How automating client intake can benefit your in-house legal team

It’s no secret that recent years have put increasing pressure on in-house legal teams. With ever-increasing workloads, ongoing global crises, and a small to medium sized staff juggling it all, in-house teams have their work cut out for them like never before. But modern technology presents creative solutions for managing all kinds of legal tasks, starting from the very beginning of the process: client intake. 

Client intake is a critical part of your in-house legal operation. Despite its importance, it is also a repetitive and cumbersome task that takes valuable time out of your team’s already busy schedule. Legal automation tools provide an opportunity to unburden your team, taking over the management of low-level processes like intake in favor of more time spent on responsibilities requiring the highly specialized training of a legal professional. 

Here are several ways automating client intake can give back valuable time and resources to your in-house team.

For in-house legal teams, the manual intake of internal clients can be a laborious task. Traditional intake typically results in a lengthy back-and-forth between counsel and client gathering more information before the document can be complete. But, intake is often nearly identical from client to client, with few significant differences in the process. 

The lag caused by intake is one of the blockers to productivity in legal teams that results in work buildup, profit losses, and frustration for all parties. In fact, recent data from analyst firm IDC has found that these kinds of inefficiencies cost legal teams between 20 and 30 percent in revenue every year. 

Automating intake significantly cuts down on inefficiencies and streamlines communication into one simple and efficient process. For in-house legal professionals at global esports performance brand Fnatic, automating these inefficiencies resulted in regaining a full day of time each week. By reducing the number of repetitive steps required to generate an intake document, your team will spend less time and effort on front-end tasks and more time working on meeting the needs of your internal clients.

For small to medium sized in-house teams, efficiency is everything. When work builds up, clients and lawyers both suffer. Automating your client intake helps streamline workflow from the front-end, helping prevent buildup throughout the rest of the legal process. 

For Fnatic’s team, an automated intake bot led to improved satisfaction for staff and clients alike. Clients benefited from self-service tools that empowered them to participate in the process, while lawyers enjoyed less time at the office managing menial tasks.

In fact, data collected by Thomson Reuters reports that lawyers save up to 82% of their time by entrusting tasks like client intake forms to automation. Taking the time-intensive intake process off the plate of your team boosts staff satisfaction and adds valuable time in the day to address other important tasks. A manageable workload for your team also translates into better service for your clients, as lawyers have increased capacity to commit to delivering exceptional results. 

Automating client intake removes concerns of human error resulting from the manual management of critical processes. The accuracy of automated technology speeds the process by replacing time spent on checking documents and emails for missing information and errors, while allowing lawyers and clients to spend less time at the office ironing out minute details. 

Collecting client intake is a critical first step in creating positive communication between client and counsel. Your internal clients depend on in-house counsel to deliver accurate and error-free documentation at every stage, particularly when laying the initial foundation for the professional relationship.

Creating a comprehensive and uniform client intake form for each and every internal client your team serves is time-consuming and difficult when managing the process manually. Leveraging automation technology ensures accuracy and consistency, time and time again.