In-house work does not arrive as a legal question. It arrives as a business decision with a deadline attached. The job is to give it structure before answering it.
May Sales offer the proposed rebate structure in New York?
Business unit
Commercial
Risk level
Medium
Needed by
Sep 24
THE PRODUCT PRINCIPLE
In-house work starts with a business decision, not just a legal question.
Capture what the business actually wants to do, the risk it carries and when the answer is needed. Research against the company's own approved material, draft advice the requester can act on, and keep a named attorney accountable for it.
Give the request a shape
The difference between advice that gets used and advice that gets ignored is usually set at intake.
State the real question
Record the business objective behind the request, not only the legal framing it arrived in.
Scope and jurisdiction
Fix the governing law and the commercial context up front so the analysis is not written for the wrong market.
Company context in scope
Select the policies, templates and prior positions that should govern, from material you uploaded.
One matter per request
Each request keeps its own documents, history and draft, so a busy queue does not become one merged conversation.
Answer with the company's own material
A legal department's advantage is its institutional memory. The tool should use it rather than route around it.
Private policy library
Upload the policies, standard positions and prior advice the department relies on, kept private to the account.
Templates for recurring answers
Author the deliverables the department produces repeatedly and revise them as positions change.
Agreement review at volume
Run a defined question set across a group of contracts and get a comparable table instead of a stack.
Explicit selection
You decide which internal material informs an answer, which matters when positions have changed over time.
Advice someone signs
Internal clients act on what legal tells them. The accountable step has to be real.
Attorney approval gate
A workflow run stops at an explicit decision rather than completing itself and notifying the requester.
Proposals, not silent edits
Model-suggested changes to advice are shown apart from the text until they are accepted.
Version history
Advice that changed between drafts can be inspected and, if needed, restored.
Deliverable in Word
Export the final advice as a real Word document for the channels the business already uses.
IN PRACTICE
The work lawyers bring to it.
Commercial question with a deadline
Turn a sales team's proposal into a scoped legal question, researched against company policy and answered with a recommendation.
Contract triage
Run a standing question set across incoming agreements and route only the genuinely unusual ones to a lawyer.
Policy consistency
Answer from the department's stated position rather than from whichever precedent the requester happened to find.
Repeat requests
Standardize the answer to a question the business asks every quarter, and keep the template current.
Outside counsel brief
Assemble the context, documents and specific question before sending work out, so the instruction is precise.
HOW THE WORK MOVES
A visible record from input to review.
01Business intake
02Risk and jurisdiction
03Select company context
04Research and review
05Draft advice
06Counsel approval
IN THE WORKSPACE TODAY
What you can use now.
Not yet available: Business intake from another system; Microsoft 365, Outlook and SharePoint; Department administration and reporting.
Per-request matter workspace
Documents, history and drafts scoped to the request.
Live
Private policy and template library
Owner-scoped upload, authoring and versioning.
Live
Structured document review
Defined question sets across uploaded agreements, with passage grounding.
Live
Approval gates and version history
Explicit attorney decision and undoable restore.
Live
Astra for Law
Legal model integration coming soon
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PRIVATE BETA
Keep the research visible. Keep the document yours.