A single point of intake for every request from the business. The agent picks up the work, resolves what it can, and routes the rest — all inside your existing email.
Deployment 2–4 weeks
Integration Microsoft Exchange
Change management None
01 — The problem
Legal has no front door
Requests arrive by email, Teams, Slack, phone, and hallway conversations. There's no single place where inbound work lands, no consistent triage process, and no visibility on what's coming in or how long it takes to get picked up.
The result is predictable: work gets lost, duplicated, or misdirected. Lawyers spend significant portions of their day on triage and admin rather than substantive legal work. The business waits, sometimes for days, without knowing where their request stands. And legal leadership has no data on demand patterns — how many requests come in, what types, from whom, or how the team's capacity maps to actual demand.
Most legal teams have tried to solve this with shared inboxes, ticketing systems, or intake forms. These help with organisation but they don't reduce the work. Someone still has to read every email, categorise it, figure out who should handle it, and route it. That someone is usually a lawyer whose time would be better spent elsewhere.
02 — How the front door works
Intake, resolve, route
The front door is an AI agent embedded in your legal team's email — an address like contracts@company.com or legal@company.com. The business emails legal the same way they always have. Nothing changes for anyone sending a request. The difference is what happens when it arrives.
1
The agent picks up the request
An email arrives. The agent reads it, identifies the request type (NDA, MSA review, policy question, procurement query), assesses urgency, extracts attachments and context. This happens in seconds, not hours.
2
Resolves what's straightforward
If the request is standard and within scope — answering a policy question, generating an NDA from your templates, confirming a turnaround estimate — the agent handles it end-to-end. The requestor gets a response in minutes. It came from legal, fast.
3
Routes everything else intelligently
Complex or unusual work gets routed to the right person on your team — with the request already categorised, context extracted, and urgency flagged. Your lawyers pick up work that's ready to action, not raw email that needs 20 minutes of reading before they can start.
The agent also handles the work around the work: acknowledging the request back to the sender, logging the matter, tracking time, filing documents in the right place. These are the tasks that consume hours of a legal team's day without anyone thinking of them as "legal work."
03 — What you can see for the first time
A live picture of your legal demand
Every request that comes through the front door is categorised, timestamped, and tracked. For the first time, your legal team gets a live dashboard of what the business is actually asking for.
Volume
What's coming in
Total requests per week and month, broken down by work type. NDAs, MSA reviews, procurement, policy questions. The shape of demand that most teams have never been able to quantify.
Speed
How long work waits
Time from request to pickup, time from pickup to completion. Broken down by work type and team member. Reveals where the bottlenecks are and which work types are consuming the most time.
Routing
Where work goes
Which team members handle which work types, who's overloaded, what gets bounced around. The invisible inefficiencies in how work flows through your team become visible and addressable.
Opportunity
What's automatable
The dashboard surfaces which work types are high-volume, template-driven, and low-complexity — the processes where agents can handle the work end-to-end, freeing your team to focus on what actually requires their expertise.
The insight most teams don't have
Until you can see what's hitting the inbox, you can't make informed decisions about where to invest your team's time, which work to keep in-house, and which work to delegate. The front door turns a blind inbox into a data-driven operating model.
04 — From routing to execution
Start with triage. Expand when you're ready.
The front door delivers immediate value as a triage and routing layer. But it's also the foundation for something more powerful: outsourcing routine legal work to supervised agents.
Once the front door has been running for a few weeks, the dashboard shows which work types are high-volume and repetitive — the NDAs, the standard reviews, the template-driven drafting that consumes hours of lawyer time without requiring deep legal judgment.
At that point, the conversation shifts. Instead of routing those requests to a lawyer, the agent can handle them end-to-end: draft the NDA from your templates, review the redlines against your playbook, apply your preferred terms and fallback positions. Finished work goes to a supervision queue where your team reviews flagged items and approves outputs.
1
Start with the front door
Triage, categorisation, routing. Your lawyers still do the work. The agent handles the admin overhead and gives you visibility on demand.
2
See your data
The dashboard shows your demand pattern. You can see exactly which work types are consuming the most time and which are candidates for agent execution.
3
Turn on execution
Choose which work types to delegate. The agent starts doing the work — drafting, reviewing, applying your playbook — not just routing it. Supervision ensures quality. Your team reviews what matters and lets routine work clear without touching it.
You decide the pace. Some teams expand within weeks. Others take longer. The front door gives you the information to make that decision with confidence — based on your own data, not a sales pitch.
05 — What doesn't change
Your playbooks. Your email. Your control.
The front door operates inside your environment. It's not an external service that pulls work out of your building — it's an embedded capability that works on your terms.
Your email
The agent sits inside your existing email infrastructure via Microsoft Exchange. The business emails legal the same way they always have. No new portal, no new interface, no change management.
Your playbooks
When execution is active, the agent follows your templates, your preferred terms, your fallback positions, your escalation rules. It doesn't guess. It applies the logic your team has already defined.
Your supervision
You choose how work gets reviewed. Your lawyers can supervise directly, a partner firm can manage on your behalf, or our supervision team can ensure quality to your standards. You set the quality bar.
Your data
SOC 2 Type II certified. Data processed in your region. No training on your data. Enterprise SSO, audit logging, and role-based access controls as standard.
The key distinction
Traditional outsourcing takes work out of your building. The front door keeps it in. The labour is insourced to agents. The work stays in your environment, on your playbooks, under your control.
06 — Getting started
Live in two to four weeks
1
Week 1: scoping
We map your current intake process — which email addresses receive work, what types of requests come in, how your team is structured, and how work gets routed today. We configure the agent's triage logic, routing rules, and any filters you need.
2
Week 2: integration and testing
We connect to your Exchange environment, configure the agent on your target mailbox, and run a parallel period where the agent processes inbound work alongside your existing process. You see everything it does. Nothing goes to the business until you're satisfied.
3
Weeks 3–4: live
The agent goes live on your inbox. Requests are triaged, categorised, and routed. The dashboard starts populating. Your team sees the difference immediately — pre-triaged, pre-categorised work arriving ready to action rather than raw email requiring manual processing.
No long implementation cycles. No months of configuration. The front door is designed to deliver value in weeks, not quarters. Timelines are adjustable to your pace — the goal is confidence, not speed.
Next step
If your legal team is handling inbound work through email today, the front door can show you what that demand actually looks like — and where the opportunities are. Get in touch at flank.ai to see it in action.
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Enterprise legal teams use Flank to handle high-volume contracting end-to-end — NDAs, MSA redlines, procurement, triage. Agents that know your templates, terms, and escalation rules.