About the Sales Contract Legal Request Intake Form

Legal teams play a crucial role in enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of sales processes, directly impacting a company's bottom line. In this partnership, while Sales teams focus on rapid deal closure, Legal ensures each transaction is legally sound and maximizes value, supporting sustainable business growth. Standardized legal intake forms are key to facilitating this. They enable legal teams to efficiently gather necessary information, minimize back and forth, and streamline the review process. Structured form data provides efficiency, consistency, and insights — creating leverage for legal teams to handle the high velocity and complexity of sales activities.

Try this form template for sales requests for legal review to help your legal team effectively set up or refine your intake process for sales-related legal requests, including review of sales contracts, master services agreements (MSA), security addendums, business associate agreements (BAA), data processing agreements (DPAs), and more.

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Best Practices for Designing a Legal Intake Process

In growing companies, legal teams face increasing volumes of legal requests. Efficient legal request management is vital — designing a better legal intake form is only the first step. Here are some best practices when setting up or refining a legal intake process for your in-house legal department.

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Don’t use only generic legal request forms; build different forms for different request types

Form design is not just about creating a document for data capture; it's about creating an effective tool that enhances the operational efficiency, compliance, and effectiveness of in-house legal teams. While catch-all, generic legal request forms make it easy for requestors to submit a request, they often lead to extra back and forth to collect all needed information, thereby delaying the process.

Create different forms for different types of requests. An AI request form will go into specific details about AI needs, while a sales contract might focus on dollar amount thresholds for the level of review. This way, the relevant questions are asked and necessary details are captured. This reduces the need for follow-up due to missing or incorrect data, ultimately saving time for both the legal team and the individuals submitting the information.

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Consolidate legal intake with the right tool

When you work with different teams, requests for legal review can come from multiple channels, including email, Slack, Salesforce, and CLM. Streamline AI’s software automatically gathers all legal request intake and brings them to one centralized place, ensuring that requests are captured and tracked correctly. However, the reality is that change management can be difficult — sometimes business stakeholders will just stick to lack or emailing the legal department. If sales teams spend outsized time in Salesforce, why not meet them where they are? When evaluating a legal intake tool, it's important to assess its  integrations with your company’s current software or communication platforms. By doing so, you ensure a cohesive system where business stakeholders have the flexibility to either adopt the new tool or continue using their preferred methods for submitting legal requests. ‍

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Make it easy to choose the right type of request

Just say a marketing team has a question about using generative AI to automatically create ad copy. What type of request would they submit? Would this be a generative AI tool request, a marketing compliance request, or something other type of request? While it might make sense to Legal what the different legal request types are, it may not be intuitive for a business stakeholder. Add a short description of what each request type means. By making it easy for requesters to figure out what they need right, we can ask them clear and straightforward questions, making it easier for everyone involved (and reducing that endless back and forth).

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Implement efficient, automatic review and approval workflows

Once you gather the information needed, it’s important that that the information gets to the right contact. Manual routing for reviews and approvals can be time-consuming and error-prone, and legal teams spend a good deal of time doing repetitive, manual administrative work. Software can be the solution to automating this process for in-house legal departments. Streamline AI can intelligently and automatically route requests to the right person based on form inputs and then automatically route to and subsequent reviews or approvals necessary, making the process expedient and seamless.