Ask an in-house legal team how work reaches them, and the honest answer is usually: however the person felt like asking.
An email to whoever they dealt with last time. A Teams message. Someone stopping a lawyer in the corridor. A forwarded thread with "thoughts?" at the top and forty messages underneath. Occasionally a meeting invitation with no agenda.
Every one of those is a legal matter. None of them starts in a way you can track, prioritise, resource, or report on.
What that actually costs
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You can't see your own workload. Nobody can say how many matters are open, what stage they're at, or who's carrying too much - because there's no list. Each lawyer holds their own mental model, spreadsheet, or Word document.
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Work is invisible until it's late. A request sitting in an inbox while someone's on leave isn't visible to anyone else. It surfaces when the business chases.
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Everything gets treated the same. Without triage, a routine NDA and a significant commercial negotiation arrive through the same channel with the same apparent urgency. The team's most expensive time gets allocated by whoever asks most persistently.
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You can't demonstrate value. When the conversation about legal team resourcing comes around, you have anecdotes. Anecdotes lose to spreadsheets.
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And it's the root cause of most of the other problems. If a matter never gets registered, there's no matter site for the documents to go into, so they end up in mailboxes and shared drives. Bad intake creates bad information architecture downstream, which makes everything else harder.
One front door
The fix is a single intake form, embedded where the business already goes - an intranet page, a Teams tab, a link in the standard email signature of everyone in the legal team. Not an inbox.
What it should capture is straightforward:
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Who is asking, and for what
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By when, and what happens if it's late
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Which business unit, and what risk category
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Enough detail that legal can triage without a round of clarifying questions
The last point is where most intake forms fail, in both directions. Too few questions and you're back to email. Too many and people abandon it, or complete it badly to get past it. Getting that balance right is essential, and it's worth doing deliberately rather than hoping.
Triage: matter, or quick answer?
Not every request should become a matter. Some things are a two-minute answer, and forcing them through a matter process is worse for everyone.
So the first decision after intake is a triage decision: is this a matter, a quick answer, or something the business should be self-serving with a template and some guidance?
That decision is a judgement call, but it should be made against written rules - which is a topic in its own right, and I'll come back to it later in this series.
Then let the system do the setup.
Once something is determined to be a matter, Microsoft’s Power Automate can do the administrative work nobody wants to do and nobody does consistently:
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Create the matter site or folder structure in SharePoint
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Apply the right permissions and retention
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Add the matter to the register with a stage, an owner, a summary and a deadline
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Notify whoever it's assigned to
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Acknowledge receipt to the person who asked
That last one is worth more than it sounds. A large part of the business's frustration with legal isn't turnaround time. It's not knowing whether anyone has picked the request up and when they will have an outcome.
The register is the point.
What you end up with is a matter register - every matter, current stage, owner, tasks and reminders, timeframes and cost.
A Power App sits on top of that register to give the team a view of everything. It's also what lets you answer questions you currently can't: how much work came from each business unit, what our actual turnaround times are, which matter types consume the most time, and whether the growth in demand justifies another lawyer or new technology.
A note on the form itself
Microsoft Forms will do this, and if it's the difference between having intake and not having intake, use it.
But for legal intake we generally use Cognito Forms instead, because the requirements outgrow Microsoft Forms fairly quickly. You want branching, so a procurement request asks different questions from an employment one. You want calculations. And you want the form to be able to create documents automatically, so a straightforward request can generate its own first draft rather than joining a queue.
That last capability is what turns intake from an administrative improvement into something considerably more useful - which is the self-service path, and a subject for another day.
Cognito Forms integrates easily with SharePoint via Microsoft Power Automate and is quick to design, build, and amend as your requirements evolve.
You can try an example Cognito Forms intake form here.
If you'd like to talk through what this would look like for your team, I'm always happy to talk it through.
This post is part of a series on building an in-house legal operating system on the Microsoft 365 you already have.
