved visibility, and made it easy for business users to know exactly where to go.
Local-language agents. Deploying agents that could respond to business users in their local language immediately deflected a large chunk of routine questions.
Licensing workaround. Using Google Forms as the intake method was a smart workaround to avoid the licensing barrier posed by the limited Jira licenses available, ensuring universal access without additional spend.
Persistent enforcement. The legal team reinforced the new workflow by redirecting informal requests right back through the agent or Google Form. This encouraged business users to adopt the new process organically, driving early satisfaction and uptake.
Now itâs 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 youâve been through something similarâor solved a different operational challenge altogetherâIâd love to hear your story and spotlight your win.