Designing Your Legal Front Door: Five Approaches to Meet Different Needs

Fit for Purpose, Built for Scale

For large legal departments embedded in complex organizations dedicated legal request intake platforms such as ServiceNow’s Legal Service Delivery module offer a robust, enterprise-grade solution. These tools are designed to drive advanced automation, workflow orchestration, and analytics and come pre-configured to handle legal service requests.

They provide professional and highly configurable user interfaces, secure data handling, self-help automation and comprehensive reporting capabilities, often powered by AI. However, this level of sophistication comes at a cost – both financially and operationally. Licensing fees, implementation effort, and the need for ongoing technical support can make them a significant investment that requires a certain scale to pay off.

Best suited for: Large legal teams with high volumes of requests, a solid business case for automation and a long-term digital strategy.

Legal Front Door as an Add-On

Apart from software that is built from the ground up to only serve as an intake management system, there is another category worth considering. Built-for-legal software suites like LawVu, Onit, Knowliah (stp.one) and Lawcadia offer comprehensive packages often combining different modules such as contract, matter or spend management for the legal department – and also contain a Legal Front Door.

Their economic efficiency lies in combining several functionalities, which are closely integrated and typically easy to configure, making them ideal for small to medium-sized units.

Best suited for: Small to medium legal departments that look to onboard several functionalities at the same time.

Leveraging Your Existing IT Environment

Many organizations already have access to powerful ecosystems, e.g. from Microsoft or Atlassian, that offer a flexible toolset to build custom business applications. Leveraging these platforms to create tailored legal intake workflows is a great way of getting more value out of the license cost that is already being paid and will save your organization the effort to select, procure, onboard and manage additional software.

This approach can be more cost-effective and faster to deploy than buying and implementing a best-of-breed enterprise platforms, especially if you start with a pilot version that offers a limited, easy-to-build functionality. Ecosystem solutions allow legal teams to customize their intake process while staying fully within the organization’s existing IT infrastructure. However, it does require significant development and maintenance capacity and the legal department will need to be able to clearly articulate their requirements since the Legal Front Door must be built “from the ground up”.

Best suited for: Legal departments operating in an organization with a strong ecosystem-based IT strategy that are ready to develop and iterate on their Legal Front Door over time

The low-cost / no-cost option

Not every legal department is ready to invest in a fully automated intake system. Especially for smaller legal teams, having a well-structured intranet landing page and a shared mailbox can be an effective way of channeling incoming requests and pointing internal clients to FAQs and other self-help offerings.

Implementing this option requires no vendor selection process, and the technical implementation will typically be done by your IT department. This type of legal front door does not post significant technical challenges, but it will require your legal team to come up with an engaging and easy-to-understand intranet site. Also, while this option will be easy to implement and communicate to the organization, it will not yield a lot of actionable data (such as number and type of requests over time).

Best suited for: Smaller teams looking for a “low-cost / no-cost" option or departments that don’t like the idea of internal customers having to “open a ticket” with Legal.

Simple but Limited

At the most basic level, legal intake can be managed using structured Excel files or SharePoint lists internally. This manual approach is extremely accessible and can be set up almost immediately without significant cost or development effort. Incoming requests and their status updates are manually added to the list by the legal team, relying on its diligence for timely and correct reporting.

While it is useful for pilot phases or very small teams, manual tracking is prone to errors and lacks scalability. It also requires ongoing manual upkeep and governance to remain effective.

Best suited for: Small teams or departments testing intake processes before scaling.