What Is a Legal Front Door? A Guide to Modern Legal Intake

Transform your corporate legal department with intelligent legal intake management and automated workflow solutions

Corporate Legal Teams are Under Pressure

Business is moving faster than ever, and legal departments are expected to keep pace with the same headcount and resources. The acceleration brought by AI only sharpens this pressure.

Too often, legal teams are still treated as service providers rather than strategic partners. Their work is oriented around business preferences, and requests flood in from every channel imaginable: email, chat, calls, even passing hallway conversations.

As organizational velocity increases, business partners want quick answers. Alongside substantive work, in-house lawyers juggle monitoring requests, following up for missing details, prioritizing, and routing tasks. This time-consuming orchestration takes lawyers away from strategic and impactful work.

Without a dedicated solution or project manager, many legal teams operate in survival mode. Lawyers spend energy managing chaos that could be spent delivering legal insight.

The Legal Front Door Solution

The legal front door offers a solution. A legal front door is a single, structured entry point for all legal queries and requests within an organization. Instead of business teams sending questions through scattered channels, the legal front door directs multi-channel requests into a shared legal view where requests can be captured, tracked, and routed efficiently.

Unlike traditional intake tools that merely collect requests, modern legal front doors act as orchestration layers. In addition to consolidating work, they create the structure that unlocks AI-powered workflows and enables point solutions without additional change management. With consistent, structured intake, automation can finally scale inside legal.

Core features of a legal front door:

• Single entry point – All requests flow into one system, eliminating confusion and ensuring nothing is missed

  
  

• Structured and unstructured intake – Flexible intake options increase adoption and force structure when preferred with forms that capture full details upfront, reducing back-and-forth delays

  
  

• Channel-agnostic intake - Works wherever employees work, from email to Slack to other familiar platforms

  
  

• Visibility and accountability – SLAs, deadlines, and status tracking create transparency for both legal and business stakeholders

  
  

• Analytics and insights – Data surfaces workload trends, turnaround times, and recurring needs, informing smarter resourcing and strategy

  
  

• Self-service with guardrails – Empower business users to get instant answers to routine questions (like NDAs or policy FAQs) without bypassing compliance

  
  

• Enterprise security – SOC2 and GDPR compliant, as well as full audit trails
  
  

These features work together to create a comprehensive intake system that transforms how legal departments operate, moving from reactive overwhelm to proactive orchestration.

Meeting Users Where They Are

Even the most advanced solution fails if people don't use it. Modern legal front doors succeed because they integrate into tools employees already use, rather than forcing behavioral changes that create adoption friction.

Email integration transforms Outlook and Gmail into gateways for legal requests without changing user behavior. When someone sends a request via email, the system captures it seamlessly. Similarly, collaboration platforms like Slack and Teams become structured request channels, converting casual messages into trackable legal work items.

• Email – Outlook and Gmail become gateways to legal requests without changing user behavior

  
  

• Collaboration platforms – Messages from Slack and Teams are structured into requests

  
  

• Document repositories – SharePoint, Box, Google Drive and other common repositories integrate seamlessly to pull in relevant files

  
  

• CLMs – Robust integrations enable two-way sync between intake and CLMs, with the option to kickoff downstream processes  

By reducing the friction of adoption and implementation, integrations make legal operations feel like a natural part of daily workflows.

Structure Then Automate

The legal front door lays the foundation for automation. Without structure, AI has fragmented, inconsistent data to act on and must be applied manually. With structure, every request is captured consistently, making automation safe, scalable, and impactful.

Centralized, consistent data gives AI a reliable base to analyze, while automation with guardrails allows legal teams to determine the appropriate level of human involvement based on risk assessment. This layered orchestration ensures requests can shift between AI and humans without friction, creating workflows that adapt to the complexity and sensitivity of each matter.

The structural foundation is made up of:

• Centralized, consistent data, giving AI a reliable base to analyze

  
  

• Automation with guardrails, allowing legal teams to determine the appropriate level of human involvement based on risk assessment

  
  

• Layered orchestration, ensuring requests can shift between AI and humans without friction
  
  

Legal Intake Management Workflow

In practice, this modern approach to legal operations transforms how corporate legal departments handle business requests: A business user submits a request through email, chat, or another familiar channel, starting their journey without learning new tools or processes. 

The system is flexible and can be set to capture general requests in the work management system or collect key details through a structured form, ensuring all necessary information is captured before the request reaches a member of the legal team. For teams that prefer a more standardized process, business users can be directed to a branded legal hub to submit and track requests, with the option of turning on self-service answers to routine questions. 

Once captured, the request is categorized. Routing rules and AI analysis work together to automatically assign requests to the right category and lawyer. Titles are automatically generated to help organize requests based on the details provided. Status updates become visible without manual follow-ups, creating transparency that keeps everyone informed. Finally, outcomes are logged for reference and reporting, building an institutional knowledge base that becomes more valuable over time.

Ultimately, lawyers spend less time chasing details and more time on substantive work.

Artificial Intelligence in Legal Operations Software

Next-generation legal front door platforms leverage AI to transform legal department efficiency beyond simple request capture.

