Over the last few months I've had dozens of conversations with in-house lawyers about how they work. While every organization is different, three key roles have emerged as a common denominator: the requester, the lawyer, and the general counsel.

The requester is someone on the commercial side. They're trying to get a deal signed, a supplier approved, a policy question answered. From where they sit, legal is a step in a process, and they want that step to be fast and low-friction.

Then there's the lawyer fielding those requests. The lawyer is the person responding to those requests, for which they need the full context before they can do anything useful. They want to protect the organization from risk while also being commercial, acting as a partner to the business rather than being a blocker.

Finally there's the general counsel. The GC cares about matching the team's expertise and capacity to the organization's most important legal needs. To do that job well, they need insight about the kind of work that comes in and how it gets completed.

When these three roles slot together, the legal department works like a well-oiled machine. In most of my conversations, what I hear instead is a broken process that fails to protect a legal team's scarcest resource, the attention of its best people.

Scoping the request

A business stakeholder knows what they want to achieve. They may not know what a lawyer needs to help them get there, and we shouldn't expect them to. When a salesperson pings legal to ask for a quick look at a contract renewal, they attach what they have and assume that's enough. But often it’s missing key additional information, like schedule documents to which the contract refers, processes followed before deciding on the extension, and so on.

Intake forms can help, because they steer the requester on what they need to provide. But a fixed set of questions often feels ill-adapted to the wide array of requests that can come through. Make the form too short and legal still has to fill the gaps. Make it too detailed and the requester simply sidesteps the intake form, or sometimes even the legal team altogether. According to Onit's 2023 Enterprise Legal Reputation Report, 67% of enterprise employees admit to bypassing legal, even when they know it breaches policy.

The standard should be a flexible system that meets requesters where they are, asking only relevant clarifying questions to gather the context needed by the legal team and nothing more.

Performing the work

Legal work is not all the same. Some of it is routine and repeatable: standard NDAs, security questionnaires, basic compliance queries. This work follows predictable patterns. It draws on the same precedents every time. The legal judgment involved is real, but it doesn't vary much from one instance to the next. Research carried out by EY has found that 27% of in-house legal professionals' time goes to routine and low-value tasks, rising to 32% in larger functions. Work like this should be streamlined, and increasingly, it can benefit from automation.

Other work is genuinely complex: an acquisition, a novel regulatory point, a counterparty pushing back on terms that matter. This work requires a lawyer's full attention. But it doesn't need to start from a blank page. As every lawyer knows, it’s far better to review a strong first pass than to start from scratch.

That means resetting the default ways of working for lawyers. When a lawyer takes a first look at a request, it should contain all the context needed, and it should contain a draft response ready for their review. And in some cases, where the question is simple and the answer is clear based on trusted positions, it might not need their review at all.

Understanding the workload

A general counsel is expected to maximize the return on their team, explain where legal time is going, and make the business case for investment in headcount or tooling. All of that requires data: on volume, on turnaround time, on which types of work are consuming the most capacity. In most organizations, that data doesn't exist in any systematic form.

Without that information, the GC is flying blind. They know the team is busy, but they don’t know where the bottlenecks lie or what to do about them. Decisions about hiring, about process, about where to focus improvement efforts rest on instinct rather than evidence.

CLOC's 2026 State of the Industry Report found that less than a third of legal departments expect attorney headcount to grow, even as demand for legal support rises. Deploying a fixed headcount against a rising workload requires GCs to become more data driven in the way they work.

What this costs

There's a cost to all of this that doesn't show up in any report. It shows up in the relationship between legal and the rest of the organization.

When the process makes it too hard to get a fast answer, the commercial org bypasses legal. On the other side, lawyers who spend their weekends working down a backlog of routine work feel demoralised and undervalued. That matters for retention, and for obtaining the right talent to match the legal requirements of the business.

Giving lawyers a new tool inside the old process only speeds up the lawyer's work. The request still arrives incomplete, routine work still consumes senior time, and the GC still can't see where the hours are going. The gains that matter come from changing the process itself.

That's why we are building Intake. It is a legal front door that changes the process itself, so routine requests can be answered instantly, complex requests come with a first pass answer for review by counsel, and the GC receives actionable insights into the work carried out by their team. More to come soon.