Legal teams lose hours chasing requesters for missing information. Elevate Enterprise Legal Management (ELM) now does that chasing for you. An AI email agent checks each incoming request, asks the requester for anything missing, and creates a complete request in ELM. Your team starts work with everything it needs.

Legal intake is having a moment. Last week, Harvey and Legora both announced solutions called ‘Intake’, renewing attention on how legal teams manage requests from across the business. At Elevate, we have been addressing that challenge since introducing intake capabilities within our ELM platform at the turn of the decade.

Over the years, we have argued that legal intake needed to go beyond the traditional ‘front door’, connecting people, workflows, information, and systems across the legal department. Agentic AI makes that connected approach more relevant than ever. Today, over 50 Elevate ELM customers use its intake and request capabilities to capture and manage incoming work. Our latest developments add intelligent email intake and AI agents that complete tasks within a request. ELM records their progress and outcomes.

A Proven Front Door for Different Types of Work

Six years of customer use have shown us that structured intake is valuable well beyond conventional legal advice requests. ELM provides a configurable entry point for employees, external parties, and service providers, with request-specific information, ownership, task management, and progress tracking. Established applications include:

Supplier onboarding: Teams collect details, documentation, and approvals before engaging a new supplier.

Legal service requests: Business stakeholders submit contract review requests and other legal questions through a consistent, trackable process.

Legal billing queries: Law firms or internal stakeholders submit invoice adjustments and appeals, and ELM tracks actions and decisions.

Internal support: IT and marketing teams manage requests such as technical assistance, presentation updates, or website changes.

Law firm enquiries: Potential customers submit requests for legal services, with intake information captured for assessment and follow-up.

IP and trademark complaints: IP owners or other external parties report potential infringements for review and resolution.

Different workflows, but the same operational principle: requests arrive through an accessible front door and become structured, accountable work within the wider ELM platform.

Seamless Agentic Intake and Execution Across Legal Data and Workflows

We recently announced Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers for ELM, giving legal teams secure, permission-controlled access to legal data, including requests, from AI assistants they already use, such as Claude and Microsoft Copilot.

We now also have the ability for ELM to interact with agents to execute and complete activities within established legal workflows. Two important applications of this capability are making it easier to both submit requests and automate the tasks required to resolve them.

Smarter Intake, Starting with Email

Email remains one of the most common ways business stakeholders engage with legal teams, but requests often arrive without the information needed to progress them. Elevate has supported email-based request creation for several years. Our latest enhancements now use an ELMA-powered email agent to make this process more intelligent.

When an email arrives in a designated shared mailbox, the agent determines whether it represents a new request or relates to an existing conversation. For new requests, it classifies the request type and checks the email contents against the mandatory information required.

If anything is missing, the agent automatically follows up with the requester, monitoring responses until the requester supplies all the necessary information. It then creates a structured request within ELM, populating the relevant metadata fields and capturing the request details. ELMA notifies the legal team to assess and allocate the work.

This reduces the administrative burden of gathering information while allowing business users to continue communicating through familiar channels. Future enhancements will extend the approach to Microsoft Teams and Slack, alongside more advanced automated triage capabilities.

Putting AI Agents to Work Within Requests

Once a request has been created and assessed, tasks within an ELM request can be assigned to ELMA agents, triggering workflows to perform specific activities. Once completed, the agent can update the task status and add internal comments to the original request, documenting what was done, the outcome, and any outstanding requirements.

For example, an agent assigned a document collection task could check whether the necessary supporting documents are already available, contact stakeholders to obtain missing information, and update the request each time a stakeholder sends a document. Another agent could manage an approval task, identifying the appropriate approvers, requesting their approval, and recording the outcome.

The same approach supports a new matter request: an agent checks mandatory information, identifies possible duplicate or related matters, and prepares the record for human approval. Once approved, ELM converts the request into a matter, bringing ELM’s broader Matter Management capabilities into play.

Agentic AI, with ELM as the System of Record

The real value of this approach lies in keeping agentic execution connected to the wider legal workflow. AI agents and human team members both complete tasks, with ELM providing a central record of progress, responsibilities, and outcomes.

This means legal professionals can see what has been completed, what remains outstanding, and what needs attention, regardless of who — or what — performed the work. It also ensures that the benefits of automation don’t come at the expense of visibility, accountability, or control.

By combining established request management capabilities with agentic AI, we’re extending the value of ELM as a connected platform for managing legal work, helping legal teams work more efficiently while maintaining the oversight they need.

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