The Slack message came in at 4:47 PM on a Thursday. It said: “Hey, can legal look at this vendor contract? They want to start Monday.”

Attached was a forwarded email chain. No scope of work. No dollar amount. No explanation of what the vendor would actually be doing. Just a sales rep who needed something signed by someone, soon, and figured I was that someone.

I wish I could tell you this was unusual. It wasn’t. At the time, our contract “intake process” worked like this: anyone who needed a contract reviewed would email me, Slack me, stop by my desk, or (my personal favorite) mention it in passing at the end of a meeting about something completely unrelated. “Oh, before you go, we need a contract for that new logistics provider. Can you handle that?”

I handled it. For about six months. Then I looked at my email one morning and realized I had 14 open contract requests spread across three Slack channels, two email threads, a sticky note someone left on my keyboard, and a voicemail from the CFO asking about “that vendor thing from last week.” I didn’t know which vendor thing. There had been four.

That was the week I built an intake process.

The Actual Problem Isn’t Volume

When I talk to other contract managers about intake, the conversation usually starts with “I’m drowning in requests.” And I get it. Axiom’s 2026 Global In-House Legal Study found that 77% of legal teams report that both the volume and complexity of their work is increasing simultaneously. That tracks with what I’ve seen at every company I’ve worked at: more contracts, more vendors, more compliance requirements, more of everything, with roughly the same number of people to handle it.

But volume isn’t really the problem. I’ve managed 400 contracts with a pretty manageable workload. The problem is how the requests arrive.

When contract requests come through email, Slack, hallway conversations, and forwarded threads with no context, you spend more time figuring out what people need than actually doing the work. Every incomplete request generates a follow-up. Every follow-up takes a day. Every day of delay makes the business team more frustrated, and that frustration lands on you. “It’s stuck in legal” becomes the refrain, even though legal never got the information it needed to start.

Lexitas, a legal outsourcing firm, put it well: ad hoc intake instigates and exacerbates inefficiencies throughout the entire contract review process. If the request doesn’t start right, nothing downstream works.

What I Actually Built

I want to be clear: what I built is not sophisticated. It’s a shared form and a set of rules. It took me an afternoon to set up, and it changed my entire workflow.

One form. One entry point. Every contract request comes through the same form. I started with a Google Form and later moved it into a more structured setup. The form asks five questions:

1. Who is the counterparty? (Company name, contact person.)
2. What type of contract is this? (Vendor agreement, NDA, client services agreement, amendment, etc.)
3. What’s the estimated annual value?
4. When does this need to be effective?
5. Who is the internal owner for this relationship?

That’s it. Five fields. Takes three minutes to fill out. If those five questions aren’t answered, the request doesn’t move forward. I can’t prioritize a contract if I don’t know its value. I can’t route it if I don’t know the type. I can’t follow up after signature if nobody owns the relationship.

No more Slack requests. This was the hardest cultural change. People love Slack because it’s fast and informal. But fast and informal is exactly what creates the chaos. When someone Slacks me a contract, I reply with the link to the intake form: “Happy to. Fill this out and I’ll get it in the queue.”

The first two weeks, people were annoyed. By the third week, they were filling out the form without being asked. By the second month, sales was pre-filling forms before vendor calls so they could submit the request the same day. The form didn’t slow things down. It sped things up, because I stopped chasing people for basic information.

A visible queue. Every submitted request goes into a simple tracker (spreadsheet at first, then ContractSafe) where I can see every open request, its status, its priority, and its deadline. This visibility solved two problems at once. First, I could actually prioritize instead of just working on whatever landed in front of me most recently. Second, when someone asked “where’s my contract?” I could give them a real answer instead of digging through email.

Priority tiers. Not every contract needs the same turnaround. I built three tiers: Tier 1 (24-48 hours) for NDAs and standard agreements under $10K. Tier 2 (3-5 business days) for vendor agreements over $10K and anything with non-standard terms. Tier 3 (1-2 weeks) for high-value contracts, new vendor relationships over $50K, and anything with unusual risk.

When someone submits a request, they can see from the tier system when to expect a response. That transparency alone eliminated about 80% of the “just checking in” follow-up messages.

