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an hour ago
What it is
Legal teams get work from everywhere — contract reviews over email, NDA questions in chat, compliance approvals in spreadsheets. Legal Service Delivery brings all of it onto the platform, with two applications:
- Legal Request Management — the front door. Employees ask, legal responds.
- Legal Matter Management — the workroom. For the complex cases that need real investigation.
Two audiences, two places to work:
- Employees use the Employee Center: read legal knowledge articles, submit requests, track progress, or just ask Virtual Agent.
- Legal teams work in the Legal Counsel Center: pick up requests, collaborate, and watch their analytics.
Request or Matter?
| Legal Request | Legal Matter | |
|---|---|---|
| Think of it as | A ticket | A case file |
| Typical example | "Can you review this NDA?" | A product liability lawsuit |
| Effort | Quick to fulfill | Weeks or months of work |
| Structure | Fields, comments, approvals | Phases, tasks, milestones, artifacts |
A request can be promoted to a matter when it turns out to be bigger than it looked.
How the work flows
Create → Assign → Work → (Promote to matter) → Close
- Create — the employee submits an intake form in Employee Center, or asks Virtual Agent. Not sure it's even a legal question? They raise a Universal Request and the routing agent sorts it out.
- Assign — the practice area lead gets notified and assigns it to a team member. Assignment rules can do this automatically by category.
- Work — the fulfiller uses Comments to talk to the requester and Work notes for the internal thread. They can add a checklist, kick off an ad hoc approval, reassign to another group, or open a matter.
- Close — complete it, or cancel it if it was never valid. Requesters can reopen a closed request (but not a cancelled one).
How you set it up
Four ideas, in this order:
| Step | What you're doing |
|---|---|
| Practice Areas | List the practices in your legal department — Contracts, Privacy, Compliance — and name a lead for each. |
| Intake Forms | Define the services each practice area offers. Each one generates its own record producer. |
| Service Catalog category | Group the services so they display neatly in the portal. |
| Subcategories | Add only if a service needs further breakdown for organizing or routing. |
Per intake form, you also decide whether it creates a request, a matter, or both, then optionally attach a fulfillment checklist, assignment rules, an SLA definition, and a matter template.
Who can see what
Every legal request carries an Assignment group permission field. Three choices:
- Read (default) — everyone in the assignment group can see it.
- Write — everyone in the group can see and update it. Assigned To becomes optional.
- No Access — effectively confidential. Only the practice area lead, group manager, and the assigned person can see it.
The practice area lead, group manager, and assignee can set this. Need a different default for a particular form? Change it in that record producer's script.
Inside a Matter
- Matter templates — standardize how a matter type is handled, so nobody starts from a blank page.
- Phases and tasks — group the work in a sensible order.
- Milestones — key calendar events, mapped to tasks, so timelines stay visible.
- Artifacts — folders for documents, emails, chat messages, and images, with per-user access you can revoke.
Ready-made legal practice apps
Content packs with the workflow already built:
- Stock Preclearance — trading windows, holiday calendars, an access-persons list, and an approval flow that respects SEC guidelines. Employees get an instant answer: window closed, no approval needed, or form submitted for review. Needs the Fiscal Calendar plugin and configured fiscal periods.
- Conflict of Interest — a central register of disclosures with configurable approval matrices (outside employment, board service, personal relationships), plus automated reminders before an approval expires.
- Ethics Complaints — intake and triage of sensitive complaints, with the option to route to legal as an ethics matter or to HR as a misconduct case.
and many more.
Where LSD connects
- Universal Request — one "Get Help" front door across departments. Legal ships with its own service set, routing group, and state mappings, so a request can move between legal, IT and HR without the employee noticing the handoff. Sensitive information stays hidden from routing agents who lack the role for it.
- External document storage — keep attachments in OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, SharePoint, or iManage (which also handles email).
- Virtual Agent — some flows, like stock preclearance, run start to finish in conversation.
Two roles worth knowing
- Legal user (
sn_lg_ops.legal_user) — can raise legal requests. - Legal fulfiller (
sn_lg_ops.legal_fulfiller) — works them. Fulfillers can only update requests assigned to them, in a New state, or where group permission is set to Write.
The one-line version
Legal Request Management gives employees a clear way to ask legal for help. Legal Matter Management gives lawyers a structured way to run the hard cases. Together they take legal work out of inboxes and put it where it can be tracked, measured, and improved.
