Legal Intake Checklist
A practical checklist for designing or improving a legal intake process.
Use this checklist to assess where your current intake process stands, and identify the next improvement worth making. You don't need every item checked off to see real gains — moving from a few unchecked items to fully checked is often enough to notice a difference.
Foundations: Capturing the Request
Before anything else, a request needs to arrive somewhere structured — not scattered across inboxes, chat threads, and hallway conversations.
- Legal requests enter through a single defined intake point, not multiple inboxes or channels.
- The intake form is tailored to the request type, rather than one generic form for everything.
- The form uses plain language a non-lawyer requester can understand without help.
- Required fields are limited to what's genuinely needed to assess and route the request.
- Requesters receive confirmation that their request was received.
Triage: Assessing What Matters
Once a request is captured, it needs to be assessed — not treated the same as every other request regardless of urgency or complexity.
- Every request is categorized by type before it's assigned to anyone.
- Urgency and risk are assessed as part of triage, not left to whoever picks up the request.
- High-risk or high-value requests are flagged for escalation automatically.
- Low-complexity requests can be handled without a full attorney review.
- Triage criteria are documented, not dependent on one person's judgment.
Routing and Ownership
A triaged request still needs to land with the right person — and stay owned once it does.
- Requests are routed based on type, risk, or specialty, not first-come-first-served.
- Every request has a single named owner at any given time.
- Ownership changes are tracked when a request moves between people or teams.
- Requests can't sit unassigned in a shared queue indefinitely.
Workflow: Moving Work Forward
Intake and routing only matter if the request keeps moving after that — through defined steps, not ad hoc follow-up.
- Each request type has a defined sequence of steps it moves through.
- Approval gates are built into the process, not tracked separately by email.
- Status changes automatically as the request moves through its workflow.
- Requesters can check status without contacting legal directly.
- Workflows are reviewed periodically and adjusted as request patterns change.
Reporting and Visibility
A mature intake process produces data legal operations can actually use — not just faster individual requests.
- Request volume is tracked by type, business unit, and time period.
- Response time and cycle time are measured, not estimated.
- Workload is visible across the team, not just known anecdotally.
- Bottlenecks can be identified from data, without manual reconstruction.
- Reporting is reviewed on a regular cadence — not just when leadership asks for it.
How to read your results
Mostly unchecked in Foundations and Triage: start there before worrying about reporting or workflow automation — those depend on structured intake existing first. Foundations and Triage mostly checked but Workflow and Reporting mostly unchecked: your front door works, but execution and visibility are the gap. Strong across all five sections: you're likely operating close to a Customer-Aligned ELM model already, and the next gains come from refinement, not a fundamental rebuild.
Want this built in rather than tracked manually?
mot-r combines mot-r Q for intake, triage, and routing with mot-r Ops for workflow execution and reporting — so most of this checklist is handled by the platform rather than maintained by hand.
For a deeper look at any one area, see Legal Intake Workflows, Legal Intake Forms, or Legal Intake Metrics — or return to the Legal Intake Resource Center for the full guide.
Ready to modernize your legal intake?
Whether you're exploring legal intake software, redesigning your legal front door, or simply looking for a better way to manage legal requests, we'd be happy to learn about your current process and discuss how mot-r can help.