Six Must-Have Features to Look for in Legal Intake Software for Corporate Legal

Legal intake software transforms a task that is often a frequent and significant contributor to a corporate legal department’s organizational chaos.

With no standard legal service request process or legal intake software, tracking and assigning requests is nearly impossible. Business partner requests for legal services are often tossed into the legal department sporadically by email, text or informal conversations from various departments. Usually, the requests omit necessary resources or documents, necessitating an email or phone conversation to obtain the relevant materials before the actual legal work can begin.

To overcome these obstacles, corporate legal departments should consider automated legal intake software.

By implementing an intelligent, self-service portal to initiate legal service requests, the first phase of the battle is already won. Information can be shared across departments and systems with this solution. Fewer staff members will need to spend time entering data for the same client and matter, saving money.

The benefits of legal service request (LSR) software include:

• The ability to streamline and simplify the legal service request process
• A drastic reduction of the cycle time spent on manual, administrative tasks
• More time to focus on high-value legal tasks
• Enhanced responsiveness to your business partners

If you think that LSR software would be a great thing to have in your corporate legal department, you are right.

Six Features You Should Look For In Legal Intake Software

1. Central intake – The ability to support a central intake process for all legal service requests not only simplifies the process but it provides a complete audit trail as well.
2. User-friendly Interface – The software should be intuitive, easy to learn and even easier to use with virtually no training to get started.
3. Variable Workflow – The workflow process should be flexible and easy to change, meaning legal service requests can be altered, reviewed and approved by all the participants and new approvers can be quickly added without slowing down the process.
4. Automated Notifications – Eliminate the “black box” perception. The software should automatically generate notifications to keep business partners updated on the status of their requests.
5. Reporting & Dashboards – Reporting and dashboard views enable the corporate legal department to track legal service requests by region, department, business unit or other criteria.
6. Rapid Deployment – A quick deployment means little or no IT involvement, so the corporate legal department can be up and running quickly.

All of this will allow the legal department to spend more time focusing on business consumers’ needs – not following up on paperwork and other purely administrative and time-consuming tasks. With well-chosen legal service request software, the legal department can provide higher quality services, operate more efficiently and become a driving force in fueling the company’s success.

To learn more about legal service request software, visit here or request a demo of how Onit can automate your legal service requests.