Coheso Team
Coheso Team
The biggest names in legal AI have embraced legal intake, the place where in-house legal work begins. Here is what that means for General Counsel.
At 4:52 on a Thursday afternoon, a sales director posts in Legal's Slack channel: a customer wants to sign today, and the contract carries an unfamiliar liability cap. On another floor, a procurement lead forwards a vendor's data processing agreement to a lawyer's inbox. Neither request will be logged anywhere.
Multiply those moments by a few hundred a month and you have daily life in most in-house legal departments. As of this month, it is also the most contested ground in legal technology.
Legal intake is the process an in-house legal team uses to capture, structure and route every request from the business into one place. The system that delivers it is known as a legal front door. In mid-October, Harvey and Legora launched products called Intake within a day of each other, and both describe them in exactly those terms.
Why the biggest names in legal AI turned to intake
Legal AI companies are moving into intake because intake is where every piece of legal work, and every piece of legal data, begins.
The logic follows the economics of AI. A model is only as useful as the context it receives, and a forwarded email with no counterparty or deadline gives it little to work with, a gap Coheso has called the missing infrastructure behind legal AI. Structured intake fixes that at the source, which is why in-house leaders increasingly structure first, then automate.
Intake also widens a platform's reach. Most legal AI serves lawyers; a front door serves everyone who needs Legal, from Sales to HR.
For Coheso, the moment feels familiar. Intake was the first thing it built for in-house teams, and its guide to the legal front door appeared in August 2025. Covering Legora's launch, the trade publication Artificial Lawyer drew the distinction itself: some companies, Coheso among them, began with intake and broadened outward, while the large platforms are now building inward.
What a legal front door is supposed to do
A legal front door is a single, structured entry point for every request to Legal: it captures work where the business operates, resolves what it safely can and keeps a reliable record of the rest.
Capture comes first, from Slack, Teams, Outlook and Gmail, because asking a sales team to learn a new portal is the surest way to kill adoption. Routine questions should be answered from approved policies with the source shown, through AI self-service and agentic workflows that act the moment a request arrives.
Work that needs a person needs an owner and a visible status, which is why leading teams connect intake and work management. And every request should feed legal analytics that let a General Counsel show what Legal delivers.
Three companies, one door, different destinations
Coheso, Harvey and Legora agree on the fundamentals of legal intake; they part ways on where a request goes once it is inside. All three capture requests in familiar tools and let AI take a first pass, with a lawyer accountable for the outcome.
Harvey routes each request to an approved agent, to its Contract Intelligence product or to a lawyer, drawing from channels such as email, Slack, Jira and ServiceNow. Legora's Intake launched in Slack, with its agent scoping each request and turning it into a tracked task, configured by Legora's Legal Engineers. In both cases, intake joins a broad AI platform built first for lawyers.
Coheso began at the point of arrival and built inward. Intake, triage, self-service, work management and analytics were designed together around a single record of every request, connected to the contract and e-signature tools a team already runs.
The advantage of starting at the door
Once every vendor can capture and route a request, the front door that matters is the one that resolves work at the source, becomes a daily habit and proves Legal's value.
Resolution starts in the conversation. When a product manager asks in Slack whether she can sign a vendor's NDA, a Coheso agent gathers the missing context, checks Legal's guidance and either settles the request or hands it to a lawyer with everything attached. Customers report routine questions answered up to 75 percent faster and more than eight hours saved per attorney each week; teams can model their own figures with the legal ROI calculator.
Adoption decides everything else. TaskRabbit's legal team expected six months to a year before the business used Coheso in earnest; usage reached 99 percent on day one.
The playbook also gets smarter in public. Coheso shows which documents its AI relies on and which questions it cannot yet answer, so self-service coverage grows month by month.
And the record compounds. Analytics on volume, turnaround and demand by department give a GC evidence for budget and board conversations. Teams go from kickoff to production in four to six weeks, as M42 found across multiple jurisdictions.
What General Counsel should ask before choosing
The quickest way to judge a legal intake platform is to follow one request from the first Slack message to the quarterly report.
Ask whether intake was the platform's foundation or a recent addition. Ask whether business users can submit requests and get answers without leaving Slack, Teams or email, and whether those answers cite approved sources. Then ask who owns a request that needs a lawyer, what the platform reveals about demand, whether it works with your existing tools and how soon you will be live.
The door is where legal work is won
The arrival of Harvey and Legora in legal intake confirms what in-house teams have long known: the front door is where legal operations succeed or fail.
Back on that Thursday afternoon, the sales director's message and the forwarded agreement would each land in one place, with an owner, a status and, where possible, an answer before the day is out. That is the promise of a legal front door, and the one Coheso was built to keep.
See Coheso's legal front door in a 30-minute demo.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is legal intake software?
Legal intake software captures requests to an in-house legal team from channels such as email, Slack and Teams, structures them and routes them to the right lawyer, AI agent or self-service answer. Read more in this guide to legal intake.
What is a legal front door?
A legal front door is a single, structured entry point for every request to Legal, combining intake with routing, self-service, work management and analytics.
Can a legal front door resolve requests without a lawyer?
Yes, for routine work within rules Legal sets, such as policy questions answered from approved documents or standard NDAs generated from templates. Anything sensitive goes to a lawyer with the full context attached.
How do you get the business to adopt a legal front door?
Meet people in the tools they already use. When requests can be raised and answered in Slack, Teams, Gmail or Outlook, there is nothing new to learn.
How does Coheso's legal front door work?
Coheso captures requests from Slack, Teams, Gmail and Outlook, uses AI to triage them, resolves routine work through self-service and agents, and manages the rest in one shared view with built-in analytics.
How quickly can a legal team go live with Coheso?
Most teams move from kickoff to production in four to six weeks, with workflows, playbooks and integrations configured by Coheso.