Legal Requests & Intake

Legal requests and intake is the process of capturing requests for legal services and starting each one with complete information. Without a single intake channel, legal teams field asks by email and chat, lose track of what is open, and cannot report on their workload. SmartSuite collects requests through forms, routes them with automations, and tracks them on a dashboard, so the legal team sees demand as a managed queue.

Each request type has its own form, or its own section of one form, with required fields and conditional questions that appear only when they apply. A contract request asks for the counterparty and value; a compliance inquiry asks for the regulation and deadline. Submissions land in the request table as records, complete on arrival.

Automations assign each request when it arrives, using rules on request type, business unit, urgency, and the current workload of each lawyer. Priority is a field the rules can set and the team can override. A daily view sorted by priority and due date tells each lawyer what to pick up next.

A request that needs a contract creates a linked contract record in Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM); a request that becomes a case creates a linked matter in Legal Matter Management. The request keeps its link to the work it started, so the requester can follow progress from the original submission. Legal operations reports on the whole chain, from ask to outcome.

Dashboards show open requests by type, owner, and age, average time to first response and to completion, and the backlog trend, with each widget drilling into the requests behind it. Managers rebalance work from the same page. The business sees a status on its own requests without emailing the team.

Yes. Intake forms can be shared across business units, regions, and languages, with routing rules per unit and permissions that keep each team’s requests separate. Reporting rolls up across all of them for the general counsel. Adding a new business unit means adding routing rules, not a new form system.

Efficiency comes from the first minutes of each request: complete information at submission, automatic assignment, and a clear due date mean the lawyer starts the work instead of chasing the details. Repeat request types get standard task lists from an automation. The time saved shows up in the response-time report.

Service delivery improves because requesters get the same experience every time: a form that asks the right questions, a confirmation, and visible status until the work is done. Legal can show the business its volumes, response times, and where demand comes from, which turns an invisible service into a measured one.