How to Run a Legal Front Door (Intake) for Contract Requests

What is a legal front door, and why does a legal team need one? A legal front door is a single, defined way for the business to ask the legal team for help, instead of requests arriving by email, chat, corridor conversation and forwarded threads. It is the intake system for legal work: one place to raise a request, with the information legal needs to act, so nothing is lost and everything can be tracked. Without a front door, a legal team cannot see its own workload. Requests scatter across inboxes, some are forgotten, priorities are set by whoever shouts loudest, and no one can say how much work legal does or how long it takes. A legal front door fixes all of that by making one channel the only channel. This is general guidance, not legal advice. ## Why intake is the foundation of everything else Intake sounds like a small thing, but it is the foundation that approval SLAs, workload reporting and self serve all sit on. You cannot set a turnaround target if you do not know when the clock started. You cannot report your workload if half of it never entered a system. You cannot route work to the right person if it lands in one inbox. Fix intake first, and the rest becomes possible. ## How to build a legal front door 1. Choose one channel and make it the only one. It can be a form, a ticketing tool, a channel in your workspace app, or the intake feature of a contract platform. What matters is that there is exactly one, and that the team politely redirects requests that come any other way back to it. 2. Capture the right information up front. A good intake form stops the back and forth of "what do you actually need". Capture: - Requester name, team and manager

• Type of request (new contract, review counterparty paper, renewal, question)
• Counterparty name
• Contract value and currency
• Deadline and why
• A short description of what is needed
• Any documents (the draft, the counterparty's paper, the term sheet)
• Priority or business impact 3. Triage and route. When a request arrives, classify it by type and risk, apply the right SLA tier, and route it to the right person. Simple requests may go straight to a self serve template; complex ones to a specific lawyer. 4. Offer self serve for standard needs. The best request is the one legal never has to touch. Publish standard templates (NDAs, simple orders) the business can use alone, so the front door filters out routine work and reserves lawyers for what needs them. 5. Track every request to closure. Each request should have a status the requester can see, an owner, and a record of what happened, so nothing stalls silently and you can measure turnaround. ## A sample intake form ``` LEGAL REQUEST INTAKE 1. Your name, team and manager:

2. Type of request: [ ] New contract (we are drafting) [ ] Review a counterparty's contract [ ] Renewal or amendment [ ] Legal question (no contract)
3. Counterparty name:
4. Contract value and currency:
5. Needed by (date) and why:
6. What do you need, in one or two lines:
7. Attach any documents (draft, counterparty paper, term sheet):
8. Business impact if delayed: [ ] Low [ ] Medium [ ] High

- Percentage of requests coming through the front door versus other channels
- Cycle time from request to closure, by tier
- Percentage handled by self serve without legal review
- Open backlog and oldest open request These numbers do two things: they let you improve, and they let you show the business what legal actually handles, which is how a legal team justifies its resource. ## How to launch a front door without resistance A front door only works if people use it, and people resist a new process that feels like extra friction. A few things make adoption stick. - **Make it faster than the old way.** If the form is quicker and gets a faster response than emailing a lawyer directly, people switch on their own. If it is slower, they route around it.
- **Redirect gently but consistently.** When a request still arrives by email or chat, reply politely with the link and ask them to log it there. Do this every time. The channel becomes the channel only when there are no exceptions.
- **Get leadership to back it.** When the heads of sales, procurement and finance tell their teams to use the front door, adoption follows far faster than legal asking alone.
- **Show the business what it gets.** Faster turnaround, a visible status, and self serve templates are real benefits. Frame the front door as a better service, not a new hoop.
- **Start simple and improve.** Launch with a short form and a single channel, then add triage rules, self serve templates and reporting as the habit forms. A perfect system no one adopts is worse than a simple one everyone uses. ## Common mistakes to avoid - Launching a front door but still answering requests that come by email, so the channel never becomes the channel.
- An intake form so long that people avoid it, or so short that it triggers endless follow up questions.
- No triage, so everything lands in one queue regardless of urgency or risk.
- No self serve lane, so routine NDAs consume the same intake as complex deals.
- Tracking nothing, so the front door collects requests but produces no insight. ## Where a workspace makes the front door real A form collects requests, but the value appears when intake, drafting, review, tracking and reporting live in the same place. Then a request becomes a file linked to its contract and counterparty, routed to an owner, with a live timeline of everything that happened and the key dates in view, and you can measure cycle time without stitching tools together. A contract workspace tuned to how your company contracts, such as [Adira](https://adiralaw.com), is built around that single workspace idea, with files, cases, an activity timeline and action items in one place. A front door is the entry point; a workspace is what makes everything behind the door flow.