Intelligence transforms every step of the process through three key capabilities:

• Smart routing - AI reviews request details and directs work to the right team instantly, eliminating human bottlenecks 

  
  

• Automated request titles - Each submission gets labeled clearly for easier prioritization, saving precious triage time 

  
  

• AI agents - Agents generate first-pass reviews for structured requests based on legal guidance, including: NDA checks against standard templates, compliance questions answered from playbooks, and contract reviews for key terms and risks

When a contract request comes in, AI orchestrates a sophisticated workflow that gives lawyers a significant head start. The system routes it to the right lawyer on the team, creates a descriptive title that captures the request, and runs comprehensive checks against templates and playbooks. It then summarizes key findings in the preferred format and flags potential issues for human review.

This approach ensures the consistent application of AI across similar requests, transforming what was once a completely manual process into an intelligent workflow.

Benefits of Implementing a Legal Front Door

The transformation touches every stakeholder in the legal ecosystem.

For legal teams: 

• One system of record - Eliminates information scattered across multiple platforms 

• Faster turnaround - Streamlined intake and automated routing accelerate delivery 

• Workload balance - Automated assignment distributes work more evenly across the team 

• Complete context at intake - Lawyers can start work immediately without hunting for background 

• Data to track performance - Provides insights that enable continuous improvement

For business users: 

• One clear way to reach legal - Eliminates confusion about how to get help 

• Real-time status visibility - No more wondering where requests sit in the process

• Quicker answers - Result from orchestrated processes and self-service capabilities

• Consistent service - Standardized workflows replace ad-hoc approaches

AI Handles the Volume so Humans can Handle Nuance

At the heart of the legal front door is intelligent routing that goes far beyond static intake systems. Modern platforms ensure each request flows to the right destination, whether that's an AI agent for routine tasks or a human lawyer for nuanced matters.

The intelligent routing system operates through three key approaches:

• AI-first resolution – With business self-service, routine questions can be handled instantly

  
  

• Expert escalation – Complex or sensitive requests are directed to the right lawyer

  
  

• Hybrid workflows – Some matters move fluidly between AI and humans, with agents taking a first pass and lawyers reviewing
  
  

Customizable Legal Operations Platforms

Every legal team works differently, and effective front doors adapt rather than force conformity. The best platforms offer flexible configuration across multiple dimensions to match existing team preferences and processes.

Customization options include:

• Entry points – Configured based on team preferences and existing systems

  
  

• Structured vs. unstructured intake – Teams decide when structured forms are required and when free-form inputs are sufficient or preferred

  
  

• Custom categories and forms – Reflect the specific types of work each legal department handles

  
  

• Routing rules – Align with team structure, whether specialized practices or general operations

  
  

• Workflows – Built around existing processes rather than forcing wholesale change

  
  

• AI Agents - Easy to build with simple instructions and relevant reference sources so lawyers maintain control over agent design

These customizations ensure that technology enhances existing team structures and preferences.

Selecting the Right Legal Front Door

Choosing the best legal front door for your legal department is as important as deciding to implement one. The platform will become the day-to-day operating system of your legal department, shaping how every request is received, managed, and tracked. A poor fit can create more friction, while the right solution unlocks scale and strategic impact.

When evaluating vendors, consider these criteria:

• Integration capabilities – The best front doors connect seamlessly with your existing tools, from CLMs and document repositories to email and chat interfaces. Without strong integrations, adoption will suffer.

  
  

• Scalability – Look for a platform that can grow with your department. The system should handle today’s volume and complexity, while accommodating future expansion as automation and AI adoption increase.

  
  

• Support and partnership – Technology alone won’t drive transformation. Vendors that provide robust implementation support, training, and ongoing customer success resources will accelerate time to value.

  
  

• Security and compliance – Since the front door handles sensitive requests and data, enterprise-grade security and audit trails are non-negotiable.

The best vendors are actively preparing your legal team for tomorrow. A future-proof partner will evolve with emerging AI capabilities, expand integrations as new business systems are adopted, and continuously enhance security to meet rising compliance standards.

Return on Investment

With a legal front door system in place, every request becomes trackable, documented, and actionable. Implementations deliver time savings from better intake and automation, as well as compliance benefits from increased visibility and legal access. 

ROI comes from multiple sources that compound over time:

• Operational efficiency – Faster turnaround, fewer follow-ups, and reduced overhead
  
  

• Risk reduction – Audit trails and compliance logs reduce exposure
  
  

• Strategic visibility – Analytics surface demand trends for smarter planning
  
  

The Initial Strategic Shift

Implementing a legal front door is often the best first step for corporate legal departments. As business velocity accelerates and AI transforms professional work, legal teams can’t afford to remain reactive with outdated intake processes.

The shift begins with structure. A legal front door creates visibility into workloads, surfaces opportunities for automation, and orchestrates AI-powered workflows. With the right platform, legal operations move beyond firefighting to deliver data-driven insights, measurable efficiency, and a direct contribution to business growth.

Platforms like Coheso are designed to bring this vision to life. We help legal teams create reliable, scalable processes that evolve with the pace of business. Schedule a demo today to learn how Coheso can augment your intake process.