Legal playbook · AI Employee: Lex

Contract Intake & Routing

Intake to first response < 24h

Install this playbookBack to marketplace
The problem

Legal is the single most-request-blocked function in most companies. Contracts arrive via email, Slack, DocuSign, portals, and "hey, can you review this?" Someone routes them to legal, legal triages by hand, contract sits in a queue. When legal is a two-person team supporting a 500-person company, the queue only grows.

At a glance
Trigger
Form + email
Approvals
Attorney assignment
What it does
Writes to your systems
Systems
Ironclad · Salesforce · Slack
How it feels in production

An hour-by-hour walkthrough.

Wednesday 2:11pm. Priya (sales) emails Lex: "Hey, Acme sent over an NDA — mutual, non-standard, they need us signed by Friday. Also here's the vendor MSA from Contoso, they want us to review by next week." 2:11pm + 3 sec. Lex parses two contract intake events from the email. Contract 1: NDA, Acme, mutual, non-standard, urgent (Friday). Contract 2: MSA (inbound vendor), Contoso, standard urgency. For contract 1: Lex classifies as NDA-non-standard, routes to attorney-on-call (Sarah, per the coverage rota). Attaches the document, adds Priya's context. Creates Ironclad record with SLA countdown to Friday. Notifies Priya: "NDA routed to Sarah, target turnaround Thursday EOD." For contract 2: Lex classifies as vendor-MSA, routes through the vendor-legal-review-intake playbook (which triggers security-questionnaire flow in parallel). Creates Ironclad record with standard SLA. Notifies Priya: "MSA in review, expect turnaround next Wednesday." Sarah opens Slack Thursday morning. Sees the intake card with the doc, the context, and the draft response Lex has already prepared based on prior similar deals. Reviews, makes two edits, sends back. Priya gets the counter-signed doc Friday 10am. Every intake logged, every SLA tracked, every deadline surfaced. Legal never re-reads the same request twice.
How it works

Step by step.

  1. 01

    Collect contract + counterparty + business context

    Intake via email / Slack / form / DocuSign envelope-received event. Lex extracts: document type, counterparty, party count, requester's business context (what deal, what SLA).

    Email · Slack · DocuSign · Ironclad
  2. 02

    Classify + route to attorney by type

    Classification model + rules: NDA (standard / non-standard), MSA (inbound / outbound), SOW, DPA, employment, IP-assignment, subpoena. Route to the attorney per your coverage rota and specialisation.

    LLM · Legal KB · Slack
  3. 03

    Create Ironclad record

    Create the CLM record with metadata (type, counterparty, deal value, SLA). Attach the source document. Link to the requester for status updates.

    Ironclad
  4. 04

    Notify requester

    Requester gets a confirmation in the channel they submitted from (usually Slack or email) with the assigned attorney, the target turnaround, and the Ironclad link.

    Slack · Email
Systems and wiring

What you connect to make this run.

Ironclad

write

OAuth credential with contract-create + metadata scopes. Every intake becomes an Ironclad record; downstream review + redline + signature tracked in Ironclad.

DocuSign

read+write

Webhook for envelope-received events triggers intake. On approval, DocuSign envelope sent for counter-signature.

Salesforce · HubSpot

read

Read the associated opportunity for context (deal value, close date, urgency). Auto-links contract to opportunity in the CRM.

Slack

read+write

Bot listens in #legal-requests channel and via DM. Posts confirmation cards to requesters and attorneys.

Legal KB (Knowledge Studio)

read

Prior contracts indexed. Lex references similar deals + response patterns for the assigned attorney to draft from.

What changes

Before and after, honestly.

Time from intake to attorney has it
Before
1-3 business days across email chains
After
Under 5 minutes
Legal-request tickets dropped or lost
Before
5-15% (email chains die, requests fall through)
After
Zero (Ironclad record + SLA tracking prevents drop)
NDA turnaround
Before
3-5 business days average
After
Under 24 hours for standard-template NDAs
Attorney time on routing / triage
Before
~10 hours/week per attorney
After
Near zero — attorneys spend time on the actual review
Related

Playbooks that pair with this one.

Legal

NDA Generation

Outbound NDA drafting; the counterpart to inbound intake.

Legal

Vendor Legal Review Intake

The vendor-specific intake variant with parallel security review.

Legal

Contract Status Lookup

Requesters and internal stakeholders check status through this playbook.

Legal

Counterparty Redline Tracking

The downstream playbook that watches for counterparty redlines and drafts responses.

Frequently asked

Answers about this playbook.

What if the contract type is ambiguous?

Lex flags it in the intake — "this looks like it might be an SOW or a variant MSA" — and asks the requester to clarify. Never mis-routes silently; always errs toward asking one clarification question rather than guessing.

Can we auto-approve standard NDAs?

Configurable. Many teams auto-approve NDAs that use their approved template with no material redlines. Lex checks the diff against your template; zero material changes auto-approves; anything else routes to attorney.

What about after-hours urgent requests?

On-call rota configurable. Weekend / after-hours urgent requests page the on-call attorney; standard-urgency queue for Monday. Requester always gets a confirmation of when to expect response.

How does this integrate with our CLM?

Ironclad is the first-party integration. PandaDoc, Adobe Sign, ContractPodAi via UIA. Lex creates the CLM record; everything downstream (redline, review, signature) happens in the CLM.

Can we track vendor + customer contracts differently?

Yes — different templates, different SLA defaults, different routing rules. Vendor contracts trigger the parallel security-review flow; customer contracts trigger the parallel deal-desk flow.

See it run on your data.

Free plan, no credit card. Connect the systems this playbook needs and run it against a past event first.

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