Managing Legal Requests Critical for Compliance and Defensibility

Effectively managing legal requests is essential for maintaining compliance and protecting your organization’s interests, as Rian Kennedy writes in a Disco blog post. Legal ops plays an important role in implementing the legal request process. Key steps are intake and acknowledgment, triaging and routing, responding and workflow management, and tracking and defensibility.

Intake and acknowledgment: Requests should typically be acknowledged within a specific timeframe to avoid monetary or legal consequences. To prevent noncompliance, it is vital to have a centralized system that tracks all requests —documenting who sent the request, when it was sent, when it was received, and who is responsible for handling it.

Triaging and routing: Not all legal requests are of equal importance. Requests need to be prioritized based on factors like deadlines, response requirements, and the complexity of the response. Automating the classification and routing of requests can reduce bottlenecks and ensure that each request is handled promptly by the appropriate team.

Responding and workflow management: Standardizing responses for common requests and creating templates can save time. Legal ops’ role as project manager focuses on improving response workflows to enhance efficiency. Regularly updating these workflows ensures they remain effective and aligned with best practices.

Tracking and defensibility: A playbook documenting the entire process from intake to resolution helps maintain consistency and is critical for internal knowledge management. Using repeatable and predictable processes — for example, templating previous workflows and responses and documenting procedures — simplifies manual tasks and ensures compliance. Requests and responses should be archived for training and reference materials.

Automated tracking systems that create comprehensive audit trails are essential for defending the organization’s actions if challenged, Disco suggests. These systems should log all activities related to managing legal requests and provide a reliable record that can be presented in court or to third parties if necessary.

For additional coverage of legal ops, check out these Today’s General Counsel articles on legal department leadership and legal services.