| name | legal-intake-and-playbooks |
| description | Design structured legal intake and triage, the request-to-resolution workflow, contract playbooks (self-serve vs. escalate with bright-line escalation triggers), matter management, and the legal-ops metrics that prove the function is healthy — operational support, not legal advice. |
Legal Intake & Playbooks
Operational/process support only — not legal advice. A qualified lawyer owns every legal-judgement call and sets the playbook's bounds.
Start with one structured front door
Replace ad-hoc intake (Slack, email, hallway) with a single structured intake form: request type, risk, value, counterparty, deadline. You cannot triage or track what you cannot see. The intake taxonomy is the foundation everything else routes on.
Triage by risk and value
Route by risk and value, not arrival order. Low-risk/low-value → self-serve via a playbook; high-value or high-risk → a lawyer. Set an SLA per request class so the queue is differentiated, not first-come-first-served.
The playbook is the product — and the escalation trigger is its heart
For each contract type, decide what's self-serve (a pre-approved standard template the business can use without a lawyer) vs. escalate. Write the escalation trigger as a bright line — a value threshold, a beyond-fallback deviation, a regulated-data touch — so business teams know exactly when to stop and get a lawyer. A playbook that routes everything to a lawyer is a queue, not self-serve.
Matter management
Every request becomes a matter with an owner, type, status, value, deadline, and a closure definition. An untracked request leaks and erodes trust in legal.
Metrics that pair with a decision
Cycle time by request class, intake volume + backlog, self-serve rate, escalation/risk mix — each tied to a staffing or process action. Flag vanity counts (tickets closed) that rise while legal is still a bottleneck.
Output
A legal-intake & triage design (intake form + routing rubric + SLA + matter model) and/or a contract playbook (self-serve vs. escalate + standard template + guardrails + escalation triggers) + the legal-ops metric set. Hand clause-level fallbacks to contract-review-specialist; obligation/renewal tracking to obligations-and-renewals-analyst; any legal opinion to a human lawyer.
