If you’re a legal ops professional, there is perhaps no aspect of your work that’s more taxing, tiresome, or costly than managing legal matter intake. Requests related to everything from contract negotiations, NDAs, marketing release forms and vendor onboarding approvals all the way to informal one-off requests related to strategy, ESG compliance and other business-critical issues come in from a sporadic array of channels—forms, phone calls, emails, chat messages, etc. Each requires you to stop what you’re doing so that you can triage it, determine the most appropriate response, and define who you need to route it to.
It doesn’t matter that you have lots of forms and apps that are supposed to make all that easier. In fact, they may contribute to the time you burn on those sorts of tasks if they’re scattered and disconnected from one another, because you’ll have to jump from app to app, which forces you into context switching. What’s more: all these forms and apps tend to create a poor user experience for employees on the other side. Which is why employees find workarounds. According to the Onit Enterprise Legal Reputation Report 2022, 67% of employees admit to skipping legal policies and procedures. Which is, to put it lightly, a compliance nightmare that opens your organization up to legal risk exposure and litigation.
Altogether, these issues can be categorized under the same umbrella term: legal intake, triage, and coordination—or ITC.
In legal, ITC problems can feel like an inevitable, necessary evil. But they’re not. A vast majority of legal ITC challenges can be automated—the tasks involved being highly repeatable—you just need the right technology and a means to use it without relying on IT departments or in-house developers.
That’s where Tonkean comes into play.
Tonkean is a first-of-its-kind process experience platform that makes it easy for legal pros to create personalized internal software solutions that can automatically intake, triage, coordinate, and standardize unstructured inbound requests. Tonkean enables you to create the structures, hierarchies, and processes you need, at any scale. And it allows you to easily track the status of all ITC-related work.
And none of this requires the deep technical expertise of software developers or the IT department, because the Tonkean interface is entirely no-code. Anyone who’s adept at thinking through workflows can create custom software solutions to solve their ITC woes.
What’s more, in Tonkean, all of those personalized automations integrate with every app, system, and tool your organization uses.
For example, to handle incoming legal requests, you can easily build a workflow where:
By automating most of the high-volume, repetitive tasks involved in legal intake, triage, and coordination, you reclaim both your time and that of your in-house attorneys. It frees them to focus more of their energy on higher-value work—like those critical times when a request needs the expertise of a skilled professional, or focusing more broadly on company strategy, revenue insights, ESG compliance, and other business-critical issues.
You can accomplish all of that using a single module. Tonkean already has a Legal Intake, Triage, and Coordination module template you can customize. But you can also create and modify modules on your own—all without writing a single line of code.
Left unchecked, ITC challenges do much more than waste time. They burn employees out, inhibit both operational agility and personal creativity, and open up vectors for human errors.
Automate the critical but mundane and time-consuming processes around legal intake, triage, and coordination and regain your time and energy. That’s inherently beneficial—both for the legal team and the individuals and teams they serve.
By doing these things, you also create an environment where legal professionals can focus on their most important work, which leads to better job satisfaction and higher employee retention for them. And the entire organization benefits from creating an environment where your skilled employees bring their best to bear on goals and problem-solving that affect business outcomes.
You’ll also curb vectors for human error, and thanks to the tracking capabilities in a centralized, fully integrated dashboard, you’ll reduce your legal risk exposure simply by using Tonkean, too.
Enterprises all over the world are leveraging Tonkean to revamp the way they operate. In the process, they’re making more strategic and widespread use of technology that was previously accessible only to engineers. They're reducing costs and increasing capacity. They're improving the employee experience. They’re eliminating the need for change management. And they’re empowering employees to spend more time focusing on high-value work.
Want to learn more? Begin exploring the ways you can solve Legal ITC challenges with Tonkean here.