What Changed After I Built It

The most obvious change: I stopped losing things. Before the intake form, I had no way to guarantee that every request was captured. Slack messages get buried. Emails get lost in threads. Hallway conversations evaporate. The form created a single source of truth. If it’s in the system, I’m working on it. If it’s not, it doesn’t exist yet.

The less obvious change: my review time got faster. Not because I was working harder, but because requests arrived complete. I wasn’t spending the first two days of every contract asking “what’s the scope?” and “who approved this budget?” The form front-loaded that information, so I could start the actual legal work immediately.

Juro’s survey of in-house legal teams found that 58% cited lack of budget and resources as their biggest challenge, and 52% said feeling buried in low-value work was their greatest concern. I can’t fix the budget problem. But the intake process fixed the low-value-work problem almost immediately. Before the form, I spent maybe 30% of my week on actual contract review. After the form, that ratio flipped.

The Templates That Made It Scalable

Once the intake form was working, I realized I could go further. Most Tier 1 contracts didn’t need me to draft anything from scratch. They needed a template with the right terms, filled in with the right details.

So I built a small library: a mutual NDA, a one-way NDA, a standard vendor agreement under $25K, a contractor agreement, and an amendment form. Each had pre-approved terms with blank fields for deal-specific details. For Tier 1 requests, the process became: requester fills out the form, I grab the right template, populate the fields, send it for signature. What used to take two to three days now takes an hour.

One important lesson: lock your templates down. At a previous company, I gave sales reps edit access. One of them deleted the limitation of liability clause to close a deal faster. Nobody caught it for months. After that, one person controls the templates. You want a change? You request it.

You Don’t Need Fancy Software

I want to push back on something I see a lot in contract management content: the assumption that fixing intake requires buying an enterprise platform. The ACC’s 2024 benchmarking survey found that only 59% of legal departments have adopted any contract management system at all. That means 41% are still managing contracts without dedicated software.

If you’re in that 41%, you can still build an intake process. A Google Form that feeds into a spreadsheet will get you 80% of the way there. It’s not elegant, but it works.

I used a spreadsheet for my first year of structured intake. I moved to ContractSafe because I wanted automated date alerts, a searchable repository, and the ability to link requests directly to stored contracts. But the intake form itself? The concept is the same whether you’re using a Google Form or a six-figure platform. The discipline of requiring complete information before starting work is tool-agnostic.

The Conversation Nobody Wants to Have

Here’s the part of intake that no blog post talks about: the political part.

When you implement an intake process, you’re telling people they can no longer get a contract reviewed by walking up to your desk. The sales VP who could always get her contracts bumped by emailing you directly? She’s less happy when her requests go into the same queue as everyone else’s.

I dealt with this by being transparent. I framed it as “I want to turn your contracts around faster, and the only way is to have the information I need when the request comes in.” Most people understood. The rest came around after they saw their contracts actually moving faster.

The other political issue is visibility. When you have a visible queue with timestamps, everyone can see how long contracts take. That’s uncomfortable if you’re used to operating in a black box. But it’s also powerful. When the CEO asks why a vendor agreement took two weeks, and you can point to the log showing that the requester took nine days to provide the scope of work, the conversation shifts. “Stuck in legal” becomes “stuck in incomplete information.” Which is what it always was.

Start With the Form

If your intake process today is “people contact me however they want and I figure it out,” start with the form. Five questions. One entry point. No exceptions.

You’ll still have people who try to Slack you contracts at 4:47 on a Thursday. But now you have a response: “Happy to help. Here’s the form. Fill it out and you’ll be in the queue by tomorrow morning.”

It took me about six months to fully train the organization. There were holdouts. There was the one VP who sent contracts to my personal email for three weeks because he thought the form was “too much overhead.” (The form has five fields. His emails never had more than two sentences of context. I’ll let you decide which one was more overhead!)

But once it stuck, it stuck. And the difference between managing contracts by inbox and managing them by intake is the difference between treading water and actually swimming somewhere.

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I’m Dave, and I write about contract management the way it actually works. No jargon, no sales pitch, just what I’ve learned from 15+ years of doing this job. New posts every Tuesday and Thursday.