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
사용법: 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.
미리보기
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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