Remember playing the game Mousetrap as a kid? If you never played, the board would be set up with varying chain reactions that would be set off based on where you were on the board. Landing on certain spaces would unhinge a mechanical boot that would kick a marble that would roll down a slide and trigger a net to catch the mouse. It was hard to set it up, but always visually worth it: I was fascinated by the precise functions of every moving piece to create these intricate chain reactions.

What does all this have to do with legal request intake? Well, it’s like building the mousetrap — getting it right requires a lot of planning, and you have to begin with the end in mind. What are you trying to accomplish? What are the steps in the process? Who needs to be involved within the legal department? Outside the legal department?

First, a word of warning: You can build the best process in the world, but if using it doesn’t help you accomplish your goals, what value does it truly have? As you build your process, keep asking if the changes simplify your current practice…or is it just putting lipstick on a pig?

That being said, the legal workflows ripe for automation are characterized by tedious, repetitive, time-consuming requests that have nothing to do with your company’s core business. A primary example is the intake and processing of third-party subpoenas and other service of process requests (SOPs). 

As you assess potential automation opportunities in your organization’s legal workflows, consider prioritizing these areas:

Automate triage 

As SOPs come in, replacing a manual intake process with any type of automation will result in significant time savings, which translates to increased productivity and lower costs. A simple mechanism to automatically route SOPs to the right team member means removing the initial triage that can take 5-10 minutes per SOP – open, acknowledge, analyze, and route. Five minutes per document doesn’t seem like a lot, but it all adds up: a company that receives 1,000 SOPs per month generates a time savings of 1,000 hours per year!

Centralize teams 

A centralized platform has never been more relevant. As remote work and distributed teams become the norm rather than the exception, having a centralized platform to manage SOPs, law enforcement requests (LERs), and other legal requests pays dividends in downstream workloads like internal auditing, team productivity tracking, and minimizing compliance leakage.

Automate responses and workflows 

By streamlining your manual playbook into a digital platform, you will be able to leverage tools like a centralized template library, response drafting and sending, and archiving. These small efficiency gains translate to time and cost savings, increased productivity, and boosted morale, and enable teams to spend less time on mundane tasks and more time on high-value work.

With the right platform, your legal team can minimize time and money spent by automating routing and response workflows. You can also ensure that responses are timely and less falls through the compliance cracks with robust tracking and auditing capabilities.

At DISCO, we’ve built a better mousetrap to help you accelerate your workflows and accomplish your goals. Ready to automate legal response compliance and make your process self-service? Request (get it?) a demo here.