Legal Matter Intake and Triage Template (CLOC Core 12)

Intake channel and separate urgent routes, intake form fields, risk tiers 1 to 4, service levels, routing by request type, matter log, reporting measures

Opérations juridiquesStandardCLOC Core 12 (Service Delivery Models, Practice Operations)matter intake triageMis à jour 29 oct. 2026

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Mode d'emploi: Use it to give the business one front door to the legal team and route each request to the right resource. Fill the risk tiers and service levels with the general counsel first, matched to real capacity. The main pitfall is a long form that pushes people back to emailing lawyers directly.

Aperçu

Legal Matter Intake and Triage: [Legal department or team]

A front door for an in-house legal team: the intake form, the risk tiers, the routing rules that send each request to the right resource, the service levels by tier and the reporting that shows whether the process works. Structure informed by the Service Delivery Models and Practice Operations areas of the CLOC Core 12 (Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, What is Legal Operations guide, August 2020). Replace every [bracketed] value and every row marked Example. This is a documentation format, not legal advice.

Document control

Field	Value
Document ID	[LEG-OPS-INT-001]
Version	[1.0]
Status	[Draft / Approved]
Owner	[@legal-operations-manager]
Approved by	[@general-counsel]
Intake channel	[Form URL / ticket queue / mailbox]
Last updated	YYYY-MM-DD
Next review	YYYY-MM-DD
Classification	[Internal]

Revision history

Version	Date	Author	Change
1.0 (Example)	2026-10-30	Legal operations manager	First issue

1. Scope and principles

All requests for legal work from the business go through intake, including contract reviews, advice questions, disputes, regulatory contacts, policy reviews and corporate actions.

Separate routes, not the general queue:

Emergencies (dawn raid, arrest, regulator on site, serious incident): call [duty lawyer number] at once.
Whistleblowing reports go to the confidential channel in compliance/whistleblowing-policy, never to the general queue.
Suspected personal data breaches go to the incident process and privacy counsel (compliance/personal-data-breach-assessment).

Principles: one channel; one owner per matter; tier by risk, not by seniority of the requester; tell the requester what happens next; measure and adjust.

Privilege: requests for legal advice should be addressed to the legal team and marked as such. Whether a communication with in-house counsel is privileged depends on the jurisdiction and the forum; ask legal before sharing advice outside the team.

2. Intake form

Field	Mandatory	Notes
Requester name, team, cost centre	Yes	Cost centre feeds spend reporting
Request type	Yes	Contract, advice, dispute or claim, regulatory, employment, IP, corporate, policy, other
Short description	Yes	What do you need and why
Counterparty or people involved	Yes for contracts and disputes	Used for conflicts and sanctions checks
Value at stake	Yes	Contract value or amount in dispute, best estimate
Deadline and reason	Yes	Business deadline, external deadline, or none
Documents	For contracts	Latest draft in editable format
Regulator, court or government body involved	Yes	Yes or no
Personal data, safety or reputational impact	Yes	Yes or no, with one line
Business approver	For contracts above [USD 50,000]	Named sponsor

3. Risk tiers

Tier	Criteria (any one is enough)	Typical examples
Tier 1 Critical	Regulator, court or law enforcement involved; threatened claim above [USD 250,000]; safety or serious reputational risk; external deadline within 2 business days	Regulator letter, claim form served, product safety issue
Tier 2 High	Contract value above [USD 250,000] or off playbook; new market or product; employment dispute; deadline within 5 business days	Enterprise deal on customer paper, grievance with legal claim risk
Tier 3 Standard	Contract within playbook; advice question with internal impact; value [USD 50,000] to [USD 250,000]	Supplier agreement on our paper, policy question
Tier 4 Self-serve	NDA on our template, signed unchanged; value below [USD 50,000]; questions answered by published guidance	Mutual NDA, FAQ question

3.1 Service levels

Tier	Acknowledge	First substantive response (Example)	Default owner
Tier 1	1 hour, 24x7 by phone	1 business day	Duty lawyer, general counsel informed
Tier 2	1 business day	3 business days	Specialist lawyer
Tier 3	1 business day	5 business days	Contract manager or lawyer
Tier 4	Automatic	Self-serve template or guidance link at once; check within 2 business days	Legal operations

Business days exclude weekends and public holidays where the owner works. The clock starts when the request is complete (all mandatory fields and documents).

4. Routing

Request type	Tier 4	Tier 3	Tier 2	Tier 1
Contract	Template and playbook T0	Contract manager (`legal-ops/contract-review-playbook`)	Commercial lawyer	Head of commercial legal
Advice	Guidance library	Lawyer on rota	Specialist lawyer	General counsel
Dispute or claim	n/a	Litigation counsel	Litigation counsel, consider outside counsel	General counsel, outside counsel, legal hold (`legal-ops/legal-hold-notice`)
Regulatory	n/a	Compliance	Regulatory counsel	General counsel and outside counsel
Employment	HR policy	Employment lawyer	Employment lawyer	General counsel
Volume work (for example NDAs at scale, contract migration)	n/a	Alternative legal service provider under framework	n/a	n/a

Outside counsel are instructed only under the outside counsel guidelines (legal-ops/outside-counsel-guidelines), with a budget for matters expected to exceed [USD 25,000].

5. Matter log

Matter ID	Received	Type	Tier	Owner	First response due	Status
MAT-2026-0201 (Example)	2026-10-05 (Mon)	Regulatory: data protection authority letter	1	General counsel	2026-10-06	Open
MAT-2026-0202 (Example)	2026-10-06 (Tue)	Contract: enterprise customer paper, ACV USD 410,000	2	Commercial lawyer	2026-10-09	Open
MAT-2026-0203 (Example)	2026-10-08 (Thu)	Contract: supplier on our paper, USD 80,000	3	Contract manager	2026-10-15	Open
MAT-2026-0204 (Example)	2026-10-08 (Thu)	Mutual NDA on template	4	Legal operations	Self-serve	Closed same day

The example due dates assume no public holidays in the period; adjust for local holidays.

6. Reporting and review

Measure	Definition	Target (Example)
Volume by type and tier	Requests opened per month	Trend only
First response within service level	Share of requests meeting section 3.1	90%
Cycle time	Request complete to matter closed, median by type	Trend down
Self-serve share	Tier 4 requests closed without a lawyer	Trend up
Work sent outside	Matters with outside counsel or providers, and spend	Within budget (`legal-ops/legal-spend-budget`)
Requester satisfaction	Short survey on closure	[Target]

Review questions every six months:

Which request types grow fastest, and can templates or guidance absorb them?
Which tier misses its service level most often, and is it capacity or incomplete requests?
Which work could move to a lower-cost resource without raising risk?

Standard and licence note

Structure informed by the CLOC Core 12 functional areas, in particular Service Delivery Models and Practice Operations, as described in the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium guide What is Legal Operations (August 2020), cited by name only; see https://cloc.org/what-is-legal-operations/. No text is copied from CLOC material. Tiers, thresholds and service levels are examples, not values set by CLOC or by any law. The organisation and matters are fictional. All text is original wording. This is a documentation format, not legal advice.

Template licence: MIT.

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